Briar smiled. ‘Yeah, she’s a real force. She reminds me a lot of you in that way.’
Alice tried not to be offended, reminding herself that Briar liked Harper and had probably meant it as a compliment. ‘How did you two become so close, anyway?’
‘We ran into each other at a party a couple months into freshman year. Noah and I had the same Intro to Education class, but I hadn’t seen Harper at all.’ She paused and Alice looked over at her, but she was staring at the wall in front of her, expressionless. ‘She said she wanted her own friends, that she was feeling sick of being the person she was in high school.’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’ Alice asked, pouring the boiling water into the French press. ‘That’s what college is for.’
Briar frowned. ‘I didn’t mind who I was in high school.’
‘Well, of course you didn’t,’ Alice said. ‘You were always the coolest person in the room. You never cared what anyone thought of you.’
Alice had always envied that about Briar. Everything Alice did was carefully calibrated to the reactions of her peers and her parents. She suspected that was a large part of why it had taken her so long to figure out she was a lesbian. She had never taken a moment to investigate who she wanted to be, separate from the constant need for acceptance.
She’d been jealous when Briar had come out in their junior year of high school, and at the time she’d had no clear explanation for the feeling. She had ended up attributing it to the fact that Briar was so fearlessly herself. And with a mother like Susan, how could she have been anything else?
Briar didn’t respond for a minute. ‘Well, I’m definitely more of a mess now than I was then. So maybe I’m one of those shitty people that peaked in high school.’
Alice stirred in the sugar, bringing the coffee to Briar and sitting across from her. ‘You didn’t peak in high school,’ she said, resisting the impulse to take Briar’s hand.
Briar took a sip of coffee. ‘I guess I just imagined my life as an adult differently, and it sometimes feels like every decision I make is just rolling with the punches.’ She took another sip and then said in a flat tone, ‘There have been a lot of punches.’
‘If it helps,’ Alice said, ‘you’re the same person to me now that you were then.’
As she spoke, she wasn’t sure if that was actually true. Yes, Briar was still the person who understood her better than anyone else. But this new thing between them, the one that they were refusing to talk about, changed things for Alice. Briar was suddenly so much more to Alice than she’d been before, and having to ignore it was torture.
Briar kept quiet, seemingly lost in thought. Then she gulped down the rest of her coffee and stood.
‘We should get started prepping sides.’
Alice stood too and passed Briar a mountain of broccoli before turning to mince garlic. ‘I still make this recipe all the time,’ she said, trying to distract Briar. ‘The garlic in the roux makes all the difference.’
Briar nodded, chopping the broccoli. ‘We always had wild garlic in the garden my mom needed to use up.’
‘There was no feeling as good as getting off school on a Friday and going over to yours to cook,’ Alice said. On those nights, the Elwood home had rung with laughter from Briar’s siblings, who had taken turns pestering them as they cooked. It had made Alice wish she’d had siblings – their home had felt alive in a way hers never had. ‘I looked forward to being an adult, to having a house like the one you grew up in and someone to share it with. Simple things.’
The bungalow had been filled to the brim with memories, from screen-printings done by Briar’s grandma to glasswork Susan had collected from the local Renaissance fair. As soon as you walked in the door, you knew exactly who the inhabitants were. Alice had aspired to that, yet had somehow ended up in a bare flatshare in London with a broody grad student and not a single piece of art on the walls.
Briar nodded. ‘Having you around made it fun, like it was our own place.’
The words mimicked Alice’s thoughts so closely that she felt entirely transparent. After having been around colleagues who hadn’t been able to read her for so long, there was something surreal in the existence of a person who she’d shared everything with once.
‘Yeah,’ she said softly. ‘It did feel like that. I thought that was what being an adult would feel like, but it never has.’
Briar cleaved a head of broccoli neatly in two. ‘No, it hasn’t.’
They had made so many plans when they had been younger, about the lives they would live side by side, the places they would go and the people they would become. None of them had come true. Alice was to blame for that.
‘Shit,’ Briar hissed, and Alice turned to see that she’d sliced her finger with the knife.
Alice grabbed for her automatically, examining the cut as blood dripped onto their hands.
‘We need to put pressure on it,’ she said, trying to project confidence. Briar had always been better at treating wounds than her, since she got queasy at the sight of blood. ‘Cook has a first aid kit somewhere.’ She whirled around and rifled through the cabinets until she found it on a shelf opposite the stove.
‘I can do it,’ she said, and Briar placed her hand in Alice’s more tentatively this time, eyeing her warily. ‘What? You don’t trust me?’
‘I’m a little worried you’ll faint,’ Briar admitted.
‘I’m not going to faint,’ Alice said, though honestly, Briar’s doubt in her was propelling her forward more than anything else. She pressed a piece of gauze into the pad of Briar’s thumb, taking tape in one hand and winding it around the finger.
