Lightheaded
Prologue - Keep the Car Running
July 19th, 2013
Jillian could hardly remember a time when she hadn’t considered Thumper hers. Even back when he was the slightly less rusty thing her mom had used to tote her and her older brother, Tyson, to school in, she knew one day he’d be hers. That was how kids in central Florida got their cars; hand me downs from the eldest child to the youngest, and her brother had long ago sworn he’d never drive something so old and loud.
But in less than forty eight hours, Thumper wouldn’t be hers anymore. Thumper would be dismantled and drained and picked apart and scrapped.
And she knew she shouldn’t have been sad about it, she’d tried her damndest to save him. She’d put ads in the paper and on Craigslist and every social media she could but it was a lost cause. No one wanted a car that old that had been making a thumping noise that no one had been able identify for as long as she’d been alive.
That was how she found herself sitting in the front seat for one of the last times, sweating her ass off in the mid July heat and carefully peeling each individual sticker that Thumper’s dashboard and steering wheel had collected over the past two and a half years.
Harry had seen her before he'd even walked out his front door. Living across the street for the past thirteen years had always had its advantages.
Technically he'd seen Thumper first, just like he did every time he left the house, still sat lifelessly at the curb where the tow truck had left it. He remembered that day vividly. Jillian calling him crying, him thinking something horrible had happened to her, her riding in the tow truck tearfully, him following dutifully from where Thumper had died on the side of I-4 in his own car. It hadn't been the happiest start to their post senior year summer.
And he knew this day wasn’t going to be a high point either.
“Jilly…” Harry mumbled softly when he slipped into the passenger seat, “A-are you crying?”
She didn’t answer, just kept picking at the sticker right above the logo on the steering wheel. A little green alien. Its head had come off but its body wasn’t budging.
“Jilly, c’mon,” he tried again, “Said you weren’t gonna cry. He had a good run, yeah?”
“‘M not crying,” she snapped and tucked a strand of her thick black hair behind her ear.
He took her in for a second. Her dark hair was messy and there wasn’t a trace of makeup on her face, she swore Florida summers melted it right off. The thing about Jilly was that on any given day, she could look like a completely different person. It all came down to what she was wearing.
That particular day seemed to be a nineties day. A mustard yellow tank top and torn up high waisted denim shorts with those clear and sparkly jelly sandals that made Harry think of elementary school. A pair of pink and white sunglasses with cat ears attached were perched on her head along with a massive pink scrunchie on her wrist. (x) Harry thought he could spend the rest of his life studying how easily she shifted between style personas. It was a part of the artist in her. He admired it. She was far from ordinary, far from anything like him.
“Lemme try,” he gently batted her hands away from the steering wheel.
“Y-you don’t have long enough nails for it,” she leaned back in her seat to let him try anyway, wiping at her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, “D-doesn’t matter, I disembodied him anyway.”
“It matters a lot clearly,” he mumbled under his breath, carefully picking at the hand of the little alien.
“‘S stupid,” she pulled her knees up to her chest, “I know.”
“It is not stupid, Jilly,” he shook his head, tongue peeking out past his lip in concentration, “Aha! Got him!”
He peeled the rest of the alien’s body clean off the black steering wheel and held it up with a proud grin.
“H-how the hell did you do that?” the way her eyes lit up despite her tears and that made it more than worth it.
He shrugged and sat back in his own seat, “Magic.”
She smiled and shook her head, leaning over to wrap her arms around him despite the stuffy heat surrounding them, “What would I do without you?”
The truth was, neither of them wanted to know.
He shrugged.
“You remember this one?” she looked at him with a bright grin when she’d peeled herself off of him, taking the sticker from him gently.
It sort of felt like a test.
His eyes shut and his eyebrows knit animatedly, “First time you got stood up. Freshman year. We went to Chick-Fil-A, you cried into your strawberry shake, I spent five dollars on those toy quarter machines and that was the best sticker out of the bunch.”
She let out a giggle as light as air, voice sounding far away, “Yeah… She was a riot, wasn’t she?”
