Lily wasn’t expecting to ever bump into Rose again in her life, but here they were, two full-time college students reaching for the same bag of chips at the local supermarket. As if suddenly repelled by the party-sized Lays, both women jumped away from the shelf.
“Oh, um. Hi Lily.” Rose took the initiative to start a conversation though she sounded awkward and unsure. Lily made a strangled noise in response–something certainly not in the English language–and instantly shut her mouth again out of embarrassment. Rose’s somewhat uncertain laugh was muffled in the warm scarf securely wrapped around her neck. “How have you been?” Rose asked the next customary conversation question.
Lily cleared her throat and fell back on her normal response to the question. “I’m doing good, how are you? Do you also go to university around here? I’ve never seen you around before.”
“Yeah, I’m at the arts school a couple blocks away from here. It’s pretty small, so you’ve probably never heard of it.”
“That’s cool,” Lily replied robotically, internally wincing from how uncaring she sounded. The atmosphere of estrangement hanging between them was painful in a subtle way, but Lily resisted her urge to cut off the conversation and run away. “Want to grab some coffee?”
“That is, if you don’t have to be somewhere,” she added.
“Sure,” Rose replied after checking her phone.
As they sat down in her favorite cafe, Lily began to have wonders about why she was subjecting herself to this impromptu rendezvous when she needed to be working on a report that was due at midnight. No, she reminded herself. This was for their old friendship, so it wasn’t a waste. It was a… resolution. The word sunk in her mind heavily. It sounded so final.
Lily abruptly realized how quickly their friendship had dissolved after graduating high school. They’d fallen out of touch in the blink of an eye. Now, it was two years later and she felt like she knew nothing about her former best friend. At the end of that train of thought, Lily found that she regretted letting their friendship go so easily.
“Lily, are you okay?” Rose flicked her forehead lightly, breaking her out of her gloom.
“I’m fine, just thinking about things,” she said and Rose made a half-convinced noise. She sat back down in her seat and brought out her phone. “Hey, do you still follow that one YouTube channel with the extreme spicy food challenges? They released a new video yesterday.”
Lily nodded, feeling disoriented with the sudden change of topic. “Yeah, I do, but why? Do you want to watch it right now or something?”
“I mean, why not?” Rose shrugged nonchalantly and brought up the video on the screen. Lily slid her chair over to Rose’s side of the table and they began watching.
A few minutes into the video, while the participants in the spicy ramen challenge groaned in despair, Lily and Rose’s coffee arrived. Almost in synchrony, they brought up their cups to drink. It was a strange coincidence… or maybe not, Lily thought as she made a connection. Once Lily had swallowed a gulp of coffee and the cup was safely back on the table, she immediately started laughing.
“Just looking at people eating spicy stuff makes my throat start to burn. Is it the same for you?”
Understanding dawned in Rose’s eyes and she started laughing too. “Yeah, I didn’t even realize, but yeah, that’s totally right! It’s kind of like secondhand suffering, isn’t it?”
Once they’d calmed down, they continued playing the video, but Lily’s mind was distracted. Even if she didn’t know Rose now, she still had a lot of memories from before. They didn’t study the same things at college, but they probably still liked a lot of the same things.
After they’d finished drinking their coffee, Lily and Rose started putting on their coats again when Lily impulsively made her suggestion. “Why don’t we hang out again sometime? I had fun today and I was thinking that I regret suddenly not really speaking to you after high school ended just because we were doing different things over the summer. We were both busy but I should’ve tried harder and I’m sorry, Rose.”
Rose stopped putting her scarf on and raised her eyebrow at Lily impassively. “You know you could’ve left it at that first sentence, right? I feel kind of mad now– but to be honest, it’s also my fault, so it’s fine.”
A bell chimed as they left the coffee shop. “See you later?”
“Uh-huh. See you.”
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