“No plans,” I said around the agitating emotion lumping in my throat.
She blinked at my short reply and tilted her head with a shaky smile. “What? You can’t have ‘no plans’ on your birthday, Soul. You’re finally twenty-one.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Thailand,” she answered, looking relieved I was picking up the conversation. “I’m in Chiang Mai right now but I'm going to Koh Kood in a couple days. The beaches are supposed to begorgeousthere.”
“We got beaches here,” I said drily.
“Soul, it’s not the same,” she laughed. “You know that.”
“I get that you like to travel, but it seems like you couldn’t wait to get off this island after your birthday.”
“Sou—” She couldn’t finish my name before her phone fell, and her screen went black. I heard muffled Thai through the speaker and Harlow answering back. I didn’t know what they said, but that distance I felt earlier was starting to feel more and more like a void.
A beat later, her face came back into view, her hair wild and her smile still brittle. “Sorry about that. What were you saying?”
“Nothing, I’ll let you go.”
“Soul, I don’t wanna go. I called you because I want to talk.”
She stared at me, her eyes rounded with something I wasn’t willing to call regret. She wasn’t sorry that I was upset. She just didn’t know what to do when I was the one putting up resistance. “You know what? I shouldn’t have answered the phone. I’m not in the mood to talk right now.”
“Soul, please.”
“Have a good day, Harley. Enjoy your beaches.”
“Don’t hang up!” she pleaded when my thumb was already hovering over the red button to end the call.
“What you want?”
“You’re mad at me for traveling?”
“I’m mad at you forleaving. Those are two different things.”
“I bought these tickets months ago…I didn’t…what can I do to fix it?” One sentence bled into another. And her face went through five different stages of heartache as she stared at me, refusing to blink.
“You can’t do nothing for me in Thailand, Harley.” I shook my head. I hated this. Out of everybody in our group, Harlow and I never had friction. But I was in my head too much right now. Had been since she left. I didn’t want to feel like this.
I knew what Rico made us promise that night. I needed to hang up. “I’m a just go. I’ll call you when I feel like talking.”
“Soul.”
I cut the call.
Birthday With a View
Thursday, July 31, 2025
It rained on my birthday.
Not the random afternoon showers that usually popped up all over the island during summer either. It was raining sheets from the time we woke up that morning. We couldn’t even sit on the balcony because it was coming down sideways.
Around noon, the event staff called it, and the street art festival we were supposed to go to was postponed indefinitely.
Now I was stuck in the house with my favorite people to do nothing with.
And a simple game of Uno around the kitchen table had turned into a competition I planned to lose.
