Arrow Rock Literary Journal

My favorite memory is from a late night in December last year. It was almost a whole year before the accident. I vividly remember the way Annika’s hair fell across her shoulder and the arm of her car seat. She always had such pretty hair. It was straight and soft and I loved whenever she asked me to braid it. She was wearing a green tee shirt even though it was fucking cold outside. Snow was falling slowly onto the foggy windshield and she was drawing something stupid in the fog. We were laughing so hard we could hardly breathe.

“I used to draw these things all the time,” she snorted. “I used to make them whole entire families and stories.” She drew a second one in the empty space to the right. “This one is you, Eva. The first one is me.”

 I looked at the weird cartoons she’d made. Two hearts with arms, legs, huge eyes, long hair, and smiling mouths stared down at us from the cloudy glass. I couldn’t keep it quiet anymore. I laughed out loud and even spit on the dashboard a little bit.

“No way, dude. I used to draw the same exact things!” I exclaimed. We were practically crying after that.

I remember when our laughter died down and I watched while she wrote our names in all capital letters on the driver’s side window: ANNIKA AND EVA. I looked down at my jeans and pulled at the strings coming off the ripped holes. I didn’t expect it to be so cold that day which was stupid because it was December. I wore two coats and ripped jeans. I looked out across the parking lot at the other cars around us. There were only two and there weren’t any people in them. It seemed we were the only ones who sat in the car for hours on end.

“Thanks, by the way,” I said.

She glanced at me. “For?”

I shrugged. “Being my best friend, I guess.” My fingers wouldn’t stop pulling at the strings. I held my hands together on my lap instead.

Annika laughed. “I love you, Eva. I’ll always be your best friend.”

I didn’t feel too cold after she said that.

There’s another day that sticks out to me after that one. It was April or May, either before or after her fifteenth birthday. My birthday had just passed in March and we had been talking about a party for her. We were planting flowers with her mom in the backyard. Her mother went inside because she was getting too hot, so Annika and I were finishing the gardening. I scratched at an itch on my cheek and felt the dirt mark my skin instead. Annika wasn’t even wearing gloves like I was. She just kept talking sweetly to the pink and orange petals with dirt caked on her fingernails. She plopped them lovingly in the dirt and covered their roots, patting the soil a few times to tuck them in.

“Spring is my favorite season,” she said.

I scrunched up my eyes and nose. “Really? I prefer summer. It’s too cold for me to swim in the spring.”

“You like flowers, though,” she pointed out.

“Well yeah, everyone does.” Silence crept into our conversation. We had been avoiding the elephant that was right between us. “Are you doing okay?” I asked hesitantly.

Annika looked over at me with her face blank. She shook her head and brushed the hair away from her eyes. “It feels so weird. One day they were normal and mom was making me eggs before school. Now they’re not even talking to each other. Dad keeps trying to call me, but I feel like a bad daughter if I answer. Then I feel like a bad daughter again if I don’t.”

“So did he…?” I didn’t want to say the words.

“Oh yeah, he did,” she said. “He cheated on her for like, their whole marriage. Whatever you’re thinking, Eva, it’s worse than that.” She shook her head to shake away the thoughts. “He feels like a different person.”

“All those years and she didn’t know?” I whispered.

Annika got quiet. She stopped untangling the roots of the petunia in her hand. Her eyes glazed over and she just looked at the grass around us. I looked away so I wasn’t staring too hard at her.

“No, she knew.” Her voice cracked. “They both feel like different people. I don’t get why she could deal with it for seventeen whole years of marriage but not any longer. Like, they’re all I’ve known. I thought they loved each other so much but they were just—“

I looked back over at her. Her eyes were wide and teary. She just stared at her hand. The pink flower was crushed. I put my hand on hers and took the flower away so she didn’t have to look at it anymore. I took her hand and heard her sniffle a little. Annika and I were friends for our whole lives. I can only remember a few times that she cried. None of those memories are as vivid as this one.

She grabbed me and hid her face in my shoulder and started sobbing. I was so stunned I didn’t even know how to react. I sat while she hung onto me.

“I wish they had just let me think they hated each other my whole life,” she confessed. “I wish they didn’t make me think everything was okay.”

