"I guess you know I like you a lot. Your friendship is the best present I ever got."
Ava’s freshman year roommate was a year older and nosy, she had gathered that much already. Cait was an artsy girl from Georgia with a southern twang and a taste for all things European. She had flunked her freshman year and despite the constant questions that Cait always asked her (like where she went to high school, what her high school was like, did she do any clubs, etc.) Ava found that she liked the inquisitive girl because she cared. For the most part, Ava had gotten around these questions by vaguely answering that she was from Washington but went to a nondescript high school in Arizona, that she didn’t have social media because she thought it was weird, but that she had been an assistant in the Library and been in both the Book and Art Club.
Cait was the one to introduce her into nightclubs, slam poetry readings at hidden cafes and the wonderful world of French lingerie. Even though Ava didn’t really care about what it was she wore underneath the paint-stained jeans and worn flannel shirts, she did find that the wonderful pad-less bras of the French variety were the most comfortable things she had ever put around her bosom despite the adverse effect the cold air of the art building had on that particular area of her body.
And it was Cait who had encouraged Ava to stay in touch with her friends—she and Papa wrote back and forth every day on email. Her friends proved a little more difficult to get a hold of since there were no pets allowed in the freshmen dorms and there was really nowhere for her to send owls back and forth from, however every now and then she would make a trip to the wizarding part of town and send an owl out to Chloe, Emery and Emrys. Ava never really wrote home to her grandfather or her friends about Cait, unsure as to how they would take the news that her roommate was a heavy chain smoker who talked too fast, walked too slow, and had a strange affection for vampire themed things.
Sometimes when she looked in the mirror, Ava wasn’t really sure if it was herself who was staring back. Ever since she’d started university in Portland, she had felt as though she was leading two separate lives. She knew her grandfather was happy that she was attending Muggle university and that the funk the past summer had put her in was over. But she also felt strange, as though Sonora had been a life time ago. What was the point? She’d asked herself, to go through all that training only for it to go to waste? She could use her magic when Cait was out, but the spells she used most often were only small ones, to keep her side of the room clean, to make sure the meat in the takeout boxes from the caf was actually cooked all the way through. She felt as though she were becoming more Muggle than witch.
Arnold was in the same city and even though it wasn’t very big in comparison to some of the other cities Ava had visited, it was still big enough that she didn’t run into him when she went around the city with Cait and her friends. She had thought, once upon a time, that she would see him more often, but being at different schools meant that they had different friends and different classes and different preferences on where to go. There was also the additional fact that she went to an all-Muggle university while Arnold’s was mixed. This made things difficult because she didn’t want to introduce Arnold to her friends and have to explain where she knew him from, plus he was living with two other wizards and Ava was frankly scared to mix her magic and Muggle lives together. Thus, like today, she tended to choose magical areas of town for them to meet in.
It was now October and Halloween was coming up. Cait had invited her to a party with some of her friends and Ava was really looking forward to it. She loved her friends from Sonora, she really did, but Cait and the others were just so relaxed in such a different way. She didn’t know how to explain it, but they made her feel invincible in ways she had never felt before. Ava had done things with them that she never thought she would have been able to do or would have ever even wanted to do. At first the smell of stale alcohol and weed had bothered her when it lingered on her clothes after a night at one of the off-campus apartments (usually Josh or Evan’s), finding the two smells some of the worst in the world, second only to the cheap cigarettes that generally accompanied the two. Now, however, all three were somewhat comforting smells and although she tended to avoid tobacco, her weekends were soon consumed by the former two.
Ava didn’t think she had a problem, per se, but she did feel as though she couldn’t tell anyone outside of the group about her weekend (and occasionally week night) activities. She hadn’t even told Chloe because then she’d have to disclose what else (or rather who else) she was doing on those evenings and she didn’t really want it getting back to Emery who she felt would be disappointed in her. Besides, Ava didn’t feel like her life was out of control and she vividly remembered Chloe breaking down as she described her whirlwind summer. It wasn’t that Ava thought Chloe would judge her—after all she was now engaging in many of the same behaviors her friend once had, but she didn’t want to bring back any bad memories for her best girl friend.
