For Fox Sake

"She's dead to me," I said. "Done. Finished. Over. I hope she steps on a Lego every morning for the rest of her life."

Kat was engrossed in painting her nails on the couch, oblivious to the imminent collapse of my world just three feet away. She didn't even glance up, instead focusing on applying the unappealing brown color to her left hand.

"Did you hear me?"

"Heard you."

"And?"

"And what? Do you want a eulogy? Should I wear black?" She switched fingers, her hand steady. "You two do this all the time. It's like the flu. You catch it, you're miserable for a week, you recover, you're sharing boba on Tuesday."

"You're a shitty friend."

“Right, a shitty friend who lets talk about the same thing over and over again, and lets you eat her food," Her eyes drifted toward the bowl of Lo Mein on the coffee table. "Well. Slobbering over my food. Which is, honestly, probably more offensive than whatever Lyra did."

"Don't say her name."

"Lyra? Lyra, Lyra, Lyra. What do you want me to call her? She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named? Jesus Christ.” She capped the nail polish with a click.

I landed hard on the other end of the couch, smudging one of Kat's nails. Her gaze burned into mine.

“Dude. Just tell me what happened," she said.

"No."

"Okay, so I'm gonna start guessing, and you know how that goes."

"Don't."

"Did she kill someone? Did she sell your identity on the dark web? Did she hook up with someone?"

"No," I replied, too quickly.

Kat's eyes flickered, but she kept going, light and easy, like she hadn't noticed. "Did she say something about your mom?"

"I told you, I'm not talking about it."

"Right. Because you're so well known for keeping things to yourself. You told a cashier your entire medical history last week."

“It was relevant."

"You were buying shampoo."

"Medicated shampoo. Context matters."

Kat watched me. She sometimes did where she went from not giving a shit to giving exactly one very targeted shit, and you could feel it land like a dart. It was something that made me want to leave the room immediately.

"Does this have to do with zeeeeee crush?"

"Do you ever shut up?"

Kat sighed. "Cas, I’ve known you both since middle school. I've watched you two fight over everything, and at the end of the day, you guys always come around. Every single time. Because that's what you do. You fight and then you miss each other and it's over. Fifteen years, Cas. You don't just throw that away."

"I'm not throwing anything away. She did. Anyway, you're supposed to sit there and agree with me and tell me she sucks."

"She sucks," Kat said flatly. "She's the worst."

"Thank you."

"Total nightmare of a human being."

"Exactly."

"And you're going to call her by Thursday."

"She's dead to me, Kat."

"Sure." She leaned back, pulling out her phone, already done with me. "Dead to you. Got it. I'll check back on Wednesday."

I ate a noodle. It was cold and kind of terrible, but it stopped me from crying. I was not going to cry in front of Kat over cold lo mein and a girl who was about to get on a plane and fly three thousand miles away from me and not care.

After Kat left, I felt it. It. The It was filling up with all the shit I didn't say out loud.

I sat there for a while. I watched as the living room changed from golden to the bluish gray of almost night. I thought about Lyra.

It was true. We'd had bad fights before. This wasn't new. Lyra and I had frequent arguments about everything and nothing. We were both stubborn and loud, and too proud to back down first. Like, during my sophomore year, she spoiled the finale of a show I'd been watching for three months and I didn't speak to her for eleven days. Junior year, we failed our English final project because of me, so she threw a smoothie from Jamba Juice at me in the parking lot. Last summer she forgot my birthday while traveling, and I sent her a text so mean she cried and I felt like shit for a week.

But those all felt... I don't know. Survivable? You yelled, you stopped talking, you missed each other like a phantom limb, and then one of you caved at 2 a.m. That was how it worked with us.

This wasn't that.

