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Dragonfly Choker

Today, I was wearing the dragonfly choker because I had forgotten to take it off last night. That was unlike me.

I ate breakfast alone, as usual. I briefly wondered if I should ask Lily if she wanted anything, but decided not to bother, and to just let her sleep on. Vaguely miffed at myself for not caring--I would have cared ten years ago, when we were better friends--I made my eggs and toast in the usual way. I blinked a few times to clear my head of the familiar/unfamiliar person sleeping nude in my bed.

She came out to the kitchen as I was washing my plate and frying pan, still naked as the day she was born. She was halfheartedly running her fingers through some tangles in her long, dark hair. She looked beautiful and disoriented. "What time's it?" she mumbled.

"Noonish," I told her. "Want some breakfast?"

She didn't answer for a moment, devoting her attention to some sleep in her eye instead of to processing my question. "Umm. Sure. Cereal?"

"Right, you're the cereal freak." She hadn't eaten anything but cereal in high school. I put my plate in the dish drain and turned around to get her a bowl. After I handed it to her, my hand went automatically to my neck--a nervous gesture--and that's when I realized I still had the choker on.

"Thanks." She opened the cabinet I pointed her at and scanned the contents. "Slim pickin's," she remarked. I knew exactly what I had in the way of cereal: some kind of Kashi natural fibery thing, and some Apple Jacks I had bought on a whim and never opened.

"Not a big cereal eater. As you'll remember," I told her.

When Lily gave me the choker in high school, everything was both more and less important. We were best friends; we were hopeless romantics but we weren't ready for sex yet; we were ambitious and principled but hadn't gotten to put any of our principles into action yet. A lot of things seemed more symbolic then than they do now.

The choker, however, had not been symbolic at the time. She'd picked it up for me at a thrift store because she'd thought I'd like it. It was real black velvet with a shiny silver clasp in the back. The dragonfly, also silver but kind of old-looking and tarnished, was hooked around the top and bottom of the velvet like he was perching there. Not exactly symmetrical, which was one of the reasons she thought I'd like it.

I wore it all the time in high school. It possibly would have been my trademark, if I'd been a noticeable enough person to have a trademark. I wore it less and less as Lily and I fell out of touch after graduation, and for a few years it just sat in my jewelry box, pretty but unworn.

Recently, I'd begun wearing it again. Years of not wanting to wear it had actually made it symbolic; I associated it with Lily. Lily had, I felt, lost interest in me. I was the kind of person who was able to keep in touch with long-distance friends, but I wasn't going to push it. If I wasn't wanted, that was fine.

I wore it for different reasons on different days. Some days I was in a nostalgic mood, and I wore it because I missed having a best friend, I missed the easy sweetness that Lily and I gave to each other in high school. Some days I wore it as a commemoration; some days I just wore it because I frankly thought it made me look hot. Last night, when I ran into Lily, I happened to be wearing it out of spite. Why the hell should this nice necklace just sit in my jewelry box forever, simply because I associated it with someone who'd stopped bothering with me?

I was a lot more surprised to see her than she was to see me. This was my city. I'd been living here in semi-isolation since the year after we'd both graduated. She'd gone to college in the northwest and had ended up, I'd heard through the grapevine, marrying someone she met there.

"Wow," she said before I realized anyone was there. "It's you."

"It's me," I said absently, and looked up from my drink. Dark rum and coke. "Oh!--wow, but it's you." My hand went to my neck and I stroked the velvet, only semi-consciously.

Lily smiled at me, widening her eyes as she did so. It struck me as off. Clearly a facial expression she'd picked up after she'd known me. "Wow. That's so weird. How are you? What's going on with you?"

"Um. Everything, I guess." I made a quick summary: "I'm writing, but I'm spending more time kissing corporate ass at this moment. But I bought a place, not too far from here, it's kind of exciting. Just this year." I didn't know how to do this. I haven't seen you in seven years: A lot's up, and simultaneously, nothing is really up at all. "What about you? How's married life?"

"Oh, you know," she said, accepting the drink the bartender handed to her. "How much?" she asked him. He held up six fingers and she handed him a ten, smiling briefly. "I mean, I guess you don't know, do you." She laughed. "It's okay. It's not really very different than living together. Just...we have legal privileges now, I guess. My mom got to put me in a dress and cry." She laughed again. "It made our families happy, it's good. Bill and I were fine to begin with." I nodded, stirring my drink without looking at it. "What about you, are you seeing anyone?" She accepted the bartender's change and separated out a tip, without really looking at what she was doing. Staying focused on the conversation. On me.

