or asleep. Though sometimes I also held it while I slept. Each interaction felt monumental, though whenever I scrolled up to reread them I found mostly trivia: Ruby’s favorite candy was blue Laffy Taffy, her favorite color was orange, her favorite band was…one I’d never heard of, and couldn’t actually recall the name of at the moment, but if I scrolled back far enough in our text history I would find it. She hated coffee and she still loved wine coolers, even though they were for freshmen. She slept with a small, worn stuffed elephant her grandma had given her when she was born, but she hid it under her bed every morning in case anyone came over unexpectedly. This last one, especially, felt significant: it told me that she trusted me.
I wanted to send her something now about the coffee, something to the effect that she was right and I’d rather be drinking a wine cooler, even if it wasn’t totally true. I got as far as opening our conversation on my phone. But I’d texted her good luck an hour earlier, and she hadn’t responded, so I replaced it, facedown, on the counter and took another big gulp of my sugary latte. And checked my phone one more time, very quickly, and put it back.
A particularly loud group of people pushed through the door, and I spotted Jamie at the back, seemingly arriving with them. Band kids, I realized, not without a little nausea. As first-chair clarinet, Jamie was the one who played the tuning note before the conductor waved his wand and the band started playing, and this made her some sort of god. For the most part, Jamie’s social interaction with the other band kids was limited to summer camp, and weekends when Ronni and I had soccer and Alexis was busy, so it was weird to see her with them now, here, when she’d implied she would be meeting me. Especially unsettling was the girl she walked in next to: Natalie Reid.
How to describe Natalie Reid? She was my nemesis, a wolf in first-chair flautist’s clothing, and number three on the Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t list. When Jamie and I were dating and Jamie had plans with band friends, I spent hours at home alone, worrying about Natalie Reid. I was always ten percent convinced Jamie was in love with her, and I was certain Natalie Reid was in love with Jamie, straight though she claimed to be. Natalie Reid was always touching Jamie on the arm, and flinging herself into Jamie’s side, and calling her “Jame.” Whenever I half teased, half prodded her about it, Jamie told me she found Natalie annoying more than anything else. Jamie told me she loved me and no one else. But still, I knew Natalie Reid was Jamie’s type, more than I would ever be: she was cute and vaguely emo and wore vintage sweaters and giant blue-framed glasses that suited her dark brown eyes perfectly, and, today, a neon orange beanie that should have looked hideous but didn’t. She matched every TV character Jamie had a crush on: a tiny, smart hipster who was pretty enough to be popular but somehow too cool to be. I’d hated her freaking guts ever since Jamie put her third on our list. I hadn’t thought of her once in the months since Jamie broke up with me, and now I wondered how I could have been so stupid.
I saw Jamie see me, and I waved. I watched her cup a hand to Natalie’s ear, and I held my breath, watching Natalie giggle. Then they separated, and I exhaled. Natalie led the rest of the band kids closer to the stage, and Jamie weaved through the crowd toward me. Even from across the room I recognized the glint of the earrings I’d given her for her seventeenth birthday. They spelled shut up in tiny gold script, one word per ear. She hadn’t worn them since we broke up, at least around me. I didn’t know how to interpret this, but I’d spent nearly fifty dollars of my own hoarded birthday money on them, so, in a purely financial sense, it was good to know she was still getting use out of them. When she appeared at the edge of the crowd as Pineapple Under the Sea