Heads Up!

“Heads or tails?”

I look up in disbelief. “You’re letting a coin determine my future?” I demand.

“Now who said anything about your future?” she quirks up a brow. 

I narrow my eyes in a hopefully intimidating way.

“Fine,” she mockingly holds her hands up. “But we’ve been analyzing every possible situation and reason,” she says while gesturing to the papers around us, “and we’ve gotten nowhere.” 

I hated it when she made sense. I glance around the apartment and do a double-take, as if just now noticing how cluttered it was. The whiteboard with a pros and cons Venn diagram sitting in the middle of the living room, papers on top of papers strewn all over the apartment, and pages from booklets at the kitchen counter were the finishing touch to our whole “fresh out of college'' look. The mess was so unbearable that I was starting to feel like I was back in college.

“It’s not that bad-” I start to say, picking up the pages.

“Not that bad,” she laughs hysterically, “the deadline is in ten minutes and you still haven’t made your decision!”

I sigh. The reason why I hesitated was that I didn’t want to leave my best friend for a job on the other side of the country. I didn’t want to tell her the real reason why I wanted to stay. She would smack me and tell me to “get my shit together.” 

“What’s keeping you here?” she asks.

Refusing to answer her question, I say “If I go, what are you gonna do to the apartment?”

“I’ll probably find another roommate or move,” she shrugs. “Now tell me the truth, what’s keeping you here,” she asks more harshly this time.

I refuse to meet her gaze and look down at the papers in my hand instead. “It’s in California and I’ve never even been there.”

“You’ve always wanted to go to California,” she counters, “and it's an amazing opportunity and I honestly thought that you already accepted it. I can’t believe we’re even in this situation right now!” she throws her hands up. 

She was right. If it were anything else, I would’ve hit accept as soon as I got the offer. 

I finally look up and meet her gaze. “I don’t want to leave you here,” I admit. 

“That’s it?” she asks incredulously.

I wince, even to my ears it sounds pitiful. 

She smacks my arm and starts a harangue about how ridiculous that reason was. 

I tune her out and instead look past her to look out the window. I look at the cafe we would go to eat lunch at every week. I always ordered the same thing, a grilled chicken club sandwich with a side of onion rings and a cappuccino, while she was on a quest to try every single thing on the menu. I look at the border collie. His name was Rolfe and he bit my hand the first time I tried to pet it. The owner apologized but looked as remorseful as a Youtuber in an apology video. The dog didn’t look better. I look at the grocery store, the corner store, the neighbors, and I think of our next-door neighbor who practices piano at night. His brother, who wasn’t any better, practiced the trumpet and was just as loud and annoying as my old band teacher. God, I wanted to go over there with a sledgehammer because who needs to practice Fantaisie Impromptu, Minute Waltz, or Mahler Symphony No. 5 at three in the morning. 

The sound of my best friend snaps me out of my reverie. 

“What?” I ask, not missing the way she looks at me sadly.

“Your eyes are misting.”

They are? I didn’t even realize. Who would’ve thought that terrible playing could bring tears to my eyes? I rub my eyes with the palm of my hands.

“Heads,” I say. 

She stares at me incredulously. “Are we actually doing this? I thought the obvious answer was ‘yes, I will accept this amazing opportunity and start packing now’ because I was just joking about the coin toss.” 

“I’m not,” I say, rushing to get my point after seeing her nostrils flare, “we have three minutes left.”

She snaps her neck left to look at the clock hanging on top of the t.v. and curses. She runs to her purse in record speed and fumbles through it, looking for a coin. 

“Heads, you take the job, and tails, you make the worst decision ever and stay.”

She flips the quarter and uncovers the coin. 

“Heads,” she says, grinning as big as one of those people at a dentist commercial. I keep my focus on her Cheshire smile and falter a little. I step a hesitant foot back, my eyes still trained on her pearly white teeth. Her smile fades and immediately transforms into a scowl, the tips of her mouth tilting downward. She looked a little insane. Maybe I should stay. She didn’t give me a chance to mull over these new thoughts. 

“Move!” she pushes me toward my computer, “you have a minute!”

I trip over a binder on the floor and stumble the rest of the way towards my desk.

I drag my mouse around to turn on the screen and hastily begin typing in the URL and sign in. “Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven… ” she counts down. She must’ve had her clock app open and decided that counting down would’ve made the website load faster. It’s not too late to decline, I think to myself. It’s for both of our well-being.

“Hurry!” she yells in between counting, “sixteen, fifteen, fourteen…” Whether she was yelling at me or the computer, I couldn’t tell. 

I was on the correct page and had my cursor hovering over the “accept” button when I suddenly paused and asked her, “What if I clicked no?”

She looked at me murderously and made a mad dash for my mouse to click the accept button herself. I laughed and took control of the mouse again and finally clicked accept. 

“I hate you,” she says, just as her alarm rings and signals that it was midnight.