This is Not a Love Story

There is a package sitting on my bed.

I find it when I drop my bag on the floor after work, ready to go to the kitchen and wash my hands. Initially, I am a little annoyed. I don’t want a parcel from outside touching my quilt. Barb must have put it there, and I consider talking to her about it, but after the bath towel incident, I don’t want to bother her.

On closer inspection the package does not have a shipping label, so maybe Barb wrapped it herself, in which case I don’t mind it being on my bed.

Oh. My name is written on the brown paper, printed with black ink in a familiar hand, neat when it tries, and clearly it tried. Not Barb, then.

Since it does not appear to have been through the postal system, I leave the package there and go to wash my hands. The sink needs wiping down, and I think maybe I’ll do that over the weekend unless I’m pulled into something else.

My apartment is the first place I’ve lived without adult supervision. It’s two bedrooms and a small kitchen on the third floor of a building near campus, with ugly pink walls that, as renters, we can’t paint over. 

Barb and I moved in together out of convenience and stayed out of friendship, after the first few weeks of getting to know each other’s routines. She’ll be back from biology class in maybe an hour, and then we’ll chat while she makes dinner.

I go back to my room and sit down carefully on the edge of the bed. Maybe I should unpack my bag and tidy up before I open the package. But I’m too curious now, so I pick it up and slip a finger under the carefully-taped paper, not tearing it even a bit as I unwrap.

It’s my book. 

Mine, the one I wrote. Inside the front cover, I can see it’s not one of my signed copies, but there is a note. 

I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I wasn’t someone you could tell, when this came out. I loved your book, Lydia.

There is no signature, and I don’t need one. For the hell of it, I flip to a random page, and almost laugh. There are notes jotted in all the margins, gel pen smears and smiley faces and underlined passages.

I put the book aside, gently laying it on my patchwork quilt. I can’t do this right now.

She wrote my name twice, on the wrapping and in the note.

Lydia.

Ly-di-a, three syllables.

Ly-di-a. Lea-der-ship. Trust-wor-thy. Ob-sess-ive. Ob-sess-ive. Ob-sess-ive.

Yeah, I get it. I wasn’t perfect. I am so far from perfect it makes me laugh sometimes, and mostly I don’t mind. I’m the only one I’m never good enough for. Except for her, maybe, or maybe it wasn’t her at all, but it still hurt. It’s still been two years. 

I’m still not mad.

I think I should be, and for a while I was. But not anymore. I’m drifting too much to hold onto anything, especially a grudge against someone I love that much.

At first, she was everywhere. Birthday cards tacked to my corkboard, t-shirts folded in my dresser, scarf hanging by the door. I think her love language was gifts, and maybe that’s part of why we didn’t work. I didn’t give my friend, in the material sense, anywhere near as much as she gave me. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it wasn’t really about the gifts. It was about communication, and when did we ever do that? Still, things she gave me were all over my room, and it stung.

Now most of those things are gone or packed away. I thought they’d stay that way.

I stand up and unpack my bag. I fold my laundry and vacuum the rug and wash my hands again and put a burrito in the microwave for a snack. Then I wash the dishes I found at a department store downtown. While I’m doing that, Barb comes in through the door, the sound making me flinch, since it came so suddenly out of the quiet.

“Hey, Lydia,” she says. “You lovely human!” She adds, noticing the mostly clean laminate countertop. 

I just smile, and she gets it, that I don’t have anything to say.

She sets down her textbooks on the counter and sits on one of the bar stools. “Did you see what I left on your bed?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. 

She waits to see if I’ll say anything else. “She asked me if you’d be mad,” she says. “I think she found me online, ‘cause I’d never seen her before. Is she an ex?”

“Not like that,” I say. “Ex-best friend, I guess. We aren’t really on speaking terms right now.”

Barb nods. “What was inside?”

“My book,” I tell her. “She wrote a note inside.”

It’s clear in her eyes that she doesn’t really know how to talk to me about this. I wish I could tell her, but I don’t know what I would say. That it’s a touchy subject but she doesn’t need to worry about it? How is she supposed to take that?

