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Noelle passes her water bottle to Diya, who opens it without hesitation. It’s good that they still have this. That some things aren’t different.
Noelle knows that things have to change when someone gets into a relationship with someone else. Diya is her best friend, and…she does want Diya to be happy, even if it’s with Min-seo. That is why she had agreed to helping the two of them work their feelings out, even if they humiliated themselves along the way.
But she is merely Diya’s friend, and Min-seo is…her…her lover.
Boyfriends are more important than normal friends. It’s why her mother won’t approve of her dating anyone until college. Not that she’s ever been interested in any boys, really, so that’s not an issue at all. Min-seo isn’t Diya’s boyfriend, of course. It would be ridiculous for a girl to be someone’s boyfriend. But she’s still important to Diya, in the same way a boy might be.
The point still stands. One day, Diya will leave Noelle behind, and abandon this town to elope with Min-seo. Because Noelle is only her friend, and Min-seo’s bond with her goes beyond that.
She’s never liked Min-seo, anyways. She’d bonded with Diya so easily, because they’d been both into baseball. Noelle still doesn’t really understand sports — why someone would be willing to subject themselves to that torture — but she participates nonetheless, and attempts to be something worthwhile to the team. If she can’t be worthwhile through her abilities, which she never will be, she can be worthwhile by knowing everything there is to know about the sport, inside and out.
Noelle had to— well, she supposes the way they met in the first place was a bit unconventional. Diya’s never done very well with people. Noelle is grateful to be one of the exceptions to that.
But it’s not enough to make Diya stay the same with her. What would be?
Noelle doesn’t think about it.
At lunch—
“Can I have some of your grapes?” Diya asks, Min-seo’s legs on her lap. They’re not subtle in the least bit. One of these days, someone is going to hurt them.
“Of course,” Noelle says, passing over a handful of grapes.
“Thanks!” Diya smiles.
She’s so happy. Of course she’s so happy. She has everything she could possibly want. She gets good grades. She has some friends. She has someone to love. What more could she want?
Noelle wishes she could have everything she wants. But some of the things she wants…they’re not attainable as she is right now. She needs to be a better person. When she manages to shed all the worst parts of her, she’ll be able to get anything she wants.
Will she even be happy when she manages it? Or will it just be the same set of issues, plaguing her now and for all time? She can’t imagine a life without school. Without assignments, without textbooks, without constantly trying to get the best grades. The idea of having to figure out an “after” for school is terrifying. She’ll be a lawyer, or maybe a doctor, and she doesn’t know what it actually entails to fall into that. All she knows is the immediate, the here and now. She can’t fathom an afterwards. Maybe there just won’t be an afterwards, and she’ll be cursed to go to school for the rest of her life.
She doesn’t want to imagine doing this for the rest of her life.
“Noelle?” Diya asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she answers. “I was just thinking about something.”
“About what?”
“The future,” Noelle answers, forcing herself to smile.
“Oh, I know what you’re going to do in the future,” Min-seo says. “You’re going to go to Berkley, or maybe to some Ivy League on the East Coast, and you’re gonna end up becoming a doctor or some other job that makes a fuckton of money, and you’re gonna get a respectable husband and settle down with 2.5 kids, and no matter how hard you work, you won’t be happy.”
Noelle stands up from the table, snatching her lunchbox and thermos. “I hate you. Did you know that?”
“Min…” she hears Diya say as she walks off to put her things in her locker.
Min-seo is wrong. She will be happy with that life. She has to be.
When she gets home, her mother talks to her about some success story she saw in the newspaper. It just reminds her of how much further she has to go. How much more she has to do, to really make her mother proud.
She goes up to her room. She stares at the stuffed snake on the bed.
She thinks about Diya, again.
One day, they’ll leave each other. Her mother is right. Friendships are temporary. Success is forever. But…
Loneliness could be forever, too.
She looks at it, and she wants. What she wants, she doesn’t know.
She doesn’t want to be alone. She wishes for the things that were just between her and Diya, between the time Min-seo moved out and everything else later.
And she’ll still have those things, with other people there. But there are things that are different, that Diya shares with the others that she doesn’t share with Noelle.
As irrational as it is, Noelle wants those things, as well.
But she can’t afford to be irrational. Irrationality is a curse that will prevent her from getting what she needs. And what she needs is the same as what she wants, or it has to be. If they’re not the same, she’ll be disappointed every time. And disappointment is the ultimate enemy.
So she has to move on. She has to.
She tears her gaze away from the snake plushie, and she looks towards her laptop.
But she can’t just move on and forget it, because it would mean cutting off Diya, and—
A chat message has appeared, from their chatroom together.
She can’t let go like this. She might never be able to.