Once Annika dried her tears, it was like they never happened. She didn’t talk about her parents again in the spring. It wasn’t until we were swimming together in July that she said anything about it again.

“My doctor told me I need to start taking medicine,” she sighed to the hot sun.

I peeped one of my eyes open and looked at her. She was still floating on her respective floaty as if she hadn’t even talked. I thought I imagined it.

“She said it’ll help me cope with the divorce,” she continued.

I took off my sunglasses and actually looked at her. “What medicine?” I tired to ask casually but I don’t know if I pulled it off right.

“I can’t remember the name right now,” Annika huffed. “Can you believe that though? I don’t even care about this stupid divorce and she thinks I need help. Antidepressants.”

I shrugged even though she wasn’t watching me. “Lots of people take them. My older sister does.”

“Yeah but do they take it because someone tells them they’re sad?” She took off her own sunglasses to look at me. “How does she even know what I’m feeling? I would know if I was sad, I don’t need someone else telling me how I’m feeling about my parents getting divorced.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I already said I don’t care about it.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You seem a little mad today,” I decided to say. She didn’t say anything, so I kept talking. “I didn’t know your parents were actually going through with the divorce.”

“I told my mom that it would be better if they did,” she mumbled. “She was upset about ruining our family by divorcing. I told her it was already ruined when he decided to tell me what he did.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but I knew it wouldn’t make her feel any better.

“What did she say about that?” I asked.

Annika seemed a lot less angry after I said that. “She cried,” she said.

“Is he still calling?” I moved on.

Annika shrugged. “Sometimes. Not really.”

“Do you want him to?”

“Sometimes.”

I didn’t see Annika much for the rest of the summer. We talked on the phone some, but she didn’t say much more about the divorce or her doctor.

“Do you want to come over?” I asked one day. “I bought some new clothes for school and I want to show you.”

“I don’t know Eva,” she sighed. “I want to see your clothes but I don’t want to go anywhere.”

“I guess I can bring some over there?” I suggested.

“No, it’s okay. I don’t want to bother you. I’ll see you this weekend though, right?”

I hummed.

“I’m sorry Eva, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I haven’t been doing anything lately. I’m lame now.”

“You’re never lame,” I promised. “It’s okay, I’ll see you this weekend.”

“Okay. Love you.”

She got sick over the weekend and we couldn’t see each other. It was like that the rest of the summer. She never felt like doing anything. When we talked on the phone, she promised me she still loved me. She kept saying there was just something weird going on with her and she couldn’t seem to make herself do anything. She promised me she wanted to see me. I kept telling myself I believed her.

I remember in October she finally seemed to be feeling better. I was going to her house again—she didn’t want me going for a bit after the divorce because she always said it felt too different. It was a weekend and she was going to help me with my math homework. I was never good at math and I always needed her help. I opened the front door without knocking—we never knocked on each others’ doors—and it felt different like she said. I went into the kitchen. Her mother was putting dishes in the sink, running the water like she was going to clean them. She jumped when she saw me out of the corner of her eye. Her hand was on her chest but I was looking at her eyes. They were swollen. She was crying.

“Eva, hi. You scared me.” The woman sniffled and wiped her eyes to get rid of any tears that were left behind. “Annika’s downstairs. Knock on her door before you go in, she’s not feeling well today.”

I nodded and turned to go downstairs, but I looked at Annika’s mom again. Her shoulders were slouched over the sink. Her fingers played in the water and I watched her for a moment.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Clary?” Was I supposed to call her that still? I’d known her as Mrs. Clary for all my fifteen years, what was I supposed to call her now that she was divorced?

She practically winced at the sound of her name. I figured out I probably wasn’t supposed to call her that anymore.

She looked at me with a weak smile and turned off the water. “Everything’s okay, Eva,” she said. I knew she was lying. If eyes could crack and break, hers would’ve done it right then. I think mine would’ve done it too.

I couldn’t look at her anymore and turned away to go to Annika’s room. I forgot to knock like her mother told me to, though, and I opened the door to see Annika covered up in her blankets in the middle of the day. She was shaking and crying loud enough I could hear her every breath.

