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New York is different than what Ramona thought it would be. Quieter. Less all-consuming crowds and flaring lights and time whipping right past her.
Not that she really had thought about it. She'd kind of tripped over that step. One second she was pressing her thumb against the idea, checking for ripeness, words spilling out in front of Oona without much consideration for a follow-through, and the next, a record skipped, lurched her forward until she was sitting in a too-cushiony seat of a small plane. A bag of peanuts on her lap. The air thin.
Still, she had expectations.
New York was supposed to be Annie's rambles bubbling over and eager open invitations, loud talking that permeated through closed bedroom doors. Uptown Girls. The metallic burn of a flask that hazed over the concern of seeing her heart unattached from her body, pulsing, tender and bloody, by her feet. Hands that brought her coffee and saltine crackers the next morning, when the pulsing was still there just moved up against her skull.
But New York, the real New York, the lived experience of it, wasn't any of that. It was curtains that opened without a whir and well-oiled doors, a noise machine she couldn't turn on and hallways so long voices couldn't carry down them.
It made her restless.
And that was different too.
Because she used to crave barricading herself inside, under a blanket of smoke-veiled humidity, folding a pillow over her ears until she could finally hear herself think. First drowning out beeping heart monitors and missed phone calls, then humming fans and pestering sisters. But around the sixth uninterrupted hour of staring up at a new ceiling—too white and smooth and missing her favourite water stain from when Gordon hit a pipe trying to build her a skylight during a middle school astronomy phase—re-looping a chronological montage of the past couple weeks like if she followed each string of conversation closely enough she could untangle its knot, Ramona rubs a hand over her face. Blinks the moisture back into her eyes and pushes herself off the bed that's molded to her body like a sludge of slow-drying cement. Grabs a hat and the closest pair of sunglasses. Steps into the enveloping heat outside.
✩✩✩
Ramona walks further and further down, past the gates and huge front lawns and hedges manicured into abstract shapes, until the people walking their dogs and yelling into, frankly comical, phone headsets, stop doing double-takes at her jorts and general disposition. She spends half an hour staring up at different crossroad signs, squinting at the street numbers, and another two surveying the kaleidoscope lines striped across the subway map before picking one at random.
She follows the speaker-crackled hum of a street performer to a bustling square of shops decorated with flashing neon lights pointing inside and buildings made of mirrors and people—a whole mass of people, breathing loudly and talking over each other and moving like a sea of fish, playing pinball with her body until she's bumped to the very outer edge of the road, pressed up against the front of a tattoo parlor.
The low thrumming rhythm of a bass zips up the notches of her spine in prickling waves as she surprises herself with how seriously she contemplates, eyes caught on the flyer announcing 'Flash Friday' in blocky, inviting font, a dollar sign where the 's' would be. Bites her lip.
She used to be able to tell time with how frequently she got something new, a sore semi-instant catharsis that came as easily as walking across the street to the college kid who drove home every weekend and worked out of his garage. Those first months in Barrie—before she learned that being hard to reach was easier than reassuring skeptic follow-up questions—Oona would get so excited at every visit. Tugging Ramona until they were sat on her bed, flush, thigh to thigh, fingers pressing indents into her pale skin as she rotated Ramona's arms to examine owly-eyed at each newly inked piece. Asking about feelings and meaning and verbally prodding until Ramona's one word answers revealed something a little truer.
A knock from the other side of the glass has Ramona jumping back, her stupor broken by the unimpressed expression of a woman in a uniform-issued black t-shirt and jeans, red lips scrunched downward. Ramona flinches. Smiles sheepishly, slowly backing away from her raised pierced eyebrow and silver-shadowed glare.
Probably for the best. With her luck she'd end up in a hospital bed with an infection staring up at the faces of every loved one who currently hates her.
