BRAIN FREEZE

That’s the thing about this city, it rots you from the inside out. Slithering down your throat to make a coiled home deep in your tummy, twisting, turning, beating like an extra heart. 

Eleanor pushes off from the ground and she soars on the swing, eyes closed, head tilted back. 

Higher and higher. 

On the swing next to her, Katinka isn’t moving. She blinks, and an eyelash stabs her in the eye. She pulls at it, unafraid, pressing it between two fingers like a tiny fairy wing. 

‘El,’ she says. Her voice is like a cough, her mouth like a cut in her face. She has never been pretty, but Eleanor has never cared about that. Eleanor, with her wild curls that she buzzed off last week and the angry set of her jaw. 

‘El,’ Katinka says again, louder this time to be heard over the wind. ‘I’ve got a wish for you.’

Eleanor braces her feet against the ground and comes to a hard stop. She twists her neck. ‘Huh?’

‘A wish,’ Katinka repeats. Reaching out her hand, she separates her fingers to reveal the eyelash. 

Eleanor closes her eyes, then leans closer and blows. Katinka knows what she’d wish for, because she’s been wishing for it for so long it’s barely a wish any more. It’s just a part of life, like the freckle on her right elbow, the one strand of hair on her right shin that’s blacker than all the rest. 

She pushes off the ground, too. 

Eleanor is leaving the city soon. To go to school somewhere far away, somewhere with sheep and fields and haughty girls prettier and smarter than Katinka will ever be. Katinka is going nowhere, she never will, where would she go? 

This is where she took her first step, where she smoked her first joint, where she knows the metro system better than her own heart. 

Take four stops on the green line and switch to the red, direction east, then another two stops on the blue line, and there’s the best waffle shop in the world. Five stops back on that blue line, and ride the red to the end—the playground they’re on right now, the best in the city, which is the only world Katinka has ever known. 

‘What’d you wish for?’

‘It won’t come true if I tell.’

‘It won’t anyway.’

Dreams are just dreams, and the metro is never clean. It’s foul and stinks of piss and beer, and the air is so stale you choke on it. And Eleanor is going away, and she’ll never look back—why would she? 

Katinka wouldn’t. 

Except, for El—

But that’s dream-thinking again, and Katinka is a big girl now. She welcomes the snake of the city and lets it eat her heart up. In a year, she won’t think of Eleanor at all any more. 

She’s promised herself that. 

Even if Eleanor is the prettiest girl she’s ever seen, and is the one who taught her how to fist fight, the one who bought the first joint she ever smoked, the only girl Katinka wants to get high with. The only girl in the whole city that matters, that would go to the beat-up playground at three in the night because Katinka couldn’t sleep, and was bored, and wanted to go. 

Next week, she’ll have to go alone. Will she even go then? 

She’ll have to find a new friend. Eleanor will replace Katinka, so Katinka will replace her right back. Her heart skids against her ribs and her eyes narrow with anticipated resentment. 

‘It might,’ Eleanor’s voice cuts through the night air, her face lit up by the shine from the streetlamps. ‘You never know. You don’t know what I wished for.’ 

‘Maybe I don’t care,’ Katinka lies. Of course she cares. She’s spent her whole life caring, but only about one thing and she’s going away. Her heart hurts so much she doesn’t know how to deal with it. 

So she doesn’t. 

She spits on the ground and somersaults backwards on the swing, arms entangled in the chains. 

*

The next morning, Eleanor calls her. Technically, it’s not morning any more, but it’s summer and time is suspended. The city doesn’t dance to anyone’s beat but its own. 

‘What’s up?’ 

‘I’m bored,’ Eleanor says, voice lazy, her vowels stretched out like a cat. 

Her heart kicks again and she flicks against a freckle on her left arm, over and over, her nail snapping against it. Little sparks of pain dance up her arm. 

‘So?’

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I know you want to do something. Let’s go get ice cream.’

‘I’m broke.’

‘I’ll pay.’

‘Fine.’ 