“Mm,” Harry hummed, eyes popping open to see her staring at the sticker, reminiscing, “Yeah. Something like that.”
“The only good thing to come of that was you cornering her after lunch,” she giggled and stuck the sticker to the back of a sketchbook in her lap lining up its head, and Harry was still relieved with that reaction compared to just a few years ago, “Threatening to dump chocolate milk all over her because that sounded like a ‘fun prank’ too.”
His cheeks turned pink, “Thought it sounded menacing at the time.”
“She did too,” she answered, draping her hair over her right shoulder as she leaned forward to work on another sticker, “She ran off crying.”
Harry grumbled, no longer able to read her expression behind her dark curtain of hair, “She deserved it.”
“They all did,” she mumbled and sat back up to stick a daisy to his cheek, pausing to admire it, “Especially the guy after that. The one you got in a real fight with,” she paused again, “You know you’re the best friend I got, right?”
Harry grinned so wide her cheeks ached and the daisy fell to his lap. He knew.
*
It was just a few hours later, but Jilly’s house had transformed around them. Filled with bright balloons and congratulatory banners and baby pictures. A going away party neither Harry nor Jillian had asked for but had no chance of stopping when their mothers got together.
“This is so ridiculous,” Jilly muttered under her breath, turning a picture frame face down on the kitchen counter as she snuck three more of her mother’s peanut butter cookies off the platter they were waiting for guests to arrive on, “Mom said that was her least favorite school picture of mine.”
Harry snorted and snagged another peanut butter cookie before they were gone, “You’d been crying. Your face ‘s all red and puffy, you can’t blame her.”
“It was kindergarten!” she snapped and elbowed him in the ribs, “I was scared. Why would she decide now, that that’s something we should relive?”
“Dunno,” he shrugged and rubbed his side, “Maybe she’s got early empty nest syndrome? After all it’ll only be Cassidy left now.”
“Whatever it is, it needs to stop,” she shot him a look as if there were something he could do about it, before taking a big bite of peanut butter cookie, “She sure as hell wasn’t like this when Tyson ran off to med school.”
“Jillian!” her mother, Sarah, came swooping in out of nowhere, batting her daughter’s hands away from the platter of stacked cookies, “Can you try to control yourself until your guests arrive?”
She was wearing a red fifties style tea dress, one of millions that took up her closet (Jilly wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her in something from the fifty years besides her nursing scrubs), with her dark hair curled back in a similar fashion. There were slight bags under her eyes, a product of three children and working in the ER for just as long, and she looked frantic and stressed. Jilly never realized how much she’d inherited from her mother.
“They’re not my guests, mom,” Jillian snorted despite her mouthful of cookie, “I didn’t ask for a goodbye party.”
And then she walked away, three cookies still proudly held in her hand. It wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have again.
“It’s not a goodbye party, Jillian,” Sarah sighed, but her daughter had already left the room, leaving her and Harry behind.
“Tried to stop her with the cookies, Mrs. Carver,” Harry desperately tried to make a joke, save the day.
She smiled at him sort of sadly like she knew what he was doing, “Thank you, Harry. Just. Make sure she doesn’t run off for me, please?”
Harry gave her a sympathetic smile, he knew the feeling, “Course.”
He found her in the living room, perched on the arm of her father’s overstuffed recliner and laughing. That was a good sign.
Her father, Geoff (who always looked exactly like an English professor and never a day over forty), was making notes in a planner and taking a bite of a cookie his oldest daughter had stolen for him.
Harry felt a bit more relaxed. It was one night. They could make it through one night of a party they didn’t want.
“Hey, Harry,” there was a small sigh from behind him and a gentle tug at his shirt, that pulled him out of his thoughts and turned him around in the doorway.
“Hey, Cass,” he smiled fondly at Jilly’s little sister and wrapped his arms around her tightly. She looked like she needed it.
