“It’s not me, it’s not my family in your head, they are crying.”
- Zombie by Cranberries


You know that silence that settles over a conversation between two people when one of them reveals something that consumes all noise? You both lapse into complete silence and look down, occasionally at one another, with curious stares and a thousand questions glittering in their eyes.

I seized to move, I seized to function. I just froze.

The air stopped moving through my lungs, and everything falls still and eerily silent as the room is bathed in the awkwardness of my announcement.

Elizabeth stares at me hard for several seconds, before shifting on her feet and sucking in her lips as she processes the new load of information. That one blunt sentence cleared up every question she might've had.

My fingers tighten around the edge of my shirt, gripping it until the frail fabric withers into the shape of my clentched fists.

The silence falls over us both like a silent veil of ash. No sound for a solid two minutes before she opened her mouth, shut it, then retreated to sit at the foot of her plush, girly-girl pink bed. She crosses her ankles carefully, her toes pointed towards the soft white carpet under her feet.

That same carper extends towards me, under the soles of my own boots. The immediate area around the tread is tainted by chips of dried mud that had fallen loose from the crevices, grinding into the pearly white colored carpet pieces of ash colored sand chips.

“What?” She finally breaths, and I take in a deep breath after having held it for over a minute and half. The expired air leaved my lips slowly and silently, and I mentally gather myself. I have nothing to reply with. I’ve already told her everything she would want to know, though of course, as a consequence, there would be questions that would follow, some I couldn’t answer, some that I wouldn’t want to, and some that I’d be reluctant to.

“What do you mean?... Like, you’re psychic or something? Have you always been like this? What else can you do?”

I sigh, and drop to the floor, crossing my legs, looking up patiently at her, feeling all meaning draining from me as I contemplate sharing my most precious secret with this pushy girl who would waste no time texting the whole school the details following my departure from her house.

“I’m not telling you shit.” I breathe, looking at my hands, scratching off flakes of the green and gold paint I had just applied two nights prior.

“Why not?!” She protests angrily, frustration tinting her anguished voice, she gets up briefly to pace her room. I watch her walk back and forth once, then return to her bed, resuming her statue like pose on the mattress.

“Because you have a big mouth and I have promises to keep.”

“What about our promise?” She whines, reminding me sharply of some pact we’d made years ago. “You promised there would never be secrets between us, and we would always keep the secrets shared enclosed between us.”

“Trust me, honey, I’m not the first to break that promise.” I mutter, shaking my head. “You’ve betrayed me enough to write a short chapter book over, and now you’re trying to pull that on me? Ha, no.”

I sit there, fiddling with the silver charms on my bracelet, listening to her huff in frustration.

“Those weren’t really secrets, though,” she goes on, trying her damndest to get me to squeal about the bizarre things I’ve been up to and the peculiar company I’ve been keeping.

“Weren’t they?” I challenge with raised eyebrows, “Obviously telling the entire boys’ football team the first time poor Ash got her period is not a secret. You made an entire spectacle out of it, and I missed school for the rest of the week because I couldn’t face my peers.” I narrow my eyes at her in amusement. The tale doesn’t bring me much embarrassment anymore, but at the time, I wanted to die.

“And let’s not forget all the times you shared the deep, dark details of my life with your fellow cheerleading squad to buy intel on other students. Trading secrets for secrets, except they weren’t yours to trade.”

“I did no-”

“Don’t tell Ash! She can’t know that I said anything about this’.” I mocked her voice with a higher octave.

Her face reddens, but damn, she won’t give up. “Those secrets weren’t hiding half the juicy details you currently are!” she exclaims, as though comparing my past secrets to this one will be enough to make me reconsider my decision to keep quiet. I scoff, “Are you really going to make a countdown list to tell which were the best?” I wonder, sarcasm coloring my tone. “Anyways, this secret is bigger than me and it’s bigger than you. It’s very existance seems to be throwing the earth into the dark ages. It shouldn’t be happening, and it shouldn’t exist, but it does, they do, and I have no choice but to live with them. They’re my shadows now. Please respect why and that I cannot tell you.”

She tries to protest again, and I interrupt her with a scowl. “May I remind you that you got defensive over Reece instead of being an adult about it? Jesus, Elizabeth, why do the rules on secrets and personal tales only apply to you?”

She finally shuts her mouth and stops trying to babble about me being a bad friend.

“I’ll tell you eventually, but not now, okay?”

She hesitated, then nods. “Yeah, okay...” A long, bothered sigh follows. “Do you promise?”

I nod, then sigh, I know I’ll probably regret this eventually.

“Wait, what if you disappear by some bizarre ghostly experience before you get to tell me?”

