The way we love

By Alyssa Leshovsky

The only time Britta had thought about the extent of her relationship with Casey was on a warm spring day in early May. She was at her desk in Mrs. Hall’s English class, bent over math problems that had yet to be assigned, with her eyebrows creased in concentration. The chatter of students as they sauntered to class buzzed brightly around the room, and scratched persistently at her skin, but she never broke eye contact with the book. Mrs. Hall stood nearby, peering slightly at the door as if anyone other than Britta would walk in before a minute before class, when the music started.

The clank of two leather boots yanked the girl from her studies. The familiarity in the sound of the steps pulled her attention towards the door, where a tall girl stood, her chin dipped down, and her eyes appearing to be counting the tiles on the floor.

Casey was her contrast, many people would tell her. Where Britta was short, her friend was tall. When she chose to be silent, Casey would say whatever thought that came to her head with such confidence, it was hard not to agree with the same amount of enthusiasm. When faced with a heavy situation, Britta would take time to view her options and refuse to make a decision until she visioned every outcome in her head. Casey would just dive in with whatever solution came to her first. And yet the two depended on each other, like how paper needs staples to keep it together. Casey had always been there, and so Britta found comfort in the sound of her steps, or the way her voice rose higher than other’s in a crowd, either from passion or because Britta’s ear would search for it. In the years they’d been friends, Britta had become understanding of all of Casey’s quirks.

Arriving two minutes before the music was not something Casey did, and so Britta’s brain was already clued into something being wrong when she spotted the twinkle of a tear on Casey’s cheek, shining like freshly fallen snow, but looking as wrong as Mona Lisa would if she laughed.

Concern rested heavily in her stomach as she turned fully towards her friend, who sat in her desk with her eyes still concentrating on the floor. Casey never focused as hard as she was on the floor in that moment, and Britta knew that something big had happened.

“What’s wrong?” She asked as she moved seats, her books still lying open on her desk. She froze for a moment to think about how lonely her chair looked without her in it, like a puppy that had been abandoned by a little boy who favored his DS instead. It was usually Casey who switched seats, and even though no one else was there, moving now felt wrong to the girl. She settled uncomfortably into a new chair, this one lower and colder than hers, but closer to the friend that obviously needed her help.

“It’s nothing,” Casey whispered through a wavering voice. “Go back to your homework. Let me guess, two units ahead of everyone else?”

It wasn’t uncommon for Casey to snap at Britta. Her words were usually painted with some shade of sarcasm, but on such occasions, Britta would counter her bitchiness with: “Do you need a tissue to wipe up how much snot was in that sentence?” Today that felt inappropriate.

“Three,” She answered. “What’s wrong?”

Casey looked at her, and Britta was introduced to red, swollen eyes. She wasn’t sobbing, only one or two tears would escape it’s mascara prison, but the hopeless desperation that twinkled in the wetness of her blue irises caused Britta’s throat to tighten. “Sam dumped me.”  

Britta felt her surprise make it’s way to her mouth, wedging a gap between her lips. She blinked once, her eyes staying closed for a moment to process what her friend had just confessed. Britta knew the probability of a high school relationship lasting was low, but had she been the type to bet, she would have put her money on Sam and Casey. They had a strange, simplistic kind of love that Britta was sure no one would ever be able to duplicate. Sam had adored Casey, so much so that he almost seemed to display the same kind of actions as a serial killer, however, Casey had found that endearing. The idea that a boy who loved her best friend so much he refused to eat meat because she was a vegetarian could dump her didn’t sit right with her. Casey and Sam not being together was wrong. To see one without the other was like seeing a seven year old do taxes or an eighty year old in a ball pit.

“I don’t understand,” She said. Casey’s face darkened with anger that was directed solely at Britta.

“I’m an ugly bitch,” She hissed, her eyes narrowed on her friend, “Tim’s words. Sam didn’t even have the balls to do it himself.”

It made sense then, all of it. It was like she had finally found the piece of the mystery that would finally point out who the criminal really was. “But you’re not-” She began, desperate to explain what she had just realized.

“Yeah,” she snorted, her words holding the hands of an eye roll, “I got the deep end of the gene pool.”

“Forget the deep end,” Britta exclaimed, “You came out of the hot tub.” And it wasn’t just a best friend trying to give a girl a little self esteem boost; Casey was hot. Like lava in your eyes every time you looked at her. With hair the color of the sky when the sun first touched the clouds during a sunset, and eyes that had more shades then there were of gray, she was the original girl on fire.

But she wasn’t just trying to convince Casey of her beauty, she was trying to save her best friend’s relationship.

“Spare me the cliche ‘you’re amazing’ speech that you probably saw on last night’s episode of Glee.” Her jaw clenched, and her eyes flickered with scorn. “I don’t want to hear about relationships from a person who’s never been kissed.”

