Yes, No, Maybe So - Chapter Ten
A Story of Love, Grief & Toilet Phones
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The Past
Our time as roommates wasn’t all turmoil. In fact, most of it was good. Unfortunately, the bad times were stronger than our good intentions. Our last months as roommates were tense and quiet. We weren’t fighting, but we weren’t really getting along either. I could tell something was up with her, and I thought that she was plotting how to let me down easy over something.
Living with my best friend was my dream. It was the future I had wanted for years—to share our lives. Like that fanciful future we had imagined where we lived in neighboring mansions and shared a pool in our backyards. In the back of my mind, I think I always believed that having something like that was possible. Maybe not the mansions, but I believed we would always be neighbors. Always be the same friends we were in Girl Scouts and in high school, but being roommates for several years proved me wrong. Our friendship had changed; it felt like a strained, frayed rope, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
Finally, Rocky broke the news to me on a Sunday afternoon while I sat on the couch and stared out the living room window.
“I got a new job.”
“Oh … okay.”
Was that all? She had been acting weird for the last week, and I assumed she was hiding something worse than a new job. Something like—
“It’s in a different city, a few hours away.” Rocky wrung her hands, waiting for my reaction, then opened her mouth again before I could say anything. “I didn’t talk to you before accepting it because you can afford to keep renting the house on your own since you got that promotion last year. It’s not like you need to find a new housemate.”
“Right…”
The neurons in my brain shorted out, incapable of making the connections necessary to string a full sentence together. Rocky was leaving and had been too afraid to tell me. She squeezed her fingers until her knuckles turned bone white.
“Well? Say something, AJ.”
“Congrats on the new job.”
She groaned. “Not that. I mean … Are you mad at me?”
“No.” I was a little surprised to find that I actually wasn’t. It was possible the news just hadn’t sunk in yet, but the only thing I felt was hollow. “Why would I be?”
She caught herself mid-eye roll and aborted the motion, but not before I saw it. “Because you’re overly sensitive, and you take everything personally.”
Indignation flared in my chest, puffing me up—until I realized that this was exactly what Rocky was talking about and forced myself to deflate. Once that feeling dissipated, I was left empty again. For once, Rocky appeared to have no idea what I was thinking. She looked down at me where I sat on the couch, cautiously hopeful but clearly unwilling to trust my calm demeanor. When it became evident that I wasn’t about to explode, her shoulders sagged.
“I guess I worried that you’d feel like I was abandoning you.”
“I don’t feel that way.”
At least, I didn’t before she brought it up.
“Because I’m not!” she went on. “Truth is, I’ve been wanting to do something else with my career for a while now, and this opportunity kind of just fell into my lap. It seemed too good to pass up.”
My traitorous brain translated that to mean that my best friend was miserable living with me. Of course she was! Rocky was outgoing and fun loving, and I was … not. We worked well together in small doses but not when we were together all the time. Maybe the reason I wasn’t reacting the way Rocky feared I would was because part of me had been expecting this. It was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped, and she realized that we weren’t the same children who befriended each other in Girl Scouts. As we grew older, the foundation of our relationship gradually cracked, like weeds breaking up concrete.
And Rocky’s response to this was relief. The worst part was that I couldn’t blame her.
Time warped in the days leading up to her departure. Some days passed so quickly that they might as well have been droplets of water slipping through my fingers. Other days passed so slowly that all I could hear was the thunderous ticking of the clock that never seemed to move. In time, I noticed a pattern. Hours went by rapidly whenever Rocky was packing her belongings into boxes and making travel arrangements while I was in the other room pretending I couldn’t hear. Time slowed down whenever I was alone: at work, at home whenever Rocky was out with her other friends.
It was as if she was already gone.
I moped for so long that it eventually couldn’t go unquestioned. It was my turn to ruin one of Hayden’s game nights—Rocky and I seemed to be taking turns—and of course he noticed my weird mood. When Rocky went to the bathroom, he cornered me in the kitchen to ask what was going on.
“Maybe this will be a good thing,” he said after I explained that Rocky was moving out and moving on. “You two have never not been together, right? You were in Girl Scouts together, you went to high school and college together.”
“We weren’t roommates in college,” I protested weakly.
“Weren’t you in the same dorm building?” I huffed but couldn’t deny it. Why did Hayden have to listen to every single story Rocky told? “All I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you could view this as an opportunity for growth. Figure out who you are without Rocky. Who is Anna Jeffries?”
What I didn’t want to admit was that I already knew who I was without Rocky. I was quiet and withdrawn. I was more inclined to stay home by myself than to go out with my coworkers. I knew that I wasn’t a fun person, but more to the point, I tended to be sullen without Rocky to slap some sense into me. I became downtrodden over things that didn’t really matter: my social skills, my reclusivity, my picky habits. My other friends and family tiptoed around me whenever I was glum. But Rocky knew that blunt honesty—as much as I hated it—was often what I needed in order to pull myself out of a depressive quagmire. And she never hesitated to give me that level of honesty.
