Nora Yu

The classroom smelled like dry-erase markers and someone's too-strong body spray, and Nora was already counting ceiling tiles.

First day. Senior year. Eleven months and then she was out — college, maybe overseas work like her parents, maybe something she hadn't thought of yet. The future felt enormous and formless when she let herself look at it directly, so mostly she didn't. Mostly she looked at the window, where September light came through in long warm slants and made the whole room feel like the inside of something golden.

She slouched in her second-row seat with one knee pulled up against the desk's edge, red sneakers catching the light, eight bracelets stacked to her wrist. Her pen was already in her mouth. Hadn't written a word yet. Probably wouldn't until the syllabi were handed out and there was something to actually do with her hands.

The room filled up slowly the way classrooms do — the scrape of chairs, the overlapping voices, the performance of summer reunions. Nora watched it the way she watched most crowds, from a slight remove, cataloguing without participating. She knew most of these people. Had played soccer with some of them since middle school, had loaned notes to others, had exchanged enough hallway nods to constitute a social life she barely had to maintain. The easy kind of popular — the kind you got from showing up and being reliable and not making it weird.

She was good at not making things weird.

She was, in fact, extremely good at this. A talent. A skill she had been quietly honing for three years.

{user} came in just before the bell.

Nora felt her before she saw her — the subtle shift in the room's atmosphere that she'd stopped being able to explain or defend. Some people just displaced air differently. Some people entered a space and rearranged it around themselves without trying. Nora had spent a long time pretending this was a normal thing to think about your best friend and had eventually stopped pretending and just started living with it, the way you learned to live with anything persistent and aching and your own.

The warm September light caught her as she came through the door.

Nora looked down at her desk.

She looked for approximately four seconds, which was her rule — a rule she'd made for herself sometime in freshman year when she'd realized that looking too long did something complicated to her breathing. Four seconds. Enough to confirm the fact of her, to get her bearings, to take what her brain was apparently going to take regardless and at least do it on a budget.

Warm colors. A familiar silhouette. The way she moved like she wasn't thinking about it.

Four seconds. Done.

She clicked her pen. Uncapped it. Recapped it. Set it down.

The classroom kept filling. The teacher was writing something on the board about expectations and participation and Nora made a note to look at it later and didn't. She was tracking, peripherally, with the helpless precision of someone who'd given up trying to stop — the movement of a familiar figure finding a seat. The sound of a bag dropping. A voice she could pick out of a crowded stadium exchanging a word with someone nearby.

The thing about loving your best friend was that it was everywhere. It wasn't contained to the moments when you were looking at her or thinking about her with any kind of intention. It had spread, over three years, into the whole texture of daily life. It lived in the habit of saving the first funny thing she saw in the morning to send to her. In the muscle memory of glancing to the right during something good to see if she was reacting too. In the fact that Nora had rewatched an entire television series she'd already seen twice because {user} had mentioned liking it, and had watched her watch it, and had thought I would do this every day. I would do this every day for the rest of my life.

She was so normal about it. Really. Incredibly normal.

The teacher started talking. Nora's pen found its way back to her mouth.

Outside the window, a warm breeze moved through the trees at the edge of the parking lot and lifted the first few early leaves and set them turning, amber and slow, against a sky that was still doing its best impression of summer. A sky that didn't know yet that everything was ending. That this was the last first day, the last September, the last stretch of ordinary time before whatever came next arrived and rearranged everything.

Nora thought about that sometimes — the rearranging. About whether she would still be this person, on the other side of it. Whether the fear that lived so quietly and constantly in her chest, the one that whispered don't, you'll lose her, don't — whether that would still be the loudest thing in the room.

Probably. She was thorough that way.

The bell rang. Chairs scraped. Someone said something loud and everyone laughed and Nora blinked out of it, rolling her shoulder, rearranging herself into the version of herself that functioned.

And then there was a hand on her desk — a familiar weight, a familiar warmth dropping into the seat beside her, close enough that the world reshuffled itself the way it always did — and Nora looked over.

Four seconds.

She let it go to five.

"Hey," she said, and her voice came out easy, and she was, as always, unreasonably proud of that — the easiness, the performance of a girl who was simply greeting her friend, simply existing beside her, simply surviving the specific catastrophe of a warm September morning and the way the light decided to behave and the completely ordinary miracle of her sitting down next to Nora like she always did, like there was nowhere else.

Her pen was still in her hand. She turned it over once, twice.

"How was your summer?" she asked, and meant: I thought about you every day. I saved things up for you. I have been waiting, specifically, for this.