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Van has a kind of sixth sense. It’s not the fun kind that lets her see dead people or block fists flying at her face without even having to look. It’s the kind that yanks her from sleep when a floorboard creams the wrong way. The kind that pulls her from her dreams if her gut starts churning warningly, prepping her for something she isn’t even fully aware of yet.
It’s this sixth sense that wakes her in the middle of the night in July, the month where everyone wants to sleep with their windows open but doesn’t because the cicadas are too loud. She sits up groggily, damp with sweat and glances around her room cautiously. After a few scares back in elementary school, Natalie had learned to either knock on the window or call Van’s name when she climbed into her bedroom, but she doesn’t see her best friend lurking anywhere in the shadows.
No noise filters in from the hallway outside her door and she decides her mother is probably still passed out on the couch in front of the television. Fumbling in her bedsheets for her phone, she squints against its light and tries to read her notifications.
Three from the contact [nat attack].
hi
im at lake
miss u
There, Van supposes, is the reason for her waking. She keeps her phone on silent at night, but has Natalie’s contact set to vibrate if she calls. The fact that she’s missed none settles the nerves whipping up in her stomach, but the texts aren’t not concerning.
It’s been a couple of weeks since they’d hung out. Van has been working as an assistant coach to a kids soccer team with Coach Scott, prepping in her off time for her upcoming college season, doing the various workouts on the sheet she’d been mailed back in May. Natalie had picked up a job at a record store a few miles from where they lived, and was spending more time at the store than she had been at home. They’d missed their weekly movie nights two weeks in a row, busy with packing or coaxing their mothers into half an hour of sobriety to sign a few forms.
Van types up a few messages, tossing her phone on the bed when she’s done.
[vantheman to nat attack]
stay there
i’m coming
don’t be dumb ily
She stands, yanking on a pair of shorts over her boxers and fumbling with a T-shirt. She shoves her feet into her sneakers, once white, now stained various shades of green and brown. Leaving out the window is a well-trained muscle, and she stands in the yard for a long few moments, stretching out the tired ones in her legs. She bounces on her feet a few times before taking off running at a steady pace. The lake is a few miles away from the trailer park and if she has any hopes of getting there before sunrise, she’s better hoof it.
Van likes running at night, or in the earliest hours of the morning. It’s quiet. Even the bugs have gone to sleep. The only sound in the whole wide world is her sneakers pounding against the ground, her breathing harsh in her own ears.
Trees whisk by creepily, bushes waving at her in the breeze, beckoning. A familiar chill races up her spine and she moves a little faster, spurred by the feeling of something chasing her. It happens when she runs in the dark by the woods. A bolt of fear whenever she hears a rock skitter or a tree branch snap. She almost likes the adrenaline it gives her, a near-welcome addition to the peace of a nighttime run.
Her legs are shaking by the time she comes up on the bend that will lead her to the lake and she spares a glance at her phone. It’s only been sixteen minutes since she climbed out her window, and she wonders vaguely if she’s just set a personal best in Natalie’s Nirvana shirt at three thirty in the morning. With the way her head is spinning from just-barely-enough oxygen, she’d believe it. Sweat is pouring down her face and she knows without looking that her shirt collar is absolutely drenched. She shakes her damp hair back from her face, grateful again for Natalie’s willingness to take safety scissors to her hair.
Two weeks before the end of their senior year, Van had burst into Natalie’s trailer, eyes wild and chest heaving. Natalie had been, for once, completely unable to discern what the hell was going on with the redhead. She’d forced Van into her desk hair, pouring a glass of water down her throat before she noticed the way Van’s hands kept ripping through her hair, tugging it off her neck over and over.
Without speaking, she’d dragged Van into the tiny bathroom, sitting her down on the toilet and draping a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles towel around her shoulders. She’d rummaged in the cabinet for her favored pair of scissors—grade-school with a pink plastic handle—and waved them in front of Van’s face questioningly. Van had nodded without hesitation, closing her eyes and letting out a sigh that had been building up for years.
Natalie’s hands had danced through her hair for what felt like hours. The blonde hummed the whole time, voice raspy and low and comforting. She didn’t ask Van for her input, knowing well that the redhead would panic and beg Natalie to make the decision for her anyway. Eventually, she’d run her hands through Van’s hair a few times and made a satisfied sound.