Cassidy reminded him a lot of Jilly at eight years old. Dark hair, bright smile, tall. Sensitive and quiet until you got to know her. Harry thought maybe that was why Jilly was so fiercely protective of her, it was like her chance to say everything she’d needed to hear at that age.
“This sucks,” she mumbled into his white tee shirt.
“Yeah,” Harry held her a little tighter than usual, “Kinda does.”
After that things went as smoothly as they could when both of their families got together. Jillian didn’t see much of Harry throughout the evening, constantly being pushed and pulled from family member to family member. Most of the attendees were Jilly’s family anyway, Harry’s were still in the UK. Not that it made much difference to him, he hardly knew any of them anyway.
His mum, Anne, was there, along with his big sister Gemma, of course, but that was it. (Not that it mattered much, he didn’t see a lot of them either, just the occasional tug of his arm to pull him into a conversation or a loving swat to his bum as he scurried between rooms trying to be as much of a help as possible.) His stepfather, Robin, wasn’t there but Harry had given up on counting on him long ago. Just like Jillian had with Tyson. (Except for once, Tyson had shown up.)
By cake cutting time (the chocolate one Jillian’s mother had insisted on baking), Harry had lost and spotted Jilly a hundred times, each time she only looked more distraught.
They were sat next to each other at the kitchen table, friends and family alike (even Tyson) surrounding them and tipsily singing some off key congratulatory version of ‘Happy Birthday’ when Jilly slipped her hand into Harry’s under the table and squeezed. There was a fake smile plastered on her face and tears brimming in her eyes as they sang and Harry leaned in to whisper into her ear.
“I fucking love you, you know.”
A hint of a genuine smile appeared on her pink lips as she glanced over him, the glow of the flickering candles dancing across her pale skin as she leaned into him, “You really must.”
*
Jillian felt her stomach twist up in excitement and nerves that night, the same way she had every night that Harry’s car had silently pulled up in front of her house. But this was the last time it would happen. And every ounce of her was all too aware of that.
Despite the fact that she had long since turned eighteen, that she was now an adult and allowed to come and go as she pleased, she kept up the tradition even that night. She took the screen out of her window and carefully stepped out of her bedroom window behind the hedges that lined the house. She quickly made her way across the prickly St. Augustine grass barefoot, an old pair of Converse in one hand and a small purse in the other. The sting of the grass and pebbles on the road before she slid into the passenger seat kept her grounded. That was all she needed.
“Hey,” she smiled coolly as she slid into Harry’s air conditioned car. It was a little past eleven and still too muggy out for her liking.
“Hi,” he smiled one of those crooked smiles he always did, but it felt different. Everything felt different. Heavier and pressured and nostalgic. She didn’t want it to be like that. She wanted it to be like every other night since freshman year.
“Ready?” she forced a grin the way she always did as she pulled her knees up to her chest to tug her shoes on.
He nodded, nervously tugging at his bottom lip and it almost put her at ease that maybe he felt the same way.
Over the years, they’d developed a few late night routines. But this one was Jillian’s favorite. A forty five minute drive to the beach with McDonald’s french fries and good music and her best friend in the whole world.
They found themselves the way they had most nights of their high school years. On a big quilt Harry kept in his trunk (specifically for nights like that), on their backs looking at the sky. It was the most clear they ever saw the stars compared to the light pollution of the suburbs and the bustling city next door.
“This sucks,” Harry mumbled after a while. Jillian could barely make out his voice over the rolling and crashing of the waves just a few feet away.
“Don’t,” she mumbled back and elbowed him lightly, “Said you wouldn’t.”
“‘M not,” he lied. They’d made a pact. They’d keep this part of their night as normal as possible. For the sake of tradition, or something. (Mostly so Jillian wouldn’t cry anymore.)
“You are,” she rolled over onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow to look at him, “‘S alright. Tell me.”
He glanced over at her, unsure. She took in the way the moonlight hit his long eyelashes and lit up half of his face. She could see so much in so little light. The scar above his right eyebrow from when he was thirteen and tried to dive into her new underground pool. The freckles that had appeared from years of Florida sun. The occasional smattering of acne along his hairline that reminded her he was only human too.
