"A whole thing?"
"A whole entire thing. Complete with dramatic backstory and possible existential crises. You're gonna love it."
Jace groans. "Can you not make my life sound like a soap opera?"
"I can only report the facts, and the facts are dramatic."
"The facts are complicated."
"Same thing."
I release Mae's arm and pull out my phone to exchange numbers. The act carries a weight that neither of us acknowledges aloud: the last time we had each other's contact information, I was sixteen and my mother confiscated the device that held it. Rebuilding this connection through a phone number feels like picking up a thread that was cut with scissors and tying a new knot in the severed end.
"Also! Let's exchange numbers? I lost all my old contacts when my parents confiscated my phone back in the day. Which means I've spent thirteen years without being able to reach you, and that's a tragedy I refuse to let continue."
Mae smiles and pulls out her phone.
And I recoil.
"Mae."
"Yes?"
"What is that?"
"It's my phone."
"That is not a phone. That is a relic. That belongs in a museum. Is that... is that an iPhone 6?"
"Maybe."
"Girl." The physical pain on my face is genuine. That device predates several geological eras. "It's been like ten years since those came out."
"It still works! Mostly. The battery dies after two hours, but that just encourages me to be present in the moment."
"Present in the moment," Jace repeats flatly. "That's what we're calling technological neglect now?"
The phone debate escalates through green text horror and the naming of ancient devices (Beatrice, apparently, has been through a lot) and the revelation that Mae has one plant named Gerald who is a succulent and judgmental about life choices. By the time I declare my love for Gerald and Mae confirms his charisma, the table has been laughing for three uninterrupted minutes.
"Well," Jace says, and his voice shifts from the teasing register into the quieter one beneath it, the one he uses when something matters too much for sarcasm to carry it. "You're going to be social now, MaeMae. Because you've got friends again. Whether you like it or not."
Friends.
The word lands in my chest alongside the guilt and rearranges the internal geography slightly. Not enough to erase the shame of having disappeared. Not enough to undo the eight years of silence that Mae absorbed while I was being shuttled between schools and social engagements and the curated lifestyle my mother believed would sand down the tomboy edges my father's influence had carved into my personality.
But enough to remind me that repair is possible. That the bridge between what we were and what we could become is not a gap to be mourned but a distance to be crossed. One lunchat a time. One conversation at a time. One honest admission at a time, until the truth that I owe her has been delivered and the decision of what to do with it rests where it belongs: in her hands.
The meal winds down with lighter fare. I tell her about the Omega hockey league, the years of fighting to be taken seriously in a sport that treats my designation as a disqualification rather than a characteristic. Jace shares his class observations, identifying the professors he trusts and the ones he suspects of operating covert villainy from behind the safety of tenure. Mae describes three years of office work that killed her soul through the slow, fluorescent-lit process of converting passion into payroll.
It feels easy. Natural. Like thirteen years compressed into a pause between breaths rather than a chasm between lives.
Maybe real friendship works like that. The kind built before you learned to protect yourself from caring. It waits. Patient and stubborn and rooted in the bedrock of who you were before the world started telling you who to be.
My phone buzzes with a calendar notification that I set three hours ago and already resent for existing.
"Crap." I wince. "I've got a thing in twenty minutes. Omega league meeting. I'd skip it, but our coach is terrifying, and I value my kneecaps."
"Go," Mae says, and the permission in her voice carries a generosity that I do not deserve. "I need to grab my timetable anyway. Miss Phillip said the administrative office would have it ready."