“Take a look, bud.”
Van had almost cried looking in the mirror. Natalie had given her something almost boyish, choppy and curling around her ears, tickling the base of her skull. Her bangs framed her face prettily, bringing out the kind of her jaw that she liked so much without seeming too girly. It was almost like Natalie’s, but shorter, a little messier. It was perfect.
Months later, Van still relies on Natalie for trims. She doesn’t trust a salon lady not to give her a girlish bob. It walks a line she’s not sure she even fully understands yet, but Natalie seems to get whenever she takes the scissors to red locks.
It’s getting a little long again and she makes a mental note to ask for another trim.
Once she’s on the beach, Natalie isn’t difficult to find. She’s in pajamas, pink plaid pants and a black band shirt, hair stark against the dark outlines of the lake. Curled into herself on a large piece of driftwood, she almost looks like an overlarge cat.
Van calls her name as she approaches, hoping it won’t startle her too badly. Natalie barely flinches when Van comes up beside her, reaching up to tug headphones off her head.
“Can I sit?” Van asks gently, and Natalie nods.
She lowers herself onto the log next to her friend, wincing when her legs burn in protest at the motion. Natalie pulls the headphones off her head, letting them fall into a heap in the sand. Normally, she would never treat her beloved headphones with such carelessness.
“You stink,” she murmurs, wrinkling her nose at Van’s sweat-soaked clothes. Van doesn’t rise to the jab. They haven’t argued, even playfully, all summer. It feels too much like childhood, burns coming up as they try not to think about what’s coming.
They’re going to different schools. Natalie had confessed to Van, drunk after their graduation, that she could hardly believe she was going to school at all. She received a hefty scholarship from a small private school in Connecticut, desperate for female soccer players with what Natalie had bitterly called “diversity checks.” She’s less excited about it than Van had hoped she would be.
Van’s attending a larger school in New York, somewhere she can study film while playing for a half-decent Division II soccer team. Her mother barely blinked when Van brandished the acceptance letter at her, questioning dully where the money would come from. Between the soccer scholarship, the merit one she’d somehow managed to qualify for, as well as the federal grants she could get her hands on, Van was willing to take out a few loans to put herself through school mostly on her own.
Lottie had begged more than once for the both of them to let her family help out with the costs. She was strangely confident that her parents wouldn’t notice if she withdrew three college tuitions from her bank account twice per year. They’d both brushed her off with the promise to let her pay for their books and new laptops. That alone felt like far too much.
All things considered, Van is counting herself pretty lucky as she sits on the beach.
“You didn’t have to come,” Natalie mumbles, burying her face in her arms. Van hums and shuffles a little closer. The blonde leans into her side. Her skin is cold, despite the balmy night, and Van wraps an arm around her.
“I know.” Her voice sounds loud in the eerie stillness of the night. “I wanted to.”
Natalie breathes out through her nose, something harsh and disbelieving.
“I haven’t seen you,” she says petulantly. Van feels guilt stick in her throat.
“It’s been busy,” she replies. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’m not mad or anything,” Natalie continues. “I don’t know. It’s just…I don’t want the summer to end. I don’t even want—I want to stay in Wiskayok. For the first time in my whole life. It doesn’t feel like it would kill me to stay here. With you. And Lottie. And Coach Scott.”
She sniffles, lifting her head from her arms. Mascara paints rivers down her cheeks and Van reaches out to try wiping it away. It just kind of smears around, even after she licks her thumb and scrubs at it stubbornly. Eventually, Natalie turns her face away and Van stops, sighing.
“I get it,” she admits. “It doesn't feel real. Like one day I’ll wake up and it won’t be true anymore. I just….I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
“Well, I have been. And it fucking sucks.” Natalie sounds a little more like herself.
“It really does,” Van breathes, feeling a panic stir in her chest as her brain races through the upcoming months. “Fuck.”
Natalie chuckles softly, patting Van’s knee. “I texted you because I was freaking out. You’re supposed to be my knight in shining armor.”
Van groans, leaning forward to clamp her head between her knees, a little sick to her stomach. She sucks in a few deep breaths, trying to focus on the way Natalie’s hand smooths over her back.
