Tw: Contains mentions of intimate partner violence and alcohol abuse.

Ava

I fell in love when I was in the third grade. I was a loner, opting to walk the perimeter of the playground instead of playing with my classmates. What was the point? I’d just end up getting teased. So around and around I walked, taking off my scuffed white sneakers so I could feel the lush grass between my toes. 

As I neared a small grassy mound at the back of the playground, far removed from the other children, I saw a boy sitting with his back to me. He was picking dandelions and arranging them in front of him in neat rows. The knees of his blue-jeans were stained green and I could see that he had skinned his elbows. 

I considered tip-toeing around him and continuing my walk, but his frequent sniffles told me he was crying. If anyone knew what it was like to cry at school it was me, so I marched over to him and plopped myself down on the soft grass. 

“Why are you crying?” I asked poignantly. 

“I’m not crying.” The boy replied. 

I rolled my eyes. Of course a boy wouldn’t want to admit he was crying. Mom always said “if you see your daddy crying you pretend like nothing happened. It hurts a man’s pride to know someone’s seen him being weak.”

I never thought of crying as a weakness, but rather a choice to let it all go and experience the emotions you were feeling. 

“Okay, we’ll if you were crying… what would you be crying about?” I asked again.

“Jordon and Leon,” he looked at me and wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve. “I wanted to play soccer with them but they pushed me down and kicked me.” He lifted a pant leg to reveal black and purple splotches on his calf. “How come you don’t play red rover with the girls?”

“No one wants me to.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Olivia told me no one wanted to touch me on account of how fat I am. She said whoever holds my hand will get fat too, and you can’t play red rover without holding hands.”

“You’re not fat.”

“My mom says I am. And she’s right about everything,” I sighed.

There was a silence between us that felt comfortable. I wasn’t mulling over what I should say to keep the conversation going and he wasn’t saying things I didn’t care about. It was just blissful silence. 

When the whistle sounded marking the end of recess, the boy shot up and offered me a hand, pulling me up to stand in front of him. He was taller than me, with huge light brown eyes and shaggy brown hair. 

“I’m Tate.” I already knew that.

“I’m Ava.” He already knew that too.

“Do you have any friends?” He’d started strolling back to the entrance of the playground when he asked me. I thought about his question for a moment.

“Well, my dad always calls me his little buddy. So I guess my dad is my friend. And my sister, even though we don’t always like each other.” 

“Not your mom?”

“No. Not my mom.”

“And no one at school?”

“Definitely no one at school.” A laugh escaped me. Too harsh a laugh for a mere eight year old. The other girls in my class were mean, petty, and no one I would ever want to spend my time with. Of course they wouldn’t let me even if I did want to. 

“Well, then we’ll be friends. Is that okay?” He grinned from ear to ear, showing off rows of straight white teeth. The corners of his eyes creased with the magnitude of his anticipatory smile. 

“Okay. We’re friends.” 

I never told him until years later that I started loving him that day, and that I loved him even after everything went to shit. 

Tate

I wish I could have known the moment Ava changed. Maybe losing her would have been easier if I’d seen it coming. But she moved through life like a high speed train, stopping to pick up people who drew her further away from me before closing the doors and hurtling off towards the next adventure. The next mess. The only constant was that she never opened her doors to let me in. Not anymore. 

One minute, we were at my family’s cabin up north, snuggled under a blanket on the beach watching the fireworks over Silver Lake; the next, I was picking her up before school and she smelled like alcohol. Her hood was pulled up over her mess of wild auburn curls and she looked down at her feet as she walked. She had a pack of cigarettes in the side pocket of her backpack.

She hopped into my truck and gripped her backpack in her lap, bringing her trembling hands to her mouth, blowing warm air on them. I reached over and cranked the heat. She reached over and rifled through the CDs in the center console. A nearly perfect snapshot of almost every morning since the day I got my license last year. 

I was content to drive in silence, pretending we were okay. Pretending that we were still Tate and Ava, inseparable best friends for almost a decade. Sure, she smoked weed now, went to parties and drank $10 handles of nail-polish remover vodka, came to marching band practice under the influence of one or the other. Or both. We didn’t go to the movies every Friday night anymore. At first, she’d tried to include me in her new life, inviting me to hang out with her new friends. I’d tried to be content sitting in someone’s smoke-filled basement, listening to them talk about bands I’d never heard of. But that wasn’t me, and Ava had seen that I couldn’t pretend it was. 