Instead, she finds a hotdog stand next to an empty, mostly clean bench. The cold metal scatters goosebumps through the cotton of her shirt as she settles back to watch the skyline. She swallows a too big bite of bun when she realizes the sun doesn't create a path of blurring orange stretching towards the horizon into the city like it always does over a lake, hits against her chest a couple times and coughs the realization down.
It's harder to navigate back home in the dark. She walks circles around the same court before she takes the familiarity of a closed bodega as a sign to make a different turn at the fork in the road, dragging her beat-up slides until the asphalt transitions to cobblestone, exhaling a sigh once she finally spots a black door and a ceramic frog she's pretty sure she's seen in her nightmares twice now since she moved in. She drops her forehead against the cool textured window, eyes flickering shut as she finally relieves some weight off her feet.
She's only just barely caught her breath when suddenly the door swings open, momentum pushing her forward until she's gasping and folded in half. She swings her arms wildly in circles to steady herself before realizing she can grip the sides of the door frame to force a stop.
Huffing, Ramona glares up through the strands of hair that had fallen over her eyes to a grinning Connor who exclaims, completely unperturbed, "Ramona! Oh thank God, you didn't run away again. I had no idea where I was going to find mushrooms without Sully."
Ramona heaves a deep breath that does nothing to slow her rattled heartbeat, wiping her palms against her knees and standing back up, the bag that'd nearly smacked her in the face falling back down her limp arm. "What?"
The crinkling must catch his attention because his eyes dart to the plastic, asking excitedly, "Hey you got snacks?"
She feels her jaw clench.
Connor, now wrist deep and digging for the chips, tells her, mockingly begrudging, "Okay, I forgive you. Wanna go halfsies on this?"
She snatches it back. Winces when she feels the chips crunch under her too-firm grasp.
"No," she asserts. "Now what the hell are you talking about?"
Connor scrunches his nose. Looks down it to inform her, judgmentally, "It's never been more clear to me you were raised as an only child."
She shoots him daggers. Stepping inside and slamming the door behind her while he puts both hands up in exaggerated surrender, digging the hole even deeper for himself as he explains, "hey, I like character flaws, gives us something to work on."
Before she can retort back a list of his character flaws, she's interrupted by the pattering sound of rushed steps and the yell of her name and the weighted wrap of arms engulfing her into a hug. It takes her a week back in time. When she'd been numbed by the full truth until Annie had bombarded her at the cottage entrance and her concern thawed Ramona right over.
Except this time the voice calling her name was deeper, powdery sweet perfume replaced with something clean and spiced, and the limbs longer, sturdier, same black hair but short and peppered. Steven. Steven?
She freezes. Half expects to hear him say some new life-altering bomb-drop. Someone else has died or come back to life or the paternity testing agency's called, she's not his biological kid and this is one last goodbye before she's left out on her ass. Less than 24 hours to pack up and get out.
"Uh," she grunts at the initial impact. "Did something happen?"
She drops the plastic bag on the ground to pat him on the shoulder when he doesn't immediately let go and Connor uses the opportunity to scoop it back up, rummaging through each item she bought with various expressions telling her exactly how much he approves or disapproves.
Steven steps back and put both hands on her shoulders, patting at her like he's making sure she's not an illusion, asking her, "Are you okay, are you hurt?"
Ramona's brows furrow. "No, no, I'm fine, what—"
At the reassurance, he gives her a reassessing glance, pinching at his forehead and chiding, "What were you thinking young lady, I've been worried sick."
'Young lady' she mouths, confused, to Connor who responds by cracking open her can of peach tea and shrugging.
Steven continues, in increasingly exasperated tones, working himself back up—not unlike an Annie freak-out, she notes with half a mind to tell Maple to turn this whole summer into a nature vs. nurture science experiment and finally win a ribbon to shut up that smug prodigy kid across the lake—"I didn't know where you were or who you were with or how long you'd be out. It's dark! This isn't Canada, we have criminals, what if you were stabbed?"
