Page 3 of Change My Mind
B&D?
It’s a date
Brooks& Draper sounded like a law firm but was actually a cute little restaurant that did brunch like nobody’s business in Montreal. It also happened to be owned by a family friend. An old colleague of my dad’s, because apparently, when the stress of being a lawyer becametoo much, it made perfect sense to start a restaurant business.
It meant that even though they were usually fully booked on a Saturday, Blake found a way to sneak us in.
Tori and I were sitting in a corner on the outside patio, surrounded by way too many trees, but they provided a certain amount of privacy. My skin was drinking up the warmth of the sun, and the ice in my coffee was hitting just right. We were both waiting for pancakes, which were going to be amazing. They always were.
Tori was my opposite in a lot of ways. Five foot on the dot, but never not wearing a four-inch heel of some description. Blonde hair that I had never seen grow longer than her jawline, currently in a pixie cut. She wore a lot of pastels and patterns.
The only things we had in common were our love of Shakespeare and French as a first language. We met when we were both TAs for a professor who wanted to be anywhere but teaching the youth, and bonded over the horrors of dealing with someone who had one foot out the door. We liked teaching, even when it was hard. She got out before the English department burned to the ground, and I found myself in the ashes trying to build it back up. She had moved to teaching high school, which sounded like hell on Earth, but she liked it.
“So, you’re leaving me?” Tori asked as she stirred the ice around her iced coffee. I noticed how she said ‘me’ and not Montreal. Like, somehow, she also knew that I hadn’t been fully committed to being in this city for a while now. It was more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’.
“In layman’s terms, yes. I am.”
Tori sighed. “When?”
I took a deep breath. I knew she was expecting at least one more summer together, given that universities across the pond started much later in the year. I’d wanted to give her one final summer. I’d planned to have one final summer right upuntil I booked my flight home. Now that the path had been cleared to go back, I wanted to be back in London as soon as possible.
“A month from now,” I said slowly before I pulled the straw of my drink into my mouth. Her face fell.
“A month? You only found out about this job two days ago, and you’ve already got plans to move in a month?”
“That’s the amount of notice I had to give on the flat.”
Tori nodded. Her eyes moved through a range of emotions and eventually settled on resolve.
“We’ve gotta make a list. All the things you wanna do one last time before going home. Do you need help packing all your shit up?”
I hadn’t allowed myself to get excited about going home until I had officially told Tori, but now that I had, and she didn’t seem to hate me, it felt like a weight had lifted.
Tori pulled out a notebook and pen from the ether (her backpack—she was never without it) and opened it to a new page, writing in all caps:
ADDIE’S FAREWELL TO MONTREAL TOUR
She looked up at me. “Where should we start?”
Three
ELI
“And you’re sure that having a flatmate doesn’t bother you? Not even a little bit? You can tell me if it does. I can make other arrangements. We did offer this to you first.” Vivi asked this from the doorway of the kitchen, where she was taking a break from being the best landlord I had ever had by helping me move all my shit into an apartment she was letting me live in for peanuts.
Vivi had double, triple,quadruplechecked with me about this flatmate situation every day since she had brought it up a week ago while I was packing my life in Manchester up.
I smiled as I plugged my coffee machine into its new home in London. “Positive, Vivi. I appreciate the concern, but my answer hasn’t changed. I can deal with a flatmate.”
The part I left unspoken was that I had felt insurmountable levels of relief when she had brought it up, surrounded by all the boxes that made up my life. There weren’t that many.
There was a lot that terrified me about moving back to London after so long away, but the main thing was that I wasscared to live alone. Adult life so far had meant that for most of it, I had other people in my living space. It was comforting that there was always someone else’s energy around. It made the transition from a hectic kitchen back home a lot easier.
There was an emptiness associated with walking into the darkness of a space that only you inhabited. No ambient sound to let you know that someone was around. No mumbled ‘hellos’ or ‘how are yous’. No shared meals or random conversations about the news or a neighbour or your days. I’d been doing that for the last three months, and I hated it. Too much time with my own thoughts.
A flatmate was good. It was preferable. Especially now that I was back in London, which was both my home city and the one that haunted me.
“I’m so happy to hear you say that. Adrienne has so much to think about, what with moving back across the Atlantic, I thought it would be a good idea to take the pressure off her having to find somewhere to live. I mean, there is always room for her at our house, but I know that she would prefer not to live with her parents and be a bit closer to her sister.”