“Tell me,” she urged. She wanted to know. That was her job, to know everything he thought and felt and hoped for.
“Dunno,” he sighed, glancing back up at the sky, “Scared.”
She hadn’t really been expecting that. Her big, brave best friend to admit he was scared. She had always been the scared one.
“Of what?”
He hesitated, licked his lips nervously, waited for her to change her mind, “Leaving. What I’ll miss. Being a proper adult.”
“But we’ll be doing it together,” she repeated in a lighthearted tone, the same phrase she had since they’d opened their acceptance letters together. This wasn’t how she wanted them to spend their last few hours as kids in their hometown.
“B-but we hafta be adults, Jilly,” one hand ran through his pushed back hair and tugged, “Fuck, our parents got us an IKEA gift card. W-we have to buy furniture! I-I dunno how to buy furniture!”
She tried to stifle a small giggle, her and Harry had always had different fears, “I think it could be fun,” she batted his hand away from his hair, “IKEA’s fun. What other furniture store has food? Bet New York City’s got the biggest IKEA ever.”
“Jilly,” he deadpanned and rolled his eyes, looking over at her, “I’m serious.”
“So am I!” she protested, “Furniture shopping sounds fun! We’re adults now. No one can tell us what our place can or can’t look like.”
“Stop doing that,” he groaned and rolled onto his side, burying his face in her shoulder.
“Doing what?” her free hand automatically ran through the soft curls at the base of his neck.
“That optimistic thing,” he sighed.
“It’s not a ‘thing’,” she mumbled, not bothering to sound defensive, “I am optimistic. I-I’m scared but ‘m optimistic. Or ‘m trying anyway.”
He pulled his head away, “Well what’re you scared of then?”
Her hand stilled in his hair as she chose her words carefully at first, "Well. Dunno. The same things I guess. Mostly leaving I think. That’s gonna be the hardest. And homesickness. A-and not letting that fuck this up this up for me. For us.”
Harry listened patiently for a few minutes, as always, until she was finished. And it all sounded so stupid and insignificant to her out loud, in the dark, as she went on with something so much bigger and incomprehensible just a few feet away, crashing down on the sand. Something that could suck her and all of her hopes and fears under and never spit her back out. Something like an entire other universe that made her problems sound so trivial and typical. She felt like such a fucking cliche that it made her want to cry.
“You’re not gonna fuck this up,” he told her softly, noticing the tears welling in her eyes, “C’mere, sit up.”
“‘S stupid,” her voice was breaking as she felt him sit up and gently tug her between his legs, her back to his chest, “S-sorry. I-I was supposed to be making you feel better.”
“Stop that,” he scolded lightly, fingers easily reaching for the hair tie on her wrist.
“‘S not a big deal,” she whispered, feeling like her chest was caving in a bit because she didn’t want it to be a big deal, “S-sorry. Y-you know how I get sometimes.”
“Shhh, you know I wanna hear what you think,” he hummed, gathering her hair in his hands, “You’re alright, keep going.”
And she wished that wasn’t all it took to unleash another messy flood of words from her lips, but it was. As much as she knew she was supposed to be supporting Harry.
That was normal though. That was what they both knew. Harry had always been the brave listener and Jillian had always been the insecure ranter. It was a part of their dynamic, programmed into their brains and etched into their skin as much as Harry was a writer and Jillian was an artist.
Jillian lost track of time, lost herself in the crash of the waves and the soothing movement of Harry’s fingers through her hair, the hot tears rolling down her cheeks and the warm embrace all around her. And by the time she’d run out of words, she was no longer shaking and there was a perfect, dark French braid running down her back.
“Harry,” her voice was tired as her fingers laced with his and squeezed.
“Hm?”
She leaned into the vibration of his chest, muscles finally relaxing, “You’re my favorite person in the whole world.”
There was a little chuckle in her ear and a kiss to her temple, his voice sounding so much lighter even though he hadn’t been the one cracking open their chest and spilling out its contents, “You’re mine.”