Ramona tilts her head. "I'm pretty sure I could also be stabbed in Canada."
Connor snorts, flaps his hand dismissively. "He's wigging out because he was expecting you to do a mini-Annie impression with her self-appointed curfew and post-it notes and you're failing miserably. For one, Annie never would've gotten a single mini-box of cereal. Where's the milk for this?"
"Can you stop eating my shit?" Ramona snaps.
Infuriatingly, it only makes his eyes glint brighter. "Hey, now you're getting it. A little higher of a pitch next time, she gets nasally."
Steven sighs, scrubs tiredly at the grey of his beard. It's crazy how different they look, Ramona finds herself thinking. His hair and eyes deeper than hers, face short where hers is long. His eye bags are so pronounced they make his cheeks sink in like manholes and she can't remember, suddenly, if he'd looked this exhausted the first time they met. If she just hadn't cared to notice.
Her stomach twists, a sharp wincing guilt that crawls up her chest. She clears her throat. Crosses her arms over her stomach.
She knows he was hoping that Annie's decision to stay in Muskoka was a bluff, expected her to join them a couple days after they landed home. And it's not her fault, it's not, Annie chose to stay all on her own. But well, she is the reason Annie came to Muskoka in the first place. The reason everyone's life has ended up where it has.
Fuck, she has got to buy antacids next time she's out.
"I was just going for a walk," she says to the floor. "I didn't think you'd get worried, sorry."
Steven shakes his head and gives her a smile that he probably thinks is less awkward and tight than it is. "No that's. It's okay. I'm just glad you're alright. And I know you're used to taking care of yourself, but I'd really like to know where you are kid, my track record with runaways is—"
"—pretty shit," Connor interrupts.
"I was going to say not great," Steven volleys back.
"Okay." She nods, glances around the room and hopes that at some point someone else will finish this conversation for her.
No one does.
Ramona clears her throat again. Frowns. "Uh, would it make you feel better to ground me?"
Steven finally laughs at that, a throaty noise that surprisingly looks as though it comes easy to him even though Ramona never could've guessed from his usual air of disfavour and she feels herself unfurl, shoulders releasing as he admits, "No, that's never worked on my kids."
He announces instead, as if it's the obvious conclusion to this conversation, "I'm getting you a phone."
Ramona opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again to ask, "What?"
"What?" Connor repeats louder.
"I have a phone," Ramona tells him, patting her back pockets before realizing it's actually probably upstairs. Gordon gave it to her when he became bed-ridden, said he didn't have much use for one when he was posted up beside the house phone all day and she should have something for emergencies since she walked home from school anyway. It's mostly sat in the back of a nightstand collecting dust since then, tumbled in with the rest of the sentimental stuff she doesn't touch when she frenziedly packed.
Steven's still nodding self-assured though, talking himself even more into the idea. "I've seen your phone, no you need a smartphone. One with Google maps. And data. And Uber, you can just Uber those snacks, you don't need to go out for—"
Connor pushes himself off the console surface he'd been perched on precariously, feet landing on the ground with a thump, outraged now. "I'm sorry, I need a new phone—because of completely natural causes, by the way—and I get chewed out but she breaks curfew and a new phone is her punishment?!"
Ramona turns to him. "Why do you keep saying that, do we actually have a curfew?"
"No," Steven reassures her while googling Apple's store hours before Connor can respond which only seems to incense him further.
His mouth drops open. Tone incredulous when he tells them, "Unbelievable. Just wait until Annie hears about this."
Still ignoring him, Steven squeezes Ramona's shoulder again, promises, "I'll get it delivered, leave it on the kitchen counter tomorrow."
"I really don't—" Ramona tries again to refuse but he's already turn around, calling goodnight and heading for the stairs, to the sound of Connor clapping, slowly and theatrically.
Connor shakes his head in disgust, says, with all the things she'd just bought in tow, "I'm taking these, you don't deserve salt and vinegar chips."