"No, not really," I said after a moment. I'd actually bought my home, only a few months ago, largely in response to a horrifying breakup with my girlfriend of three years. I'd felt it was time to start setting down my own roots instead of finding another person to be my roots for me. It was still all kind of weird and foreign. "I was dating someone for a few years; it didn't work out," I summed up again.

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." She sipped her drink thoughtfully, then smiled. "Well, single life is fun, anyway, right?"

"Sure," I said amicably. I waved my hand at the bar, indicating, I suppose, some multitude of examples of the fun-ness of single life. See hipsters playing out tired dating roles in new and exciting scarves, like it's never been done before. See awkward people dance to music they don't listen to at home, and try to convince themselves they're having a great time. See me sip my rum and coke, not bothering to approach anyone for the third night in a row. Fun. Single life.

"Yeah, I miss it sometimes," she confessed, stirring her drink and sipping through the stirrer. Vodka and Sprite, I was betting. Some things never change. "I love Bill, we've been through so much together, he really... knows me, you know?" Her eyes widened again in that unnatural-seeming way. "We just weren't very experienced when we got together. So I guess... We're still not. And now we're in our twenties. But sometimes it happens like that." She shrugged.

"Some people would think that's sweet. That's kind of like being high school sweethearts," I pointed out. Then I felt odd for saying it--because Lily and I had known each other in high school, not Lily and Bill.

"Yeah, I guess so." She brightened. "Speaking of high school, do you keep in touch with anyone?"

"Not really," I answered honestly. I was capable of keeping in touch, but Lily had been my only good friend in high school to begin with.

"Me neither. Life happens," she intoned in a movie voiceover guy voice. She rolled her eyes. "You get so busy."

"Sure," I said.

We'd talked, we'd drunk. The conversation had seemed to get a lot better as we got more inebriated. The social lubricant, I remembered thinking at around my third rum and coke. Maybe this is what I was always missing in high school. Lily told me more about her relationship with Bill, how she loved him but she couldn't help "wondering what it would be like"--a phrase Lily used often, and without further explanation--how they didn't even like the same music and how weird that was because music used to be so important to us--Lily and myself. She talked about her job, which had to do with housing law and which she was passionate about, but it was too complicated to explain why. I listened. I was always a good listener. The bartenders started to clean up and turn on lights, and the logical place to go was my apartment, just a few blocks away.

And now she was naked and eating cereal in my kitchen. Kind of acting like nothing had happened. Nonchalant, and beautiful as ever. I'd thought she was beautiful in high school, too, but I hadn't really known I liked girls in high school. Well. I'd known a little, but I hadn't wanted anyone to think I was a creep.

My ex-best friend was naked and eating my month-old Apple Jacks at my kitchen table. I had no idea what to do with myself. My hand went to my neck again. Nervous.

She noticed. "Hey, that's that choker I gave you," she said after swallowing a mouthful of Apple Jacks. "Did you know these are kind of stale? It's fine though." She waved me off as I started to apologize and offer her something else. "It looks really good on you," she continued. "It--"she gave me a kind of slant-eyed look, spoon halfway between her mouth and the cereal bowl. "It looked good on you last night." I was taken aback, and blushed slightly. "Thank you." It felt like the wrong response. "I never told you something," she said. "I think I kind of had a crush on you in high school. I think that was why I bought you that choker." I didn't know how to respond. "Really?" "Yeah." She took another spoonful and chewed slowly. "It didn't even really come from a thrift store. I bought it from, I don't know, some nice place. A real place. I don't remember what it was called, it was in town near where my sister went to school. When I was visiting her." "Oh," I said lamely.

"I didn't want you to know." She grinned at me. "I think I was embarrassed, or something. Like, I wanted you to think it was no big deal."

"I know what you mean," I told her.

She smiled at me. "And like. I didn't want you to think I was some kind of creep or something." She dug up another spoonful of Apple Jacks. She smiled at it, shaking her head.

I wondered what, if anything, she would tell Bill.


Rorie Kelly

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