I knew what friendship was like, and it wasn’t that fragile. Honest to God, I wasn’t lying…and yet Elle’s sadness and anxiety showed no signs of shrinking. Then again, I hadn’t exactly provided any evidence to support my claims. I did have some, though.
Elle shot me a look that said Are you telling the truth? Then I looked into her eyes, into her fearful heart, and finally conceded. Silently, I apologized—but not to her.
Sorry. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m still taking baby steps. I hope you can forgive me.
With that selfish apology complete, I looked Elle in the eye and donned a smile. “Yeah, I think you’re gonna be just fine.”
She looked straight back at me, but I didn’t avert my gaze. In exchange for learning about her way of thinking, I would instead share a bit of my own. That way we could fill each other’s gaps. And as the thought crossed my mind, for the first time, I felt my heart take shape.
“You see, uh, the truth is…”
I was perfectly fine keeping it to myself, but as I prepared to reveal my secret for the first time in who knows how long, I was overcome with shame. In that moment, I felt like this exchange had taught me more about human emotions than I’d ever learned from looking at the pips.
“Ta-daaaa! See? Don’t they look good?!”
“Whoa… Coming from you, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they actually look like cookies!”
At my compliment, Mickey glared at me for a moment, then smirked and thrust her chest out proudly. “Ha ha! Pretty impressive, am I right?”
“Wait, but…didn’t you use Elle’s recipe? Why do they look different?”
“Good eye! See, I added chocolate as my secret ingredient!”
She gestured happily to her cookies, which were just as brown as everything else we’d eaten.
“If you think chocolate counts as a secret ingredient, we may need you to get your eyes checked,” Looney snarked. Mickey responded with a smile and a punch, then handed out little gift bags to each of us—first Looney, then Elle, then me, then Kyou.
These cookies were really nothing special, but nevertheless, Kyou was as stiff as a board. I elbowed him for fun.
“How about it, boys? Does your heart flutter, getting cookies from a girl?” Mickey grinned. Unbeknownst to her, however, she was right on the money. About Kyou, anyway.
“Well, it’s better than the M&M’s you gave me for Valentine’s, I guess,” I answered on his behalf. Normally this would be enough to satisfy her, but today she was too worked up to let Kyou off the hook.
“What about you, Kyou-kun?”
“Uhh…er…”
“Well?”
“Um, y-yeah. I’m really touched. They look great.”
“Ha ha! Glad to hear it!”
Her joy-spade swelled overhead. Kyou was always terrible with compliments, so it took a lot of courage for him to praise someone outright. Joy-spades sprang up over Looney and Elle, too. So, on behalf of the group, I gave Kyou another elbowing for good measure.
“Go on, now! Everybody dig in!”
On command, we all untied the ribbons on our bags, pulled out a cookie, and put it in our mouths. For a moment, everyone fell silent…and what happened next betrayed my every expectation.
“Holy crap, these are good?!” I blurted out without thinking.
“They are,” Looney nodded. “And there’s no way Miki-chan has any connections to a cookie factory.”
“What cookie factory?! I bought the ingredients, I made them, and now I delivered them! It was all me!”
“Mickey, these are great! The chocolate really adds something!” Elle exclaimed without a trace of sarcasm.
Beaming, Mickey thrust her fists into the air. “Yes!” Then she looked at Kyou. “What about you, Kyou-kun?”
Questioned yet again, Kyou hastily chewed and swallowed his second cookie so he could respond. It was entertaining to watch.
“Uh…y-yeah, they’re good. Really good.”
“Awesome! Good thing I took Elle’s advice!”
As she raised her fists in victory once more, I found myself quietly relieved. Not about the cookies—about Kyou and Elle. But as I would soon discover, this wasn’t the only good thing that would happen today.
“Kyou-kun, I’m going to have some of your yakisoba, okay?”
As Elle reached for Kyou’s Tupperware container with a smile, Mickey let out a tactless “What the…?”
“Weren’t you full?”
“I thought I was, but apparently not. Whenever I eat something sweet, I always start craving something salty… Yeah, thish ish really good!”
Elle grinned at Kyou, who stared back in shock. Then he smiled, too, and a joy-spade rose over his head. Words couldn’t begin to express how relieved I felt. At last, all of our problems had been solved.
“You know, I’m glad we did this,” I said suddenly.
“Right?!” smirked Mickey, the main organizer of our little event.
“When Miki-chan fails her entrance exams, let’s all get together and have a good laugh,” Looney suggested, ruining the moment. Then Mickey retaliated with a karate chop, and Kyou and Elle laughed. Spades and hearts as far as the eye could see.
Then something else occurred to me: I didn’t actually care about helping people. This was what I wanted.
And when the realization set in, it felt like my ex’s voice finally stopped reverberating in my head.
Okay, time to talk about my secret. Not that it’s all that important, mind you.
I got my first girlfriend back in junior high. Back then, I was every bit as sports-obsessed as I am now, so I didn’t know much about relationships and wasn’t that interested. Still, I had the vague understanding that romance was something that happened between close friends. So, naturally, I ended up dating my closest female friend. I was comfortable around her; she was more fun than the other girls, so I figured I probably had feelings for her. To me, it was love, and it appeared to be mutual. And so our relationship began with two sentences:
“Wanna be my girlfriend?”
“Ha ha! Sure!”
But about a month after we became an item, I think we both simultaneously realized that something didn’t feel right. On the way home after my club practice, we were eating ice cream when she said it out loud.
“Something doesn’t feel right.”
Then, for the first time, I realized: friendship was not the same thing as dating. Platonic love was very different from romantic love.
Looking back, we were too bashful to even hold hands with each other. So naturally, we broke up soon afterwards, and things were awkward for a while after that. But fortunately, it was only temporary, and after about a month I was ready to laugh it off. Like an idiot, I had decided that it was less embarrassing to just lean into it.
But while she laughed along with me, she must have been really embarrassed about it deep down. After all, even if she really did have romantic feelings for me, the relationship still hadn’t worked out, in the end. As far as I was concerned, we’d gone back to being regular friends and I’d gradually forgotten all about it, but for her, this shame must have deepened with each passing month. Then, on the day of our junior high graduation, she brought it back to the forefront of my mind and made me swear I wouldn’t tell anyone it happened, blushing beet-red as we made our pinky promise.
“Cross my heart and hope to die… I don’t wanna do the needle part, though,” I muttered to myself.
“Huh? What was that?” Mickey asked, glancing back at me as she rinsed out our Tupperware containers in the drinking fountain—a chore foisted upon us after we lost a round of rock-paper-scissors.
“Oh, uh, nothing.”
Maybe I couldn’t manage the needle thing, but I’d let her hit me with one of her kicks, probably.
After she washed the last container, I towel-dried it, and then we headed back to the tarp where the others were sitting. Mickey was humming to herself, enjoying our stroll through the park. And as I gazed after her, I found myself wanting to tell a friend what I’d selfishly learned about my feelings, even if I knew she wouldn’t understand it.
“Next time, it’ll be the real deal,” I said.
I was expecting her to say “huh?” and shoot me a puzzled look. But instead, she stopped humming, and her joy-spade swelled like a balloon as she looked up at the sky.
“Ditto,” she said.
“What?”
I stopped short. Likewise, she came to a stop and glanced over her shoulder.
“I took Elle’s advice,” she continued.
Then she set off walking once more. And when she spotted my best friend carrying the rest of the dirty Tupperware, she took off like a jet.
Dazedly, I watched her go. Then I started laughing.
We were all so clueless that it was kind of hilarious.