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It’s a quiet, meandering thing when Adaine closes her emptied locker on the final day of freshman year. She’s already stalled as long as she can; the predictably raucous end-of-day shuffle she usually tries her best to either get ahead of or wait out has long since petered out into a scattered hum that is now scarcely more than a couple other students milling about, waiting for friends or gathering up the last of their things. Adaine has long since gathered her own things—spell books, notepads and decorations; loose sticky notes Kristen and Riz have stuck inside the door of her locker, printed out photos of her friends from their adventures (running the full breadth of the scale from casual Strongtower hangout to life-threatening mid-battle snap), and a white board and marker set with some of Gorgug’s drawings she couldn’t bring herself to erase. They sit in a vaguely organized, unceremonious heap at the bottom of her backpack, one strap slung noncommittally over her shoulder as if she’s keeping it ready to drop at a moment’s notice. And she’s not not doing that, but she also knows that the notice will likely not come.
She’s going to have to go eventually. She’s going with Jawbone, taking him up on his offer of a longer term stay in the wake of her parents’ disappearance so she doesn’t have to impose by bouncing between her friends’ houses every couple of days, anymore. He’d told her he would be maybe twenty minutes or so after the final bell, just to get his things in order, but she was free to hang out with her friends or even meet him at home later, if she wanted.
(Home. She watched him sort of catch himself as he said it, watched him check her for any flare of discomfort or hope or whatever else traumatized teens tend to feel about that. She supposes he would know better than her. She’d told him she’d let him know, but would probably end up just going with him, anyway.)
Riz and Fig invited everyone to Strongtower for an after-dinner celebration, but the rest of the afternoon was Adaine’s to fill. And right now she’s scarcely doing that, still stood in front of her locker with the afternoon leaking out from under her feet. It looks a lot like sunlight, and she takes a minute—’cause she has one, obviously, she’s still stalling—to really look at it: the way it washes the scuffed title into a warm, glowy sort of yellow versus its usual pale mint, the way it cuts over the toe of the sneakers Fabian technically bought for her, with that gift card. The way it hasn’t ever looked like this before, this exact sunlight on this exact square of floor, this time and day a combination she’s never seen here before, never lived here before. Maybe next year on the last day of school she can do it again, another meaningless tradition to add to the list she guards inside her chest. It’s mundane, sure, especially in a school where people do magic and get killed and what not—but it’s hers, and even if everything is wrong and she doesn’t have any photos in her bag or drawings on her white board when she gets here in a year’s time, she’ll have this. This patch of sunlight, this square of tile beneath her feet, holding her up at the precipice of another uncertain summer.
She’s not anticipating everything being wrong. She’s trying not to anticipate anything at all, taking the world one even breath (in four, hold seven, out eight) at a time, as per Jawbone’s request. Because anticipation leads to speculation leads to catastrophizing, which is not good for her anxiety.
(Which she has. Which she’s being treated for. This is a right, not a wrong.)
She’s trying not to think about if her friends will be her friends next year or not. She’s trying not to think if tonight will be a last hurrah following an unprecedentedly kind eight (8) months of friendship and preceding an awkward, slow fade into silence, timeline undetermined. And she’s certainly trying not to think about how the longest she’s ever had a friend before has been one (1) year, and how it only lasted that long because they were in the same summer classes, and how she’s quickly running up to that temporal milestone with the bad kids, and how she has never loved anyone as fiercely as she has loved them.
(Another right, not a wrong. She’s trying not to think about how much that terrifies her.)
She is not anticipating everything—or anything—being wrong, but she is not anticipating it being right, either. She is simply standing here letting the weight of the implication sitting inside her backpack fasten her to the spot, collecting this moment and this sunlight and this tile into her pockets for safekeeping. Collecting herself for safekeeping.
There is the sound of shoes down the hall and Adaine turns to meet it instinctively, trying to look busy instead of like she’s just been standing at her locker staring at the floor for the past four minutes. She supposes she could always lie and say she was having a vision, but—
“Adaine!”
Her backpack slides off her shoulder and drops to the floor. “Gorgug!”
His smile is wide on his face and Adaine can’t help but feel a flash of warmth at getting to tuck him away into this moment, too. “I didn’t think anyone would still be here, I was just talking to Porter.”
“Yeah? I’m—I was waiting for Jawbone, but. How was that?”
“Yeah, good. He knows my name now for sure, so that’s cool.”
“Hey, nice.”
“Yeah. Got some summer reading for barbarian class, wanna make sure I’m ready for next year.” He shrugs, halfway to bashful, and tilts his head slightly. “What are you up to?”
She blinks, looks at her feet, then back up to him. She settles on, “Standing,” which isn’t untrue.
He nods thoughtfully. “Cool. Do you wanna—oh, you said you were waiting for Jawbone, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” she rushes, “but it was like, he said I could leave with him or if I wanted I could just do my own thing.” A click of the tongue, a beat, and then: “So, uh. If you wanna—”
“Yeah, wanna hang out?” He smiles brightly as she nods, head bobbing before he’s even done his sentence. It’s probably too eager, but she can’t bring herself to care all that much right now, sunshine stretching up her shins and down the hallway between them. Gorgug shifts the hold of his books in his arm—he’d stopped bringing a backpack to school after the first week—and says, “Cool. I was thinking of maybe going down to the river, it’s about the right time of year for the wildflowers to start growing?”
She gasps, a small thing steeped in delight. “Yes! I would love to do that.” Her chest unfurls into something warm and effervescent, the feeling bubbling up into the back of her throat. She watches Gorgug beam for a moment—almost him setting the hallway aglow, not the late afternoon sun—and then picks up her backpack, unzipping it dutifully. “Can I take your stuff for you? So you don’t have to carry it all the way to the river?”
His eyebrows draw together and he pouts, ever so slightly. “If it’s not too heavy?”
“Of course not.”
They follow their shadows down the hall, sun reaching at their heels as they make their way to Jawbone’s office. The door is open and Adaine hears him before she sees him, humming along to something tinny and old-timey on the little radio he keeps on his desk.
“Oh, hey kiddo!” he greets as they appear in the doorway, taking in the full sight of him, cardigan and glasses chain swinging as his idle dancing comes to a stop. “I’m just about ready to go, if you give me three more minutes I’ll be good?”
“Hi!” Adaine says brightly, “Actually, me and Gorgug were gonna go down to the river to see if there’s any cool flowers we can pick. I’ll meet you at home if that’s okay?”
Gorgug waves from behind her, giving him an awkward, toothy smile. “Hi Jawbone.”
“Hey Gorgug,” he replies, then turning to Adaine with a growing smile and an enthusiastic, “That’s more than okay! Sounds like a super fun way to end the school year. You kids have fun, I’ll have spaghetti ready when you’re done—Gorgug, you’re welcome to come over for dinner, if you’d like.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks, Jawbone. We’ll see you later.”
Adaine spares one last glance at her locker as they leave. That was hers, but so is this. She doesn’t need to stall any longer.