Honestly wouldn’t surprise me. I think to myself.

“Well then you get to live with the mystery.” I laugh, slowly feeling better having not said anything. It’s not my story to tell, I’m merely a character in the plot. It feels weird to share the tale with someone outside the loop, much less someone that Andy doesn’t even like.

“That’s hardly fair.” She frowns, “but will you at least explain to me how you can see them?... Wait, I saw them, too! Does that mean I am special, too?”

There’s a giddy excitement glowing in her eyes, which makes it quite hard for me to finally shake my head and explain enough of the myth to sate her thirst for knowledge.

“No... Anyone can see them, the ghosts just decide who can and who can’t. It takes a lot of energy for them to remain visible for a big crowd, so they have to rest.”

“Ghosts sleep?”

I nod “Sleep, cry, bleed, everything except piss. Being dead isn’t much easier than living, really.”

She processes that, then a sly smile crawls across her face. “You told me something!” she exclaims happily, and I sigh, hanging my head. “Dammit.” I mutter under my breath.

“No more questions! No more!” I wave my hands in a cross, shaking my head.

“Suurreeee.” she drawls out with a sneaky smile on her face, already thinking of new ways to get me to slip up.

I glance at the clock, and the hour is nearing seven in the evening, and the sky outside her bedroom window is turning violet.

“I probably need to head home.” I say, my voice sounding guilty.

“But you just got here.” She looks saddened, trying to conceal it.

“I know, I’m sorry. My parents need me there.”

“Your parents need you or you need an excuse to leave?”

I frown, and take her words into consideration, deciding to avoid her question all together. “After the flood... They need me more than ever.”

She scoffs at my lame attempt to cover up my need to escape. Sadly, I don’t feel any different than when I came through her front door, and it feels like a waste. Now she knows of my deepest secrets, and I'm leaving feeling no better than before. We still feel distant and it still feels like she'll use anything as leverage against me.

“Right...” she mutters, looking at her hands, rolling her sliver rings around her fingers. “I really don’t think we’ve made any progress. I have more questions than I did before.”

“But you trust me, right?”

“I don’t know.” she admits with a shrug, “I want to, I do, but you’ve kept all of this from me when I thought we were friends.”

“I thought we were friends, but then you smacked me in the hall during the worst week of my life because I was acting weird. Eliza, this split in our relationship has been a long time coming, hasn’t it?”

She didn’t answer immediately, just looked embarrassed. “Has it?”

“You’re not an honest friend.” I murmur awkwardly, forcing out the words. “You sugar-coat everything and then stab me in the back.”

“Like when?!” She throws her arms in the air in aggitation.

“Last year,” I mutter through clenched teeth. “You knew I had a massive crush on Finlay Peterson, but you still asked him to go to homecoming with you.”

“He ended up being gay anyways!”

“So? You knew I liked him and you wouldn’t stay out of the way. Why would you do that? I would never do something like that to you! I never did! You had a crush on Jay, and he approached me a couple times and I always turned him away because I was always thinking of you.”

I swallow hard, feeling a headache coming on. “Nothing is easy anymore... Maybe it never was. Maybe I wasted my time coming here.”

I push myself up from her plush white carpet, slinging my backpack over one shoulder, looking back at her. “I truly hope that you’re happy, and that you’re safe.” My face falls into a grimace, “no matter what, if you need a shoulder to cry on, you know where to find me. I’ll always be there for you, you know that. But we have just... Grown apart. I don’t think there’s anything left for us here.”

She has tears identical to mine forming in her eyes, “Ash, come on, let’s fix this. We already made new promises,” she sniffles, “you’re stuck with me now.”

I grit my teeth to keep the overwhelming swell of emotions from taking me. I feel torn down the middle. Part of me wants to run to her and fix everything wrong between us, and the other half, the wounded, scared half, just wants to put down as much distance between us as I can. I have this terrible knack for making too many promises to too many people, and it often ends in one or the other getting hurt.

She does something unexpected, and it commits me to my decision. She gets up and comes towards me, wrapping her arms tightly around my stiff form, burying her face between my shoulder blades. I exhale sharply, the cold feeling of abandonment drifting from my limbs as it’s replaced by the warm, nostalgic feeling of friendship that I did not realize that I was missing.

Elizabeth is a part of my old life, and like it or not, she's a piece I am not quite ready to give up.

Notes

DUDES. NEXT CHAPTER IS NUMBER ONE HUNDRED.
I've never had a story with a hundred chapters lol.

♠ ♠ ♠ Chapter inspired by The Night We Met by Lord Huron ♠ ♠ ♠

Shoutouts!
- Merelan

Thanks for reading! I love seeing your comments! <3