I ran into an old friend last week. I didn’t recognize her at first.

I heard all three syllables of my first name echo from across the Chevron parking lot before I even saw her.

It was early, the morning sun just barely peeking over the horizon. The highway was still quiet. A breeze kept sticking stray hairs to my lip gloss. One hand gripped my car door, the other clutched a sweating Red Bull.

I didn’t recognize the voice immediately. But I should have.

It was familiar, but not in a way I could immediately place. By the time I looked up, she was already walking toward me, waving like we’d just seen each other yesterday. I remember squinting at her for a second too long. Not because I didn’t recognize her. Because I did. It was her.

We met in the second grade. It was late September, still hot enough outside for heat mirages to form over the blacktop. She had bright ginger hair cut into a flat bob and her family had just moved down from Chicago. Mrs. Yuele sat her beside me because I was “good at making people feel welcome,” which really just meant I talked too much for her liking. The entire morning was spent whispering and exchanging giggles instead of doing our work. Our birthdays were on the exact same day, down to the year. I remember both of us sort of staring at each other for a second after our discovery, like we had accidentally stumbled into our own secret kingdom.

She’s still the only person I’ll ever truly share my birthday with.

My best friend at the time was a girl named Lily from one of the other second grade classes. We’d only really been friends since the year before, but Lily had already developed a habit of acting like she owned me in the way kids sometimes do. She was visibly irritated when I invited the new girl over to sit with us at lunch, especially once she started noticing the little similarities we kept pointing out to each other. After lunch, we spent all of recess trying to avoid Lily.

Our elementary school backed up against the highway, with this sprawling field beside the playground that felt enormous when you were seven. We hid under the jungle gym, inside the tube slides, behind the equipment shed we weren’t supposed to touch. Every time we thought we’d lost her, Lily would appear. I remember her chasing us down like a foxhound on the grass, shrieking and running as fast as our legs could carry us. She only stopped when the bell rang and we had to go back inside.

It felt funny at the time. Looking back now, I think that was probably the first time anyone tried to pull us apart.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, my mom hosted our birthday sleepover. She made rainbow cupcakes and bought special unicorn sprinkles so we could decorate them ourselves. We mostly ended up making a mess and staying up too late from the sugar rush.

After my parents had “gone to bed,” we were on the floor in my room playing with the new Breyer horses her grandma had bought her. I was in charge of the stallion, she had claimed the mare and the foals. We were conducting a dramatic escape from an evil stable owner who wanted to sell them all off.

“Shhh! If we go over the fence too loud he’s gonna wake up,” I whispered, trying to deepen my voice the way I thought grown men sounded. I nudged the stallion forward. “Okay, Glitter. Now.”

She lifted the white mare, jumping the invisible fence line between the hardwood and my carpet. Her voice shifted into character.

“Come on kids, you can do it!”

One by one, she moved the foals over the “fence,” careful and dramatic, like their safe landings were of some great importance. When the last one made it across, I followed with the stallion.

“You saved us!” she squealed, too loud for how late it was, her hands flying to her mouth like my dad’s lumbering footsteps would start down the hall any second now. For a second, everything went still. She didn’t move the mare anymore. She just looked at me.

“I love you, Thunder.” The words came out of her mouth quietly, like it was still a part of the game.

After fifth grade, I moved on to the local middle school while her parents enrolled her in a private school. We saw each other a couple of times throughout sixth grade, but we were both busy learning how to be around other people and figuring out what new versions of ourselves fit the changing landscape.

My hair changed first from deep brown to blue, then pink. She grew hers out long. Every time one of us changed something about ourselves, the other usually followed with their own version of it. It didn’t feel particularly painful at the time, I just remember she wasn’t around as much anymore. It was the kind of thing you don’t notice until it’s already over.

By freshman year, my hair had grown back to its natural brown and developed loose, uneven curls. I had pierced my own nose that summer and started a collection of small, poorly done handpoke tattoos across my body.

When I walked into my last period, she was there.

She had kept her hair long, but it was box-dyed black now and visibly damaged at the ends. Her mascara was always clumpy and a little smudged, like she had put it on in a hurry and stopped caring halfway through. She wore her eyeshadow in a similar fashion, a little too heavy for her features and not quite blended all the way.

Our high school was on a block schedule, so we only saw each other every other day, but within a few weeks we had fallen back into it like nothing happened. It felt like picking up a conversation we had paused somewhere back then. Like we had never really been separated in the first place.

She had started smoking weed in eighth grade, and we began to take frequent bathroom breaks between classes just to meet up and disappear for a few minutes at a time. I always let her hit my Juul in exchange for her cart. We’d stand there leaning on the stalls for almost twenty minutes sometimes, talking about nothing important, then walk each other back to class as slowly as possible like neither one of us really wanted to return.

