A/N - Oh my goodness it has been a long time. Please forgive any errors - this is a very tentative re-entry into the world of fanfic, basically something to prove to myself that I can string sentences together that have nothing to do with my job. Hopefully you'll like it.
Imagine a girl.
Imagine a boy.
Imagine a group of friends in which the girl and boy are, whether they know it, the centre of the universe, the star around which all others orbit. If girl and boy are in a good mood, their friends are too. If trouble rears its ugly head for girl or boy, it will infect the group without care or attention.
But trouble rarely comes. Life is, if not idyllic in the true sense of the word, certainly good for the friends. Members of the group come and go, parents move jobs and districts, stars fall out of orbit only to be pulled back in at a later date.
Through it all, girl and boy remain stable, so the others remain stable.
Until, suddenly, a rip in the fabric of their existence.
All of the friends had their talents, some shared, others unique. One was a science lover, and was invited to expositions throughout the state. Some had been brought up on a diet of martial arts, and were usually found in the corner of the youth centre of their town, if not practising new moves then teaching old moves to others. Some loved music, although avoided putting their individual talents to the test of exposure for fear of ridicule.
Girl was a gymnast. When boy practised martial arts, girl could be found at the other side of the gym, diligently practising backflips, somersaults and the usual tricks of the trade, while both surreptitiously glanced at the other when they believed the coast to be clear.
Girl was spotted at a competition by a renowned coach. Although not of a national level, he knew people who were, and he knew he had stumbled across an athlete who would be of interested to them.
He made the phone call.
At her next competition, an assistant coach of the national team was in the audience, a few rows behind the group of the girl's friends, who knew enough about gymnastics to genuinely enjoy the competition, even if they would not have dreamed of attending had the girl had not been competing.
Girl won the beam competition by a country mile. And as the boy went to kiss her congratulations, and take her back to their town for an evening of celebrations, the assistant coach cleared his throat behind him, and asked if she could talk to the girl.
Alone.
And that's the moment, whether the group of friends knew it or not, that everything began to change.
Girl was offered a trial with the national team. She had genuinely never considered a career in the sport that she loved, had thought hazily that if any opportunity would come her way, it would have been if she were younger, that her age of seventeen had automatically made her too old.
Apparently, she had been wrong. She was wanted. And the national team was based clear across the country.
If she looked at life objectively, without her friends, there was little keeping her to the town in which she lived. Her parents had divorced two years ago and she lived with her father in a house which was big enough for each to pretend the other was not there. Her mother had remarried (with what some had remarked to be unnecessary haste) soon after the divorce from her father, and now lived in Paris with her French husband.
A conversation with her mother could take place just as easily on the Atlantic coast as it could the Pacific. Her father wouldn't even notice she had gone unless prompted.
But, her friends...
Her friends genuinely wanted what was best for the girl. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, they said. We always knew you were talented, now others have noticed it too. You'd be insane not to take this shot and make the spot in the national team your own.
And the boy?
In his head, the boy knew that his friends were right. That the girl - his girl - deserved more than a life rattling around an empty house, struggling with homework, and mainly small-time competitions with half the venue's seating area cordoned off to make it look as though more spectators filled the seats than actually was the case.
But his heart desperately wanted to ask her to stay. To make her realise that she was the only thing stopping him from floating away, she kept him grounded to the floor yet on his toes through every interaction with her.
He loved her, deeply and with everything that he had. In the end, he told his heart to be quiet, and he didn't tell the girl that she was his everything, that every day he pinched himself to check he wasn't dreaming, that she had chosen to share her life with him and not the god she so obviously deserved. He didn't deserve her, he loved her, and she deserved all that was good and amazing. Surely she had to make the most of this opportunity which had come out of the blue and turned his life upside down.
So he said nothing of the turmoil inside him.
The girl packed her suitcases, silently wondering why the boy had not made more of an effort to ask her to stay.
Did he...
Did he actually want her to leave him?
And the initial crack that the assistant coach's words had made upon the glass of a life slowly began to spread away from the initial impact, and began to cover more of the surface around it.
Life was harder.
If she'd thought life was hard while sitting silently and quietly in the bedroom of her old house, listening to the wreckage of a marriage boiling beneath her, she had been wrong.
If he'd thought life was hard while being a sullen outcast at his previous school, before the girl and her group of friends had come to envelop him in their lives in his new school, he'd been wrong.
These were the days before cell phones, before e-mail, before Facebook and Skype and all the modern accoutrements which would have made separation easier in so many ways. If the girl had been able to see the boy and all their friends on a daily basis, she wouldn't have quietly panicked that they were moving on without her, that the boy whom she loved so deeply had found another, that the gap she had been left had been filled until it was as though she had never been there.