Jillian could hardly remember a time when she hadn’t considered Thumper hers. Even back when he was the slightly less rusty thing her mom had used to tote her and her older brother, Tyson, to school in, she knew one day he’d be hers. That was how kids in central Florida got their cars; hand me downs from the eldest child to the youngest, and her brother had long ago sworn he’d never drive something so old and loud.
But in less than forty eight hours, Thumper wouldn’t be hers anymore. Thumper would be dismantled and drained and picked apart and scrapped.
And she knew she shouldn’t have been sad about it, she’d tried her damndest to save him. She’d put ads in the paper and on Craigslist and every social media she could but it was a lost cause. No one wanted a car that old that had been making a thumping noise that no one had been able identify for as long as she’d been alive.
That was how she found herself sitting in the front seat for one of the last times, sweating her ass off in the mid July heat and carefully peeling each individual sticker that Thumper’s dashboard and steering wheel had collected over the past two and a half years.
Harry had seen her before he'd even walked out his front door. Living across the street for the past thirteen years had always had its advantages.
Technically he'd seen Thumper first, just like he did every time he left the house, still sat lifelessly at the curb where the tow truck had left it. He remembered that day vividly. Jillian calling him crying, him thinking something horrible had happened to her, her riding in the tow truck tearfully, him following dutifully from where Thumper had died on the side of I-4 in his own car. It hadn't been the happiest start to their post senior year summer.
And he knew this day wasn’t going to be a high point either.
“Jilly…” Harry mumbled softly when he slipped into the passenger seat, “A-are you crying?”
She didn’t answer, just kept picking at the sticker right above the logo on the steering wheel. A little green alien. Its head had come off but its body wasn’t budging.
“Jilly, c’mon,” he tried again, “Said you weren’t gonna cry. He had a good run, yeah?”
“‘M not crying,” she snapped and tucked a strand of her thick black hair behind her ear.
He took her in for a second. Her dark hair was messy and there wasn’t a trace of makeup on her face, she swore Florida summers melted it right off. The thing about Jilly was that on any given day, she could look like a completely different person. It all came down to what she was wearing.
That particular day seemed to be a nineties day. A mustard yellow tank top and torn up high waisted denim shorts with those clear and sparkly jelly sandals that made Harry think of elementary school. A pair of pink and white sunglasses with cat ears attached were perched on her head along with a massive pink scrunchie on her wrist. (x) Harry thought he could spend the rest of his life studying how easily she shifted between style personas. It was a part of the artist in her. He admired it. She was far from ordinary, far from anything like him.
“Lemme try,” he gently batted her hands away from the steering wheel.
“Y-you don’t have long enough nails for it,” she leaned back in her seat to let him try anyway, wiping at her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, “D-doesn’t matter, I disembodied him anyway.”
“It matters a lot clearly,” he mumbled under his breath, carefully picking at the hand of the little alien.
“‘S stupid,” she pulled her knees up to her chest, “I know.”
“It is not stupid, Jilly,” he shook his head, tongue peeking out past his lip in concentration, “Aha! Got him!”
He peeled the rest of the alien’s body clean off the black steering wheel and held it up with a proud grin.
“H-how the hell did you do that?” the way her eyes lit up despite her tears and that made it more than worth it.
He shrugged and sat back in his own seat, “Magic.”
She smiled and shook her head, leaning over to wrap her arms around him despite the stuffy heat surrounding them, “What would I do without you?”
The truth was, neither of them wanted to know.
He shrugged.
“You remember this one?” she looked at him with a bright grin when she’d peeled herself off of him, taking the sticker from him gently.
It sort of felt like a test.
His eyes shut and his eyebrows knit animatedly, “First time you got stood up. Freshman year. We went to Chick-Fil-A, you cried into your strawberry shake, I spent five dollars on those toy quarter machines and that was the best sticker out of the bunch.”
She let out a giggle as light as air, voice sounding far away, “Yeah… She was a riot, wasn’t she?”