He flicks the lights off before follows up, leaving Ramona standing in the now dark entryway by herself.
✩✩✩
Ramona is not exactly a fan of the new phone.
It's coral, which is not her fucking colour, and about as big as her face and she nearly leaps out of her skin the first time that it talks back at her, but there are opaque phone cases and, apparently, whole Reddit threads detailing features she can toggle off and, the next weekend, when she's sprawled so her head is hanging off a pool-side lounging chair—sweat beading by the nape of her neck under the sun of a record-breaking high-temp day—and swipes right at the insistent vibration of an incoming FaceTime call, the camera turning green before revealing Annie's face stretched on the full screen, Ramona supposes the phone might not be so bad.
Ramona lifts an eyebrow as the pixel resolution races to catch up to Annie's excited waving. She looks good. The nose bridge of her face pink and windblown, tendrils of curls escaping her usual tightly-pulled ponytail and rumpled white button up—that Ramona knows is Ellis' because she was there the first time Kate had dragged them to the newly opened mall on mainland to 'finally get some goddamn clothes that aren't stained with marine grease'—slipping down to expose the slope of her shoulder.
Ramona doesn't think she's ever seen her so unfettered, sloppy. Or happy.
"Hi! How's the city treating you?" She greets, voice a touch too perfectly rhythmic like she rehearsed the line in a mirror beforehand.
Ramona smiles. "You have grass in your hair."
"I do no—oh fuck," she says, biting lightly on her bottom lip and angling the back of her head to the camera as she attempts to hand-comb through the mussed up tips.
Ramona moves closer to the screen while she's distracted, tries to sneak a wider glance at Annie's surroundings. She doesn't know why she always think the island is going to magically change overnight when she's not there. Anticipating it, like she's waiting to catch it red-handed. Betrayed at coming up empty when it doesn't.
She puffs her cheeks out, pulls herself up to sit back against the chair normally. "Where's Ellis, are you two finally done with the attached-at-the-hips honeymoon stage?"
Annie rolls her eyes but her face goes all soft and dreamy and gives her away, fingers pausing their anxious brushing to twirl the same strand of hair into figure-eight circles. "He's fixing up a customer's boat."
Ramona fake gags. "Okay, fucking gross dude—"
"I'm just giving you the facts!" She splutters, offended.
"You used your sex voice," Ramona deadpans.
Annie, frantically jams her thumb against the volume button, racing to quiet Ramona with a hushed plea of denial, outraged—even as a smile is stretched so widely across her cheeks that Ramona rubs against the side of her own face in phantom pain.
"What does that even mean? No, don't answer that! Shut up! I'm in public," she spouts with a single breath.
"Yeah, in public, gawking at your boyfriend."
Annie huffs, fans her face like it'll make her splotchy blush disappear. "Whatever. Stop deflecting, how's New York?"
Ramona shrugs. "Different. Good. Really hot actually, what's up with that?"
"The urban heat island effect," Annie answers automatically. She pulls a knee up, rests her chin on it and teases, voice soft, "Miss us yet?"
Ramona doesn't know what her face does but it must be bad because Annie sucks a breath between her teeth, backtracks immediately, overly reassuring, "That wasn't a dig—I'm not being passive aggressive, I swear."
Ramona rolls her eyes. "I didn't think you were, you're not capable of doing anything passively."
The snark doesn't do anything to dissipate that look Annie's giving her again, like she's a puppy whose paw just got run over. It makes Ramona groan, head rolling up to the sky so she can evade her wide-eyed stare. "I'm fine"
"Okay."
"I am," she assures, bristling now.
"Alright."
The awkward silence that falls over the line doesn't last long before Ramona hears a gravelly voice cough conspicuously behind the camera. Annie takes peaking glances at the figure, darting her eyes from side-to-side, mouth twitching in restraint.
