Talk About It

She shuts the door a little harder than normal when she climbs into the car. It rattles the Hello Kitty-shaped air freshener, the one she got me for my birthday, hanging from my rearview mirror. She throws her bag in the back and settles into her seat. The engine hums and fills the space between us. I look at her wrist, and her friendship bracelet (the gross, faded one that I made her in high school) is noticeably absent. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch her open her mouth, hesitate, and close it. I sigh. “So are we just not going to talk about it?” 

“No, we don’t have to talk about it.”

“I really think we should talk about it.” 

“I really don’t want to talk about it.” She reaches over and turns on the car radio, turning up the volume a little too loud. Tinny voices rattle out of the speakers, talking about the weather or a celebrity or whatever radio hosts talk about. 

“Fine, we don’t have to talk about it,” I say, shifting the gear to reverse and pulling out of her driveway. She leans back into the passenger seat. She sits there so often that the headrest has conformed to the shape of her head. 

“...I like your outfit,” I say as she clicks her seatbelt into place. We’re both wearing the same uniform, of course, but they’re so boring and stained that it’s become an ongoing joke to compliment each other on them. Usually we’re more creative about it, though. 

“Can we just not?” she sighs. 

“If we’re not going to talk about it, then we have to talk about something.”

“We really don’t.”

“I hate awkward silences.” 

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that.” 

“Look, it wasn’t even my fault, okay? It was literally a misunderstanding.”

“Mhm.” 

“You’ve never mentioned it before, so I had no idea it would be a problem. I apologized. I would never have done that on purpose.”

“I know.” 

“So you can stop being mad at me now.”

“Okay.” 

“I really didn’t mean to make you upset.” 

“Okay, I get it! Can we please just not talk about it?”

“Fine,” I huff. “Just plug my phone in, then. The charger’s in the glovebox.” 

However, she’s beat me to it—she plugged it in by force of habit when she got in the car. There’s a beat of silence before she asks me, “Do you want me to turn our playlist on?” 

“Yeah, thanks.” 

She unlocks my phone and selects our playlist, the one we’ve been building since middle school. At this point it’s upwards of forty hours long. Sometimes we shuffle it and a song that we liked in sixth grade starts playing, and it’ll be so cringe-worthy that we fling the phone into the backseat. 

The playlist cover is a picture of the two of us, sitting on the roof of my car. There’s a glare reflecting off the metal, and we’re squinting against the sun, but we’re smiling. The car is parked in the tiny parking lot of a beach, from the time last summer when we drove there and sat in the trunk of my car and watched the sun set. We got a stranger to take our picture before the sun went down, and when he handed the phone back I leaned over too far and fell off the car roof, and she laughed so hard she almost fell off too. (She got his number afterwards.) 

The music shuffles, and the upbeat guitar strums of “Party in the USA” fills the car. It’s such a contrast to our current mood that I can’t help but laugh out loud. 

“What’s funny?” she asks, but she’s stifling a smile. We bop our heads to the music as we pull out of her neighborhood and onto the main road. By the time it gets to the chorus, we’re fully singing along. 

I open the windows and let the air rush in, waking me up. The wind whips through our hair, and she shrieks as her hair whacks her face. “You’re insane! Put the window up!” I laugh as I put the window up. She smooths her hair back into place, giggling. 

An ad starts playing, and we roll our eyes simultaneously. She smiles and leans back against her seat again, looking out the window. A silence settles over the car, broken by another ad starting to play. 

“…So we’re definitely not going to talk about it,” I say after a moment. 

“Ugh, dude, everything was fine and you had to go and bring it up again!” she huffs, crossing her arms. 

“Okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just really think we should talk about it.” 

“There’s nothing to talk about. You apologized, and I’m being a jerk for no reason and I’ll calm down eventually, so we can just forget about it.” 

“Well, if you’re still upset then I can’t really just forget about it.” 

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want you to be upset with me!”

“Okay, God, you don’t have to yell at me!” 

“I wouldn’t have to yell if you didn’t turn the radio up so loud!” 

“You’re mad about the radio now?!”

“You’re the one who’s mad, not me!” 

“I wasn’t mad until you started berating me!”

“Will you please just turn it down!” 

She angrily swats at the volume dial, but she accidentally turns it up instead of down. The speakers blare with the sound of someone trying to sell us a replacement for insurance. It startles me, and I swerve instinctively, narrowly avoiding hitting the curb. 

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, TURN IT OFF!” I shout. I take the right turn a little too hard and have to jerk the wheel to get back into my lane. She lets out a cry of frustration and smacks the dial, finally shutting the radio up. 

The car is steady and quiet now. The only sound is our agitated breathing and the tires rolling over the bumpy pavement. 

I take a deep breath. “Look, I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to talk about anything. I just don’t want us to have a problem with each other. I hate fighting with you. We rarely ever do, and when we do it goes on forever and ever until neither of us can remember what we were upset about in the first place, and I’d rather just avoid that.” 

“Yeah.” She sighs. “I’m not upset with you, okay? I was yesterday, but I’m not anymore. I’d rather just forget about it, ‘cause it’s really not that big of a deal.” 

“I agree.” 

“Can we just drop it?” 

“Definitely.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“I’m sorry too.”  

We pull into the parking lot, and I go to park in our normal spot by the light pole, but our coworker has taken our spot again. “Ugh, Diane!” we growl at the same time. We look at each other with raised eyebrows, then crack up. We’re still laughing as I put the car in park and turn off the car. 

“She’s gonna catch hell from me if she keeps this up,” she says. 

“I’ll back you up. That is literally our spot.” 

“We should paint it or something. Or put up, like, a sign.”

“‘OUR PARKING SPOT. DO NOT PARK YOUR DIRTY CAR IN OUR SPOT.’”

“Pass me a Sharpie, I’m on it.” 

“We should just write it on her windshield at this point.” 

We cackle, and I throw my keys in my bag. I notice her inconspicuously pull her friendship bracelet out of her pocket and slip it back on her wrist, and I grin to myself. She grabs her bag and we unbuckle our seatbelts, but before we get out of the car, I nudge her on the arm. 

“So… we’re good?” I confirm. 

“We’re good. We don’t have to talk about it?”

“We don’t have to talk about it.” And the silence that follows isn’t uncomfortable at all.