Mingled Souls

Mireya is eating dinner at her own house, but she’s still all over my room. Her purple backpack is leaning next to my blue one at the foot of my bed, next to the Sharpie signatures -- Mireya Hutton, Rowan Sullivan -- my mom let us leave on the Ikea frame, next to the two yellow water bottles that we keep getting mixed up.

It’s dark outside, in that summer-evening way, only it’s late September. One of those weird fall days when it’s still annoyingly warm and I have to leave the window open, which I’ve done, letting the untied curtains flutter in the slight breeze. When Mireya is done eating she’ll call to me, leaning too far out of her own window like I can’t hear a word she’s saying, and chuck her pencil case in my direction. It’ll hit the outside of the house like always and land in the flowerbed, and she’ll pick it up on the way over. I try not to think about how I’ll spend my afternoons this time next year.

I’m home alone tonight. Dad is having dinner with some work friends and Mom is visiting Reed at his college. I love wandering around the empty, dusky house. I can even leave all the lights off, since no one is here to tell me I’m a weirdo or a vampire for liking the dark so much.

After unpacking my backpack and checking to see if my favorite fanfiction has been updated (it hasn’t), I rummage around under my bed for my skateboard. Homework can wait for the weekend. I take the board outside, set up the bluetooth speaker to play my Halsey playlist, and then kick off and make a couple loops around the cul-de-sac.

Suddenly my music turns off. I look over to see Mireya holding my speaker with an eyebrow raised. 

“Jerk,” I say, skating over. She’s brought her board, too. “What, you having an Adele day again?”

“Don’t want to lure Cass and Batty out here,” Mireya explains. She’s wearing patched denim overalls like she lives on a farm or something. I’m just in basketball shorts and a Minecraft t-shirt.

She has a point. My cousins live two houses down from me, and while they’re pretty fun to hang out with on a good day, I’m socially exhausted and all I want to do is screw around with Mireya for a few hours. “Gandalf tree?” I ask.

“Hell yeah.”

There’s a tree in the woods behind our houses that my brother Reed thought looked like a wizard, so an eight-year-old Mireya named it the Gandalf tree because of her Lord of the Rings obsession. We climb it all the time, Mireya always going a little higher than me. She’s always braver.

As we trudge through the fallen leaves, I pull my hair back into a bun. I practically sigh in relief, although the air still makes my skin clammy. 

Mireya jogs ahead and hoists herself into the tree before me. “Do you remember,” she begins, “when we were five or six, your dad teaching us to ride a bike?”

“Yeah, that was fun,” I agree. 

“I fell off and my knee got all scraped up, and you came over and hugged me and played doctor, and then your dad wanted you to go have another try while I took a break.”

I remember this now. “I didn’t,” I say. “I sat with you until you stopped crying.”

“And I kept pretending to sniffle, just to see how long you would stay.”

“That was pretend?” I settle onto the branch below her, looking up.

“Not all of it, but mostly, yeah.”

“That explains it. You’ve always hated crying when you got hurt. The summer after seventh grade, when you broke your finger, I don’t think I saw a single tear.”

“It didn’t hurt that bad,” she says.

“Girl, I saw your x-rays,” I tell her.

“But the point is,” Mireya continues, “You stayed. You sat right there with me in the street for probably half an hour, and you held my hand and sang the Pokémon theme song to me because that was before we knew any actual music.” She pauses, and when she starts speaking again her voice is quieter and a little shy. “You knew I was pretending, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

I did. I remember seeing that change in Mireya’s eyes when my dad called for me to come get back on the bike. I’m sure she would have been all right. Even then, she was scarily resilient sometimes. But, I think, she’d gotten in a fight with her other friend from Kindergarten, and she wanted to know that she wasn’t going to lose me too. 

So I plopped right down next to her and stayed. I held her hand and our matching unicorn charm bracelets hung limply, brushing the pavement.

I reach up and take her hand, missing once because it’s really too dark now to be out without a light but we know these woods like we know each other and I know it’ll be okay.

“Thank you,” Mireya says.

We sit like that for a few minutes, listening to the forest critters settle in for the night and communicating novels’ worth of information without speaking a word.

“Are you scared?” I ask, barely above a whisper.

“More than I’ve ever been.”

“It’s not fair, but I am too.”

“You should have accepted Florida,” she says.

“I don’t want to be that far from you.”

“Rowan, I’m going to California.” She squeezes my hand. “No matter what you do we’re going to be far apart. You shouldn’t give up your future to shave off a few miles.”

“Try a few thousand! I don’t need to go to college. The world is changing! I can be a tennis coach or something. I don’t know.”

“We can’t keep doing this,” Mireya whispers. “I love you, Rowan, but we can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?” 

Everything, together. Homework done leaning off my bed every night, my clothes in her closet, sleepovers on her screen porch every night all summer.

“You know, the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other, was forty-eight hours in third grade? When you had a stomach bug and my mom wouldn’t let me visit you?”

“That can’t be right,” I say, but then I think about it. We don’t have matching school schedules but we’ve always had the same lunch period. And outside school we’ve done everything together since tummy time as babies.

“I don’t know who I am, Rowan,” she says. I’m still holding her hand. “I don’t know who I am without you. I don’t want to lose what we have but I need to be--” she breaks off, and I can hear her free hand waving in the air like she’s searching for words. “I need to be my own person. And so do you.”

I close my eyes, although there’s not much light left to block out. “Not… not all at once, okay?”

“Not all at once,” she agrees. “I’m not leaving for almost a year. We have time.”

“We could start tomorrow?”

“Let’s start now,” Mireya says gently. “This is going to be hard.”

“How do we even… do it?”

I can sense her smile. “Let’s go to your room and figure out which clothes are mine. I’ll take them home. We can do my closet tomorrow morning.”

It’s so small. It wouldn’t even have to be the start of something bigger, except it is, and that thing is the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do.

But I guess it’s not like I have to do it alone.

I squeeze Mireya’s hand and she squeezes back.

And simultaneously, we let go.