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She was leaning against the hood of a pastel blue convertible with the cover pulled over the beige leatherbound seats, her black hair a blunt bob about an inch above her shoulders that had already discarded her blazer, draped over the rolled down window of the car, curtain bangs like mine hiding her eyes. She was still barely five feet tall, her skirt reaching further down her legs than mine, but it took me a second to recognize her.
She was heavier than before, with a double chin and shining stretch marks visible around the cuff of her short sleeve, her stomach bulging around the waistline of her skirt. Other than Noel Preston, the change in her appearance was the most noticeable, but it wasn't like I wasn't curvy myself. My thighs never didn't touch, my own stomach was never flat, and last fall when I went on a hayride at a pumpkin patch, I was very aware of how everything jiggled over the dirt paths. There was a part of me that worried that if I did ever decide to date in high school, one drifting hand over my love handles would be enough to end everything before it even started.
I tentatively stepped toward her, bookbag folded against her shins with her knee-high socks sliding down and bunching around her ankles and wished that El Atraco de Nuestras Vidas hadn't ended four years ago when I could've desperately used a tried-and-true icebreaker in that moment. So instead, I just gestured to the silver bumper against her thighs. "I like your car."
She glanced up from her phone, just like she had when we first met, and in the pause that stretched between us, it struck me all that had changed since we were bored twelve-year-olds in a stranger's courtyard. Her eyes widened, phone drooping. "Ivy?"
"Surprise," I said, my enthusiasm waning from my voice on each syllable, nerves prickling holes in the word and twisting around my muscles. "I transferred back to Chanler—"
"Ivy!" I barely understood what was happening as she stumbled around the bookbag slumped against her ankles, muffled clattering echoing from inside as she kicked it aside with the toe of her shoe and pushed herself off the bumper of the convertible. I was bringing my arms back around her before I even realized that she had hugged me in the first place, relief blooming throughout my chest and the tension in my shoulders finally released after three years as soon she wrapped her hands around them. "Ivy! You're back!"
I smiled against the stiff material of her button-down. "I am. I've been looking for you all day. I was beginning to think that maybe you moved or something."
Her grip around me loosened, brushing her hair behind her ear as she pulled back from me, and her Chelsea boots scrapped against the pavement like the screech of a record needle coming to an abrupt stop. Something shifted in her gaze, eyes glancing away from me, and she cleared her throat as she reached down to grab the bookbag out from under the hood of the convertible. "Yeah, um," she said, running the strap through her hand. "I guess we don't share any classes this year."
The relief that I felt a moment earlier withered within in my chest because I thought, for a second—but then the other memories flooded back like it was a collage I just couldn't put down no matter how many times I wanted to shove it away. The unanswered text messages, the phone calls delivered to their voicemails, my fifteenth birthday party that none of them came to. Jun still followed me on Instagram, but she almost never liked any of my posts. She would text me back, but she was always the first to stop. Before, we used to tease Jun for how much she texted and how she always managed to text back immediately—no matter the circumstances—but then when I was in Pennsylvania, hours stretched before I received a response, one.
