“Hey,” she grins, ducking her head so he can just see the way her hair is parted zig-zag, like she couldn’t be troubled to do it straight. He remembers combing it for her, making it ruler-lined.



“Hey.”



They pause for a moment of reverence for their mutual awkwardness.

She breaks first, laughing in that full, open way she has that lifts her cheeks to meet her eyes, which crinkle up in retreat.



“So, you’re leaving for college.” She scuffs her toe in the gravel.



“Yeah, I am.” He rubs at the back of his neck.



Another moment of reverence. Finally, she sighs.

“It’s….I’m going to miss you, you know. More than I thought. I’ve been telling myself this whole summer,” and now the words are just tumbling out of her, grabbing onto each other’s tails, “that when the time came, I’d just leave. I’d make myself a new life and a new me. I thought I might even change my name, start wearing make-up. I have a pretty good British accent, I totally could have told everyone I was the diplomat’s daughter, or just that I was off in Oxford before coming to their lowly public school. I thought about it. A lot. Stories are sometimes easier to face than the truth. But…”

He watches the way her eyes fade off into the distance, looking at nothing in particular, turned inward for a rare moment.

She shrugs, and he follows the rounded progress of her shoulders that have enough freckles to alter the texture of the skin. He misses having the right to touch her sometimes. Despite it all.

“But I don’t know. I kind of want to keep the person I am, you know? I’m going to be somewhere else. I don’t know if I could handle being someone else as well.”

There’s a bit of moisture in her eyes that make them gleam and dance, and he knows it’s just tear ducts working overboard, but in that moment it seems like something more. Like her thoughts are coalescing in her eyes and shining out.


“I can’t say I’m disappointed,” he admits, smiling sideways, “I’m not very fond of the idea of you leaving completely. In case you haven’t realized, I like you quite a bit as you are.”



Her smile is incandescent.

“Thanks, Hale. You know, part of that is due to you. Me, that is. There’s a bit of you in me somewhere. It’s how friends work. We give a bit away and get a bit back, and before we loose ourselves completely we meet somewhere in the middle and agree it’s best to just be friends. So somewhere in me there’s a little box neatly labeled ‘Hale,’ on it in gold letters, and inside there’s a bit of brooding and a bit of pouting and a bit of social awkwardness. Hey!”

She laughs as he elbows her in the ribs, rubbing with mock-offence at the spot as they devolve into a quick but vicious elbow duel. She wins, as always. When he finally throws his hands up in surrender she backs away, her own fists raised in victory until a thought strikes her like divine interpretation. She rummages in her bag, coming up with a little black-velour box.

“God, I almost forgot. For you,” she says formally, handing it over with a little bow. He takes it, shaking dramatically to see if he can guess what’s inside, but all he can hear is a faint sort of rattling.



“Open it!”



He could never refuse her anything.



Inside, the box is lined with gold satin, and in the middle there sits a small cube of Perspex, encapsulating what looks to be a single, perfectly circular crystal.



“It’s a bubble,” she says quietly, taking it from him so she can hold the little cube up to the light, “they’re sold as frozen dreams. I don’t quite understand the point of a frozen dream, but I kind of like the idea of a dream you can never touch. By its very nature if you can touch it, it ceases to exist.”



Her mouth quirks up sideways, a habit she picked up from him long ago.

“It’s beautiful,” he smiles, taking it from her so he can turn the rounded corners over and over in his fingers, “Thank you.”



“Thank you.”

And there’s no need to explain what the acknowledgement is for. Not after this long.

“I didn’t get you anyt-“ he starts to explain, a twinge of regret tying his stomach, but she waves him away impatiently, long pianist’s fingers cutting the air with their frantic energy.

“Oh shut up, I don’t want anything really. Well,” she pauses, and then continues, “Actually, there’s something you can do for me. When you go off to college.”



“What is it?”

She smiles again, but this one’s not crooked. It’s slow and sad and beautiful. In the way her sadness has always been a little bit beautiful. It’s the suffering of an artist, the sadness you know will somewhere become something exquisite.



“What do you want?” he asks again.

“I want you to remember the time I sat with you for hours and watched all your stupid YouTube videos I didn’t even care about. Or the time I taught you the entirety of Austrian history in one night before your test and was so tired I slept through all my classes the next day.”

He opens his mouth to say the obvious, ‘but I already remember – ‘ but she ploughs on, ploughs through him like she does when she has a point to prove.

“Shut up, I’m not done. I want you to forget the time I told you I didn’t understand you and didn’t want to try. Forget the time I said it was me, not you, and didn’t bother to explain. Forget all the times I didn’t sit through your Youtube movies and your obsessive tweeting. Forget every time I talked over you like you didn’t matter.”



She runs out of breath in a great huff.



He just stares.



“But…” the confusion in his voice makes him slow, “I….No.”



“Why not?”




“I won’t do that to you.”

“Then do it for me!” she growls, exasperated. Then, quieter, “We all have parts of ourselves we’re not proud of, and it’d be so easy to cover them up with another person entirely, but I won’t. I’m not a British ambassador’s daughter or any of my other daydreams. I’m Wren. And I can just be Wren, go into college as just Wren, but only if I can believe Wren is someone worth being. Please, Hale.”

It’s so tempting to say yes, to say he’ll forget her flaws so she can forget them just as easily.

But then, he knows how her chest seizes up when she cries to herself, how she makes no noise at all lest someone hear and feel obliged to help. He knows how she has a list of songs with lyrics like, ‘Baby I’m done living/I can’t move and the walls are unforgiving,’ that she play as loudly as her headphones will allow, letting herself forget in the deafening screams the parts she doesn’t think are worth looking at. He knows she doesn’t understand, for all her obsession with art and beauty, that sometimes the spider-web cracks in old oil paintings only serve to make them real to us.




“No,” he says firmly, and sees her frown.



“What?”

“I’m not going to forget anything, Wren. I know all the times you messed up, and I’m still here. I’m still your friend. I’ll still miss you horribly, and I’ll still be here when you come home. I don’t need to forget anything to realize that the person you are is worth remembering, Wren. So I’m sorry, but I’m not forgetting.”

There falls another moment of stunned, silent reverence, as when they began the conversation. This time, though, neither of them could have put into words exactly what it’s for.

And then she’s crying, and hugging him, and there are actual little sobs coming from her chest, noises of desperation as they try to merge their souls by touch.

“I…I just wanted you to remember me better than I was,” she whispers into his ear. He smiles, pulling her closer still, until he can feel her heartbeat like a fluttering of wings against his.

“I will remember you just as you are. If anything, I think that’s the greater compliment.”