It is the night before her sixteenth birthday, almost ten years after Farkle first met her. Riley's shoes squeak as she clambers up a yellow slide, her dark hair swinging, and when she turns her head to grin at him from the top she is all long legs and wide eyes glinting in the near-darkness. Somewhere in the city, a siren's wail cuts through the warm late-June air. She is almost a midnight baby, and it is almost midnight, he's keeping track. Maya's nose wrinkles as she laughs at a joke Lucas cracked; they are perched beside each other at the very top of the playground structure and Farkle is chuckling along with the other two when his watch beeps 12:02 am.
"Happy Birthday!" he calls. Maya whoops and hops off the railing she was sitting on with a swing of her legs, ripping open the six-pack of cream soda by the top of the slide.
"Ba-doo doo doo da doo doo doo do" she scats, then dons a voice that reminds Farkle of those old black-and-white TV commercials from the 60s: "Congratulations, Miss Riiiiley Matthews, you have been alive on this insane planet for sixteen insane years! Press one to claim your prize." Riley beams.
"ONE!" She yells out, a sound of pure joy. Maya reaches over to give her a can first before tossing one each to the boys. Farkle watches his friends from below, marveling at how close he feels to them and how right this moment feels; at the same time, he's always believed everything good comes to an end eventually. He fumbles his can when it hits his hands, but doesn't let it drop.
"Welcome to the club, Riles," Lucas laughs, and Maya whoops again. They all pop the tabs and drink, except for Farkle. He hesitates, everything he knows about the concoction of chemicals and carcinogens contained in the bubbly pink soda running through his mind and weighing his mouth closed. But a moment later he downs it anyway, carbon bubbles popping on his tongue upon contact like tiny fireworks, because it is Riley's birthday and her happiness is important to him.
When the four of them make their individual ways home half an hour later, they promise to meet up for ice cream the next day. That is one of the last truly good nights for a long time. And even then, they are beginning to spiral apart, imperceptible fracture lines snaking through the landscape of their friendship, thin as threads.
The only difference is, they haven't realized it yet.
The problem with growing up, of course, is that sometimes along the way people grow apart from the ones they love. Even if their pasts are intertwined like the roots of trees planted too close together, their paths inevitably begin to branch out in different directions. This must've been what happened because in September when school comes back into session, something is already unmistakably different.
Farkle can't place it at first, because it's little things that begin to tug them apart: Lucas and Riley have no classes together, so when he's home sick for a week in November she only finds out the day before he gets back. Maya's spirited banter with Lucas begins to taper off, until one day he calls her a short stack and she hardly responds, just shrugs a little and glances away. There are times when she seems distant, untouchable; sometimes he catches Riley looking in her direction, eyes filled with worry and confusion. The weeks go on, and as they settle back into the familiar rhythm of high school, their group doesn't find as much time for each other as they used to. He often misses middle school, when all their classes were the same and they went everywhere together—now, some days, they are limited to quick hallway exchanges:
"Junior year is nothing like in the movies," Lucas grumbles to him one day as they pass each other in the Science wing. "I thought by now I'd be quarterback of the football team or something, but our school hasn't even got one 'cause freaking Manhattan's too urban for football fields."
Or another day, when somehow all four of them end up at Riley's locker between first and second period:
"You guys wanna come over today?" Farkle invites, tired of the distance. He misses when it was normal for them to all burst out laughing at the same time over jokes nobody outside their tight-knit circle would understand. He remembers when they used to spend hours listening to each other's heartaches and worries, and how those hours would feel like mere seconds after they were over.
"Can't, got a big game in Brooklyn," Lucas responds. When did they all stop going to his basketball games? Lucas spends more and more time with the jocks, and Farkle can't tell if Riley and Maya are noticing the same way he is, because, being Farkle, he can't help but notice everything all the time.
"I've got to study for this huge thing, sorry," Maya rakes a hand through her newly-cropped hair. Her blond waves barely brush her shoulders, and it makes her look different, but also older, he thinks.
There's a pause.
"Maya," Riley begins, clearly planning to make a frustrated objection of some sort. Maya doesn't study, doesn't do much schoolwork at all except for when advanced art class is involved. But then the bell rings before she can finish her sentence and they scatter without another word. That seems to be happening a lot, and so the next few months pass that way.
