Friend Like Me
Turbine | Kapohau Hannah Amante, A Few Lines Magazine
For six weeks over summer, we’re bringing you new stories from creative writing students at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Today’s story is by a writer and editor living on the Ka¯piti Coast with her partner, James, and two guinea pigs. For her MA in creative writing, she wrote a novella set in suburban California about friendship, womanhood and obsession. This is an extract from that story. Her writing has been published in and the US publications and Portfolio.
We were getting ready to go out. Autumn sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her full-length mirror, and I sat on the bed just behind her, flopping my bangs from one side to the other.
Just pin em up, she said to my reflection.
No, my forehead’s too big.
That means you’re smart. That’s a myth. But I am smart. Autumn gathered her long black hair with both hands, piling it on the top of her head. Her shoulder blades flexed over the gentle muscles of her arms. Her hair tumbled back down over her back, like the dropping of a curtain.
I don’t know what to do with mine either.
Let me fix it, I said. The feel of Autumn’s hair always surprised me. It was thick, heavy and straight but with something of a coarseness to it. It felt strong, like it would break a pair of scissors. It ended in a V pointing towards her tailbone.
Leave it down, I said, raking my fingers through it. Ugh, you’re like a dog I can’t stop petting. Autumn barked. We both laughed. Have you ever had your hair short? I asked.
Not since I was like, 5. My mom would kill me.
I think it would look cute! Although it is one of your biggest assets. Yeah, my hair is like your boobs. Yeah, someone with those two things would make the perfect woman.
Giggling, I got down on the floor and crawled in front of her legs, facing
the mirror with her. I gathered the hair from both sides of her head and divided it on top of my head. Bending her neck forward, she adjusted it until her hair ran down my own shoulders. I pushed my breasts out.
How do we look? she said, laughing against the back of my neck. I grabbed my phone, which was charging on the wall next to the mirror. I took a selfie. I gave Autumn her hair back and we looked at the picture together.
Hot, she said.
At the party a guy named Rob half-asked, half-told us that we were Filipino. No, we’re Dutch, actually, said Autumn.
Oh, so like you grew up there. No, I just wanted to rob you of your moment of glee.
She pulled my wrist and dragged me towards the opposite side of the room. I felt an energy running through from her palm to my bones.
I remembered a friend of my mother’s saying something similar to her when I was 10 years old. They had been sitting in our kitchen, while I was playing with some action figures with her son, Kevin, who was my age. It had been my turn to pick the ‘‘world’’ our characters were living and fighting in. I had been fully immersed as though in another universe. I had completely forgotten that I existed as a person named Rose.
Tita Ruth and my mother spoke English to each other unless there was something they didn’t want Kevin and me to understand. It didn’t matter because most of the time we weren’t listening to them. We were listening to each other, for cues, for the voices of the multiple characters we were
juggling. But I had the distinct feeling that I was being talked about. The reality of our made-up planet began to dissolve and the molecules of my body fused back together.
Rose will be fine, Tita Ruth was saying. She’s got that exotic beauty. That can get you places if you know how to use it.
My mom smiled tightly and changed the subject.
Shortly after that I couldn’t go back to playing. It didn’t feel as much fun any more. The stakes of being sucked into the vortex of Dr Evilman’s spell suddenly weren’t as high.
After Tita Ruth and Kevin had left, I looked up ‘‘exotic’’ in our big Webster’s dictionary.
introduced from another country, not native to the place where found FOREIGN, ALIEN strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual
I held on to number three tightly for the next few years. I decided it was good to be mysterious, different, striking. Until I learned that few people in junior high thought this way.
Autumn was the person who renewed my interest in being mysterious, different, striking. Before we became friends, I’d met people who wanted to be individuals, who thought they were different. But they didn’t carry themselves the way Autumn did. Behind their piercings, tattoos and weird clothing choices, I read their fear, because I had this inside me too. The fear of not really being anything special, and the fear of our fear keeping us on a path of normality and mediocrity.
With Autumn, there was no fear at all. She didn’t seem to care whether she belonged, or if anyone thought she was special.
As a child, I had heard myself described as beautiful before, never by my own parents, but by my relatives. My aunts were especially obsessed with being beautiful, urging my mom to try all sorts of creams and soaps to keep her skin bouncy and bright (which I later learned meant white) and to wear more makeup. But Mom wore only the lightest swipe of mascara and said, simple is best. My parents both stressed to me that being smart was more important than being beautiful. But I always had a strong suspicion of this.
When I met Autumn, my suspicion was confirmed. It was important to be both.
When Autumn ghosted me, not only could I not write, I couldn’t read either. There was a film or a curtain between the words my eyes recognised on the page and the part of my brain that made the words real, made them transform into image, sound, emotion, person, situation. Books themselves were distancing from me.
The books for my favourite classes became indigestible, as torturous as math problems and scientific papers. I felt that when I was reading them, I was merely transcribing them. Not really listening, just trying to get through them as fast as I could before it was time for my shift at work. I couldn’t forgive her for this. The fragrance of tacos and fried noodles lured me from the other end of the parking lot. It had rained in the night; wet patches glimmered on the asphalt. It was a mid-week, midday market, the kind assembled for office workers on their lunch break. Suits and strollers surrounded me.
I saw Autumn before she saw me. Even with her sunglasses on, I knew it was her. I would have recognised her posture anywhere. My own posture went rigid and I stopped being able to swallow. I felt cold, exposed, my empty shopping trolley next to me like a patient dog.
She was scowling at some artichokes, a macrame bag draped on her forearm filled with lemons and limes. She was three or four stalls ahead of me. Few people crisscrossed the space between us. I longed for the weekend market crowd.
At first she didn’t see me. It was a trick of hers. You didn’t exist for her until she wanted you to, and then you were the most important person in her world, and strove to maintain that position as if you’d fall off the edge of the planet otherwise.
Our eyes met, and it was only then that I realised I’d been walking toward her. I scanned her entire body and felt my cheeks get hot. She did the same to me with raised eyebrows. I felt enormous and frumpy.
Long time no see, I heard myself say in an inappropriately ironic tone.
I know, right? Her voice sounded so unmistakably hers, that it pierced the surrealness of the moment. Here she was, Miss America.
What are you doing here? I mean, besides shopping, of course.
I can be wherever I want, her sunglasses said. I’m visiting for the summer, she actually said, pushing her sunglasses up above her forehead.
I noticed the faintest of lines around her eyes and checked for the vertical one that was starting to deepen between my own brows, the one that had scared me when I used to see it on my mother’s face. I couldn’t see any frown line on Autumn’s face. Her skin looked amazing.
Look, I don’t have Facebook and I don’t have a phone number yet but we should hang out.
I waved my hand at an invisible fly. Yeah, no worries, we’ll figure it out. To my surprise, she laughed. I started laughing too. It sounded loud and manic.
She leaned over to hug me. I stiffly moved closer and hugged her back. Her lemons and limes swung forward and bumped my hip.
Well, lovely to see you. I sounded matronly and distant.
Yes, lovely to see you too. She was mocking me.
I walked briskly away, accidentally running over someone’s foot with my trolley and not looking over my shoulder or stopping to apologise.