Magnolia
2015
‘I felt as though I were dead.’ Ruby said, tugging at a knot in her hair. It was short and choppy yet still accumulated tangles. She was not looking at me, or anything for that matter; merely gazing at nothing.
‘What did it taste like?’
‘Petrol.’ She spat through her braces, a garish neon pink wire ran across her teeth.
‘Well next time your brother buys you some please save me a bit. I want to try vodka.’ I concluded.
‘Elijah gets weird about buying it. He doesn’t do it very often. And anyway, you wouldn’t like it.’
‘That’s not the point.’ I said as I ran glittery lipgloss across my chapped lower lip.
We grew up in the towns across from one another, but went to the same school. A half an hour ride in the car if we could nab a lift, or an hour on the bus. I knew Ruby better than I knew my own mother, but when we stopped going to school together we stopped living the same lives. Now aged fourteen, our intermittent catch-ups occurred perhaps twice a year at best. Always in the same park, sat upon a hill arching over the town like the spine of a cat. We sat poised on a bench below a magnolia tree.
‘That colour doesn’t suit you.’ Ruby sighed, after a long pause. She stared at my nail varnish.
I had liked to believe that because of these blunt foundations, we had formed in our formative time together, that when we grew older we would always be able to return to this lovingly plain method. I didn’t sugar coat anything for Ruby, and she did the same for me.
When our nail polish debate had died I turned to confide in her: an abrupt turnaround. ‘Ruby.’
‘Yes?’
‘You know Isaac?’ Isaac was my boyfriend.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think I can stand him any more.’
She began to howl with laughter.
‘No Ruby it’s not funny,’ I protested, ‘I can’t break up with him because I’ll have to see him in maths and geography every day.’
She laughed even harder.
‘This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do!’ I snapped.
‘Break up with him for Christ’s sake.’ She jumped straight to the endgame. I pouted into the distance, because I knew she was right.
Conversation spiralled around everything from which jeans made us look chubby, to our newly discovered intrigue surrounding hair scrunchies. When she departed, she did so with a vigorous bounce, and disappeared out of sight like a spring. I walked down the other side of the hill and gave the magnolia tree a brief glance before I caught sight of my ride.
2017
Ruby had her braces removed in March. It was May now, and we had returned to the park for one of our ritual catch ups. It was full of blooming magnolia, verdant pinks flushed through the branches.
We talked about what we want to do after sixth form, life beyond school and the safety of our suburban upbringings. She told me about how she couldn’t wait to get out of the town and stop running into the same faces on every street corner. She wanted good grades so she could leave and do something else. Ruby insisted she wouldn’t be a store assistant like her mum. She said she was sick of the repetition, sick of the itch which came with living upon this small corner of a map, working at the corner shop on Saturdays.
I told her I had fallen in love. I told her all about Oscar, and how he made me feel. I overflowed with detail and exuberance about this person who had now become the centre of my gravity. I told her about his boyish smile and how he kissed me on the forehead. She smiled and said she was happy for me, but I could tell her mind was elsewhere.
Elijah died last autumn, and Ruby wore the remnants of grief upon her cheeks; her fine greyish skin resembled tissue paper. I was sick to my core thinking about losing a sibling. She told me he went on a night out at one of our few small town clubs and never returned home.
‘It’s like someone just pressed backspace on his life. A small blip and he was wiped away. It was so fast and so permanent, it was as though he never existed. There was no struggle.’ She rolled a cigarette: a skill which she told me she learnt how to do from one of her older friends who now left sixth form for university. She pinched the tobacco between her fingers and laid it gently in the paper.
I thought about how Ruby’s life got blind-sighted by this domestic tragedy. I almost wished there was some grandeur to her brother’s death, for her sake. I sniffed violently whilst gazing at the horizon, in such a way that she couldn’t see my eyes well with tears. If there was one thing Ruby and I would never do in front of one another, it was cry.
We sat under the misty veil of her cigarette smoke for a few moments before I announced I had to go and get a lift. We hugged goodbye and she gave me a tissue ‘for my cold’. She left with a lethargy, and turning back I could see her wind down the other end of the hill like a tiny pink ant.
2019
Our soft suburban adolescent has reached a crescendo. Now both eighteen we are the peak of our youths, and I know it. It is a delirious summer day in the holidays after our school life has come to an end weeks before. I sip white wine from my plastic cup. Ruby and I split a bottle. My forehead is damp with sweat and we sit aimlessly on that bench once again, like two compass pins pointing at nothing.
All of the hair straightener burns, ruined trainers and tears are streamlined into this moment in which we have returned to the bench on the hill. I bathe in an amber glow from the sun, the same light which gives Ruby’s newly bleached hair a honeyed hue. Her hair is still short and choppy but she has grown taller and slimmer over the previous years.
She tells me she fears what is to come. She says some days she wakes up and is unsure whether she can face people, and face trying. She says she is scared to experience, or not experience. Fearful of doing something wrong but equally of missing out.
I point across towards the bottom of the hill, and tell of every finite sign of life on the roads below, all the tiny twitches in the town and the crossing paths of each person. But equally, I tell her I understand.
‘Oscar broke up with me’ I say.
‘Oh god are you serious?’
I nod, recalling the way my heart plummeted to the centre of the earth when the love I had become so accustomed to was snatched from my veins.
‘He didn’t deserve you anyway.’ Ruby wraps me in an all encompassing hug, winding her arms around my back. I laugh, a choked laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.
‘You should have told me sooner’ she says. She crunches the plastic from her cup of wine in her fist.
‘Does it get easier? This loss’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘I know it’s not the same, but do you still miss Elijah?’
‘Yes.’
I can feel the weight of our endeavours bearing down upon my body like pressure underwater. Every lighthearted friendship turned bitter, every sour swig from a bottle under red lights at parties, each moment spent applying pearlescent eyeshadow in the hopes of catching the right attention. Every day off school for lack of wanting to leave the solace of a bed, every indignant tear shed in silence, every time we told her parents we were at a friend’s house when we were elsewhere. Over the years, we become an amalgamation of each broken fingernail, each I love you spoken aloud and every melancholy lesson learnt.
Ruby glares out over the horizon, as though she is about to fight it. Throwing fists at the border between the rooftops and the clouds. A caramel twilight ascends upon the restless heat. The sky is a milky pink, and our breathing is slow but succinct. I watch a bus pull out on a street below the hill, and I wonder where it is going.