Why she bothered to put up a fake fight about it—of course she’d give in, because of course Eleanor is right. Of course she wants to do something. There’s always a new alley to explore, a new shop opening somewhere, a new something to do—and always the same old ache in her chest when standing next to Eleanor, her hand twitching to bridge the gap between their skin. 

‘I’ll meet you outside in five minutes,’ Eleanor says, which means she left home at least five minutes ago, because she knew Katinka would say yes. 

‘Okay.’ She hangs up and slides the phone into the pocket of her shorts, then slides on the wooden floor to go brush her teeth.

Eleanor is leaning against a light pole outside, hands shoved into her pockets. She’s wearing shorts, too, black denim, and a washed-out grey tee tied at the front. Katinka wants to swipe her hand over her scalp, feel the soft tickle of the buzz cut against her skin. 

‘Where to?’ she says in lieu of greeting.

‘Panda’s.’ 

Panda’s is an ice cream parlour so tiny it doesn’t have anywhere for customers to sit down and enjoy the obnoxiously great ice cream they sell. They’re well acquainted with the owner, Rodriguez, which has never resulted in them getting a discount. That’s the city, too. Nothing comes for free. 

‘Of course,’ Katinka replies. 

Eleanor is half a step ahead as they walk down the street. 

‘Are you excited?’ 

‘For ice cream?’ 

‘No,’ she says, ‘for your new school. Moving away.’ 

It’s the first time she’s brought up Eleanor’s impending departure, because even thinking about it makes her chest tighten. But they have to acknowledge it at some point, don’t they? She’s leaving, it’s already decided, Katinka is being left behind. 

Eleanor shrugs her shoulders and rolls her neck so it clicks. 

Katinka curls her hand into a tight fist, clammed up like a shell. 

At Panda’s, Rodriguez greets them with a smile and asks if they want their usual. They do, of course, because what ever changes? For Eleanor, this means one scoop French vanilla and one scoop caramel; for Katinka, this means one scoop salted caramel and one scoop liquorice. 

Eleanor, true to tradition, wrinkles her nose at Katinka’s ice cream choices, but says nothing. The subject has been beaten to death already.

‘You didn’t answer,’ Katinka presses when they’re standing outside, each with a cup in one hand and a colourful plastic spoon in the other. She scoops up ice cream and licks it off the spoon. 

‘About what?’

‘The new school. Whether you’re excited about leaving.’ 

‘I guess,’ she says, licking her own spoon, her tongue so pink. 

Katinka looks back at her own ice cream and carefully spoons up more, enough to give her brain freeze for a solid minute. ‘You guess?’

‘It’s just more school,’ Eleanor says. 

She doesn’t say what Katinka wants to hear, but then she never does. Does Katinka ever say what Eleanor wants to hear? What does Eleanor want to hear?

It’s too embarrassing to ask. It’s too stupid to think about it in the first place. 

She shoves her spoon into her ice cream so it stays there and her hand is free. She curls it into a fist again, then rubs at her eye. Hard, hard enough to see glitter. She rubs, and rubs, and when she pulls her hand away, she pulls an eyelash with it. 

It rests on her palm like a present, a fresh wish, and she holds it out for Eleanor. 

She’s not sure if the magic works when you pull them out deliberately, but it can’t hurt. 

Eleanor closes her eyes and hums. She’d look peaceful, if it weren’t for the tension in her jaw. She’s the deep end of the pool and Katinka never learned how to swim. She’s a slick car driving 50 above the speed limit. She’s just a girl, and Katinka is, too, and that’s half the problem. And she’s going away. So soon, she won’t be here any more, and Katinka will be alone, and she still won’t know how to swim. 

‘What’d you wish for?’ she asks, after Eleanor has blown the eyelash away. It didn’t tickle, she didn’t feel it; it was just there, and then it wasn’t any more. 

Eleanor looks at her. She isn’t a swimming pool or a fast car or even a girl so much as she is everything Katinka has ever fucking wanted, the scar on her left cheek, the honeyed gold skin, her lips twitching into a half smirk that’s going to haunt her for the rest of her life. 

Her ice cream is melting. 

She’s going to be sick.