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August 2 - August 4, 2021
I’ve been super swamped with life. Adulting. Bills, taxes, existential doom. You never told me it was such a drag.”
Elle was tired of everyone looking at her like she was a mess when she was just trying her best.
“Quit trying to marry me off like I’m some Regency spinster in one of your favorite Austen novels.” “Your name is Darcy.” “And I might be a single woman in possession of a good fortune, but I’m not in want of a wife.”
The sky was blue. The grass was green. Darcy was beautiful. Universally acknowledged truths.
DARCY (4:25 P.M.): Comedy would be History of the World Part One. Action . . . God, I don’t know. The Mummy, maybe? Rom-com . . . America’s Sweethearts. Drama would have to be Dead Poets Society. ELLE (4:26 P.M.): the mummy?!? ELLE (4:26 P.M.): i credit that movie for my bisexual awakening
ELLE (4:30 P.M.): did I want to be evelyn or did i want to ride off into the sunset with her? ELLE (4:30 P.M.): both obviously
hetero + contextualize = heterotextualize
DARCY (4:49 P.M.): So when’d you stop? Heterotextualizing? Elle chuckled as she typed. ELLE (4:50 P.M.): shortly after I tried to heterotextualize my friend going down on me at a theater cast party when I was in high school ELLE (4:51 P.M.): just gals being pals ELLE (4:52 P.M.): the mental leaps and bounds were like, acrobatic DARCY (4:53 P.M.): You’re lucky you didn’t pull something.
“How come when I day drink on holidays, it’s all ‘Elle, be reasonable. Tequila’s not a breakfast food.’ Or, ‘Elle, take that onesie off. You’re scaring the kids.’ But now you’re all, it’s five o’clock somewhere. What gives?”
Darcy’s jaw ticked, her ability to tolerate bullshit slim, her ability to tolerate condescension worse.
“For what it’s worth,” Darcy said, her right hand joining the left to wipe away the tears and liner from beneath Elle’s eyes. “I like cilantro.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t expect them to agree, or even completely understand, but I wish they’d respect it. My choices. Me. I wish I didn’t have to be so . . . so serious in order for them to take me seriously. Does that make sense?”
“Eventually, when those massive stars reach the end of their lives, they go out with a bang, a supernova so bright, so beautiful it drowns out all the other stars. And when they do, they throw out all those elements they created. That’s what we’re made of. We’ve got calcium in our bones and iron in our blood and nitrogen in our DNA . . . and all of that? It comes from those stars.” Elle’s eyes glistened, sparkling as bright as the stars she spoke of as she blinked and pointed up at the sky. “We are literally made of stardust.”
I hate snow.” Elle covered her mouth. “What? How? Why? Darcy, who hurt you?” Darcy wrinkled her nose. “Have you ever spent thirty minutes scraping ice off your windshield?” “That’s ice, not snow. Snow is pretty.” She stuck out her tongue. “Oh please. For all of ten minutes before it turns into gray sludge that refreezes into black ice that’s responsible for twenty-four percent of weather-related vehicle crashes, injuring over seventy-five thousand and killing nearly nine hundred annually.”
“You keep your standards high.” Elle nodded resolutely. “They make vibrators for a reason.” Margot’s tongue poked into her cheek. “When in doubt, rub one out?”
“It’s the zodiac signs as breakup songs.” Maybe heartbreak was screwing with her focus. But only a little. Understanding passed over Margot’s face as she tilted her head and lifted a finger in the air. “Hence the music.” Other way around. Bless Spotify. The playlist I Should Be a Sad Bitch had pulled double duty, letting Elle sit in her feels while providing inspiration. Multitasking at its most depressing.
“No one is worth feeling like you’re not good enough, that you’re not amazing exactly as you are.
“What the hell was I thinking?” Margot bared her teeth in a grimace. “Tequila. You weren’t doing much thinking.” “Did I . . . did I realize how stupid this was?” Elle shook the doll in the air. She’d even attached those twisty-ties they kept in the junk drawer, the red ones from bread loaves, to the doll’s head like hair. It looked terrifying, like some rustic doll of olden time possessed with the spirit of a vengeful child. Elle was creeped out that she had made it. “Please tell me I came to my senses.”
Brendon made it sound simple. The sky is gray. It’s raining out. You love Elle. As if it were easy. But there was nothing simple about how she felt.
“Look. I told Elle I wasn’t a fan of this, this fake dating shit you sprang on her. I told her from the beginning not to expend emotional labor you didn’t deserve. Quite frankly, I’m still not sure you deserve Elle because she’s my best friend and the greatest person I know. I will always think she deserves the absolute best and I don’t like you right now so in my book, you’re the worst. But who’s best for her isn’t up to me to decide. I pour the drinks and feed her ice cream and hold her hand when she cries and yeah, I give my opinion and plenty of advice, but Elle can make her own decisions.
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“I like who I am. A lot. What I do, who I am, it makes me happy. And I . . . I deserve someone who likes me exactly the way I am, mess and all. I need to be able to know that. I need to hear that. I need to believe it. I deserve someone who can say it.”
Darcy lifted the potted plant in front of her. “It’s cilantro. Because I’ve liked you for longer than I knew how to say, before I could say it. Before I could say it the way you deserve to hear it. But I have and I do. I like you exactly the way you are, Elle. Boxed wine and glitter and astrology and most of all”—Darcy sucked in a gasping breath—“I love the way you make me hope. You make me hope and you make me happy. You make me so happy, Elle.”
know how I feel and I’m five hundred percent certain that on a scale of one to ten, I want to be with you, exactly as you are, infinity.”
For the first time, Elle didn’t need a maybe, didn’t need to hope because she knew. This was it. Boom. End game. A lifetime of butterflies.
