.
“Three…two…one…” said Sara, looking at her watch. Lena stood next to the stone stairs of the porch.
“I still feel the same,” replied Lena.
“Well, cheers,” said Sara, sarcastically raising her cracked crystal glass full of sparkling cider and tapping it against Lena’s. She turned at the sound of fireworks a few blocks away. Sara looked back at her watch; only seven hours until her flight home.
“Any resolutions?” asked Sara. Lena stared down the dim street hoping to catch a glimpse of some cheap sparks. “Lena?”
“No. No diet, no goals, and I think I will actually take up smoking.” They laughed. “Nothing too simple.”
“Come on,” said Sara, grabbing Lena’s thin arm and pulling her up the stairs into the large suburban mini-mansion filled with black jackets, spaghetti straps, and conversations that mixed into one haphazard mélange. Some kids ran out the door and onto the lawn with armfuls of firecrackers. “Let’s pretend we are rich tonight, Lena. Just tonight I want to feel like I matter.”
They weaved between the parents that danced and the parents that compared portfolios. They circled the room twice; neither new what to do. The minutes were ticking away fast; they could feel the memory of their month together begin to fade into a blur…into something that “happened a long time ago.” No one in the room noticed the pair of 12-year-old girls. No one ever did.
Lena found some stairs and pulled Sara up into a darkened room filled with expensive wooden shelves and generic books, and reached behind Sara to close the door to the drone from the floor below.
They sat together in an ugly red leather chair and held hands. Lena pulled an atlas from the shelf.
Sara sighed and turned to a map of North America and Europe. “I wish the world was this big,” and spanned part of the length of the open pages with her hand.
“We would only be nine inches away,” said Lena, “and that couldn’t keep us apart.”
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Monday, February 2, 2009
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