Everyone except Sophie, who had turned to look out of the window, hair swept over her far shoulder, exposing a heavily studded lobe, a single steel hoop through the tragus. Sophie’s best friend had always been the one people made a fuss over – Win had seen the comments beneath Freya’s selfies, been there when Freya would check for them mid-conversation – but Sophie’s face was a striking kind of beauty that Win wished she could compliment her on.
But only the Sunnys of this world got to blurt out admiration like it was effortless.
Suspicious of the silence, Win watched her sister in the rear-view mirror. She was scrolling through something on her phone, brow furrowed in a frown.
“Are you looking for Freya online?”
“No… I’m looking for clues.”
Sophie’s weary expression matched Win’s, as if she was only now realising they should have made Sunny walk.
“There’s no point,” Sophie said, twisting to look over her shoulder as the car slowed to join the queue of traffic waiting to cross the bridge into town. “She’s not posted anything since January. Unless this parcel got very delayed in the post, there won’t be anything useful.”
“Why though?” Sunny punctuated her question with a tut. “I’d be all about the updates if I’d moved.”
“Hard to make new friends when all you’re thinking about are the old ones,” Sophie said. “She’s deleted all her apps to take away the temptation. Gone cold turkey until she’s settled in for real.”
“It’s been five months…”
“It takes time, Sunny,” Win said. Maybe her sister couldn’t see it, but Sophie’s patience had been watered down so far it was practically homeopathic.
“I’m just saying –”
Win closed her eyes for longer than a blink. “You really don’t have to.”
“– that I’d find it ridiculously hard. I’d want to keep in touch with everyone. Not just my best mate… No offence, Sophie.”
“None taken,” Sophie murmured, head down as she checked her phone, as if she nursed hope that Freya might call her up right now. If Freya could see the sadness that shadowed Sophie’s face, she might have done.
Win would have.
June – 203 days before Freya left
Things with Riley had fizzled out before they had dissolved into tears. Win wouldn’t have said she was heartbroken, but she was sad – and she needed somewhere other than her own home to feel it. Crying alone in her room in the middle of her GCSEs was behaviour that would worry her parents on a cellular level.
So when she could, Win escaped to Freya’s, armed with revision notes as cover – and for something to do when Freya got distracted by her phone.
Where Win’s home buzzed with the feel of family – the murmur of the TV in the lounge and singing in the kitchen; the smell of cooking; conversations shouted between rooms and up the stairwell – Freya’s did not. Even on the rare occasions her mum was there, the two of them weren’t enough to fill the space inside.
Maybe that was why Win valued peace and privacy and Freya preferred to live out loud. Win could have taken an extra GCSE in Freya Drama and been confident of getting top marks. And there was a lot of drama. Everything was a big deal for her – there was the war of attrition between Freya and her mum; her concerns over what her teachers thought, or said, or how they’d given her unfairly bad marks; some boy she fancied (or maybe she didn’t); what her friends were doing and the many ways in which they were amazing, but also the worst…
Then she’d ask how Win was feeling, and Win would get halfway towards actually talking about it before the irresistible dog whistle of another message would light Freya’s screen. For Win, who was selective about who she shared her number with and only answered messages when she had time to talk, Freya’s way of life looked exhausting.
“Are you going to your prom?” Freya had just finished typing something when she looked up from her phone to where Win was sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, Physics folder open on her lap, pen poised over a page of formulae she’d been over so often she could have scribed it from memory. Which was exactly the idea.
“I am.” Win had bought a plain black dress from TK Maxx and had every intention of noping out of the official photos, but she had a few people she wanted to party with.
“Now that you’re not with Riley, are you planning on taking a date?”
“Obviously not.” Win hadn’t been planning on taking Riley, either.
“Do you want one?”
“Ha!” Freya was straighter than a spirit level. “Thanks, but you’re not my type.”
“I meant I could find you one…” Freya looked at her phone speculatively and, for one moment, the word Who? threatened to leap from the tip of Win’s tongue so that she had to clamp her teeth tight to stop it.
“I told you,” she said, hoping her self-control wouldn’t go unnoticed from whatever god-like being was watching. “I’m not out at school. And I don’t want to be.”
“I thought that was a not-yet thing, not a not-ever thing?”
This wasn’t the first time this had come up, but Freya had a bad habit of only remembering the things she wanted to be true.
“Not-yet might be not-till-university.”
“What? I’d die.”
Win blinked for a little longer than necessary. That wasn’t a great thing to say.
“Is it because of your parents?”
Also not great, but again, Win didn’t say so.
“No,” Win said, with a certainty she wished she felt. She couldn’t know how they would react, only guess. “I’m going to talk to them after we come back from Dom and Liu’s wedding.”
Telling them before would be unnecessary stress for everyone, her parents having to figure out how to behave around family they only saw every couple of years, while they might not know how to behave around her. After gave them time.
“So…?” Freya was in one of her inquisitive moods, and Win capped her pen, knowing that revision was done for now.
Sometimes being with Freya felt like being interrogated; on other occasions Win was appointed casting director as Freya read for the part of “Friend”, her interest more performative than real.
Nothing like the conversations she had online, or with Sunny. But then, most of Win’s online crowd were queer, and her sister was Chinese. Freya was neither and sometimes that showed.
This conversation was exactly the kind that dropped down the gap between the two.
“At school, and around the people my family know, I’m this Win.” She waved a hand at herself. “And I like her. I don’t feel like I’m lying or hiding. But if I come out, that changes who I am to other people and that takes effort. It wouldn’t be easy.”
“You did it with me,” Freya said.
“Yes.” Win nodded. She didn’t add that it wasn’t always easy with her, either, that even talking like this was work. “But you’re only one person.”
“I get that,” Freya said, nodding. “People already have an idea of who you are around here. When you’re with them it’s hard to remember how to be anyone else.” Which wasn’t exactly what Win had been getting at, but when Freya meandered down a tangent, Win let her. “Like, change is so much easier when there’s no mould for you to break. Otherwise you have to find twice the strength, enough to push through other people’s expectations and enough to make yourself new.”