She twisted one of her many rings around her thin fingers as she waited for Arnold to arrive. She hadn’t seen her best friend in weeks and was starting to question if they were even best friends anymore or not. Usually she made sure to have a pair of clean clothes to see Arnold in, taking the time to wash her hair and scrub the old make-up from her face, feeling almost ashamed to meet with Arnold in anything but the light clothes she wore back at Sonora. However she had crashed on Josh’s couch and she hadn’t woken up in time to make it back to her dorm before her meeting with Arnold.
It would be the first time he would have seen her like this, dirty jeans and a loose black shirt (knotted in the front to make it smaller so that it pulled the bottom left hem up to expose an inch and a half of smooth stomach and the corresponding bit of wide collar down a little too close to the top of her bra) with one of Ian’s button-ups thrown over it since she hadn’t been able to find her sweater (Georgia would later call her up, apologizing for having taken it home with her on accident), the smell of Jonah’s cigarettes clinging lightly to her tangled brown hair which had been haphazardly clipped out of her eyes with a couple bobby pins on one side though most of it still fell forward past her shoulders. She had toyed with leaving it down to hide the smudged eyeliner around her eyes, but in the end had just washed her face and used some lotion to clean up most of her face because at least if she had her hair pinned back it could look like the tangles were part of the style? Yeah, Ava thought to herself as she pushed her lighter further down into her worn black purse as though to hide it from the world even though it had already not been visible, she didn’t know who she was trying to fool.
“Hey,” she said quietly when he took the seat in front of her, her voice hoarse from the joints and singing of the night previous, and pulled her mug of coffee towards her, her silver rings clanging prettily against the yellow ceramic of the cup. “Sorry about…” she lifted a hand and waved it around to indicate her appearance. “Long night. Anyway, how are you?” Despite its’ roughness Ava’s voice was still in her signature chipper tone and she offered Arnold a carefree smile. Perhaps if she acted like this was normal (which, quite honestly, it had become so) he wouldn’t ask too many questions and they could get on with the day.
Disheveled was the word that came to mind when he looked at her, but Arnold supposed he couldn’t really judge her. While his outward presentation was fairly well put-together--he’d even worn a collared shirt and bowtie, mostly to distract from the dark circles under his eyes, lingering evidence of a recent all-nighter--he had become fairly disheveled himself since beginning college. He had tried some new things, some good and some bad, and almost all at the beckoning of Smitty, one of his roommates, and when he wasn’t occupied by those things, the workload was a significant step up from Sonora. And while natural intelligence had mostly carried him through school, college demanded a lot more effort. He was retroactively quite grateful for his study sessions with Ava, because now he knew how to prepare for things. It was just unfortunate that he had to study so much more frequently here.
“No worries,” Arnold returned casually. Ava was of course always beautiful, but he didn’t hang out with her for her looks, anyway; he hung out with her because she was his best friend, a title he still awarded her now even though new people had certainly entered both of their lives. “I’m not bad,” he answered her question. “College is rough, but, y’know, it is what it is. I’ll survive it.” I always do, he added mentally, allowing himself a quick introspective moment, a rescanning of prior difficulties.
He did wonder if perhaps he ought to ask about her appearance, made a bigger deal of it. When she’d turned up to study at Sonora still in her pajamas, it was because she hadn’t slept, had spent the whole night awake tossing and turning over a difficult situation (namely Emery). For now, he decided to table the inquiry and instead make judgment on her behavior and attitude as their friend-date progressed. “How about you?” he did offer, leaving it fairly open for evasion. “Are you liking college?”