Without Rocky, I would sink. Sink into my own insecurities and doubts. Sink into loneliness that encroached whenever she was gone. She wasn’t responsible for my wellbeing, though. She didn’t deserve to feel guilty for moving forward without me, so I swallowed my fear and resignation and put a smile on my face.
I had just finished taking a leisurely Saturday morning shower, stuck one arm past the shower curtain to reach for my towel, when it suddenly appeared in my hand. Heart in my throat, I clutched the towel to the front of my body before cautiously peeking past the curtain. Rocky sat on the toilet seat, one leg crossed over the other as she scrolled on her phone.
“What are you doing in here?!”
“Waiting for you to get out of the shower.”
“I locked the door!”
“And I unlocked it with a bobby pin.”
In a huff, I wrapped the towel around my body and then pushed the curtain aside. “It was locked for a reason.”
I was never the type of girl who felt comfortable having my friends in the bathroom with me; I didn’t even openly undress in the locker room at school. Rocky thought that was a stupid line to draw when she had stripped down in front of me countless times growing up.
“What do you want, Rocky?”
I bent awkwardly to grab my clean clothes while holding onto the towel at the same time. Even though I didn’t look graceful, I was adept at dressing under a towel or inside a sleeping bag—a skill I had acquired thanks to Rocky’s lack of boundaries. She shrugged, attempting to look nonchalant, but I knew better. If this was really a casual conversation, she would have waited until I was out of the bathroom to talk. If she was ambushing me while I was naked, that meant she was afraid I would bolt.
“I just wanted to spend time together. Is that a crime?”
“No.” But it was highly suspicious. Rocky eyed my outfit without any subtlety when I dropped the towel.
“You’re going to want to change into something different,” she advised me. “Something you don’t care about.”
This spontaneous outing reminded me of old times. I should have been happy, but it felt … off. Like Rocky and I were forcing ourselves into clothes that no longer fit. I drove us to the park, per Rocky’s directions, and the two of us hiked up the hill. Huffing and puffing, I braced my hands on my knees.
“What…” I panted. “Are we … doing here?”
I was a little annoyed to see that Rocky was not nearly as out of breath as I was, even though she was carrying a small, battery-powered stereo in her arms. She set it on the grass and then dusted off her palms.
“Being nostalgic,” she answered proudly.
From her giant purse, she produced an old cassette tape.
“Hope you don’t mind that I grabbed this from your car while you were taking forever to lace your shoes.”
I groaned. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Cinematic Animal Noises!”
“No!” I lunged for the tape, but Rocky danced out of the way, stuffing the tape down the front of her shirt. “Rocky, we’re in public!”
“So?” She tried to run circles around me, but I used my long arms to my advantage and caught her around the middle. “When did you become so uptight, AJ? Weren’t you the one who criticized me for ranting about my favorite lemon cookies?”
“I’ve always been uptight, just not about Girl Scout cookies.”
Suddenly, Rocky’s body felt like it weighed more than a cannonball as she let her legs go limp. Grunting, I tried to hang on to her, but the abrupt shift in our centers of gravity sent the two of us tumbling to the ground. I was too tired to continue fighting. I laid flat on my back while Rocky rolled away from me.
“Can’t believe this is what it takes to make you listen…” She went on muttering unflattering things about me under her breath as she popped the tape into the little stereo. “I’m working hard to recreate a good memory—the least you could do is cooperate.”
“What are you—” I started to ask, but then I remembered. When we first moved in together, we were driving and Rocky found that stupid tape. Then she demanded I pull over so that she could … Oh, no.
She popped the tape in, and the animal noises began playing at full volume. The heads of everyone in the park turned in our direction. I hunched my shoulders, hoping to make myself smaller.
“Come on.” She grabbed my hands and tugged me to the crest of the hill. “You can’t complain about grass stains since I made you change out of your nice clothes.”
“I get dizzy!”
“Then throw up at the bottom of the hill, but you’re doing it with me this time.”
I looked down at her stupidly happy face, framed by the wild golden curls that she never managed to tame. It always seemed like Rocky asked for too much of me and yet asked for nothing at all. I could give her this one thing, even though she wasn’t going to be the one who vomited in front of our neighbors.
Hanging my head, I relented. “Okay.”
“Yes!”
Her hands tightened around mine, and she dragged me down to the grass. I stretched out beside her. As soon as she counted down from three, I pushed off and went barreling down the hill. When I rolled to a halt, the treetops continued to spin. In the name of not puking, I stayed on my back for a minute and just listened to Cinematic Animal Noises which was punctuated by Rocky’s laughter. I wished I felt the same happiness. Instead, I felt like I was trying to grasp the shadow of a joyful memory and failing.
The sun was eclipsed by my best friend. She stood over me, a big smile on her face, and offered me a hand up. “See, AJ? That wasn’t so bad.”
“I guess not.” I tried to smile.
“I’ve got our whole day planned out,” she explained, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “This is just the beginning! We’re going to hit up all of our old haunts.”
I trailed behind her, nodding and smiling when necessary. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that her efforts—instead of uplifting my dour mood—were casting a pall over it. I was running out of time before my best friend moved away.