Besties
Written by Moriah Katz
Her blood might as well have spelled “I love you Tair”, bright as it was on the concrete. She’d fallen off her board trying to get me to pay attention to her. Again. I was getting so tired of this.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
People were looking at us now, heads turning to see two gay girls fight in the half pipe. Placing bets. Paying too much attention. Fuck them.
“My problem?”
“Who the fuck else would it be? Every time we skate you fuck yourself up. I can’t look away for one second before you get hurt. What’s happening? Spill.”
“You already know.” “No I don’t.”
“Yes you do!”
Her accusation echoes loud through the bowl. I hate how responsible it makes me feel. “You can’t make this my fault.”
“I’m not making it anything.”
“Bullshit!” I spit the word in her face. Her lip is busted and gushing red, her right foot hanging limp from her ankle. I hoist her up by the arm pits, nearly fall over as the world tilts. I’d grown used the the cuts and scrapes, the bruises flowering and barely visible across her skin. The broken bones were new. She was getting worse.
“Can you move it?”
“No.” She locks her eyes to the constellation of blood on the ground. She never looks at me when she’s hurt. Not until we’re in the emergency room and she remembers that she hates doctors and anesthesia, when she needs my hand to hold and my voice to distract her. I don’t want to think about the the cracks spiderwebbing through her metatarsels, so I say,
“You remember when I used to beg your mom to braid my hair?” She laughs.
“Yeah, you used to hit her with the “just one braid Mrs. Evans!” Bang on the door until she came out.”
“I was happy with that one braid, too! I know I looked crazy with my hair half done. But I didn’t care.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I thought her hands were magic. That one braid made me look more like you.”
She runs her hand across her head, feels for the hair she hacked off months ago. She’d had so much it couldn’t fit in the trashcan. I’d had to carry it outside for her, ropes of wool stuffed in a plastic bag from Target. She’d hid at my house for a week after cutting it off, avoiding her mother’s silent treatment. Some things hurt more than a beating.
“Those were the good old days, weren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
Her stitches look like letters on her mouth, and I wonder if it hurts to talk about the versions of ourselves we left in our mothers’ photo albums. I think I liked her more before the gold teeth and the fade, before we both came out and had to start fighting about the girls I’m dating who aren’t her.
Sometimes, you’re just supposed to love your best friend. Even if she hates you for not loving her the right way.
