Page 15 of Every Step She Takes
“Food,not just black coffee,” she scolds in demonstration of her terrifying psychic friendship powers. When I arrive at the eatery, I grab the largest cup for coffee, but I also grab a banana. For Michelle.
“I don’t need you to micromanage my eating habits from five thousand miles away,” I snap, even though I sort of do. Grief does weird things to your appetite, and sometimes I forget about food all day until it’s midnight and I can’t sleep because my stomach is an angry pit of despair.
Not that I’m grieving. Not exactly.
I position my cup beneath the coffee carafe, but then I force myself to put a sausage roll on my tray.
“Yes, you do,” Michelle snaps back, because she knows me far too well. “I’m worried about you. This whole trip feels a lot like fleeing again.”
“I’m notfleeing. I was going to fly out for the funeral in three weeks anyway, and now I’m arriving early to do a quick Camino.”
“It’s the funeral part of that sentence that concerns me.”
My hands tighten around my tray, and I find myself frozen in the middle of this airport cafeteria. The fucking funeral.
In three weeks I’ll have to publicly mourn the man who gave me life and then ruined it. I’ll have to sit in a church, under the watchful eyes of someone else’s god, and say my final goodbyes. People will come up to me, want to shake my hand, want to tell me they’re sorry for my loss, even though I didn’t lose anything when he died; I’d already lost it all twenty years ago.
The other end of the phone is silent, and the thoughts swarm like bees. My ribs squeeze against my lungs, and I temporarily forget how to breathe until, blissfully, a man with a cockney accent screams at me. “You gonna pay for that, love?”
My body and brain come back online like a rebooted computer, and I walk my tray over to the register. I pay with myphone, and when I finally respond to Michelle, my voice is even. “Oh, by the way, I drank the last of your oat milk and left you some money to replace it.”
“I don’t give a darn about the oat milk.” She pauses, then clicks her tongue. “Are you referring to the hundred-dollar bill under my Yellowstone magnet?”
“Of course.”
“That isn’t remotely how much oat milk costs,” Michelle says in the disgusted tone she usually reserves for commenting on the contents of her son’s diapers. “You’re doing it again, you know.”
“Doing what?”
“Running away from your feelings. Falling in love with the first pretty girl you see and chasing her halfway across the world because that’s easier than sitting with your thoughts and feelings.”
I gasp indignantly into my giant coffee. “There’s no girl. No one said anything about a girl.”
“There will be a girl soon enough. There always is.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m temporarily distracted by a head of red curls that flashes in the corner of my eye. I turn, but it isn’t her.
“There was probably a girl on the plane.” Michelle’s voice is deep and dry, like a perfect white wine.
“Howdareyou? I’ll have you know there was horrible turbulence the whole flight! We almost crashed! We almostdied.”
“No, you did not.”
“No, we did not,” I concede. “But if we had died, wouldn’t you feel guilty about these false accusations?”
“I’ve known you for almost nineteen years,” Michelle says pointedly. “Don’t act like this isn’t a thing you do.”
It is a thing I do. If anyone knows my dysfunctional romantic habits, it’s Michelle. She was the undergrad girlfriend who necessitated the three-week Icelandic road trip. She was once agirl who lived halfway across the world, and I fell in love with her instantly.
It was Berlin, spring semester, during a study-abroad program. Michelle was a college junior studying environmental science at Western Washington University. I was a twenty-year-old haphazardly accumulating credits in everything from psychology to agriculture to linguistics at an American school in Madrid.
She was a lesbian who loved astrology, reality television, and dancing until four in the morning in faux-leather pants and feather boas.
I wasn’t interested in labels, and I loved loud parties, new beginnings, and her.
I loved her so much, in fact, that when the study-abroad program ended, I followed her back to the tiny Pacific Northwest town of Bellingham, Washington, just to be close to her.
In true sapphic style, we immediately got an apartment together. And our romance lasted a whopping six weeks into our lease before we broke up.
