Once, a girl from our anatomy lab made a comment about “scholarship drama girls reinventing themselves by the beach.”
Lily looked up from her notes and said, “That’s brave coming from someone who thought the spleen was part of the digestive tract.”
No one messed with Lily after that.
Or me.
We found a stray cat behind the alley near our favorite coffee place in Santa Monica. She was skinny, gray, suspicious, and missing part of one ear. Lily immediately decided she was ours.
“She looks like a Cupcake,” Lily said.
The cat hissed at us from behind a dumpster.
“That cat has killed before,” I said.
“Cupcake has boundaries.”
“We are not naming a feral alley demon Cupcake.”
We named her Cupcake.
We started feeding her twice a week. Then three times. Then every day we could, which meant we were basically co-parenting a criminal with whiskers. Cupcake only let Lily touch her after six months. She let me touch her after eight. I considered that a greater honor than half my nursing grades.
Lily and I had rituals.
Matcha tea lattes became our new die-for drink, which was ridiculous because I used to think green drinks tasted like lawn clippings and regret. Now I craved them like oxygen during finals. We got them before exams. After exams. During emotional breakdowns. On Sundays when we pretended we were going to meal prep and instead bought pastries.
We went to concerts.
Cheap ones mostly, because even with the trust money I still had an instinctive terror of spending too much. Lily loved indie bands with names that sounded like medical conditions. I loved anything loud enough to drown out my thoughts. We wore boots and eyeliner and came back hoarse, sweaty, and laughing.
We Netflix binged entire seasons when we should have been studying.
We made inside jokes no one else understood.
We had a shared note in our phones called Evidence Against Cupcake.
We kept a running list of professors most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse.
We ranked every coffee shop within driving distance by caffeine strength, bathroom cleanliness, and likelihood of seeing someone cry over organic chemistry.
I had friends before Lily.
I still kept in touch with them—the ones who had been there that bonfire night, the ones who had seen pieces of the fire and survived their own versions of the aftermath. But we had all split off in separate directions. Different schools. Different jobs. Different attempts at becoming people who did not flinch every time someone said our names too sharply.
We texted. Sent memes. Checked in on birthdays. Sometimes, late at night, one of us would send a message that said, You awake? and the rest of us knew what that meant.
But Lily was different.
Lily was my every day.
My matcha run.
My study partner.
My person.
I had never had a ride-or-die like her before.
