Shopping Day

Noelle showed up with two boba teas, which meant she’d thought about it before she left her house. I took mine without comment and didn’t say what it meant that she’d thought of it.

Lylah was already there. She looked up when we came through the door, did her small nod, went back to reading. Her arm, when she turned the page, was noticeably thinner than last cycle. Not dramatic. Just different in a way that stayed.

Noelle sat down and put her earbuds in and that was the whole transaction. She’d learned early that the infusion room had its own rhythms and I didn’t need to perform anything in them.

The nausea this cycle was different. Lower, more persistent, the kind that sat under everything and made the room feel slightly farther away than it was. I kept my eyes mostly closed and let the room do what it was going to do.

Hanna came through on her rotation, checked my line, ran the questions. Then she moved to Lylah.

Noelle’s earbuds were in. She was looking at her phone. But the one nearest to me wasn’t quite seated, and I saw the moment her eyes moved from her screen to Hanna. The particular stillness that settled over her while Hanna asked Lylah the questions. Hanna’s voice was the same as always. The pause before the first question wasn’t. The note she made afterward took longer than last time.

Noelle put her phone down on her lap. She didn’t say anything. She put her earbud back in and looked at the nature documentary until the end of the session and I didn’t explain what she’d seen, because there was nothing to explain that would make it better.

On the way out Lylah slowed beside my chair and looked at me for a moment. Just that. Then she left.

The drive home.

Noelle talked. Who was going with who, the group dinner reservation, whether Maekynzie was actually going to wear the thing she’d been sending everyone photos of for a week. Normal things. The kind of conversation happening in every car on every road right now, in a version of the week where I was just a junior going to homecoming instead of a junior going to homecoming between cycles. She talked without pausing long enough to invite a response, offering it the same way she’d shown up with the tea. Something to hold.

Noelle pulled into her own driveway and I crossed over fast. I caught a glimpse of Stetson in the great room as I dropped everything, shopping bags and purse, and rushed to the bathroom.

The downstairs hall bathroom. Door open. I didn’t have the energy to close it, or maybe I just didn’t think to. I was sick. It was fast and it was done and then I was on the floor with my back against the tub, waiting.

The tile was cold through my leggings. The light above the sink was too bright and I didn’t reach up to turn it off.

Footsteps in the hall. Stetson. He’d seen me rush past and followed. He stopped in the doorway and looked at me on the floor and looked at the light I hadn’t turned off.

He came in and sat down on the floor beside me. Not at a careful distance. Right next to me, shoulder to shoulder, back against the tub. He didn’t ask anything.

After a moment he put his arm around me and I leaned into him and we stayed like that. The tile was cold. The light was too bright. Stetson’s sweatshirt smelled like laundry detergent.

“I hate this,” he said. Not to me exactly. Just out loud.

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. He pulled me a little closer and I let him and eventually Bernard pushed through and put his head on our feet and the three of us stayed there until I was ready to get up.

Saturday Noelle picked me up at eleven and we drove to the mall in Aurora with the heat on high and a playlist she’d made specifically for the occasion, which she announced by name when she connected her phone. The name was Shopping Slay which was very Noelle and I didn’t tell her that.

She had a system. She walked into stores the way some people walked into rooms they already owned, direct and pulling things off racks before I’d finished orienting myself. I drifted. I read tags on things I had no intention of buying. This was our pattern and it worked because eventually Noelle found the thing and I tried it.

We’d been through two stores and a pretzel from the food court when we ended up in a boutique that arranged things by color and didn’t play music loud enough to need to talk over. Noelle went straight to a rack near the back. I went to the sale section out of habit. There were two other girls in the store, both pulling things without hesitation the way Noelle did, holding them up and putting them back in the specific rhythm of people who knew what they were looking for. I stood between two racks and didn’t know what I was looking for, which hadn’t been true six months ago. Six months ago I’d have had a list.

My phone buzzed.

you still surviving?