“I’m not freaking out,” she calls, and feels Natalie shake with laughter against her side.
“No, me neither.”
“Connecticut and New York are like, right next to each other,” Van says after a long beat of silence. She doesn’t sit up, a little unwilling to look at Natalie’s face right now. She’s too dehydrated to have a cry, and she can already feel the sobs building in her throat.
“Technically,” Natalie drawls.
“Trains exist,” Van chokes out. “It can’t be that hard.”
“Okay, bud, slow down,” the blonde soothes. “You hadn’t thought that far ahead?”
“Nope.” Van sits up and gives Natalie a withering look. She gets a mournful one in response and she sighs again. “Look, it’ll be okay. I mean, different. And hard. But okay.”
“Are we gonna—” Natalie cuts herself off, blowing out a heavy breath. She looks away, hair falling in front of her face, clearly a little embarrassed. “Are we gonna stay friends?”
Van squawks, tripping over her words as she tries to respond. “What—are you—Nat—yes, of course!”
“It’s easy to say that!” Natalie groans.
“It’s easy to say it because it’s true,” Van says firmly. “Why wouldn’t we still be friends?”
“Van, we sleep in each other’s beds like three nights a week. We have been since we were little kids. I see you almost every day. Half the clothes in my closet are yours. You’re like my stupid, annoying barnacle of a little brother.”
“I’m only three months younger than you,” Van replies distantly, still going over Natalie’s words in her head as she speaks.
Natalie had been the most constant thing in her life besides her mother’s drinking problem for as long as she could remember, and yet she had barely considered what life was going to be like without the blonde living twenty steps from her.
They wouldn’t, maybe ever, see each other every single day again. Clambering through the other’s window on a bad night would soon be a fond childhood memory. In less than a month, Van would have to bite her lip and press her back against the wall, and weather the storm without her anchor. She’d hear Natalie’s voice through the phone and pretend like it wasn’t tearing her apart to hear the blonde’s voice catch and stutter the way it did whenever she was upset.
It sounded like a no fun way to live.
“Are you going to come home for breaks?” Natalie asks.
Van bites her lip. “I don’t know. Summer, yeah. At least.”
Neither of them say what they know she’s thinking about her mother and car rides or plane tickets.
“Maybe you can come see me during them,” Natalie suggests, sounding a little hopeful. It reminds Van of when they were ten and Natalie got detention for pushing a kid off the slide. What the teacher that doled out the punishment hadn’t known was that the reason she shoved him was because he had been trying to dump his juice box on her head, but she got detention nonetheless and pouted about it for a week, until Van had gotten detention in solidarity at Natalie’s request.
“That would be good,” Van agrees, nodding vigorously. “I’m sorry I haven’t really been around. I guess I just hadn’t really been thinking about all this.”
Natalie shrugs. She fumbles in her pocket for something and withdraws a lighter. She gives it a few clicks, staring at the flame for a few seconds at a time before letting it go dark again. Natalie goes through lighters faster than Van can count. Contrary to what she knows most of their team thinks, it’s not because Natalie chainsmokes or anything. She’s just prone to fiddling with it, burning the lighter fluid and wearing out the mechanisms.
As part of her going away gift for Natalie, Van has three personalized lighters tucked underneath her bed. Between her and Lottie, they’d manage to find an online business that would screen pictures of their faces onto the lighters, distorted and goofy-looking. Between that and the mixtapes she forced almost everyone on their team to contribute to making, she feels pretty good about her gift.
“I figured. Every time I did see you, it was like your head was totally somewhere else.”
Van nodded guiltily, digging the toes of her sneakers deeper into the sand. As the wind picks up, the lake sends small waves lapping against the shore, the sound soothing and repetitive. She shivers, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Are you gonna miss it here?”
Natalie stops playing with her lighter, letting it dangle precariously between her fingers.
“Probably. It’s home.”
“Yeah.” Van thinks of her bed, which she loves despite how shitty the rest of her home is. She thinks of her brother’s abandoned bedroom, still littered with his things and wonders if she should be thinking about storing it all somewhere. She has no idea how her mother will deal without Van there to keep her halfway in line. Some part of her hopes that it will force Vicky to get her shit together. Mostly, though, she hopes it will stay the same.