"Right, um. I'm glad you called actually, I have updates—"
"No more bomb drops," Ramona interjects. Voice pleading. "I'm serious Annie, I don't want to know. Aunts, cousins, distant relatives, I don't care, don't tell me."
Annie laughs nervously. "It's not that, it's not anything really. I just wanted to give you a heads up that, well it's kind of a long story actually. Did you know Oona has a phone?"
Ramona narrows her eyes. Of course she knows. She was there the first time Oona's mom left, there the night before too with the presents and the unreciprocated tearful goodbyes. She used to make a game of stealing the phone and taking candid shots of Oona when she wasn't paying attention, leaving her to find them in her camera roll like a treasure hunt, hoping for one of those smiles that came rarer immediately afterwards.
Then, later, she was banging against the side of a stubborn hospital vending machine hoping for a bag of smarties to untangle itself from metal coils when the prepaid year of an internet package ran out and their phone calls became scarcer, accompanied with the customer-filled, crowded background noise of the only restaurant on the island with service. Remembers how much easier it was to cut those calls short, blaming noise or static or overstimulation.
She nods, suspicious.
"Well I might have had this mini freakout at 3am the night you left because a branch hit the window which I mistook as someone trying to break in and in my contemplation of mortality—"
"There's something seriously wrong with you," Ramona notes.
"—I realized that if something happened, I wouldn't be able to reach you until the next day and even then I'd have to bug someone first and I mean it's not like I can ever go back to Rory's house so I'd have to bother Sully who's such a sweetheart and already deserves a luxury-resort-dream-vacation after putting up with Connor all month and dad left his card instead of just apologizing to me like a normal person so I may have just bought a couple different cell packages at my most common locations and—"
Ramona shakes her head, not processing any of the information that was just warbled at her. Says disbelieving, "You bought Oona hotspot service?"
The one and only time Sully had attempted to get them to participate in Secret Santa, Oona had found the listed price of the carnelian ring Ramona got her from an online antique store and spent the next two weeks trying to sneak her insurmountable amounts of free food anytime she was on shift. Ellis spent the whole winter stressed out that she would get caught and charged with corporate theft.
Annie gives a helpless half-smile, offers, "Her house has become one of our hubs?"
Ramona blanches. "Annie, you can't just buy people things, it makes them uncomfortable—"
"She's fine with it! She said she's going to pay me back, I mean I don't actually care but it seemed to make her feel better!"
Ramona gives her a skeptical look. "She was fired from her job, because of you by the way—"
"She got a new one," Annie blurts out.
Ramona feels herself still uselessly like a stalling car. Her throat tightens. "What? Where?"
"The new touristy ice cream shop on mainland, they just opened. She's surprisingly really good at interviews," Annie says, impressed.
Ramona curls her hand against the scorching metal feet of the chair, lets the heat sink in so the way she's burning up inside-out becomes less noticeable. Stares up and blinks shutter-fast and tries not to think about the ever-growing list of people who get to know more about Oona than she does. "Right, okay good. Was that it? Did you want permission to give her my number or something?"
Annie winces. Purses her lips.
"What."
"It's just," She hesitates. "I may have given it to her already, it was easier to just airdrop my contact list."
Ramona pushes her tongue against her bottom teeth. Presses down. One week. Oona's had her number for a whole week. So much for doing what's best for the friendship.
Annie wavers. Asks like she already knows the answer, "She hasn't reached out to you?"
Ramona shakes her head.
"She doesn't mean anything by it—"
"It's fine."
"She probably just thinks you're mad at her—"
Ramona sighs, angles the phone so her face is only half in frame. "I said it's fine, didn't I? Listen I have to go, your pretentious high school is making me do an entrance exam and I haven't paid attention in math since they introduced letters."
Annie frowns, sympathetic and seeing right through her. "Okay, I'm sorry. If you ever want to talk—"
Suppressing another sigh, Ramona waves goodbye and exaggeratedly motions that she's ending the call.
