Sorrow | 18+

5 The princess has arrived

Song to listen to: Madonna - Material Girl

Author's note: dialogue between "" in cursive means characters are not speaking in English even though it is written in it. Zara and Vivi code switch mainly between French and Swedish, but it would interrupt the story too much if everything they said would be translated in parenthesis

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Vivienne

The train station was full of people rushing around with big suitcases. Summer was finally starting, which meant that everyone wanted out of our small city to go to their cottages, hit the beach or spend week-end shopping in bigger cities. Yet, I was going to have the best option over all of those. Or would have if the train would ever arrive. The digital screen on the station's old concrete wall was showing that Zara's train was 21 minutes late. She should've arrived 20 minutes ago, so If I was lucky there would be only a minute left to wait, but can you really trust train schedules?

The waiting area of the train station was extremely small and smelled bad, like mold inside. The building was a grey concrete box builded too many years ago and nobody had thought to make any basic fixes to it, which is why I chose to sit outside waiting on the platform with the evening sun.

Finally five minutes later, I saw a train slowly coming towards the station and when the doors slid open another huge crowd flooded the already bustling station. I might have missed Zara, but she was not a person to be lost in a crowd. Not when she was screaming my name like a crazy lady and everyone gave her a glance, thinking something was wrong. "Vivi!" She continued screaming even when she finally noticed me properly and started taking amazingly big strides with her brown high heels that gave her at least 10 centimetres more height, which meant she has doubled our height difference. 161 cm is not that short, Viv. One thing I truly loved about her was how she shamelessly took all the room she needed for herself, living her life like the main character. The confidence and permission to be loud rubbed off on me also.

"Hej, min älskling", Zara expressed happily and gave me a tight hug when I reached her.

"Hej! Stop screaming, please", I begged her.

"Yeah, yeah. Ah you look great, so pretty that I want to eat you as a dessert. You are wearing the clips I sended you, nice", she answered and I indeed had put on the brown butterfly hair clips she had sent me a few weeks ago. Zara was wearing a muted, darker pink hijab that made her brown skin tone to glow, with off white high neck blouse and pink formal trousers. We also pretty much matched with my brown maxi skirt and ruffled shirt, which had the similar colour to her pink. Zara was a beauty queen and my best critic when I was making clothes. I couldn't deny that she was sometimes a bit self-absorbed, but never mean. She was the only child of her tall and blonde, Swedish-speaking mother and short Arabic father, who have given her everything, except maybe friends. She was the princess and she knew it. When we first met at our strict and posh, French-speaking boarding school, where Zara joined at the age of 14 when her father decided she should learn to speak French, nobody wanted to befriend her in the first few days. Also she didn't try to befriend anyone else other than me, the other loner. She was too weird in the eyes of the popular schoolgirls, until they realized her family had some real money, more than any of them, they tried to charm her until Zara said fuck off and stayed with me.

"The princess has arrived!" Zara exclaimed when we arrived at my tiny apartment after a short taxi drive. "Oh, I like what you have done with the place."

"Merci, also Min-young donated me a few plants", I replied and pointed to the hanging plant, which was called philodendron if I remembered correctly, and the orchids which I was slowly but surely killing. Zara had been here only twice, a bit over 6 months ago when I moved to the city and in February during my birthday. At first, I only had my round brown wooden dinner table, double sized bed, my sewing machine and some tableware. I had bought a pretty, antique green dresser for the left side of the apartment's entrance as the bathroom door and rack took place at the left wall. From the entrance, the place led to the main living area with kitchen wall with brown cabinets and my dining area on the left, where I had added pastel pink cushions for the kitchen chairs and on the opposite side continuing the long main wall with windows, I had found a sunflower cover from my bed and curtains with the same pattern. I had put the curtains to separate the nook, which was next to my bed. Usually those were meant for a bed, but I had turned it into a dressmaker's room as the floor was one step lower than the rest of the apartment. Zara had insisted that I should have gotten a bigger apartment with my heritage money, but I didn't want to spend it. I even hesitated buying this place when I could've just rented something, but then I saw the pastel flower wallpaper and unique, pastel pink bathroom and couldn't pass up the chance.