If it doesn’t, it just means Vicky was always able to change. She just wasn’t willing to for her daughter.
“I hope it doesn’t change too much,” she continues, nibbling at her bottom lip. Natalie pokes her cheek to get her to stop and she obeys because it’s too late in the night, too late in the summer to argue with her now.
“Wiskayok? Change?” Natalie scoffs and it makes Van feel a little bit better.
“We’re gonna change,” she murmurs. She knows she will. She’s been waiting for the space to morph and shift and grow for her entire life. Natalie will too, she thinks. She’s always been too big for this town. Too much heart, too much antsy creativity humming away under her skin. Van hopes Natalie’s prospective art history degree will suit her.
“Hell yeah we will,” the blonde replies, getting to her feet. She’s a little wobbly and Van gets up too, hands on a hair-trigger ready to catch her if she stumbles. “And that’s a good fucking thing.”
“Yeah, Nat. It is.”
“Bet on it,” she says firmly. Van smiles.
“Wanna head hom—back?”
She knows Natalie’s heard her misstep by the way she jerks away from Van’s hand, but she doesn’t say anything about it, just nodding and falling into step with Van. They trudge alongside the edge of the road in the dark, cautious despite the late hour. Van had seen no cars on her way down, but she’d changed a lot from her sophomore year self, who would run heedlessly in the middle of the road for reasons she’d never let herself think about.
Maybe halfway home, Natalie loops their arms together and Van feels a whitewash of relief. She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that her friend was mad at her, upset with her absence, frustrated with her inability to think about the future before it reached them in the present.
They don’t speak, listening to the wind in the trees and the crunch of their shoes against the ground. Natalie’s come out on top in their battle of height, an inch taller without the massive platform boots she’s currently sporting. Van likes to act like it doesn’t bother her, but it does, just a little, even if she likes the way she can rest her head on Natalie’s shoulder easily now. At least, she thinks, Natalie’s not as tall as Lottie or Taissa. When she hugs those two, she feels absurd with her face pressed against their chests instead of their shoulders.
Taissa’s height is not something she’s willing to think about at the current moment, not with Taissa jetting off to Ohio in two weeks, and she tries to shake the flush off her cheeks before Natalie picks up on it.
If she does, she doesn’t say anything.
They clamber in through Van’s window and change into clean shorts and T-shirts. She tries not to let the fact that Natalie very carefully makes sure to only grab clothes that belong to her and not to Van get her head. They collapse atop the covers and lie side-by-side, staring up at the ceiling. Natalie’s humming something that Van doesn’t recognize but feels like she should.
It’s so dark outside that it’s almost light again and for some reason, the stress of trying to fall back asleep before the sun comes up is making Van feel more awake than ever. Beside her, Natalie keeps tossing and turning, and she finally makes an executive decision.
She scoots up close to Natalie when the other girl’s flipped away from her and curls her body around a slightly taller frame. She tucks her nose into the spot where Natalie’s shoulder and neck meet, wondering how many times Lottie’s done this or if it’s the other way around for them. She’s almost never the big spoon with Taissa.
Natalie’s stiff at first, a little awkward and Van almost starts giggling because it means that Lottie is the little spoon. Eventually, the exhaustion and the thought really does get to her and she lets out a barely-suppressed guffaw.
“You’re so bad at this,” Natalie groans fondly, shoving Van off her back and onto her other side. She curls herself around Van, sliding one arm around her waist and the other under her head smoothly. Their legs tangle together, heatless and comfortable. As much as Van hates to admit it, she much prefers it this way. Natalie presses a chaste kiss to her hair and tells her to go to sleep, so she clenches her eyes shut. She can feel her shoulder drawing up to her ears the way they do when she tries too hard at practice or holds back from shouting at her mother, and cool fingers start brushing through her bangs.
It’s enough, then, finally, for the both of them to doze.
It’s restless at best, but they peel themselves out of Van’s bed at noon the following day feeling marginally stronger.
As she watches Natalie gather up some more of her clothing to take home, Van thinks about the lighters and the mixtapes and the brand-new goalie gloves she’d accidentally found in Natalie’s dresser and thinks they’ll be just fine.