I was making coffee. I tended to be the earliest riser in our happy little abode. Marco could sleep until noon if you let him. Paige usually got up around nine or ten if she didn't have anything pressing to do. If she had something pressing to do than she was getting up five minutes late, jumping into the shower, yelling down to us for coffee, strong and black because she had things to do. And we'd oblige her. It was funny. Paige was one of those people who got people to do things for her, and now she was working as an assistant to someone else. I wondered how she liked that.
I listened to the hiss and gurgle of the coffee brewing. I popped some bread into the toaster. I looked through the dark green curtains at the clear blue sky outside. I liked the curtains. Marco picked them out, hung them up, decorated. It was nice living with a gay guy.
"Good morning, Eleanor," Paige said, coming down the stairs and into the kitchen slowly, like some Hollywood starlet from the 20's. She had on this satiny pink robe with faux fur around the edge, she had on these pink slippers that appeared to have feathers on them. Feathers? They were pink feathers. Weird.
"Morning," I said, pouring her some coffee, "cream and sugar? Sweet and light, like yourself?" I said.
She nodded, the sarcastic little gleam coming into her eyes.
"And how do you take your coffee, Eleanor? Black, like your soul?"
I smirked, taking my coffee over to the table and sitting down. I was dressed in flannel pajama pants, a T-shirt of some seventies punk rock group that was huge, no doubt pilfered from Craig's closet. Me and Paige were still so different, like in school when I wore the death garb of the true gothic and she wore preppy pink stuff, high heels and matching eye shadow, lip gloss. She was a fashion victim and I was a freak, and back then we couldn't stand each other. I blinked, sipped my hot and sugary coffee and wondered when that had changed.
Paige had mellowed over the years. She let her caring side come out more often, and the Queen Bee super bitch took a back seat. I guess we've all mellowed, like wine sloshing around in a cask. It's funny, you know, because the way we were back then, grade nine and ten, were we more ourselves or less? Or do we just evolve? I just never thought I'd be living with Paige Micalchuk when she was treating me like a baby cockroach that just happened to cross her path.
"Good morning," Marco said, padding into the kitchen, his hair sticking up in little black spiky tufts. He kissed each of us on the cheek, "how are my two favorite ladies?" He went over and stacked the toast on a plate, hunted in the fridge for some butter and Trappist jam.
"Good. You're up early," I said, watching him pour some coffee, his eyes still half shut.
"Yeah. I'm trying to get up earlier, not waste the day, you know?"
Oh, I knew. I felt like I wasted most days, I watched them go by in a drift of leaves, in a song on the radio that reminds me of another era I once lived through. We spread jelly on toast, nibbled on the edges, poured more coffee and dumped sugar into it. We laughed and joked and teased each other and I thought of how far we'd come, really. There was once the day when I didn't just dislike Paige, I hated her. She represented to me everything that sucked about high school and other people. She was mean, she was belittling, she was all caught up in her little sphere of things and never considered the fact that other people existed. What was so great about cheerleading? What was so great about shopping? Not everyone had the money to shop like that so you ended up wearing last years' clothes and clothes from the salvation army. She acted like that was some crime against humanity.
Oh, I hated her. I hated the way she spoke to me, like I was stupid and insufferable. I hated her tendency not to give people a chance, so I didn't give her one. But now, we lived together, we got along. There was the ghost of our old feelings about each other, though. It came out in our gently sarcastic remarks. I still thought her outfits were silly, and she still thought I was too intense and slightly freakish. Oh well. There were things I valued about her now. Her willingness to be a shoulder to cry on, to be a solution when you were out of answers. I liked that. I thought maybe she had found things to value in me.