“Oh, you know,” Ava said with a shrug, her loose shirt and Jonah’s flannel slipping slightly from her shoulder. With a swift, practised move, her ring covered fingers pulled it back up and she offered him a tired but happy grin. “It’s going, it’s survivable and I’m having the time of my life.” Perhaps a little too much in Papa’s opinion if he knew, Ava thought to herself grimly, but it was her life, not her Grandfather’s and besides, he didn’t know so there was nothing to worry about. “But you don’t look too rough, I’m jealous,” she added with a laugh, commenting on Arnold’s pulled together look. “I’m lucky if I make it out the door with mostly clean clothes!”
She paused to take a sip of her coffee and frowned. There were some things she was wondering about, certain people she needed to know about, but she wasn’t sure how to segue into it all. “And the whole mixed university thing... Is that... is that going well?” Of all her friends, she guessed Arnold was probably the closest to knowing how little she used magic in her day to day life. In fact, these catch-up sessions with Arnold were probably the most magical moments of her semester. It was odd how she would occasionally crave the connection, how a small jealous monster would sometimes go crazy deep inside her when she asked Arnold about his magical classes. It was a connection that she (mostly) forgot about when she was surrounded by Muggles, something that was certainly aided with the frequent use of mind-altering substances.
“You should see my roommate,” he chuckled lightly at the mention of his appearance. Arnold was born into stress and had since made it work for him, so presentation was one of his specialties. Smitty, on the other hand, looked like a mess even when he was calm (which was basically always). “I don’t think he’s ever worn clean clothes.”
“Mixed school is so nice,” Arnold returned genuinely. “I love it. Honestly I was kind of skeptical going into it. I mean, my sister’s involved with the magical section at Harvard, so I guess I knew it could be done, but it’s so different to see it play out in front of you.” Arnold wished the whole world could be more like mixed university; admittedly, the Muggle side didn’t know about the magical side, but it was still so close, so immediate, so real. Everything was real and interconnected. And as hippie-dippy as thinking that way felt, it was honestly such a powerful sensation.
“I can only imagine,” she returned. “It really shows how happy you are.” She took another drink of the coffee and looked towards Arnold expectantly. “Are you getting anything? My treat, of course.”
The previous night, one of Evan’s friends had seen some of the things she’d drawn to hang up in his apartment and asked if she wouldn’t mind drawing him a tattoo to which, before she could even respond, the ever enigmatic Lauren slung an arm around the little freshman and tossed a raised eyebrow and a stern look the way of the tattoo hopeful. ‘And how much are you going to pay her?’’ Lauren had slurred, smoke from the cigarette she had just started curling out of her mouth in a way not too dissimilar from the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland and Ava was momentarily distracted as she watched the curlicues twist their way upwards until they disappeared. And so now she had $20 and some change more than she’d had last night and she was feeling generous with her fortune. She’d exchanged about half of it before arriving at the magical coffee shop and had already paid for her coffee but she was thinking about getting a piece of cake too--it was never too early for cake, as Lauren always said.
“Oh, yeah. I ordered before I sat down. I’m not really sure what’s taking so long,” he commented idly. Today he was trying some fancy tea that he could hardly pronounce. He didn’t really know what about it meant it had to take fifteen minutes--why couldn’t they just give him hot water and a bag?--but he supposed it would probably be worth it. Above the dull roar of the cafe-goers, he heard the woman at the counter call a number. “Oh, I think that’s me, actually. One moment.”
As he retrieved his order, Arnold couldn’t help but feel glad he had in fact ordered before he joined her at the table. He was quietly discomforted by her offer to treat him; his family had more money than they really ever could spend, and as a fairly generous person himself, he was more used to being on the giving end than the receiving. Ava, on the other hand, had definitely had financial struggles along the way. He wasn’t so absorbed in his wealth not to notice that kind of thing when present in his friends’ lives. In fact, he was certain that among his group of close friends, he was easily the richest except for maybe Emrys. The others had to work. Arnold had always been given what he wanted. And more, he thought with slight bitterness, remembering his latest package from his father. Ross Manger had taken to sending expensive gifts out of the blue a few years back, and now the man just couldn’t seem to stop.