The school year blurred into itself. So did the summer after.

We’d end up on her back porch at night more often than not, passing things back and forth, laughing too hard at things that weren’t that funny. I remember throwing up on the weathered wood after too much of her parents’ Casamigos, the charcoal taste still sharp in my throat when we slipped back inside like nothing had happened. I’ve avoided tequila ever since.

In the morning, when her mom came in yelling about it, we tried to blame it on the dog.

“I know you two are lying because it smells like straight LIQUOR out there!”

She stormed into the kitchen, and we couldn’t hold it in anymore. We just looked at each other and lost it. After that, it became an inside joke. Anytime one of us was stretching the truth, we’d click our tongues and mutter, “It smells like liquor out there…”

In the fall of sophomore year, she’d started seeing a freshman. It wasn’t anything serious, at least not in the way she talked about it, but she kept asking me to go to one of his JV football games with her because she was too nervous to go alone. I eventually agreed, mostly just to stop hearing about it, and told her I’d only go if we could get stoned first.

She came over after school that Thursday and we killed time at my house until it was late enough to leave. We didn’t really talk about anything important. Just let the hours pass between us the way they usually did.

At some point I looked over at her and said, “Hey.. did you still want that tattoo?”

She had asked me for one weeks earlier, after I pierced her nose in the school bathroom. Neither of us had brought it up since.

“Duh,” she replied. “Can you do it at the game tonight? I have to be home kind of early.”

I picked at my nails for a second before answering. “Yeah. What did you want again? I need to draw it out with a Sharpie first.”

“What about a star? Like the one you have, but on my ankle.” She smiled a little. “So we can match.”

She always got a little too excited when we matched. Clothes, jewelry, all the usual teenage things. At the time, it felt flattering more than anything else.

I remember pausing longer than I meant to. Just for a second. Then I shrugged. “Sure.”

By the time spring had rolled around, COVID had started shutting everything down.

After lockdown, I spent most nights at her house. There wasn’t much of a structure to it, just hours blurring into each other. We’d sit on her bed and watch YouTube videos we weren’t really paying attention to, or lie there in the dark talking about nothing until one of us fell asleep mid-sentence. Sometimes I’d catch her answering questions for me before I could speak, like she already knew what I was going to say. She’d started sneaking out to see that boy from the fall, using me as cover more than once. I always hated it, but I never had the guts to fully say it out loud.

By then, whatever we were had stopped having a clear shape. Late-night makeouts, hands fumbling under clothes, moments that felt like too much to be nothing but too ambiguous to call anything else. We started falling asleep cuddling more often than not.

She laughed once and said it was like we were practicing on each other. I didn’t laugh back.

It felt like more than that, so much more than that, but I couldn’t ever find a way to say it that didn’t feel like it would change something I didn’t want to lose. So I didn’t. I just stayed.

We were wandering down to the park one late summer night, intent on getting the last drops of wax out of an old TKO extracts we had been saving. The moon hung low in the sky, a dreamy crescent like the kind you would see in an old children’s cartoon. There weren’t any clouds, but the air was thick and muggy from the rain three nights ago.

She flicked her lighter on and held it against the glass longer than she needed to. It left a black scorch mark that never really came off, smearing onto my fingers as I propped the cart straight up. She looked at me for a long moment before speaking.

“You know I’m in love with you, right?”

I blinked. It took me a second longer to reply than it should have.

“Yeah,” I paused. “Maybe sometimes I’m in love with you too.”

She laughed like she didn’t know what to do with my answer and changed the subject.

We finished what was left of the conversation and I asked if she wanted to get stoned. She nodded, of course she did, and when she took the first pull she kind of held it for a moment before grabbing my face.

Her lips were soft and the smoke tasted like metal in the way it always does when the wax is almost gone. We sat there for a little longer and she asked if I wanted to go to the Waffle House down the road. I agreed.

By the time we got there, the post-bar crowd had already passed and there was only a single server behind the counter. I tipped her more than I needed to and told her I hoped she didn’t have too much longer on her shift.

I don’t remember much about the food. I never really do.

I remember her eyes, though. Big and brown, darker than mine, always framed with smudged eyeliner and this pinkish-silver glitter around the inner corners. Watching me more than anything else. Watching me like she was trying to understand something by looking at it long enough.

She held onto my arm the entire walk back to her house.

We stole a bottle of her parents’ liquor like we usually did and fell asleep buzzed; she was curled into me like we were girlfriends. It felt like we were that night.
She woke me up two hours later at four in the morning to tell me she was going to see him; she would be back before seven. I knew what I wanted to ask and I think she did too. But I was too scared, she could tell.