When he hears her voice on the intercom, he knows something is wrong. A few minutes later she lets herself into his room, hair dripping because she is Riley and sometimes she forgets to take an umbrella with her; unfazed, he grabs a clean towel from his bathroom and tosses it to her, and while she peels her jacket off she begins to choke out the story.
It's because of a boy, the older one Maya's been disappearing away with for hours on end since Christmas, the one whom her friends rarely ever see and have never formally met. Every time someone tries to bring him up, she brushes it off; if they press on, she finds a reason to leave. She won't even tell them his name.
"I went to see her because she's never around anymore and she won't talk to me like she used to, but she just stood there in the door and kept saying she was busy. She wouldn't even let me come in. And then she went to close the door and her shirt slipped a little off her shoulder, and there were," Riley's breath hitches, "there was a big purple bruise, right there. And it was probably him, because who else would do that to my Peaches?" She sits down beside Farkle at the foot of his bed, toweling her hair off.
He thinks back to the last time he and Maya talked, really talked, about a week and a half ago. He could feel her drifting, changing, and it scared him. He'd always known how broken she felt inside, but sometime during the past few months it became the way she defined herself. It didn't used to be that way when they were all still close and she had Riley's innocent joy and unconditional love to balance her out.
Around him, I don't feel like I'll never be enough. He's screwed up inside, just like me. You and Lucas and Riles… I had fun with you, but none of you get what it's like to be me. You're all bright and shiny and happy, the three of you, and I don't belong. You don't even know who I am anymore, she accused. But he does. He knows me. When he tried to disagree, she cut him off: Don't, please. This is hard enough already. We're both better off this way and you know it. The words still sting, and he finds himself glad that Riley wasn't around at that very moment. It had been like talking to a stranger, and that was why, when Maya slammed her locker door so hard it rattled and disappeared around the corner, he found himself letting her go.
"What did you do?" he asks.
"As soon as she knew I saw the bruise, she just said that she really had to go and I should just leave her alone and stop bothering her. I was going to stay there until she changed her mind because, Maya and I, we don't give up on each other, you know? But she's never kept me waiting this long before… and I'm so tired of this, Farkle. I can't hold on to her when she's made it clear she doesn't want me around anymore. She keeps on shutting me out and pushing me away, and all I want is my best friend back. I miss her so much, I don't know if it'll ever stop hurting.
"So I stood there and I waited, and I waited, and I waited some more. I almost left, but then I told her I wasn't going anywhere unless she talked to me, and she just looked right through me until she shook her head and muttered something I couldn't hear and then—" her voice grows small, and her hands fall into her lap. It takes him a moment, but he pieces together what happened next.
"And then she shut the door in your face and wouldn't open it when you still refused to go away, so after a while you got back on the subway and came here," he finishes for her. She nods, and he notices the tears rolling down her face and dripping off her chin. In the quiet that follows, he thinks he can hear her heart breaking.
Sorry," she finally says, wiping her face with her sleeve and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "I didn't know where else to go. I can't go home like this, because my parents will ask and I can't tell them about... you know. And you've always been here, even when I didn't know I needed you."
He doesn't know what to say at that. He never knew she noticed him.
So he wraps an arm around her and pulls her close, like he's seen Maya do so many times before. She rests her cold cheek on his shoulder and sighs deeply, smelling of crisp rain and February; it must be below zero outside and he is reminded of heat transfer. Thermal conduction, he thinks: heat's spontaneous flow from a warm body to a cold body at contact. He's just as worried about Maya as she is, but right now it's Riley who has stopped shivering, whose breathing he can feel against his chest as it calms. It's her whose every movement he is acutely aware of, even as he reminds himself that this is just Riley Matthews, who he's known since forever. Who clings to thoughts of sunshine and rainbows especially during the worst of storms, who almost drowned the first time she went apple bobbing. His best friend. He tightens his arm around her and thinks he sees her smile out of the corner of his eye.
They sit there for a while; at some point, the flow of rain down Farkle's windows slows to a trickle.
A few blocks uptown leaning against a thick, solid tree trunk somewhere in Central Park, Maya gingerly takes a lit joint from a tall boy with chapped lips and dark eyes- her first smoke, but it's about damn time, she mutters to him—and takes a long drag, fighting hard to keep from coughing it up as the smoke invades her lungs. Then she takes another. Soon, her head begins to buzz pleasantly, and she begins to feel as if she's floating away. She must be floating away, floating away, away.
A/N- Part II coming soon. Shoot me a review if you enjoyed this, I'd really appreciate it!
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