—
“Let’s sleep outside tonight,” Clara suggested the following week. They could bring their mattress out to the balcony. “We’ll be able to see the stars,” she said.
It was the kind of March that could go either way, with crocus shoots and a chill in the breeze, but that day smelled like spring, like mud and grass and a hint of garbage with the melted snow. Jess had walked back to the dorm in short sleeves, the sun on her arms for the first time in months, passing the frat boys up and down St. George Street who’d dragged their crappy couches onto the lawns.
“Sounds good,” she said to Clara. By now, Jess had learned not to question Clara’s impulses, to just follow along and reap the rewards.
And that night, snug on the mattress under piles of blankets, Jess asked her, “Have you done something like this before?” They were lying even closer than usual to stay warm, the evening chillier since sundown, which made it more important to follow through with the plan, fond as Clara was of incongruity. If the night had been milder, she might have lost interest and headed inside.
Clara said, “I mean, I’ve been camping.”
“But not like this,” said Jess. Not beneath the lights of the city, surrounded by its sounds, traffic and sirens. Jess thought about how, from Clara, she’d learned how you could build your own little world. You could bring home a trunk from the sidewalk, or move your bed out under the stars.
Clara agreed. “No, not like this.” They lay in silence for a while, and then Clara said, “You know, every time I’ve been close to anyone—friends, boyfriends—they’ve been so much older. And I don’t even know why. Maybe because my sisters were teenagers when I came along? So I’ve always been the one running behind, trying to catch up, trying to be faster, to be more. And with you, it feels like the first time ever that I don’t have to do that.”
She added, “I’ve never had a best friend before. Honestly, I thought I wasn’t the type.”
Which was ridiculous. Clara Summers could draw other people with the force of a magnet when she turned her attention on them—the guy who’d fixed the oven on their floor had sent her flowers. Clara could be friends with anyone if she just bothered to give them a chance, but she almost never did. So how exactly had it transpired that Jess, of all people,would finally end up here at the centre of the world with Clara beside her, the entire night sky above them? What did Clara see in Jess that made her so different from everyone else that Clara never had any time for?
But she couldn’t ask a question like that, especially not to Clara, whose self-assurance Jess had been trying to mirror all along. Jess was scared that if she spoke at all, the spell would be broken. Because, even though the usual inclination between girls she knew was always to relate, to say, “Me too! Same, same,” Jess had had strings of best friends for as long as she could remember, often changing with the seasons. But her connection with Clara went deeper than any of those, it was true. She said, in all honesty, “I don’t know if I’ve had a real one in my life.”
—
Little by little, Jess and Clara started to broaden their world, to prop the door open and let other people inside. Something had shifted and Jess felt confident enough in their connection to trust it, and even to turn her mind to other things, such as the endearingly dorky boy beside her in the chorus. Clayton, with whom she shared all kinds of inside jokes now after weeks of standing by his side in rehearsals, and who didn’t seem to mind that she’d stolen his yellow bucket hat. Who already had his own favourite mug from Clara’s collection, the cracked one with the hippo, since he’d started turning up on their doorstep all the time, although Jess couldn’t tell if helikeliked her, or if they were only friends. The other week at the campus open mic, he’d dedicated a song to her, but it was “MMMBop,” which didn’t clarify things. She tried to engage Clara on the topic, but Clara was noncommittal, insisting that she mainly regarded Clayton as a pet,scruffy and lovable, and that she was incapable of thinking of him in any other way.
But Jess was thinking of him now on the afternoon before opening night. She was putting up promotional posters downstairs at the entrance to their building, but really, she was waiting for Clayton. They were going to help Clara run her lines. The play was still terrible, but they were buzzing with the prospect of finally performing it, the culmination of so much work. The theatre would be full no matter what, the campus being its own universe with nothing else going on so close to exams.
When Jess saw him approaching, she threw open the door. “I was just postering,” she explained, hoping not to seem too eager, spinning the roll of tape on her wrist. Clayton hugged her back the way he always did, hard and close, and then she scrambled up the stairs behind him and down the hall to Clara’s room, which was empty.
Clayton stopped. “Where is she?”
“Clara?” Jess asked. “She’s around. Probably in the kitchen.” He popped into the hall to look again. “Or the bathroom.” Jess sat down on edge of the bed. “What’s going on?”
“She didn’t tell you?” He came back in and started rummaging around for the hippo mug. “How our man Brett made a move?”
“A move on Clara?” Jess pointed to the shelf where he’d left the mug the last time he was over.
“She shot him down, obviously, but I guess he found her acting skills quite convincing.”
“Whose acting skills?” asked Clara, arriving in her oven mitts, carrying a loaf of banana bread fresh from the oven.
“Yours,” said Jess. “Apparently.”
“A woman of many talents,” said Clayton, leaning close to breathe in the baking. “I can’t believe you actually made this,” he said, which was what he said every time Clara made anything, as though she’d performed a miracle instead of merely reading a recipe. “The poor guy, I heard you broke his heart.”
“But you never said a thing,” Jess said to Clara. They’d been together all day. If anyone had ever made a move on her, she would have had Clara analyzing it from every angle for hours. Clayton hadn’t made a move yet, and she’d been going on about it for weeks.
“Because there was nothing to say,” said Clara, plugging in the kettle. And here was the distance between them. Jess wondered what it must be like to be the kind of woman who found it literally unremarkable when men, even awful ones, fell at their feet.
—
The show opened and, of course, Clara stole it, reading lines from Brett Bickford’s awful script like they were satire, highlighting their absurdity, which made the bad play almost make sense. That week the campus paper published a positive theatre review for the first time in its history.
And then it was over, this huge, amazing part of their life collapsed like a fan. To aid with the transition, they drank until they were stupid at the cast party backstage, Brett Bickford with Emily Holt in the props cupboard as usual, apparently over his heartbreak at Clara’s rejection. Everyone else was out in the corridor drinking warm beer out of red plastic cups, debauchery flowing like the booze was. The costumes room had been raided and people were already taking off their clothes, putting on wigs.
“Where’s Clara?” Clayton asked, appearing with two drinks and handing one to Jess. He was wearing an oversized Viking hat with horns. Jess had no idea where Clara was, having last seen her in a pink wig arguing about cultural appropriation with some jerk in a feather headdress, but that was ages ago. Someone else said that Clara had left. Jess sipped her drink, no longer able to properly string a sentence together. She reached up and fondled Clayton’s right horn. “Really, are Vikings culturally appropriate either?”
“Listen, I gotta talk to you,” he told her. Finally, Jess was thinking. “Not here,” he said, leading her along the corridor, around the corner to the lounge, where two people were already sucking each other’s faces, setting the tone.