“Mom,” she said pathetically. “Please just go away. I’m tired of talking.”

“Annika?” I called.

She jumped and turned over to look at me. “Eva?”

“Um, I came to do math homework,” I explained in a near whisper. “Are you okay, Annika?”

She wrapped the blanket tighter around her shoulders and looked off into space. “I don’t think I can do homework today.”

I dropped my backpack on the floor of her room and kicked my shoes off. We didn’t say anything when I climbed into bed with her. I held her hand and we were both quiet aside from her sniffling.

“The doctor said that I’m supposed to feel better after some time taking the pills,” she said. She squeezed my hand. “But everything just keeps getting worse. The guidance counselor yelled at me today because my grades are low. I don’t know why I can’t just be normal. I just want everything to go back to the way it was. I’m so tired of being tired and sad and angry. Something’s changed in me, Eva. I hate who I am now.”

We fell asleep in her bed and when we woke up, I felt different. It was just like she had been saying to me. Something had changed in her and I felt it changing something in me.

Just two short months after that I got the call from Annika’s mom. It was cold and raining in December. I had been huffing all day about the fact that it wasn’t snowing. Snow was always my favorite weather. Annika always came over when it snowed and we would drink hot chocolate together before we would build miniature snowmen along the sidewalks. My mom came running into my bedroom. She burst through the door and nearly tore it off the hinges with how fast she was moving. I almost fell off my bed.

“Mom, you scared me,” I said breathlessly. She just stared at me. Tears were falling and trailing her cheeks. Seeing her crying scared me more than anything. My mom never cried, never hard enough to make her face turn red. But her face was completely red and she was stuttering over her breaths to try and talk to me.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I jumped up and tried to hold onto her hand but she pulled me into a hug.

“Something happened to Annika,” she told me. “She slipped on the road and hit a tree.”

I could feel my body slowly going numb. I couldn’t even make myself breathe, I could only stiffen my arms around my mother’s body.

“She’s okay, right?” I asked, although I could already feel the answer in my veins. It was confirmed when my mother put her hand on the back of my head and pet my hair.

“They tried to help her as soon as they got there but it took a while to get through all the back roads and—“

I didn’t hear anything else she said. I was already crying and losing my balance in my mom’s tight hug. She half-carried me back to my bed and we both just laid there together and cried. I buried my face in her chest like a little kid and told myself it was a nightmare; I often had nightmares of people close to me dying. I knew this time was different but I tried to pretend it was a dream. It couldn’t possibly be real. Annika couldn’t have crashed her car into a tree. My best friend couldn’t be dead.

It’s almost an exact year from when Annika and I were drawing in her car. I’m wearing a dress even though it’s fucking cold outside. I stare at one of the weird paintings on the room’s walls because I can’t make myself look with everyone else. I hate it when people cry because it always makes me cry. There are so many people crying around me, I can’t even concentrate on my own feelings and thoughts with the sounds of their sniffling in my ears. Annika’s mom—she told me to call her Nicole now—grips me into a hug so tight it feels like my bones might pop out of my body. I haven’t slept properly in the five days since I got the news and I’m too tired to try pushing her away from me.

Nicole keeps telling me she’s sorry as she’s crying on me and squeezing me. I find a little bit of my strength and hug her back. That little bit of strength makes me finally look at the front of the room with everyone else.

I’ve never seen a dead person before. It doesn’t feel real when I look at Annika’s soft skin and hair. It’s straight and brown and soft, just like it always is. It’s falling over her shoulder, just like it always did. She looks just like she always did. It’s too weird to look at her. She looks like she’ll just open her eyes and start laughing or yelling or planting flowers or something. I don’t understand why I’m not crying.

“It’s okay,” Nicole hiccups in my ear. “She’s in a better place now. She’s happy now.”

I look at Annika again before I hug her mom a little tighter than I did before. I want to tell her the same thing, but I can’t get the words out. How will I ever know if it was really an accident that her car hit that tree?

Cayley DuBray is a senior English major at Lindenwood University. She has one publication on the Lindenwood University Digital Commons. She is a writer and reader of romance, fantasy and poetry. She enjoys coffee, the Sims4, cats, and traveling.