Shaking all the money woes away, he returned to his seat, blowing gently across the spout of his beverage to cool it. “And now the big moment,” he said dramatically. Arnold sipped his tea with discernible concentration. The hot liquid dance across his taste buds, slipping down his throat. He paused for a moment, contemplating the experience. “Yeah, not worth waiting fifteen minutes,” he decided. “Anyway, where were we?”
Ava laughed at the mention of Arnold’s roommate who she had yet to meet. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to meet him (not because of anything Arnold had said but simply because things got too complicated if she started to go and mix up all the different parts of her life) and fully intended to deny any invitations from Arnold to further venture into the magical world with plausible excuses, thank you. However, that didn’t mean she didn’t like to hear about Arnold’s time in school. She was genuinely happy that he had moved on from Sonora in such a happy way. He was such a lovely person she thought he deserved every good thing that happened to him.
As Arnold got up to get his order, Ava took another sip of her coffee. She hadn’t noticed his entry, probably too lost in her own internal monologue, and hadn’t seen him placing his order. She felt bad because it was her who had picked the cafe as a meeting place but she supposed it wasn’t a horrible thing to not pay for Arnold. This way she could save her money for the next weekend. Cait had promised a trip to the coast with some of the guys and Lauren and Ava was really looking forward to the small car trip. Her share of the contraband would be paid by Charlotte, of course since Ava was sure her proper and clean mother would hate to know what use her money had been put to, but everything else Ava planned to finance with money clean of her mother.
Shortly after the large fight on her graduation, Charlotte had started to depositing a small amount of money each month into a bank account for Ava. Ava herself was kind of loathe to use it as it felt as though Charlotte were trying to pay for Ava’s forgiveness, but soon she had realized that living on her own was expensive and, in a completely un-Ava like move, she had started to use the money, a little at a time. The way she had come to see it after talking it through with Cait (leaving out the very intimate details about magic, of course) was that if Charlotte wanted to waste her money on Ava then that was just fine. Once the money was in Ava’s account she could take it and do with it what she wished, she didn’t owe anything to anyone. Ava’s grandfather had a different stance, having gotten quite stressed over the account, he thought it would sway Ava to return to the Magical world, causing a bit of eye rolling and teenage antics on Ava’s part before she finally convinced the uneasy man to relax.
Arnold returned before Ava could continue plotting what she would contribute to the next weekend’s car trip and she smiled politely at his mild joke. “That’s why I never order tea at these places,” she said with a wave of her hand. “It’s never worth it when I could just as easily do the same thing myself for half the price and half the time. But I suppose some of the money does go towards the atmosphere of it all which is quite nice.” She drank again and decided not to get the cake and waved her hand in the air in response to Arnold’s question. “I’m not sure... Magical school, maybe? I think you were talking about the merits of living the mixed life?”
He nodded, sitting his cup down on the table. Maybe it would taste better when it cooled down a bit. “Right,” he smiled. “Yeah, it’s nice. It makes you feel in the heart of it all, you know? I’m not missing out on anything.” Arnold paused briefly, considering the implications of his words. “I mean, I’m not missing out on anything except that I miss the others, but what are you gonna do?” He sipped his tea despite the goal of letting it sit, reticent to continue down this path. “Have you heard from anybody recently? Like, maybe…. Emery?”
Ava nearly choked on her coffee but recovered rather smoothly, if she did say so herself. Her fingers itched to dig into her bag and pull out her lighter, having recently required the nervous tic of playing with it when she wanted to distract her mind. But she was determined to keep everything from her muggle life away from her Magical life and so with enough self-restraint she kept it deep down in her bag. “Not anymore than the others,” she said with the only semi-practiced air of someone who did not give one ‘monkey’ about a situation. It was a tone of voice that Lauren used when she dismissed the boys who tried to hit on her and Ava admired the older girl immensely for it.
