Lila Has Crossed the Sound

Chapter 2 The Pattern

The thing about being the third person in a friendship is that you get very good at reading the room. You learn to notice the small shifts, the way two people lean toward each other without thinking, the way their sentences overlap and finish each other, the way they laugh at jokes you didn't hear. You learn to occupy the space they leave for you, which is always slightly smaller than the space they take for themselves.

I had been doing this for three years. I was an expert.

The trip to Vancouver had been the first real sign, though I hadn't seen it at the time. We'd driven up together in Evan's car, Marisol in the passenger seat, me in the back. I'd told myself it was practical. Evan was driving, Marisol had the better map app on her phone. It made sense for her to sit up front.

But then at the hotel, they'd ended up in one room and I'd ended up in another, and I'd spent the evening alone, watching a hockey game I didn't care about, while they went to dinner and came back laughing about something that had happened at the restaurant that I would never understand.

The move-in at Whitman had been worse. We'd rented a truck and driven up together, all our belongings packed into boxes and bags, and somewhere between Portland and Walla Walla, they'd started talking about the future, about where they wanted to live after graduation, about the kind of apartment they wanted, and I'd sat in the back seat and listened and realized that they were making plans that didn't include me.

Not on purpose. They weren't cruel. They just didn't think about it. They didn't think about me at all.

And now there was a lease. Two names on a piece of paper. A two-bedroom apartment in Belltown, move-in September 1st.

The email I wrote that night was short. I didn't send it. I saved it as a draft and closed my laptop and lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain start against the window, and I thought about my mother.

My mother had been the third person once. She'd told me the story years ago, in the kitchen of our house on the peninsula, while she was making dinner and I was sitting at the counter doing homework. She'd had two best friends in college, a couple, and she'd spent four years trailing after them the way I trailed after Evan and Marisol. And then they'd gotten married and moved away and slowly, gradually, they'd stopped calling. She said it didn't hurt anymore, but I saw the way she said it, the way her hands stilled for just a moment over the cutting board.

"I should have said something," she told me. "Not to them. To myself. I should have admitted that it wasn't enough. That I wanted more."

She'd never said what she was going to do with that admission. She'd met my father a year later, and that was that.

I didn't want to meet someone. I didn't want to wait.

I wanted to be seen.

Friday morning came gray and wet, the kind of day that made the ferry terminal feel like the end of the world. I arrived early, earlier than I needed to, and sat in the waiting area with a paper cup of coffee and watched the passengers line up. Families with strollers. Couples with matching backpacks. A group of teenagers laughing too loudly.

Evan and Marisol arrived together, as I knew they would. They'd spent the night at her apartment, I knew that too, though neither of them had told me. I could tell by the way they moved, the easy intimacy of two people who'd woken up in the same bed.

"Lila!" Marisol waved, bright and cheerful. She was wearing a yellow rain jacket, the kind that made her look like a lighthouse in the gray. "You're early."

"I like to be early."

Evan came up behind her, carrying both their bags. "Did you get a good seat?"

"Row fourteen," I said. "Middle."

He frowned. "Middle? Why didn't you get a window?"

"They were sold out."

"Ah." He shifted his bag to his other shoulder. "Well, it's only a thirty minute crossing. You'll survive."

I smiled. "I always do."

We boarded the ferry together, and then we separated. They went to row twelve, and I went to row fourteen, and I sat between a man in a suit who was typing furiously on his laptop and a woman with a stroller who was trying to soothe a crying baby. The baby cried the whole way across the sound, and the man in the suit kept sighing, and I stared out the window at the gray water and the gray sky and the gray islands in the distance and thought about the email in my drafts folder.

I hadn't sent it. I wasn't sure I ever would.

But I had started something. I could feel it, a small hard knot in my chest, the beginning of a decision I wasn't ready to name.

The rental house was on a quiet street on the north end of the island, a small gray cottage with a white picket fence and a view of the water through the trees. Marisol had found it online, some vacation rental site, and she'd been excited about it for weeks. She'd sent us photos and floor plans and had already planned the meals she was going to cook.

"It's tiny," she said as we walked up the path. "But it's cute, right?"

It was tiny. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with a stove from the 1970s, a living room with a pullout couch that looked like it had been purchased at a garage sale. The bedroom doors were right next to each other, close enough that you could hear everything through the walls.

"I'll take the couch," I said, before either of them could ask.

Evan looked at me. "Are you sure? We can figure something out."

"I'm sure." I set my bag down by the couch. "I don't mind."

Marisol was already in the kitchen, opening cabinets and exclaiming over the dishes. Evan watched her for a moment, then turned back to me.

"Lila," he said, quietly, so she wouldn't hear. "Is everything okay? You've been quiet lately."

"I'm fine."

"You don't seem fine."

"I'm just tired." I met his eyes, and for a moment I saw something flicker there, something that might have been concern or guilt or just the same old affection he'd always had for me, the affection that had never been quite enough. "Really. I'm fine."

He nodded, but he didn't look convinced. He never looked convinced. That was the thing about Evan. He always knew when I was lying, and he never pushed hard enough to find out why.

The first night, we ate dinner at a restaurant in town, a small place with wooden tables and a menu written on a chalkboard. Marisol ordered a bottle of wine for the table, and we drank it slowly, and they talked about the apartment, about paint colors and furniture and which of them would get the bigger closet. I listened and nodded and laughed in the right places, and I thought about how easy it was to disappear into the background of a conversation, how you could be sitting right there between two people and still be invisible.

After dinner, we walked down to the water and stood on the dock and looked at the lights of Seattle across the sound. It was beautiful, the way the city glittered in the darkness, the way the ferry slid across the water like a small bright animal.

"I'm going to miss this," Marisol said, leaning against the railing. "When we move to Belltown, we'll be in the city. No more ferry rides."

"We can still take the ferry," Evan said. "It's not that far."

"It's not the same."

I stood a few feet away, my hands in my pockets, the wind cold against my face. And I thought: I'm going to miss this too. But I'm not going to miss being invisible. I'm not going to miss being the third person. I'm not going to miss the ferry rides where I sit in a different row.

I didn't say any of that.

But I took out my phone and opened my email and looked at the draft I'd saved, the one I hadn't sent, and I read it again.

And I started to revise.