Living without adults – we’re eighteen, but that doesn’t mean anything because neither of us considers ourselves grown-up – has been an interesting experience for all the wrong reasons. When we split up chores, we decided that I would do most of the cleaning and Barb would cook. What that has meant so far is that our apartment always smells faintly of vinegar and Clorox; and for dinner tonight we are eating cornbread, carrot sticks, and what is probably supposed to be rice pudding, but which I have decided not to ask about, in case it comes off as rude. It tastes pretty good, regardless of what it’s meant to be.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Barb asks. She is halfway through her cornbread, which is slightly burnt on the bottom and slightly gooey in the center, but not enough of either to complain about unless you are Paul Hollywood or under the age of six. She said the oven was the wrong temperature.

“The cornbread?” I say, taking a large sip of water.

She raises an eyebrow, and I look back, pretending I don’t know what she means even though I very well do. “The note,” she explains. “Some girl came up to me after work, asked if I was Barb Haufmann, handed me a package with your name on it, and told me she missed you. You don’t owe me an explanation, but if you don’t mind too much, I’d like some backstory.”

“She misses me?”

“Are you sure she’s not an ex?”

I roll my eyes. “Yes, I’m sure.” I bite the end off a carrot stick and chew it all the way. “We were friends as little kids. A couple years ago she decided we shouldn’t be. Said I didn’t care about her interests, I think. I don’t know if it was really about me, though.”

Barb winces. As understanding as she is, sometimes she takes it a little too seriously when someone gets mad at me for a little social thing I forget to do – in this case, talk about things other than whatever I’m buried in at the time. “She doesn’t sound very nice.”

“She was, though. She was the kindest person I knew. She was just in the middle of a complicated relationship with someone else, and it got… a little manipulative. I think.” I don’t actually know the details, and it frustrates me. I try not to theorize.

“Sounds like one of those situations you need to stay out of for your own health,” Barb says.

“Maybe,” I say. I chew another carrot to mush. “I’m going to make her something.”

Barb sighs. “I won’t stop you. Just be careful, Lydia.”

“She’s my best friend,” I say firmly, present tense because I told her I needed time, not that we shouldn’t be friends again. 

I wash the dishes while Barb dries, then curl up in bed with my sketchbook and laptop. I don’t draw very much, but I don’t think that’s really the point, in this case. 

There was a cartoon show, that we watched when we were younger. I remember emailing back and forth past midnight, looking at the fan art she drew and telling her how much I liked it, even if that was before I’d seen the show when I didn’t know the characters. I remember feeling high on conversation and the sort of jokes pre-teens think are scandalous.

I sketch out the two main characters from her show. Underneath, in a gel pen from middle school that I think she complimented once, I write: I miss you.

It’s small, and the edge of the paper rips when I try to tear it out along the perforated edge. It’s nothing compared to how long it must have taken her to mark up my book. But maybe it’ll be enough.

I know her address, the same one she had two years ago. I can tell – same wallpaper stains in the background of her Instagram posts, same fake marble countertop under pictures of meals she’s made. I don’t have Instagram, but I check her page sometimes, to convince myself she is real and alive and okay.

The drawing goes in an envelope, sealed with a donut sticker like we’re still thirteen and addressed to just her first name, like she wrote on mine. I call to Barb that I’m going on a walk and step out into the damp, chilly October night. Should I check her posts now, I wonder if they would be filled with Halloween decorations.

The mailbox at the drugstore makes me pause, partly because I’ve seen people touch that handle right after clumsily scooping up dog poop, and partly because what if this is a terrible idea, what if it’s not enough, what if she thinks the drawing means more than ‘I want to stop pretending we don’t care.’

I stare at the chipping blue paint, the box casting an eerie shadow in the dusk. The sticky air is somewhere between comforting and suffocating, and I’d better do this quick and get home before someone asks what a random girl is doing loitering in front of a mailbox. Still, I stand there for what is probably another five minutes before doing anything.

Finally, I open the mailbox with two fingers and slip the letter inside, listening to it thunk down onto metal.

As I run back home, I try to convince myself that the little ache in my stomach is just the urge to wash my hands.