Her surprise hit her flat across her face, and tingled down her arms to her fingertips. Casey had done a lot of things to Britta, but she had never so easily humiliated her. She never used those type of things as weapons before. “I don’t,” she whimpered as her embarrassment painted her cheeks, “I don’t understand.” She was just trying to help.

“Of course you don’t,” Casey thundered, “You don’t know anything about life or love or friendship. I want you to leave me alone.”

Of course she didn’t. She knew she was Casey’s ugly best friend, the Robin to her Batman, and she was forever forced to sit on the sidelines, doing homework inbetween class instead of making out with her boyfriend in the hallway, but Britta wasn’t completely stupid when it came to life. After all, she had seen the way Tim looked at Sam, with the same kind of adoration Sam looked at Casey with.

“But you don’t understand,” Britta said urgently. People had begun to stride in, and the music was pumping through the speakers at a fast pace. She needed to make this quick. “Tim’s-”

“I don’t want to hear your stupid idea in why Tim and Sam thought they needed to humiliate me in the hallway. I don’t want to hear the theory you’ve come up in your head of why Sam couldn’t do it himself, why he avoided me and let his best friend do it for him. I want you, and everyone else, to leave me the hell alone.” The tears were coming fast now, like a storm in her eyes. Each tear left a black smudge, and she wiped at it like it was blemishing her face.

Britta stood, and walked numbly to her seat. Casey didn’t want to hear, and Britta was the type to give up easily. Maybe she couldn’t convince her friend of her importance, and maybe she couldn’t mend the relationship she knew Tim purposely sabotaged, but she could give Casey the space she desperately asked for.

She looked back at her friend only to see her face being cradled by her shaking hands. She swallowed, her mind asking a question she’ll never voice.

Why was her friend’s self worth dependent on who did or didn’t love her?

 

When she was eight, Casey punched Sam in the face for calling Britta a “butthead.” It was the favor that started their friendship, and a favor Britta never thought she’d have to return, however,  it would seem that the moment where Britta was called to be the knight has come, and she had seven minutes to find her target.

She found Tim instead.

Britta and Tim were often victims of the “double date.” That’s probably how Britta knew of Tim’s love for Sam. While Sam stared at Casey with nothing but adoration in his puppy-brown eyes, Tim would look on with a clenched jaw and a pulsing green gaze. Now his eyes sparkled with the tears of guilt.

“Where’s Sam?” She asked. Tim shrugged one shoulder. “I know you know where he is, Tim.”

He looked up. He looked uncomfortable, but not in the same way that Britta feels when she stays in the hallway for longer than the time it takes to get to class. He looked like the world fell off it’s axis and now he couldn’t stand or breathe or think. He looked beyond guilty. He looked sick, and so the part of Britta that liked Tim, the part that sat next to him on those awkward double dates when Casey and Sam would be too engrossed with each other to notice if flies had started doing the macarena around their heads, and talked with him, about the math and their favorite books and whatever else Casey would call them nerdy for saying. It was this part of her that pulled her into the empty stop next to him.

“Tell me.”

“Sam doesn’t know what I did. He thinks- he was really upset when Casey didn’t show up this morning. He thought he did something wrong.” He looked at her. “He’s never going to care about me that way, and I feel horrible, because I wanted to be happy so bad that I ruined his chances of it.”

“You could fix it?” She suggested. She could think of a hundred thousand ways he could fix it, but in the moment she said it she realized that it didn’t matter, he needed to be able to think of a way to fix it. So instead of pushing him towards a solution that wouldn’t make him feel better, she tapped his shoulder. “Love sucks.”

“Yeah,” he breathed.

“But it also never ends. You love one person, and you love another, and another until you think that there’s no more room for you to love. And sometimes it destroys you, but other times it fills you with this amazing power you feel you can be anyone or do anything. And it never ends, this constant circle of love sucks and love is amazing, and at some point you won’t want it to. Because love does a lot of things to a person, but I do believe that one day you will have what Sam and Casey have. Just not with Sam.”

He looked at her, and one corner of his thin lips pulled into an apologetic smile. “Thanks,” he breathed, “I’ll… I’ll go tell Sam what I did. And you can tell Casey about me. I sort of deserve it?”

“I’m not going to tell her because you deserve to be punished. I’ll tell her it was a misunderstanding, because being gay is your secret to tell, and not something that can be used to hit you with when you make a mistake.” After a minute she added, “Don’t think that you don’t deserve anything good, including love, just because you go about attaining it differently than the norm.”

He smiled a little more, but the pain of his guilt still showed in his eyes. “Thanks,” He said again and turned around, walking off, leaving Britta to sit against the concrete wall.

“And Casey said Glee wouldn’t teach me anything about life,” She mumbled as she pulled herself up and scurried to class.