This was something that had cracked all the way through and I didn't know if there was a version of us on the other side of it. The worst part... the part I couldn't say to Kat, is that I could've stopped it. I could've been the one to say no, or wait, or this is going to ruin us. But I didn't. Because I wanted it. Because I'd wanted it for so long that when it was finally there, right there, I couldn't make myself be the person who turned it away.

Being Lyra’s best friend, it was surprisingly easy to pretend the crush was just a crush. Lyra's parents were always strict, forbidding her from dating until college. Lyra followed their rules to the T, as she always did. She didn't have any boyfriends and she didn't sneak around. She was just there, mine in every way that didn't matter and in every way that did. I could have her without having her, and I could want her without seeing her want someone else. I never had to confront the meaning of this, as the situation never required it.

So yeah. Maybe I got comfortable. Maybe I let myself live in it too long, this space where nothing had to change and nothing had to be named and I could keep being her best friend who looked at her for a little too long. But I was safe. Untouched. The line right there in front of us, clear and never crossed.

I got up off the couch and walked down the hall into my bedroom. It was a mess, the way it always was. Clothes on the floor, converse that I had taken off and left where they fell, a desk buried under textbooks I hadn't opened since the semester started. But the walls were the problem.

The walls were covered in us.

Polaroids, photo booth strips, printed pictures, ticket stubs, and a dried flower she'd pressed into a card for my eighteenth birthday. Us, freshman year at the state fair: Lyra mid laugh with cotton candy stuck to her chin. Us, at junior prom where we'd gone together: "as friends," like that, needed clarifying. One from last summer on the beach, our shoulders touching, my eyes on her and hers on the water.

I ripped the first one down.

It didn't make me feel better. I thought it would. I thought it'd be satisfying, like ripping off a bandaid, like burning a bridge on purpose, but it just made the wall look wrong. Empty. A square of lighter paint where something used to be.

I pulled down another one. Then another. Faster. The tape pulled little strips of paint with it and I didn't care. I grabbed the one from the prom and ripped it off the wall, and something gave way: the corner, her shoulder, a tiny, violent triangle of her face came off.

I pulled them all down. Every single one. The polaroids, the strips, the card with the pressed flower, the ticket stubs from every movie and every concert and every stupid thing we'd done together since we were seven years old. I grabbed an empty bin from underneath my bed and I shoved everything inside. I went to my closet. I grabbed the shirt she'd left here, which still smelled like her, a bracelet she'd made for me in sixth grade, a keychain from the aquarium and a half-empty bottle of her face cleanser. I pulled the pillowcase off my pillow and shoved that in too.

That's when I noticed it. It was wedged against the closet wall like it had been hiding there. It was small and hardcover. The spine was cracked, and the gold lettering had almost faded away.

The Princess and the Pauper. The cover had a girl in a blue dress and a boy with a lute and a castle.

I sat down on the floor with it in my lap.

Lyra loved reading. Her parents were the type who thought that screens could rot your brain and they would shove a book into her hands every time she so much as glanced at the TV. By the age of seven, her bookshelf already looked like a small library had thrown up in her bedroom. She read every single book. She loved fairy tales the most.

Then, there was me. I didn't know shit about fairy tales or princesses or any of it. I'd lived in four different group homes before Tess took me in, and none of them had given me a book about princesses. Reading was not something I did; I could not do it at all, really. Not the way everyone else seemed to. The letters moved, not metaphorically, but literally. Rearranging themselves on the page, swapping places, flipping backward and turning into each other. Eventually a word I had been staring at for thirty seconds became unrecognizable, a pile of shapes that meant nothing. Dyslexia, they told me later, as if naming it would help. It didn't. It just meant there was an official word for why I was stupid, which was not the comfort anyone seemed to think it was.

I told people I didn't like reading. It was easier. Hating something was simple and nobody asked questions. You hate reading? Cool.

So when Lyra, seven, sat down next to me on the reading carpet with pigtails and purple light-up sneakers and asked, "Wanna read with me?", I'd said no.