"I have my old study materials in the white rolling drawer under my desk, they're in chronological order and in colour coded binders by subject!" Annie calls out in a buzzer-beater rapid-fire sequence.
It makes it a little easier for Ramona to force the corners of her mouth to curve up. "Bye, love you."
The furrow between Annie's frown deepens. "Love y—"
Ramona presses her thumb against the little red button. Bangs her head against the back of the chair. Watches the clouds move in a turtle-slow pace, stamping across the sky, until her eyes start to sting. She blames the sun. Doesn't walk into the pool as much as she crawls from the lounge chair onto the cement paving before rolling over the tile edge and into the water, chest deflating as she exhales to sink deeper.
The chlorine nips at her lungs in a way that lake water never did. The after-sun cream she finds in Annie's bathroom makes her skin itch.
✩✩✩
Eventually, Ramona falls into a routine.
She leaves the curtains open at night—after the first time Steven finds her eating cereal at noon and frowns like he's just barely holding back from giving a speech about productivity and 'setting yourself up for success'—so the leer of the sun can wake her up at a socially acceptable hour. She spends the hotter parts of the day inside, trying to make sense of the highlighted equations on Annie's stapled graph papers and rewards herself with a cup of coffee from the Jacobson's fancy machine after finally forcing Annie to voice dictate a step-by-step tutorial of what buttons to press. Steals Connor's brownie batter creamer and runs her tongue across the sugary film on her gums when she accidentally adds too much. She doesn't really like it but this move isn't supposed to be about what she likes.
It's about being different. Better.
In the evenings, she explores deeper in the city. Finds a thrift store where the prices aren't 300% jacked up and runs her finger along the dusty edge of the sunglasses display. Makes friends with the too-bubbly girl running the cash register—cheeks aching, like she's a Vaseline-wearing pageant girl, from the purposeful lack of scowling. Trying to be less sullen. Forcing a change in propensity that she's not sure anyone's really buying—who calls it a 'date' when Ramona accepts her offer to be given a tour of the city.
She's inspecting the receipt, at the number sprawled in magenta sharpie over the store's return policy, when a couple—obnoxiously wrapped together and swaying with no regard for the space they're taking up—crash against her, startling her into dropping the piece of paper.
The woman's arm is wrapped lovingly around his waist, breathlessly giggling and lightly slapping his chest when he swears at Ramona before pulling her closer into him protectively. Not that Ramona notices. She's too busy staring at the sidewalk. At the stars graffitied in nostalgic pastels—pink and blue and the light yellow of sun-dipped curls—and outlined in white.
They remind her of the cool breeze at dusk that resets the melted aftermath of summer's heat and of those first days in late August when vacation activities have halted but before the responsibilities know to start back up, of Oona pushing Ramona to the middle of the bed before curling up against her back to avoid the way Maple always got antsy during the second half of whatever new movie they'd been playing on loop that month. Of tensing every muscle to make her full-body shiver less obvious when Oona woke up to the surging beat of the end-credits, yawning into Ramona's back, into the dip between her shoulders. Warm.
Of feeling such a desperate, crushing need to get out of that boathouse before she made a fool of herself that she jumped on Maple's whine of boredom, grabbed the bucket of leftover chalk the youngest girl had brought home from camp and roamed the neighbourhood for 2 hours on hunt for non-private roads, offered her own back porch when the scheduled streetlamps had turned on mid-search. She'd woken up the next morning with rectangular bruises on her knees and a deck so deeply stained—the wood grains flashing under the sun like lightning strikes, blinding like glittered tiger stripes—that Oona freaked. Walked to the only hardware store nearby and begged to be let inside before it opened, bought every wood stain shade they carried. When even the lightest one dried down a hazelnut brown, she avoided Ramona for a full day. Couldn't look Gordon in the eyes for the rest of that week, even though he never said anything to them about it.
