Page 65 of No Greater Oblivion

She picks up her spoon and starts dumping sugar into her teacup again. Lyss turns her head to take in the scenery, the sun glistening like a halo behind her auburn hair making it look copper. This is the first time we’ve seen each other in years. All at once she looks exactly the same and not at all. I hardly recognize her as the girl I sat next to every year in elementary school or the pre-teens we later grew into, with braces and bad haircuts. Nor does she look like the teenager I remember, freckle-faced and lovely, still growing into her figure and insecure about what she looked like compared to other girls.

We’re adults now. No one tells you how strange that is…to be an adult with the people you shared your girlhood with.

On the inside, I feel exactly the same and the only reminder that we aren’t twelve years old anymore is the reflection of maturity in her face. Lyss is a woman now and so am I.

How very strange.

“Early onset dementia. Very early.” She looks down at her tea and finally takes a sip. “We found out around two years ago and as soon as we did, I dropped out of Stanford and moved back home. My brothers are eternally useless and I couldn’t let Mom drown on her own.”

A pause and then she continues.

“It took a bit for me to get back on my feet. I was able to transfer to Fordham and it took longer than I expected but my five-year plan went out the window with Dad’s health.”

“How is he now?”

“Shockingly well. Doctors say he’s kind of a miracle. The disease is progressing at an almost snail-like pace. His long-term memory is intact and even though he occasionally has trouble with the short-term, he does a good job of keeping track of things. He records himself on his phone throughout the day and then writes it all down in a journal at night.” She manages a smile. “One thing I will say is he curses a lot more in Gaelic than he used to.”

I laugh. “Is that so?”

“And the accent is stronger too. I swear, he sounds more Irish now than he did when he lived in Ireland. Funny how the mind works.”

“And your mom?”

“Still loud, still difficult, still trying to set me up with a nice Italian boy.”

“Your cousin Guiseppe’s stepbrother is hot. I’ve always told you to go for it.”

Lyss laughs so abruptly, hot tea almost shoots out of her nose. “Oh my God, you don’t know!”

“Know what?”

“About Marco!”

“No! I don’t live in New York anymore, remember! Gossip is on a delay here.”

Lyss regales me with tales from home—about how Marco is actually gay and almost married a woman he got pregnant, which confused the Hell out of the entire family. She tells me about our old childhood friends, how they are, where they ended up, and why. Many of our former archnemeses went to nursing school and are either engaged to police officers or paramedics with the exception of Hannah Beck whose fiancé just cheated on her. Neither of us feels any sympathy because she was a slut-shaming bitch in high school who ended up sleeping with a teacher anyway.

Sparing her the gory details, I tell her how I ended up in Barcelona. How Alejandro and I met, what happened after I went home last summer, and how a year later I’m here, sharing a home and a life with him. Only now does it occur to me how much has changed in the last year and how profoundly different my life is from what I always pictured. Beni comes up in conversation again and I make up some excuse about Alejandro’s family being very rich and very paranoid and how I don’t mind it at all.

Lyss knows me too well to take what I say at face value but she doesn’t probe, and I’m grateful.

“I bumped into Marcia over the summer. She told me you’d moved to Spain but she was in a rush and we didn’t talk much about it.” Teacup now empty, she runs her finger around the rim. “I…I thought about calling you. But I wasn’t sure if your number was still the same.”

“My number has never changed.” I say and I almost expect the conversation to end here.

It doesn’t.

“Look I…when everything happened…” She moves to the edge of her seat, teacup abandoned. “I didn’t expect it to affect our friendship the way it did. I never meant to hurt you.”

Ah, yes. The topic I’ve been secretly dreading from the moment we bumped into each other on campus. Why I haven’t been able to fully ease into this conversation as well as her.

“Alyssa, you went to Stanford. Without me,” I tell her. “We were supposed to go to Columbia together and at the last minute, you changed your mind.”

“You could’ve gone to Stanford too⁠—”

“How? With what money? What co-signer for a student loan?” I sit up in my seat. “I couldn’t afford to dorm out there and keep my apartment at Marcia’s. What was I going to do at a college on the other side of the country with no job to fall back on?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make me guilty for doing what I thought was best for me at the time. I had always dreamed of living in California and you knew⁠—”