“Mm,” Harry hummed, eyes popping open to see her staring at the sticker, reminiscing, “Yeah. Something like that.”
“The only good thing to come of that was you cornering her after lunch,” she giggled and stuck the sticker to the back of a sketchbook in her lap lining up its head, and Harry was still relieved with that reaction compared to just a few years ago, “Threatening to dump chocolate milk all over her because that sounded like a ‘fun prank’ too.”
His cheeks turned pink, “Thought it sounded menacing at the time.”
“She did too,” she answered, draping her hair over her right shoulder as she leaned forward to work on another sticker, “She ran off crying.”
Harry grumbled, no longer able to read her expression behind her dark curtain of hair, “She deserved it.”
“They all did,” she mumbled and sat back up to stick a daisy to his cheek, pausing to admire it, “Especially the guy after that. The one you got in a real fight with,” she paused again, “You know you’re the best friend I got, right?”
Harry grinned so wide her cheeks ached and the daisy fell to his lap. He knew.
*
It was just a few hours later, but Jilly’s house had transformed around them. Filled with bright balloons and congratulatory banners and baby pictures. A going away party neither Harry nor Jillian had asked for but had no chance of stopping when their mothers got together.
“This is so ridiculous,” Jilly muttered under her breath, turning a picture frame face down on the kitchen counter as she snuck three more of her mother’s peanut butter cookies off the platter they were waiting for guests to arrive on, “Mom said that was her least favorite school picture of mine.”
Harry snorted and snagged another peanut butter cookie before they were gone, “You’d been crying. Your face ‘s all red and puffy, you can’t blame her.”
“It was kindergarten!” she snapped and elbowed him in the ribs, “I was scared. Why would she decide now, that that’s something we should relive?”
“Dunno,” he shrugged and rubbed his side, “Maybe she’s got early empty nest syndrome? After all it’ll only be Cassidy left now.”
“Whatever it is, it needs to stop,” she shot him a look as if there were something he could do about it, before taking a big bite of peanut butter cookie, “She sure as hell wasn’t like this when Tyson ran off to med school.”
“Jillian!” her mother, Sarah, came swooping in out of nowhere, batting her daughter’s hands away from the platter of stacked cookies, “Can you try to control yourself until your guests arrive?”
She was wearing a red fifties style tea dress, one of millions that took up her closet (Jilly wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her in something from the fifty years besides her nursing scrubs), with her dark hair curled back in a similar fashion. There were slight bags under her eyes, a product of three children and working in the ER for just as long, and she looked frantic and stressed. Jilly never realized how much she’d inherited from her mother.
“They’re not my guests, mom,” Jillian snorted despite her mouthful of cookie, “I didn’t ask for a goodbye party.”
And then she walked away, three cookies still proudly held in her hand. It wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have again.
“It’s not a goodbye party, Jillian,” Sarah sighed, but her daughter had already left the room, leaving her and Harry behind.
“Tried to stop her with the cookies, Mrs. Carver,” Harry desperately tried to make a joke, save the day.
She smiled at him sort of sadly like she knew what he was doing, “Thank you, Harry. Just. Make sure she doesn’t run off for me, please?”
Harry gave her a sympathetic smile, he knew the feeling, “Course.”
He found her in the living room, perched on the arm of her father’s overstuffed recliner and laughing. That was a good sign.
Her father, Geoff (who always looked exactly like an English professor and never a day over forty), was making notes in a planner and taking a bite of a cookie his oldest daughter had stolen for him.
Harry felt a bit more relaxed. It was one night. They could make it through one night of a party they didn’t want.
“Hey, Harry,” there was a small sigh from behind him and a gentle tug at his shirt, that pulled him out of his thoughts and turned him around in the doorway.
“Hey, Cass,” he smiled fondly at Jilly’s little sister and wrapped his arms around her tightly. She looked like she needed it.
Cassidy reminded him a lot of Jilly at eight years old. Dark hair, bright smile, tall. Sensitive and quiet until you got to know her. Harry thought maybe that was why Jilly was so fiercely protective of her, it was like her chance to say everything she’d needed to hear at that age.