Evan. I typed back before I’d thought about it.

barely. Noelle has opinions

Three seconds.

good luck. text me when you’re free

I put my phone away. The exchange had taken maybe forty seconds. Easy, like it always was with Evan now. I was still looking at the tag on a silk blouse I had no intention of buying when I caught myself thinking about showing the dress to Chandler. Not to Evan. Chandler. I looked up before I could sit with it and found Noelle watching me from across the rack.

She had the specific expression she used when she’d already decided something and was waiting for you to catch up.

“This one,” she said, and held up a dress.

Burgundy. Deep, almost wine-dark, the kind of color that didn’t announce itself. Fitted through the bodice, midi length, thin straps. The fabric moved when she held it out, a soft weight that caught the store light differently when it shifted.

“Try it,” she said.

“I’m not really a dress person right now.”

“Try it anyway.”

The dressing room light was either very flattering or very honest and I couldn’t tell which. I got the zip most of the way and then couldn’t get the last inch and had to open the door and let Noelle finish it.

She finished the zip and stepped back.

The back was what I couldn’t see. Whatever was there, I couldn’t crane far enough to catch it. Noelle could. That was where the quiet lived, in the half-second she spent looking at something I didn’t have the angle for, before the words started.

Then she was talking too fast about the color and how it did something with my eyes and the length was perfect and I should turn around. I turned around and looked at myself. The hem hit just below my knee. I glanced down at it twice in the first thirty seconds, still calibrating. The slit was mid-calf and I kept forgetting it was there until I shifted my weight and the fabric parted, and then I’d remember, and then I’d forget again.

The fabric made a sound when I moved. Not loud. A whisper of weight and give that was nothing like the layers I’d been living in since September. I shifted again just to hear it.

“You’re getting it,” Noelle said.

“I haven’t decided.”

“You’re getting it.”

I looked at myself. Not at the dress. At myself in the dress, which was a different thing, and one I’d been avoiding without knowing I was doing it.

Noelle sat on the small bench in the corner and crossed her legs. She was looking at the back of the dress. After a moment: “You already know what you want. You just haven’t let yourself want it yet.”

My eyes went to hers in the mirror.

“You can want two things at once,” she said.

I looked back at myself. The dress. The hem I kept glancing at. The back I couldn’t see.

The information was just there now, in the dressing room with the honest-or-flattering light. I stood with it and noticed I was standing differently than I had five minutes ago.

I reached for the hanger.

“I’m getting it.”

Noelle smiled, the real one. “I know.”

I stood there for one more second. Then I took my phone out and took a photo of the back. That was what Noelle could see and I couldn’t. The keyhole was small and low and the rest of the dress was just the dress. I sent it to Chandler before I’d decided to.

His response came back fast.

you should wear that.

Nothing else. I put my phone in my bag.

In the car, bags in the backseat, my phone buzzed. Chandler.

you survive the mall?

I smiled before I thought about it. Typed back quick.

barely

I put the phone in my bag. Noelle pulled out of the parking structure and said: “So apparently Tahni’s been telling people she’s worried about Evan. Like, that he’s so sweet for being there for you but she just hopes he’s not, like, putting his own stuff on hold. Because it’s a lot to ask of someone at this age.”

I looked out the passenger window.

“Haley Rothstein told Emory,” Noelle said. “Emory told me.”

Tahni hadn’t said anything about me. She’d said something about Evan, which was smarter, because now everyone who heard it had a picture in their head of Evan as someone doing a kindness under pressure. Which made me the pressure. The thing that was costing him something. She’d built that whole structure without saying my name once, and by Monday it would just be the way people thought about it, ambient and sourceless, the kind of thing you couldn’t argue with because nobody had technically said anything wrong.

“Okay,” I said.

Noelle nodded. She changed lanes. She turned the music up one click and we drove the rest of the way without discussing it.

I hung the dress in my closet when I got home, between the team hoodie I’d stopped wearing and a jacket from freshman year. The burgundy sat differently than everything around it.

I stood there for a moment looking at it.

Noelle had bought earrings from the same store. Small, gold. She’d held them up next to my ear and said these, and I’d let her pay without arguing. That was how Noelle said I love you. Earrings and brown sugar milk tea and driving me home and not asking about the things she’d seen in the infusion room. Buying things that assumed a future.

I closed the closet door.

I went to bed.