Lila Has Crossed the Sound

The email came in while I was still in bed, the soft chime of my phone cutting through the gray Saturday morning light. I reached for it on the nightstand, expecting a reminder about the group project, or maybe a note from my mother about Sunday dinner. It was from the ferry service. Confirmation for two adult round-trip tickets, Bainbridge Island to Seattle, departing Friday at 4:15 PM. Passenger names: Evan Cole and Marisol Reyes. I put the phone down. Picked it up again. Read it a third time. Evan had booked our tickets for the Vancouver trip last spring the same way. I hadn't thought about it then, not really. He was organized, he liked handling logistics, and I was grateful. But the Vancouver trip had been four people and now it was three, and the email I was looking at had exactly two names on it. I got up and walked to the kitchen. Evan was already there, standing at the counter with his phone in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. He was wearing the gray sweatshirt I'd given him for his birthday, the one with the frayed cuff. He looked up when I came in. "Morning," he said. "Did you see the ferry confirmation? I went ahead and booked ours last night." "Ours," I repeated. "Yeah." He set his mug down and picked up his phone, scrolling. "Mine and Marisol's. I assumed you'd handle yours separately since you usually like to pick your own seat." I opened the refrigerator and stared at the shelves without seeing anything. "I usually like to pick my own seat." "You know what I mean." He laughed, easy and familiar, the same laugh he'd had since we were seventeen and sitting next to each other in junior English. "You always want the window. I didn't want to guess wrong." I closed the refrigerator. The window. As if that were the point. "Right," I said. "I'll book mine today." He nodded and went back to his phone, already somewhere else, already halfway to Friday. I stood there for a moment longer, watching the back of his head, the way his hair curled at the nape the way it had when we were kids, and I thought about the seat map I'd pulled up on my laptop the night before, just out of curiosity, just to see. Two seats together in row twelve. One seat left in row fourteen, middle, between a man in a suit and a woman with a stroller. I hadn't booked it yet. I'd closed the laptop and told myself I'd do it in the morning. Now it was morning, and the only seats left were the ones that didn't matter. Marisol lived in the apartment above the coffee shop on Cedar Street, a one-bedroom with a fire escape she'd decorated with fairy lights and a view of the water if you stood on your tiptoes. I'd been there dozens of times. I'd helped her paint the bathroom last summer, had sat on her kitchen floor eating takeout while she complained about her thesis advisor, had fallen asleep on her couch more than once after a late study session. She was already awake when I knocked, her hair in a messy bun, wearing running shorts and one of Evan's old t-shirts. I recognized it. I'd bought it for him two Christmases ago. "Hey," she said, stepping back to let me in. "You're up early." "Couldn't sleep." She poured me a cup of coffee without asking how I took it, which was fine, because she already knew. Black, one sugar. She knew that. She'd known it for years. "Did Evan tell you about the ferry?" she asked, settling onto her couch and tucking her feet under her. "I told him you'd probably want to book your own, but he said he'd just handle it." "He handled it." "Good." She smiled, warm and uncomplicated. "This trip is going to be so good. I need it. This semester has been brutal." I sat down in the armchair across from her, the one with the tear in the upholstery that we'd never fixed. "Marisol, did you know he booked your seat next to his? Specifically." She tilted her head. "I mean, we're taking the same ferry. It makes sense to sit together." "It does." "Lila." She set her mug down and looked at me with that expression she got when she thought I was being dramatic, a mix of affection and mild concern. "What's going on?" I wanted to say something. I wanted to say: I have been the third person in this friendship for three years, and I am tired of it. I wanted to say: You are wearing his shirt. I wanted to say: When I look at the two of you, I feel like I'm standing on the other side of a glass wall, watching a life I was never quite invited into. But I didn't say any of that. What I said was: "Nothing. I'm just tired." She nodded, accepting it, and picked up her phone. "Oh, check the group chat. I just sent something." I pulled out my phone. There was a photo, taken in the bright light of the leasing office on Fourth Street, of a rental application and a lease agreement. Two signatures at the bottom. Marisol Reyes and Evan Cole. A two-bedroom apartment in the Belltown neighborhood, move-in date September 1st. My hand went still on the phone. "We were going to tell you," Marisol said. "We just wanted to wait until it was finalized. But it's done now. We signed yesterday." I looked up at her. "You're moving in together." "Yeah." She was watching me carefully now, the smile fading. "Is that okay?" "Of course it's okay." The words came out smoothly, easily, in a voice I recognized as my own but didn't quite feel. "That's great. That's really great." She relaxed. "Good. I was worried you'd think we were leaving you out or something." "Never," I said. "I'm happy for you." And I was. That was the worst part. I was happy for her. I was happy for him. I was happy for both of them, and underneath that happiness was something dark and cold that I didn't have a name for yet, something that had been growing for years, something that had started the day Evan introduced me to Marisol and said, this is my friend Lila, and she'd smiled at me and said, I've heard so much about you. I'd heard nothing about her. The three of us had met at a party during freshman orientation. Evan and I had known each other since high school, two kids from the same small town on the Olympic Peninsula who'd ended up at the same university by coincidence or fate or whatever you wanted to call it. We'd been friends for years, the kind of friends who knew each other's families, who'd shared rides home for holidays, who'd eaten Thanksgiving dinner at each other's tables. He met Marisol that night. She was from San Diego, loud and bright and immediately magnetic, and within an hour she'd pulled us both into her orbit. Within a month, the three of us were inseparable. Within a year, I'd started to notice the way Evan looked at her, and the way she looked back, and the way I was always one step behind, one seat over, one ticket short. But I never said anything. Because what was there to say? They hadn't done anything wrong. They hadn't excluded me on purpose. They were just two people falling in love, and I was their friend, and that was supposed to be enough. It wasn't enough. But I'd never admitted that, not even to myself. I walked home the long way, down along the waterfront, past the ferry terminal with its green and white signs and the tourists lining up for the Bainbridge crossing. The water was gray under a gray sky, the kind of Pacific Northwest morning that made everything look like a photograph taken through dirty glass. My phone buzzed. A text from Evan. Evan: You okay? I stared at it for a long moment. He knew. He always knew when something was off, even when I didn't say it. That was the thing about Evan. He was perceptive. He was kind. He was the kind of person who remembered your coffee order and your birthday and the name of your childhood dog. He was impossible to hate. I typed back: Fine. Just tired. Evan: You sure? Lila: Yeah. See you Friday. Evan: See you Friday. I put my phone in my pocket and kept walking. The ferry horn sounded somewhere in the distance, low and mournful, and I thought about the trip ahead, three days on the island, a rental house with two bedrooms and a pullout couch in the living room. I'd be in the living room. They'd be in the bedroom. Of course they would. That night, I sat at my desk with my laptop open and the ferry website pulled up. Row fourteen, seat D. Middle. Between a man in a suit and a woman with a stroller. I bought it. And then I opened my email and started typing.