That didn’t stop her. She opened Cinderella on her lap, pushed it between us, and pointed at the first line, waiting. I stared at the page. The C flipped; the whole sentence turned into soup. My face grew warm, but I avoided eye contact with her. Instead, I focused on the text, willing it to stay put, just for this moment.

"Once," I said. That one I knew. "Once... up... upon..."

I stopped.

"Once upon a time," she began, speaking slowly and patiently. She waited again. I stared at her. She kept reading on, her finger moving under each word. Her voice was so low that no one else could hear. I let her, which may have been the first time I ever let someone do anything for me without a fight.

She read me Cinderella that day. The following day, it was Sleeping Beauty. Then came Snow White, followed by Rapunzel. At recess, while the other children ran around screaming and throwing wood chips, Lyra and I sat under the big oak tree by the fence. She read to me. Her parents kept giving her new books, and she kept bringing them to school.

“This is boring,” I groaned one day.

"No, it's not; the prince is coming!"

"The prince is dumb."

"He's not dumb, he's brave!"

"He's dumb and boring. Where are the dragons?"

She'd get all huffy and scrunch up her face and tell me I was being mean, then she'd turn the page and keep reading. Lyra never quit. She kept going, no matter what, not on books, not on arguments, not on me. I'd sit there, pretending not to be listening, arms crossed and scowling at the grass. But secretly, I hung on every word because those were the only stories I'd ever heard; even the boring ones were better than the inside of my head.

Then one day, Lyra sat down under the oak and she had a different book. She opened it on her lap and said, "I think you're gonna like this one."

"Is there a princess?"

"Yeah."

“Booooorrrringgggg.”

“She's not like the other ones. She's cool."

"Princesses aren't cool."

"This one is! She plays tricks on people. She's mean to all the boys who try to marry her. She plays pranks on them."

I squinted at her. "... What kind of prank?"

"Bad ones. Really bad ones. She made one guy fall in a fountain."

"... Okay."

"And there's a dragon. And sword fights."

I sat up straighter.

"How many?"

Lyra held up her fingers. She didn't seem sure of the actual number but she held up a lot of fingers, which was good enough for me. That afternoon, she read me The Princess and the Pauper straight through recess. She was right. That princess was a goddamn icon. She didn't sit in a tower. She didn't wait for anyone. She was the first character in any book who seemed like a real person. A real, angry, person who didn't want to do what others told her. Yeah, maybe that resonated with a seven-year-old foster child with a bad attitude too much, but who cares?

"Read it again," I told her the next day.

"We just read it yesterday!"

"So? Read it again."

"Don't you wanna hear a different —"

"No. This one. Read this one."

She read it again and again. Every day for weeks, I asked for the same story every single recess, and Lyra read it every time without complaining. I could tell she wanted to move on to something else, and she brought new books that her parents had given her, but I pushed them away and pointed at the one I wanted. She sighed and opened it and started from the beginning as if it was the first time. Then one afternoon, she closed the book and held it out to me.

"Here. You can have it."

"Have what?"

"The book, dummy. I'm giving it to you."

"But your parents gave it to you."

"So? You like it more than me." She shoved it into my hands. She wore a stubborn expression, chin up, like she'd already decided and nothing I said would change it. "I'm serious, take it."

I sat there on the floor for a long time; the box was beside me. The walls devoid of us. I finished putting everything in the box. The photos. The hoodie. The bracelet. The keychain. The perfume. Everything except the book.

I slid into bed with it. Which was the exact kind of sentimental bullshit I'd spent the entire day swearing I was above, but no one was watching and I could be a hypocrite in private if I wanted to. The cover was soft under my fingers, the gold lettering almost worn away from years of handling. I ran my thumb across the spine where it had cracked: three places, from all those afternoons under the oak tree.

I opened it.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom bordered by mountains to the north and the sea to the south, a king and queen gave birth to a child. They had long believed that such a blessing was beyond their reach.