All I said was, “Okay. Call me if you need anything.”

She looked at me for a little longer than she needed to. Then, she smiled, small and tired, before kissing my cheek. On her way out, she paused at the window.

“Leave it unlocked for me,” she whispered.

And then she was gone.

We didn’t see much of each other after that night.

Graduation was the last place we really spoke. We exchanged pleasantries in the crowd after the ceremony, talking about college like it was something happening to other people, how we’d made it through before and we’d make it through again. We drifted again without really making it feel like a decision.

She moved about thirty minutes north of where we grew up. I moved downtown into Atlanta. It didn’t feel like anything dramatic at the time, just distance doing what it had always done. I always figured we’d find our way back eventually.

There were a couple times after that where we ended up together again. They were brief, almost accidental, but nothing that really lasted. We couldn’t seem to find our anchor.

And then there was the Chevron. Early morning, just before traffic started to pick up, where everything still felt hazy and quiet.

She was in front of me now. It took me a second to unclench my jaw and reply. “Oh my god! How have you been?” I adjusted my expression, grinning now and reaching my arms out for a hug. She squeezed me too hard and laughed, tossing her head back a little.

“I’ve been good. It’s been way too long, I almost thought you didn’t recognize me!”

I played her last remark off with a nervous laugh. “God, yeah. It’s been forever.”

“Why don’t we go grab coffee at Starbucks? If you have time, I mean.”

“Uh, I guess I’m not too busy, yeah. I’ll meet you there?”

She bounced up into the air, brimming with excitement. “Yay!! Come on, I’ll be right behind youuu!”

I forced a smile and began to get into my car as she bounded back to her own. Sighing, I tossed the Red Bull into my glove box and pulled out of the lot.

We pulled into the Starbucks a couple streets down from the Chevron and parked separately. I watched her get out of her car, pretending I was a few seconds behind.

Inside, it was early enough for the place to feel too empty and too clean. We ordered without much discussion. She ordered something complex I vaguely remembered as my go-to back in high school. I stuck to a plain iced latte, I didn’t really want coffee anyways.

We sat down by the window and she started talking first, mostly about college. Then the usual questions you ask when you’re trying to rebuild something you’ve left untouched for too long. I answered her with a tone slightly brighter than it had been in the parking lot, and she nodded along in a way that felt familiar enough to be disorienting.

At one point, she interjected. Not rudely, just surprisingly naturally. It felt like the way we used to back in high school, talking over each other and laughing it off. I noticed, but I let it go. I kind of missed it.

We talked about boyfriends after that. It hadn’t felt like a loaded topic at first, just one of those things you’re supposed to update each other on. I told her I’d broken up with mine not long after graduation and made a half-hearted joke about how I should have always stayed away from blond men, something about how their hair never darkens because they’re still immature at heart.

She said she had split it off with her ex around that time too, but she was seeing someone new now. They’d been together for a while. I made a comment about not really dating anybody seriously since then. I called myself a free spirit in the way people do when they’re trying to make something sound lighter than it is.

She showed me a photo of him. Her new boyfriend. I guess he was technically kind of old, but new to me.

He was tall and blond. Familiar in a way I didn’t want to think too hard about. She mentioned his parents were Slavic too, from Ukraine to get specific, and laughed a little like it was funny how these things worked out.

I just smiled in response, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in those moments.

As she launched into a bit of a rambling monologue, I started noticing her jewelry. She used to always wear gold. I only wear silver, I always have, but that had never mattered before. Her necklace was silver and her earrings were too. I told myself not to read into it.

The conversation was beginning to drift. She was still talking the same way she used to, but something about it felt slightly off. Her tone had flattened in places where it used to stay animated, like she was matching something without meaning to.

I wasn’t sure what I was hearing anymore.

We stayed there for a while talking about high school. It had been about half an hour, maybe more. The world outside was fully awake now.

She brought up the time I pierced her nose in the school bathrooms.

“I can’t believe I let you do that. It’s a miracle it even healed at all! And the infection lasted like a whole month, you felt soooo bad!”

“What? I don’t remember it ever getting infected.” I furrowed my brow slightly, “I think you were just so scared it would be you almost convinced yourself it was.” Maybe I was wrong.

She laughed. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you forgot about that! It looked like a humongous pimple and my mom called me Rudolph until it healed.”

“Huh. I guess you’re right.” I held my tongue as she brought up a couple more memories, each ever so slightly off. Not necessarily wrong, just… different. Like she had lived some alternate reality. I didn’t bother correcting her again.