Ramona's pretty sure he knew though. He would smirk every time he had his morning coffee on the back steps. She figured he found it amusing more than anything else.
She regrets not ever asking him directly, when she still could.
Crouching for a closer angle, Ramona takes a pictures of the drawn-on stars. Opens the messages app and types in the nine digits that she's had memorized since she was 13. Attaches the photo and clicks send all while holding her breath, the receipt crumped and shoved in her pocket. She only realizes afterwards that she doesn't even know if Oona's still using that number, if she knew to suspend it when she first lost service or had to change it all together now.
That doesn't stop her from anticipating a reply.
She thinks about it on the walk home, making a U-turn at the stairs for the subway in case it messes with her service and blocks incoming texts from coming through. She thinks about it as she strips in the bathroom, running an extra-hot shower and letting the water rinse over, eyes closed. Thinks about it as she's eating leftover take-out from the fridge and regurgitating small-talk with Steven over the low volume of the evening news. Thinks about it when she's changing into the band tee she's used as her pajamas for at least a decade now, the one Oona would always tease her over for being worn to death—chronically cold fingers poking at her flushed skin through the tears in the torso where the thread gave up—and as she's cracking a window open, slipping under the sheets. Thinks about it as she stares at the ceiling.
Thinks about it until her phone buzzes.
She doesn't even notice at first, assumes the noise is some self-soothing pseudo neurological response that's more indicative of her mental state than anything happening in the real world, until she catches the inverted triangle of blue light radiating from the top of her nightstand in the corner of her eye.
She scrambles for the phone.
(9:43 pm) maple says our stars were better
Ramona hiccups on a breath, a relieved exhale that feels like it was punched out of her. Licks her lips, dry all of a sudden. Heart racing. And feels distinctly stupid because she has no idea what comes after this. No idea how to respond. She'd always been so bad at faking normalcy, never had the practice like Oona did. It was why she always went silent instead.
(9:43 pm) Smart kid
(9:44 pm) And what do you think?
(9:47 pm) i think the more you remember how good the past was, the harder it'll be to recognize when something better is happening in the future
Ramona stares at the message—blinking, illuminated, stark—and hates that she can't even tell what the fuck Oona's trying to get at.
(9:48 pm) Which one does that make you?
The silence that follows isn't exactly surprising but it grates at Ramona regardless. She falls back against her bed, stretches all the way out, joints popping, before flopping limply, curling her body to the side to stare at the screen without sitting back up.
(9:56 pm) idk
(9:56 pm) sorry, was multitasking
(9:57 pm) making paper lanterns
(9:57 pm) for work
Ramona bites her lip.
(9:58 pm) Do you want to call?
(9:58 pm) Hands-free, might be easier
(10:01 pm) no it's fine we'll talk later
She scoffs. Right. She's heard that before, fuck, she's said it before.
(10:02 pm) oh
Sends without thinking and then bristles that her response sounds so sad when she was aiming for indignant. She was pathetic, a truly, deeply, unfixable kind of pathetic that needed to be shunned from society.
Ramona digs the palms of her hands against her eyes. Feels the pressure build and build and disperse.
Oona had told her. Oona had warned her.
Because if we try it and it doesn't work—
But Ramona had to be selfish, had to tug and pull and want. Kiss her anyway. Now Oona was writing the same text over and over again, strained and wavering. It didn't suit her.
Ramona watches the three little dots loop. Clenches her jaw.
She makes a choice then. Decides to make things easier for Oona. It was about time, after a summer of only making them harder. She fiddles with the plastic ridges encasing her phone. Types and clicks send.
(10:08 pm) okay, later
The three dots disappear.
Ramona doesn't feel lighter.
She pushes her phone off her bed and flips over so her head is firmly pressed against the silk of a pillow. Screams. Loud and frustrated and embarrassed. Heartbroken. Until she hears three knocking thumps from the other side of the wall she shares with Connor's room. Swallows her feelings instead.
At least that's the same.