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i. i’m leaving you behind, but it’s not the end
Long story short, friendships do in fact have a limit on the bend before they break, even one as strong as theirs. I’m tired of hurting you translates for them both at roughly the same time and when it comes to the day they finally part ways (Karma, for UCLA and an exciting shot at a record; Amy, to New York and Columbia for pre-med), it becomes the natural end of what had become, for lack of a better word, just a massive clusterfuck.
It is not as painful as either expects.
They attend senior prom together, as the plan has always been, and in the months afterwards, Karma will insist on explaining to anyone who listens how much alcohol was in the punch bowl and Amy, upon hearing the tumbling waterfall of excuses, rolls her eyes and says nothing, choosing instead to bitch in secret to Lauren. (Who will then tell Shane and the wheel continues to turn.) Prom goes on as it does in the movies, all cheesy eighties themed with bad Cyndi Lauper outfits and Kygo vibrating out into the parking lot; Shane has brought a flavour of the month college guy, Lauren is slow dancing with Theo in the corner of the gym, and Karma sits dejected on the sidelines - a first in her short life. Amy had been crammed between Oliver and Felix, laughing until she cried over some Weird Science references, and noodles over once she realises something isn’t quite right with her best friend.
“What’s up, buttercup?” but her jovial tone is too loud or too quiet or too -- uninvolved, because Karma gives her this look that doesn’t mean anything and bolts. Escapes right out into the night giving Amy no choice but to follow, to run out after her and catch her in the parking lot fighting with her keys. “Hey -- !”
“I’ve gotta go,” Karma blurts out in a rush, fingers slipping on the metal in her hands. They clash with the concrete. Amy stops her from getting them with a hand on her shoulder and the same burning love in her eyes they both despise but know is there regardless.
“Hey, are you okay?” Gentleness takes her voice; funny, she spent all her time thinking of princesses, of knights in sarcastic armour, she never really stopped to consider she wasn’t either. She wasn’t even the dragon.
“Fine,” Karma announces, a little too strangled to be confident. Amy withdraws her hand and tries really hard not to notice the sudden inhale, like Karma can breathe. Tries being the watchword; the fist of pure reality hits her square in the gut, like it did in the pool, like it did at the white party, like it did in the gym years ago, and her own lungs retract and push out the last breath of patience she possesses.
“Okay,” she says, quietly to the night.
Stillness overcomes them, a glass-like structure enveloping them both, so fragile anything more than the puffs of steam between them might shatter it. Karma hedges her bets and glances up at her best friend, all trembling fear and please, do it because then I won’t have to; Amy is content in being the bad guy this time. At least she knows what she’s signing up for. Louder: “Okay. If this is how we live now, then okay.”
No, she isn’t the princess, isn’t the knight, isn’t the dragon.
Amy was never in the story at all.
ii. it’s gonna be weeks until i breathe again.
Amy cries for a solid thirty-eight minutes (the time it takes to drive to the airport and get through security) but by the time she arrives in New York, her blood thrums a little easier and her heart beats a little harder for all the best reasons; life no longer snowballs through a blanket of pain, misunderstanding and fear, doesn’t rely on the broad beam of sunlight provided with every handhold or sly smile. It is glorious and she is her own goddamn ray of sunshine. It sounds arrogant and though she would never admit it to anyone out loud, there is a private part of Amy which thinks her friends in New York - pre-med and biochem (Oz and Tyra), a physicist who lives downstairs (Lance), and a TA named Sarah who laughs at her donut shirt and asks to go for a drink sometime - are better than those in Texas; smarter, prettier, less judgemental, less dramatic, and, God, just happier.
A personal record is set by not thinking about Karma for a whole seventeen hours. It doesn’t last, because a flood of memory and innate, human emptiness threatens to overwhelm her by the time she gets a seat in orientation, followed by the immediate shit, I really don’t want to be the girl who cried the first day. Bobbi - Nebraskan, cooler than her by a long shot, and with a vaguely Shane-minus-the-flaky-personality - offers her a tissue and smiles like she completely understands.
From then on, Amy stays busy - does things, goes out, gets a job, parties and studies - to avoid thinking about Karma. About karma. Calls Lauren to extol the virtues of New York and they wind up on the topic, so Amy fakes a side-conversation and lies about an art gallery opening downtown. She hangs up and doesn’t feel guilty.
iii. checking into hotel loneliness, it’s not what i’m used to i confess.
Sarah kisses her and it surprises so badly, Amy winds up biting her lip too hard and drawing blood. Rust and salt fills her mouth too vividly for her to really take in anything that comes out of her mouth; hasty stumbling over shit, sorry and I’m not really used to this and maybe that last beer was a bad idea. Her head screams don’t love me! Don’t get too close! Don’t depend on me! Because, really, she is still hardly whole, all nineteen and gangly and running through her life like she has stolen it, so who the hell is Sarah to come along and try to shape her into something better?
So, it winds up in a screaming match. Sarah cries but Amy doesn’t and doesn’t feel bad the next day. It’s just something else to do while not thinking about Karma. Nineteen sucks.
iv. so wake up three times a night, talking to a stranger is nothing new.
The next three years slide by in a whirlwind of exams, booze and tears and somewhere along the way she has started doing things just to do them, not just to distract herself. In fact, the personal record of Not Thinking About Karma has been diluted into days, weeks, months -- a year. A solid year. New Years Eve is fantastic, a bright throb of the latest and greatest coupled with the newly married (Lance, to a PhD student at Barnard) and the freshly single (Tyra, after finally realising she was bigger than her boyfriend’s picket fence dream); the music consists of chilled remixes, the food something spicy and wholly Oz’s grandmother-recipes, and the apartment booms with activity as their myriad of guests swarm the Wii, the bar, the balcony.
Amy just laughs the whole night through.
At least, she does until she hears it. It cuts through the haze of New York, of the sanctity time has offered her, and like any good bucket of ice cold water, it chills right to the bone. Karma Ashcroft must have got her record deal after all, because it’s her voice booming out of the speakers, a tricky beat behind it, curling through the living room out onto the porch where Amy stands and Desi (Romanian art-grad in her late twenties) is about to rip a fat rail of white lightening off the edge of the coffee table.
Some answers are better left unspoken when you know you ain’t getting any younger.
Amy is twenty-two and she runs. Out of the apartment, out of the city, out of the state. The cab rolls to a stop in New Jersey before the driver leans over and asks if she’s alright and would she like to go home now?
v. i know that you hate it and i hate it, just as much as you.
Despite herself, at three am on a Wednesday morning, fourteen hours into her first twenty-four hour rotation, she has to watch. Some teeny-bopper awards show - TCA or MTV or BFG, whatever - and it creeps along until the category she really wants to see gears up to appear; it doesn’t matter what exactly it is for, album or song or new artist or best artist, the announcer calls out the one name Amy swears will always be tattooed on the back of her amygdala, and the wind knocks out of her lungs at the sight.
She doesn’t look as healthy as she should. Meals replaced by cigarettes and a whiskey sour, maybe. A sly humour in her eye that hasn’t faded with time. It occurs to Amy that after seven years apart, maybe she will never not have Karma memorised.