She mentioned something about us being attached at the hip back then. I checked my phone more than once after that. Started thinking about leaving, but didn’t say anything out loud.

Then she asked why I was back in town. I told her it was just an early Mother’s Day visit. I didn’t ask her what she was here for, I didn’t really want to know.

She nodded like it made perfect sense, like she’d been almost sure of my answer before asking.

The conversation kept going, but something had shifted. She was bringing up little things about my life now, things I hadn’t told her. Not in a way that felt impossible, but just personal enough to make me feel unsure about where she could have learned them.

“So things are good with you and your mom right now?” She asked, tilting her head.

“Yeah, it’s been pretty good. We haven’t had a big argument since around graduation.”

“Huh. I thought you missed your period that month though?”

I blinked, a little dumbfounded. I didn’t recall telling anyone about that. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, sorry. I thought you guys usually only argue right before your period starts. You would get all worked up about every little thing and all.” She sounded a little apologetic now, though her expression looked more like a deer caught in headlights.

“Uh… I guess that was probably a factor or something, yeah.” I let the awkward moment wash over us for a second. She didn’t. She launched right back into some tired speech about how her and her mom had been the same, they still couldn’t reconcile, blah blah blah.

I could feel my patience thinning, like I was watching her instead of talking to her. That was when I started noticing the smaller things.

The way her tone flattened in the same places mine does when I stop trying to sound interested, or how she was holding pauses. I told myself I was imagining it.

There’s this little divet on the inside of my right nostril on the part of skin that covers the septum. When I was a kid, I had an angioma right there and everyone would always ask if my nose was bleeding. My mom got sick of calls home and my complaints, so when I was in fourth grade she had it removed. It’s not noticeable now unless I point it out, the kind of thing I think about in passing here and there.

She was still talking when I looked at her more carefully.

It was there.

The same small dip in the same spot.

For a second I didn’t respond at all. My stomach twisted.

I stood up abruptly, my chair scraping a little too loudly against the floor. I didn’t say anything and neither did she. I walked out fast, leaving my almost untouched coffee behind on the table.

I didn’t look back for long, but when I did, I could see her still sitting there by the window. Eyes wide and trained on me, still smiling like the conversation hadn’t ended.

I got in my car and drove.

My phone buzzed while I was merging onto the highway. Her name popped up on CarPlay. A wave of nausea crashed over me and I barely managed to pull onto the shoulder before full on heaving my guts out onto the pavement. Just pure bile, nothing left.

I don’t really remember getting back to my apartment. I just know I was weaving through the heavy morning traffic like I was on autopilot. When I finally got inside, I checked every lock twice; front door, deadbolt, chain, balcony, windows.
I knew I had to open the text. My fingers trembled as I unlocked my phone. The preview popped up. Just one word.

“gotcha.”

I didn’t go anywhere after that. I called out of work for the next day, and the day after that. I told my manager I was coming down with some sort of stomach flu. I told my roommate Kyla the same thing. She’s been picking up groceries for the week. I didn’t leave the house again until Saturday morning.

I avoided all of my usual spots, just straight to work and back. Work was slow and uneventful. It almost made it worse. Part of me almost wanted her to come in, just so I’d know where she was. The utter absence of customers made my skin crawl. I couldn’t bring myself to tell any of my coworkers why I was so off.

I got home that afternoon and realized I’d run out of cigarettes. I texted my roommate and asked her to pick up some more while she was out. She replied within a couple of minutes.

ya no prob but whats up w ur number?

I paused. What? My number? What the hell was that supposed to mean? That sick feeling began to rise up into my chest. Before I could respond, she sent another message.

u texted me this morning from a new one lol

I didn’t respond after that. Kyla came back with a fresh pack within the hour and I tried to explain it all to her, stumbling over my words.

“I don’t really care if this sounds crazy. You just need to block that number. That wasn’t me.”

She blinked at me in disbelief. “Uh, okay… yeah. I’ll block it. You should probably just get some rest, this whole thing sounds a little outlandish.”

I stopped arguing and kind of just stood there for a minute. There was no point.

Around 11PM last night, my mom called.

“Hey sweetie.. why does your location show you’re at your apartment when I’m looking at you standing outside the door?”

“What?”

“Someone just knocked. Said they forgot their keys and needed to come in. They sound exactly like you.”

“Mom,” I started, “that’s not me. Don’t open the door. Call the police.”

My mom went quiet for a second.

Then, very softly, she spoke again.

“She keeps pulling at her sleeves like you do.”

I heard another knock through the phone.

Three quiet taps against the front door.

Then my own voice. Muffled, but mine.

“Mom, please. You know it’s me.”