Would we have been closer if I had stayed?
The question has been circling my brain since the corridor reunion, orbiting the guilt like a satellite trapped in agravitational field it cannot escape. Not whether we would still be friends. That feels certain. The bond between us was forged in the specific, unbreakable alloy of childhood intimacy, the kind that survives distance and time because it was created before either of us learned how to protect ourselves from attachment.
But closer. Would we have beencloser?
Would I have been the person she called at two in the morning when the world felt too heavy? Would she have been the first to know when I presented as Omega and the confusion and the fear and the grief of becoming the designation my mother most despised turned my adolescence into a war zone? Would we have navigated the years between sixteen and twenty-four together, holding each other's hands through the specific, gendered violence that the world inflicts on young women who dare to exist outside the lines drawn for them?
Yes.
Without question, yes.
And she was robbed of that. Not by fate or circumstance or the organic drifting apart that friendship sometimes requires. By my mother. By a woman who viewed my relationships as assets or liabilities on a social balance sheet and determined that Mabeline Mae Rose did not contribute sufficient value to the portfolio to warrant preservation.
Jace survived the cut because his family's wealth made him strategically relevant. Mae did not survive it because hers did not.
And I am ashamed.
Ashamed that we are sitting in this cafeteria restarting a friendship that should never have needed restarting. Ashamed that Mae is looking at me with cautious warmth instead of the comfortable certainty we used to share. Ashamed that the first question I need to ask her is "how's life been" instead of already knowing the answer because I was there for it, theway I promised I would be when we were nine and swore a blood oath with a pricked finger and a Band-Aid that my father found in the bathroom trash and questioned with the concerned expression of a man who does not fully understand the social rituals of prepubescent girls.
Mae has always been the forgiving kind. The person who absorbs pain and metabolizes it into understanding rather than resentment. She forgave the bullies who chanted her nickname until her self-worth eroded to a thickness that could barely support her own reflection. She forgave the teachers who saw the cruelty and looked away because intervening required energy they had already allocated elsewhere. She will probably forgive me, too. For the silence and the absence and the eight years of nothing that I delivered to her doorstep wrapped in the packaging of a vanishing act she did not deserve.
But forgiveness she should not have to give is not the same as forgiveness I have earned.
And sitting here eating bread rolls while she eats pasta, pretending that the gap between us is conversational rather than structural, feels like another form of the dishonesty that created the gap in the first place.
"So." I swallow the bite in my mouth and pin her with my full attention, leaning forward on my elbows. "Spill. How's life been, Mae? What brings you to our illustrious institution?"
I gesture grandly at the cafeteria, performing enthusiasm because the alternative is performing grief, and neither of us has the bandwidth for that over lunch.
"Are you here to finally pursue the figure skating dream? Because I remember how obsessed you were. All those early morning practices. The way you'd make me watch competition videos until my eyes bled."
She snorts.
"Your eyes did not bleed."
"They bled metaphorically. I still have PTSD from that one Russian skater's spiral sequence. The one you made me watch forty-seven times."
"It was a perfect spiral!"
"It was traumatizing!"
The bickering feels natural. Effortless. The verbal equivalent of muscle memory, our rhythm resuming after thirteen years of silence as if the pause was a held breath rather than a held grudge. Jace watches us with barely concealed amusement, sipping his green smoothie with the detached appreciation of a man attending a performance he has been waiting to see.
"Anyway." I wave a hand, redirecting. "Figure skating? Is that why you're here? Finally chasing the dream?"
Mae pushes a piece of pasta around her plate, and I recognize the gesture. The buying-time maneuver of a woman composing a confession in real time, arranging words in her head the way you arrange furniture before guests arrive, hoping the placement disguises the mess underneath.
"Actually..." She takes a breath. "I'm here because my family is trying to marry me off."
The cafeteria noise continues around us. Students laughing, trays clattering, the ambient drone of a hundred simultaneous conversations providing a soundtrack to the silence that has just detonated at our table.
My fork freezes halfway to my mouth.
Jace's smoothie hovers in midair.
We stare at her with matching expressions that I can feel on my own face but cannot control. Horror. Pure, unfiltered, jaw-loosening horror.
"I'm sorry." I set down my fork with a deliberation that prevents me from snapping it in half. "Can you repeat that? Because I could have sworn you just said your family is trying tomarry you off."