If the boy and the group of friends had been able to see the girl, they would have seen the anguish and despair that lurked behind her eyes from the moment she woke to the moment she fell asleep. They would have been able to realise that when she told them she was fitting into the team, that everyone had gone out of their way to make her feel welcome, she was lying.
She would have seen, and believed, that the boy was fading without her presence, that he needed her there to believe that he was real, and that life could be joyous because she made it so.
But they couldn't see each other, couldn't keep in regular contact without letters and phone messages crossing and making any attempts at conversation convoluted and confusing.
So, when the boy came home from school and found a message on his family's answering machine from the girl, who said calmly that she had met another boy whom she liked better, and please could he not call her again, he would not be able to see that she had successfully kept the tears out of her voice and had in fact been sobbing towards the end of the conversation. He could not see that she had been lying.
That day, the cracks across their fragile glass threatened to shatter the substance completely. That they didn't was something of a miracle, but in reality, it would have been a kindness if the glass had shattered that day. If the boy had picked up the phone, defying the girl's wishes, and called her back, he would have realised that things were not well in her world. If the girl had followed her instincts and called the boy once more to try to intercept her previous message, she would have heard the tears that he would not have disguised as well as she did hers in her message.
They may have been able to begin repairing some of the cracks, although the boy's trust was diminished and the girl was falling too fast for anyone to catch her without being crushed themselves.
But the boy was wounded, and he retreated into the quiet boy that he had been before he opened his heart to the girl. His friends were there, raging against the actions of the girl who should have known better, although a few quietly had their doubts, and wondered what had prompted the girl to act so uncharacteristically.
And because her message did not prompt any response from the boy, the girl began to truly believe that she was as insignificant as her so-called team-mates would have her believe. Oh, there was no outright bullying, or violence, or even what could traditionally be called unkindness. But silence was a potent weapon, and the girl was withering under the strain of a life away from everything she knew, the life of a professional gymnast, and the constant need to be better.
Her friends called, and she delivered an acting masterclass in persuading them that everything was fine. She avoided all mention of the boy - when they tentatively dropped him into a conversation where his name bore no relevance, she ruthlessly changed the subject, or claimed she had to go, that someone else needed to use the payphone and she'd been talking for long enough.
So the girl withered, and the boy nearly crumbled, but life went on, time went by, and if you'd never known better, you would have thought that the girl had always been a quiet, painfully thin girl, who drank water as though it were about to be outlawed and constantly looked as though she were listening to voices in her head as opposed to paying anything like enough attention to the conversations around her, involving her - about her. You would have believed that the boy had never truly let anyone into his life, that his friends now fluttered around him without ever really landing, that he had never seen in a girl's eyes that to her he meant the world.
You may even have believed that both of them were exactly where they were meant to be. But they weren't, and no-one could see enough to change that, and although it couldn't be described as anyone's fault, neither of them could see the truth of the matter, and so when each went to sleep at night, they bitterly blamed the other, themselves, the universe, for how life was treating them.
And through it all, the friends watched, desperately wanting to do the best for the boy, hoping against hope that the silence would be broken by either party, knowing that they could do little but not realising that they could have done so much more than they did.
The girl drank water. She counted random numbers in her head, she stared straight in front of her when walking down corridors, she spoke only when spoken to unless absolutely necessary, and through it all she wondered why nobody could hear her screaming. When she scraped through the Olympic trials by a fingernail's breadth, the friends wondered why she didn't sound more enthusiastic, and asked her. Again, it could have been an opportunity for the girl to stop the waves from crashing in her head, to let someone in, to begin contemplating letting thoughts of the boy distract her from the monotony that her life had become. But she withdrew, told her best friend that she was enthusiastic but trying to contain herself as she was surrounded by people she had beaten to the team and didn't want to rub salt into the wounds she had inadvertently caused.
You may have guessed by now that she was wishing herself anywhere but on the Olympic team.
But where could she go?
The boy watched her. Of course he watched her. He hated her, he hated what she had turned him into, he hated that now he had to force himself to be a part of the group, whereas when she had been around there was nowhere else he would rather have been, because she would have been there.
But despite that, despite everything she had done to him, all the times he had lain in bed silently cursing her name, he was part of the group of friends gathered around the TV at a strange time of the morning, watching as across the world, the girl won her medal.
His vision was hazy, not through tears, but because he did not let himself focus on her, had finally been able to harness the discipline he had been taught through martial arts and could not look at her clearly or he knew he would not cope. So he watched as though through our shattered glass, and he could not see the shadow in the girl, could not see her desperate eyes as she searched the crowd for the friends she had ordered not to attend.
He could not see, and she looked but did not find. In this way, life would go on, and nothing would ever be quite as they thought it would have been, until a decade later, when a woman careered into a man while edging her way through Starbucks, and girl laid eyes on boy for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.