Cali
I sit back down in my seat, my mind whirring. Ember and Bryn split up perhaps a month before I last saw Bryn, and before we all fell out. I remember Bryn being heartbroken and asking us all to not mention her ex after Ember moved across the country to live by the sea, shortly after their break-up. She wanted to shut down the memories and get over her as quickly as possible, so we all obliged. I can’t see how Bryn went from that to being friendly enough again with her that she’d invite her to her wedding?
‘Sorry, can I just squeeze out again?’ I say to the man next to me, for the second time in less than twenty minutes. He sighs, and the shuffle-squeeze-shimmy dance begins again, and when I’m back in the aisle I walk briskly, my head down, until I reach Luke’s row. He’s in the aisle seat, and I crouch down, looking up at him.
I use the seconds it takes him to pause his movie and remove his headphones to scan his face, absorbing his skin, his lips, his brows. I haven’t been this close to him in so long. Our eyes meet, his softer now in the muted dim of the aeroplane.
‘Um, hello, Cali, how can I help?’ Luke stumbles over the simple words, like he’s reading from a script. It makes me snort out a gurgled nervous giggle, which is just great timing, thank you, me. ‘You okay?’ he asks me. That voice. Deep but with a quiet lightness, like I’m the only one who can hear him.
I find my words. ‘Ember’s here.’
‘Amber?’
‘Ember. Bryn’s ex. She’s on the plane.’ My voice doesn’t sound like my own, it’s crackling and squeaky, the natural patter between us now sounding like the first table read of a pilot TV show. Between two non-actors. Who speak different languages.
‘She is?’ Luke llamas his neck up to try and see her but I pull on his jumper and he turns back to me.
‘Don’t look!’
‘Are you sure it’s her?’
‘We said hi to each other. And yes – we knew her for like, a year. It’s her.’
‘Is she going to the wedding?’
‘Um, I don’t know. She must be, right? That would be a big coincidence otherwise?’
Luke runs a hand through his hair. His other hand, not the one attached to the arm whose jumper sleeve I’m holding onto. He hasn’t moved that. ‘I guess they made friends again.’
We fall into silence. I wonder if he’s thinking the same as me, wondering how Ember and Bryn managed to reconcile when we couldn’t.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I think it’s a coincidence. She’s probably just going to Toronto for work or something.’ I start babbling, filling the silence with anything that comes into my head, not wanting to leave his side yet, and then there’s movement beside me.
‘Do you two want to keep it down so the whole plane doesn’t know our business?’ In a crouched position beside me, Joss has appeared, and I snap my mouth closed. Where’d she come from?
‘We were just saying—’ Luke starts.
‘I know, I heard. You’re talking about The Ex.’
We all fall silent, Luke pressing his lips together and, briefly, meeting my eye. My thighs are beginning to shake from squatting, and I can feel Joss’s glare darting between me and Luke. I lean back a little, not wanting her to think I was being too clingy on Luke already, and subsequently topple back on my bum, which I style out by sitting cross-legged in the middle of the aisle, but I’m pretty sure I’m sat in some spilled cola.
I hope it’s cola.
‘Are you okay?’ Luke asks, twisting and untwisting the wires of his headphones.
‘Yeah, totally fine.’
Seven years tick by while we all think of something to say, and then Joss drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Do you reckon she’s staying in the cabin with us?’
‘No.’ I shake my head, an unsure chuckle escaping a little too shrilly. Christ, maybe I am a bit loud. ‘I think Bryn would have told us if Ember was going to be there too.’
‘Maybe Ember was the big surprise?’ Luke suggests.
‘Weird surprise,’ mutters Joss. Then, like we aren’t all in this bizarre tangle of resentment and bitterness and confusion, she reaches over and takes a swig out of Luke’s drink. Even after half a decade the girl has no boundaries.
She sets it back down, slowly, as if she just realised what she did. Her cheeks glow red and she tosses her hair back, covering the embarrassment. ‘Cali, find out.’
‘Why me?’ I hiss.