“This sucks,” she mumbled into his white tee shirt.
“Yeah,” Harry held her a little tighter than usual, “Kinda does.”
After that things went as smoothly as they could when both of their families got together. Jillian didn’t see much of Harry throughout the evening, constantly being pushed and pulled from family member to family member. Most of the attendees were Jilly’s family anyway, Harry’s were still in the UK. Not that it made much difference to him, he hardly knew any of them anyway.
His mum, Anne, was there, along with his big sister Gemma, of course, but that was it. (Not that it mattered much, he didn’t see a lot of them either, just the occasional tug of his arm to pull him into a conversation or a loving swat to his bum as he scurried between rooms trying to be as much of a help as possible.) His stepfather, Robin, wasn’t there but Harry had given up on counting on him long ago. Just like Jillian had with Tyson. (Except for once, Tyson had shown up.)
By cake cutting time (the chocolate one Jillian’s mother had insisted on baking), Harry had lost and spotted Jilly a hundred times, each time she only looked more distraught.
They were sat next to each other at the kitchen table, friends and family alike (even Tyson) surrounding them and tipsily singing some off key congratulatory version of ‘Happy Birthday’ when Jilly slipped her hand into Harry’s under the table and squeezed. There was a fake smile plastered on her face and tears brimming in her eyes as they sang and Harry leaned in to whisper into her ear.
“I fucking love you, you know.”
A hint of a genuine smile appeared on her pink lips as she glanced over him, the glow of the flickering candles dancing across her pale skin as she leaned into him, “You really must.”
*
Jillian felt her stomach twist up in excitement and nerves that night, the same way she had every night that Harry’s car had silently pulled up in front of her house. But this was the last time it would happen. And every ounce of her was all too aware of that.
Despite the fact that she had long since turned eighteen, that she was now an adult and allowed to come and go as she pleased, she kept up the tradition even that night. She took the screen out of her window and carefully stepped out of her bedroom window behind the hedges that lined the house. She quickly made her way across the prickly St. Augustine grass barefoot, an old pair of Converse in one hand and a small purse in the other. The sting of the grass and pebbles on the road before she slid into the passenger seat kept her grounded. That was all she needed.
“Hey,” she smiled coolly as she slid into Harry’s air conditioned car. It was a little past eleven and still too muggy out for her liking.
“Hi,” he smiled one of those crooked smiles he always did, but it felt different. Everything felt different. Heavier and pressured and nostalgic. She didn’t want it to be like that. She wanted it to be like every other night since freshman year.
“Ready?” she forced a grin the way she always did as she pulled her knees up to her chest to tug her shoes on.
He nodded, nervously tugging at his bottom lip and it almost put her at ease that maybe he felt the same way.
Over the years, they’d developed a few late night routines. But this one was Jillian’s favorite. A forty five minute drive to the beach with McDonald’s french fries and good music and her best friend in the whole world.
They found themselves the way they had most nights of their high school years. On a big quilt Harry kept in his trunk (specifically for nights like that), on their backs looking at the sky. It was the most clear they ever saw the stars compared to the light pollution of the suburbs and the bustling city next door.
“This sucks,” Harry mumbled after a while. Jillian could barely make out his voice over the rolling and crashing of the waves just a few feet away.
“Don’t,” she mumbled back and elbowed him lightly, “Said you wouldn’t.”
“‘M not,” he lied. They’d made a pact. They’d keep this part of their night as normal as possible. For the sake of tradition, or something. (Mostly so Jillian wouldn’t cry anymore.)
“You are,” she rolled over onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow to look at him, “‘S alright. Tell me.”
He glanced over at her, unsure. She took in the way the moonlight hit his long eyelashes and lit up half of his face. She could see so much in so little light. The scar above his right eyebrow from when he was thirteen and tried to dive into her new underground pool. The freckles that had appeared from years of Florida sun. The occasional smattering of acne along his hairline that reminded her he was only human too.
