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“What do you think?” Jo says, holding her sketchbook up to her phone’s grainy camera. Even with the shitty service, Raissa can make out enough details to be sufficiently horrified–Raww’s six-packs have six-packs.
“T-That isn’t even anatomically correct,” Raissa sputters instead of what she wants to say–which is that she never ever wants to be that close to a bare man’s chest, human or otherwise. “Not to mention, completely inaccurate!”
“Pshaw.” Jo flips her hand at the camera before turning back to her sketchbook, scratching at something furiously with her pencil. Raissa desperately hopes it’s not more abs. “A little white lie never hurt no one.”
Raissa takes a moment to parse through the double negative.
“Yes, it did! It’s hurting me!”
“Oh my god, that reminds me, I saw this great post that I need to send to you–”
“No!” Raissa yelps, beet-red. She’s already seen an exorbitant amount of fanart for Jo’s book, featuring an incredibly white-washed figure that Raissa guesses could be her if she squints with a Raww or Prince Merman that’s blown up two sizes larger than normal and is often pinning her to a wall. Raissa’s already blocked Jo’s main and her side account but somehow Jo keeps finding ways to generate new burners and send her Tumblr posts unwarranted. “No more fanart!”
Raissa feels half-manic, chest heaving, and Jo recoils an actual half-foot from the camera.
“Geez, okay then,” she says, her hands stretched out in front of her like she’s trying to calm a rabid dog. “What’s your type then? Give me something to work with here.”
Raissa stares at Jo, a forgotten pencil tucked behind her ear, her eyes warm and bright like she’s genuinely invested in Raissa’s answer.
“My type?” she echoes dryly.
“Yeah, like do you want me to add muscles somewhere else?” Jo turns back to her paper, a tiny flash of her tongue poking out as she draws and Raissa feels something deep within her chest build and build. “Oh my god, what if I gave the starfish on Prince Merman’s pecs pecs–”
“My type is you, you idiot!” Raissa hollers, like a bomb going off.
The result is catastrophic. Jo drops her pencil, the tip clattering uselessly against her sketchbook before it rolls off the table. They stare at each other wide-eyed through the screen, seven thousand miles apart, and all Raissa can hear are the words oh my god, I did not just confess to her and definitely not while she was actively drawing Prince Merman’s pecs over and over again, beating like a drum.
Jo looks up at her, impossibly warm and understanding.
“Raissa, I l–”
Raissa does the only sensible thing and hangs up. Then, she blocks Jo’s contact on her phone just to cover her bases.
It’s fine. Everything’s fine. She built a rocket out of scraps and Reynaldo’s crappy car, she can navigate the shitstorm of accidentally confessing to her lifetime best friend. Raissa’s close to hyperventilating so she pushes off her desk and walks the length of her shoebox-sized dorm.
So maybe she can never visit the Philippines again. It means that she’ll probably be resigned to the crappy lumpia from the place down the street–the one that she swears gave her food poisoning that one time–for the rest of her life but it’s fine, her parents will come visit her. Probably. They can smuggle some food into their suitcases for her.
Raissa walks up to the window just as someone smashes something against a wall outside. It sounds like glass shattering and it’s quickly followed up by a string of colorful curses. She slams the window shut and latches it just in case.
It’s fine. L.A.’s not even that bad, if you avoid the back alleys and don’t leave your apartment after dark. At least all the major pop stars stop in the city while they’re on tour. Raissa takes a deep breath and stares at her phone… whose lockscreen is a picture of her and Jo at her first book signing. Fuck. Of course it is.
Raissa turns her phone face-down so she doesn’t have to look at it and takes a deep breath, rolling onto her bed.
This is fine. She can do this.
This is not fine and she definitely cannot do this. Her phone is ringing off the hook the entire day and Raissa has a sinking feeling of dread each time the screen lights up with a call. She blocks the numbers as they come but Jo is nothing if not persistent, and all throughout lab and lunch, her phone buzzes like a hornet’s nest. Raissa doesn’t even know where she’s getting this many phones from. She must be harassing half the island to borrow their cells and the thought makes Raissa smile before dread inevitably drop-kicks her in the stomach.
It gets so bad that Jo even involves Raissa’s mom, which is crazy because Jo hates her mom and her mom hates Jo just as much. She doesn’t know what she said to her mom to convince her to reach out, let alone say something remotely positive, but Jo’s managed it somehow. Raissa gets a singular you should call jo back, it sounded important in the middle of Thermodynamics and she just barely manages to hammer out it’s not important, i will eventually from underneath the table.
She barrels her way through one day and then another, the knot in her stomach slowly loosening, bit by bit. Jo stops calling. Her mom moves on to ask her about her day. Raissa thinks she’s managed to regain some semblance of normalcy when she hands in her lab report without her hands shaking but it all comes to a screeching halt when she sees Jo, in the flesh, standing in the lobby outside her classroom.
She slaps herself just to make sure she’s not dreaming but all that does is alert Jo to her presence and she snaps her head up, like a bloodhound that’s picked up a trail. Raissa turns tail and runs because she’s a coward not an idiot but Jo’s always been the faster of the two and she’s on her in an instant, blocking her exit.
“Oh, no you don’t!” she hollers. She looks proud of herself, standing in the middle of Caltech’s lobby with her baggy sweats and an oversized hoodie, reeking of LAX.
“I can’t believe you’re...” Raissa trails off, unable to find an adjective that properly encapsulates Jo’s lunacy. “It’s 3 PM on a Wednesday. I can’t believe you dropped everything to fly halfway across the world, actually, wait, I can totally believe that” She takes a moment to take in Jo’s frazzled appearance, her frizzy airplane-hair half-out of its forgotten ponytail. “But I don’t understand why.”
“‘Cause you didn’t let me say my piece.” Jo rummages through her pockets and balls her hands into fists, sticking them out towards her. “Here, pick one.”
The knot in Raissa’s stomach tightens.
“Jo, I’m really not in the mood for games right now,” she says, ducking her head. She’s also not in the mood right now for existing or being perceived at all for the next 100 years but nobody needs to know that.
“Just pick,” Jo says, pushing her fists further at her. Raissa sighs and taps her right hand, because never in her life has she ever been truly able to say no to Jo. Never has she really wanted to.
Jo grins, turning her hand palm-up and revealing a small heart-shaped charm in the middle. Raissa goes still as a statue as Jo pushes up her sweater so she can attach the charm to her bracelet. She never takes it off–even on days when she has lab, she shoves it in her bag during the part where they’re dealing with explosive chemicals but she puts it on right after.
“It’s a heart,” Jo says, staring at the ground. Is she blushing? Raissa didn’t know her cheeks could do that. “‘Cause you’ve always had my heart, since the day we met.”
“Oh,” Raissa says. The knot in her stomach untangles in a sudden burst of warmth, flooding her gut with butterflies. “That was so cheesy,” she says but her face aches from holding back her grin.
Jo’s red as a fire-engine at that.
“What?! Hey, I was working on that the whole plane ride over, I even made the guy next to me practice with me.”
Raissa bursts out laughing because she can totally see it, Jo leaning into the unsuspecting college student or grandfather next to her’s seat to make them practice her confession for 14 hours straight.
“You’re crazy,” she laughs and Jo tilts her head up at her, uncharacteristically bashful.
“But that’s what you like about me, right?”
Raissa stares at the heart charm in her free hand, and the jangle of charms on the worn-down string, an entire lifetime compressed into one bracelet.
“Yeah,” Raissa says, taking her heart and hooking it on Jo’s bracelet. “I do.”