Perhaps I could live like this. I could go on pretending, and eventually she would grow up, we would grow up, and things would be okay again.

Then she turned and looked at me. And I saw a purple bruise blooming around her left eye. And my world shattered around me. 

We’d barely made it three miles down the road, and the closest place to pull off was the cemetery. The one right on the lake. The one where she always made a point to stop off and check if her grandma’s flowers needed to be watered. I whipped into the narrow gravel drive and put the truck in park.

“Ava--”

“Don’t,” she put a hand up. Her face was arranged into the same expression she donned when she was trying to hold it together. An expression I had seen break time and time again.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” I didn’t need her answer. I knew whose fist had marred her skin. 

My world had shattered many times since she started dating Chase Milliken. 

“You know I have to tell your dad,” I said. “This is, what, the fifth time?”

“You can’t,” she said, her eyes suddenly going wide with worry. That’s all she did since her mom left. Worry about her dad. And she numbed the emptiness all that worrying left her with by getting too high to care, too drunk to remember. “He doesn’t need another problem right now. You know that.”

I didn’t have anything to say. Couldn’t think of anything I hadn’t already told her. Nothing that would get through. Nothing I could say without breaking in half. 

“Say you won’t tell him,” she said. She was still clinging to her backpack, her feet drawn up onto the seat. If I squinted, I could still see the girl who I’d laid next to in the grass at her dad’s house. A nose covered in freckles and dirt under her fingernails. Her feet bare, her toes digging into the grass. “Promise me, Tate.”

I sighed. Next year, I’d go to U of M. She’d either go to GVSU and get out of this suffocating town, or, more likely, she’d stay here with Chase. And we would be done. The last decade would be a distant memory, and I’d have to learn to navigate life without her. 

So I promised. I linked my pinky with hers, and I almost fell apart at the sight of her small, sad smile. 

And I prepared to stop fighting for her. I couldn’t have known that not fighting for her would mean not reading her texts. Not telling her when I was home visiting. 

I couldn’t have known that not fighting her would mean doing everything possible to forget about her, too.

Ava

I was alone, just the way I liked it. Avoiding the Memorial Day bonfire at my parents’ house. The yard was teeming with their friends, and their friends’ kids. When we were younger, the Memorial Day bonfire was magical. A night with drunk, inattentive parents, and access to the 3 acres of thickly-wooded property my dad had built our house on. What could be more alluring to a gaggle of children?

The house jutted right up against Lake Huron. Unlike a manmade lake, Lake Huron is wild. She is utterly ferocious during a heavy rainstorm. The thunder only seems to encourage her. In the winter, she becomes a sea of snow-covered eyes and waves frozen in time. I liked to keep walking until I reached the edge. Where the ice stopped, where it became too deep and too cold to freeze. 

But at the Memorial Day bonfire, the water was calm. It was a balmy evening. The dim, blue-tinted light from the darkening sky cast shadows across the lake. I focused on the feeling of my bare-feet squishing in the soft, cool mud at the edge of the shore. 

There was no beach. No sand, no buoys. It was just Lake Huron and the rocky, narrow shoreline. I knew every rock to step on, every stagnant pool full of minnows. I knew that there were leeches in the warmer shallows, and lake trout once you got out far enough. I had plenty of scars on my knees and the bottoms of my feet from the razor-sharp zebra mussels. 

Plenty of ruckus emanated from the lawn behind me, but it was the sound of sandaled feet traipsing down the grassy hill from the lawn down to the lake that caught my attention. 

“Of course you’re down here,” Tate said, leaning down to pick up a flat rock. He lobbed it into the still water, where it effectively plopped right down to the bottom. 

“Tate,” I breathed. I hadn’t expected him to be here. He had to have found out about Chase and I. He wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t. Wouldn’t have risked seeing the man he’d watched me forgive over and over. 

I could still hear him pleading with me in my dad’s driveway. His truck was packed, ready for the drive to his new life. A life he would be better off living without me there to give him more messes to clean up. 

“Just come to Ann Arbor with me,” he’d said. “I have a whole apartment to myself.”

“Please,” he’d started crying then, “don’t stay here. Don’t stay with him.”

It started to drizzle. The rocks around us were darkening with the wetness falling from the dim late-evening sky. I studied him. The rounded shape of him, with his soft belly and thick, stocky arms, had hardened. Stubble cast a shadow over his jawline. A year had changed us both in more ways than were visible, but the physical difference in him was clear. Shocking, even. 

“You look good,” I managed to say.