“Tell me,” she urged. She wanted to know. That was her job, to know everything he thought and felt and hoped for.
“Dunno,” he sighed, glancing back up at the sky, “Scared.”
She hadn’t really been expecting that. Her big, brave best friend to admit he was scared. She had always been the scared one.
“Of what?”
He hesitated, licked his lips nervously, waited for her to change her mind, “Leaving. What I’ll miss. Being a proper adult.”
“But we’ll be doing it together,” she repeated in a lighthearted tone, the same phrase she had since they’d opened their acceptance letters together. This wasn’t how she wanted them to spend their last few hours as kids in their hometown.
“B-but we hafta be adults, Jilly,” one hand ran through his pushed back hair and tugged, “Fuck, our parents got us an IKEA gift card. W-we have to buy furniture! I-I dunno how to buy furniture!”
She tried to stifle a small giggle, her and Harry had always had different fears, “I think it could be fun,” she batted his hand away from his hair, “IKEA’s fun. What other furniture store has food? Bet New York City’s got the biggest IKEA ever.”
“Jilly,” he deadpanned and rolled his eyes, looking over at her, “I’m serious.”
“So am I!” she protested, “Furniture shopping sounds fun! We’re adults now. No one can tell us what our place can or can’t look like.”
“Stop doing that,” he groaned and rolled onto his side, burying his face in her shoulder.
“Doing what?” her free hand automatically ran through the soft curls at the base of his neck.
“That optimistic thing,” he sighed.
“It’s not a ‘thing’,” she mumbled, not bothering to sound defensive, “I am optimistic. I-I’m scared but ‘m optimistic. Or ‘m trying anyway.”
He pulled his head away, “Well what’re you scared of then?”
Her hand stilled in his hair as she chose her words carefully at first, "Well. Dunno. The same things I guess. Mostly leaving I think. That’s gonna be the hardest. And homesickness. A-and not letting that fuck this up this up for me. For us.”
Harry listened patiently for a few minutes, as always, until she was finished. And it all sounded so stupid and insignificant to her out loud, in the dark, as she went on with something so much bigger and incomprehensible just a few feet away, crashing down on the sand. Something that could suck her and all of her hopes and fears under and never spit her back out. Something like an entire other universe that made her problems sound so trivial and typical. She felt like such a fucking cliche that it made her want to cry.
“You’re not gonna fuck this up,” he told her softly, noticing the tears welling in her eyes, “C’mere, sit up.”
“‘S stupid,” her voice was breaking as she felt him sit up and gently tug her between his legs, her back to his chest, “S-sorry. I-I was supposed to be making you feel better.”
“Stop that,” he scolded lightly, fingers easily reaching for the hair tie on her wrist.
“‘S not a big deal,” she whispered, feeling like her chest was caving in a bit because she didn’t want it to be a big deal, “S-sorry. Y-you know how I get sometimes.”
“Shhh, you know I wanna hear what you think,” he hummed, gathering her hair in his hands, “You’re alright, keep going.”
And she wished that wasn’t all it took to unleash another messy flood of words from her lips, but it was. As much as she knew she was supposed to be supporting Harry.
That was normal though. That was what they both knew. Harry had always been the brave listener and Jillian had always been the insecure ranter. It was a part of their dynamic, programmed into their brains and etched into their skin as much as Harry was a writer and Jillian was an artist.
Jillian lost track of time, lost herself in the crash of the waves and the soothing movement of Harry’s fingers through her hair, the hot tears rolling down her cheeks and the warm embrace all around her. And by the time she’d run out of words, she was no longer shaking and there was a perfect, dark French braid running down her back.
“Harry,” her voice was tired as her fingers laced with his and squeezed.
“Hm?”
She leaned into the vibration of his chest, muscles finally relaxing, “You’re my favorite person in the whole world.”
There was a little chuckle in her ear and a kiss to her temple, his voice sounding so much lighter even though he hadn’t been the one cracking open their chest and spilling out its contents, “You’re mine.”