“So do you,” he lied. I’d been crashing at my dad’s house, wearing clothes he’d never gotten rid of after I moved out until I could figure out how to get my belongings back from Chase.

Until I could find a way to undo the entire idea of him. Of everything he did to me.

“Your dad told me what happened,” he blurted. My gaze snapped to him and his cheeks reddened. 

“He had no right,” I muttered.

“He’s worried, Ava. And rightfully so. If I’d known it was that bad I would’ve…”

“You would have what, Tate?” I said too harshly. “You would have saved me?”

“I would have tried,” he snapped. “You have to know that.”

I stared at him. I tried to find a hint of the boy who used to drive me to school every morning, who had patiently taught me to ski, who had let me weep hopelessly on his shoulder when my parents broke up.

I could only see the texts I’d sent him, delivered but never read. 

“You abandoned me,” I said finally. “I was destroying myself, and you left.”

He started to say something, but I pushed past him. I put the lake behind me and climbed up the hill to the lawn, trekked across the lawn to my car, and drove up the driveway to the only place I could ever seem to think.

Tate

It’s pointless to count the stars. It’s also pointless to count freckles, but I know that she has 24 on the bridge of her nose. I know that her auburn hair smells like strawberries and she only paints her toenails black. I know that her favorite book is an Allen Ginsberg anthology she found at a yard sale.

I knew that she was driving too fast down M-25. She’d drive through town, braking at the Catholic church and the street that leads to the beach because that’s where the cops hide. 

I didn’t feel my feet moving, but suddenly I was in my truck. I was turning the ignition and pulling out of her dad’s driveway. I didn’t think as I drove through the drizzle that had turned into a downpour. 

I pulled down the street to the playground, and found her in the parking lot, leaning against the hood of her car, letting herself get completely soaked in the rain as she stared out at the place where we’d met. I sat in my truck, just watching her for a moment. Finally, she turned and saw me parked behind her, and I couldn’t make out her expression through the fat drops of rain. 

I saw her open the driver’s side door to the Buick she should have gotten rid of years ago, and my heart sank at the thought of her leaving before I could say what I’d come back to this shithole town to say.

I was out in the rain and running over to her before I could think better of it. 

“What are you doing here, Tate?” she asked, flinging her arms out in frustration.

“I’m… Ava, I--”

“You’re what?” she yelled.

And then I grabbed her by the arms and pulled her closer so she could hear me over the rain pelting on the tin roof of the new playscape they built a few years ago.

“I am wholly and irrevocably in love with you. Can’t you see that?” I shouted at her, making her eyes go big. She reached up and wiped her nose with the back of her wind-beaten hand. I softened my voice. “I don’t know how or when, but I do know why. Shit, I could go on for hours explaining why. I could write books-no, encyclopedias describing all the magnificent parts of you that have had me hopelessly hooked on you for years.”

“But-”

“But I won’t do that now,” I interrupted. It isn’t like me to interrupt her. After all, I have always valued her thoughts, felt privileged that she would want to share them with me. But at that moment, I realized I might have waited too long. I needed her to know before it was too late. “I won’t go into detail about how wrong I was to leave you here. Or about how selfish I am for being so unable to watch you become broken that I forgot it was my job to fix you. I’ve seen you when you feel worthless, Ava. And I see now that the only way I can make up for it is to make sure you never feel that way--”

Then she kissed me. In her defense, I was a babbling mess. It really was the only thing that could have shut me up. My eyes were watering from the cold air blowing in off the lake and the release of the words I had waited too long to say. She just grabbed my face and slammed her lips into mine. I put my hands on her arms and pulled away, looking down at her, sure that I would find she had only been a figment of my imagination, that I would pull away and she would be gone. But there she was, looking up at me with icy blue eyes, separated by a grove of freckles and framed by soft, sweeping curls. I slid my hands around her waist and pulled her onto her toes, kissing her the way I had wanted to kiss her for as long as I’d known what kissing was. 

So we stood there, in the yellow glow of my truck’s headlights, rain pelting us, with my arms wrapped around her, her hands still clutching my face. It was as if all the other opportunities we would have to kiss each other didn’t matter. As if all we had was that moment in that parking lot. As if we were the only people in existence. It didn’t make sense, and it didn’t fix anything. We would finally end up together, or we would fall apart again. All that mattered was standing with her in my arms, looking out to the back part of the playground, where a chubby little boy with skinned elbows had asked a freckled girl with pigtails to be his friend.