And though she had gotten better at hiding her emotions since graduating Sonora, she still wore her heart on her sleeves so while her body language showed some signs of the internal conflict going on inside her, they were only slight. Had Arnold heard of something he thought she ought to know? Was Emery seeing someone else? She had known for a long time that he could never like her like that and so it only made sense that he would find someone while he was away at college and she was eternally screwing over her life. No matter, if she showed up at the dorms heart-broken then she was certain Cait would call some of the girls over and they’d help her take her thoughts off things for a little. That would be nice, Ava mused. Lauren would probably be there and Lauren had a lovely way of helping her whenever her mind lingered too long in an upsetting thought. Lauren was probably Ava’s favorite of Cait’s friends.
She was fun and spunky, and never made concrete plans, and that was part of her allure. Ava had met her one night at one of the slam poetry readings that Cait had brought her to and was immediately captivated by the silky voice which lulled her into the most relaxed state of her life as it talked about the horrible chaotic things that were a part of her past. Ava had found out, rather quickly, that she was utterly enthralled by the way Lauren took life and turned it into what she wanted from it. Her philosophy was to never give up and to never take no for an answer. These were things that Ava had issues doing but she wanted to learn, oh how she wanted to learn. Her thoughts turned back to Emery and she felt sick to her stomach.
“Why?” she asked casually. “Did you hear something from him? Or Chloe? Is everything okay with their family?” Taking the caring friend worried about a family that had only so recently been torn apart from the death of one of it’s members seemed like the best way for Ava to squash down those horrible feelings that always seemed to creep up inside her. Feelings that Arnold knew about and likely pitied her for having since he knew just as well as she did that they could never be returned.
Now, Arnold would never say he enjoyed watching Ava squirm--that was mean and insensitive, two traits very much not in his nature--but there was a slight satisfaction in her discomfort, a small hint of his lingering frustration with his two friends. Arnold himself was by no means brave, but he had managed to reveal his feelings and desires to Ji-Eun, and despite some bumps along the way, he was happy. He didn’t get why Emery and Ava couldn’t do the same, especially when both of them liked one another. “Everything’s fine,” he returned. “I just thought maybe you had talked to him about…. You know….”
“I feel like you guys never really got closure,” he commented with forced casualness, a small shrug accompanying the words that he said so gracelessly across the top of his tea, punctuated by unsatisfying sips. “Do you still like him? At this point, you really need to either tell him or else…. Have you met anyone at school that piques your interest?”
“Yes!” Ava exclaimed rather quickly and without thinking. Nevermind that it was a lie, nevermind that Ava didn’t think she was ever going to get over Emery--at least that’s how she felt at the moment, but she was not going to give Arnold the satisfaction of pushing her out of her comfort zone. She didn’t like feelings, she didn’t like expressing her feelings, and she didn’t like how Arnold was pushing her to admit them. So she did the thing she was best at--running and hiding from them. “There’s this...” and she trailed off. It wasn’t completely a lie now that she thought about it. She’d had feelings like this before, but because of Emery she had realized they weren’t real.
Now, however... Now Emery wasn’t around and Ava was finding that there was one particular person who she liked being around. She liked being around this person as much as possible, when they put their arm around her for a hug hello or when they complimented her she felt tiny butterflies in her stomach--all things present when she received the same attention from Emery but because when it happened with Emery it was one a much higher scale, she had ignored it. Up until this point. Perhaps she would never like this person as much as she liked Emery, but because of her stupid meddling friend, Ava realized she couldn’t deny that she did like this person, at least enough to want to kiss them.
Arnold raised a red eyebrow, a bit sceptical of how quickly she had blurted out her response. Ava wasn’t one for the touchy-feely thing--as evidenced by her stubborn refusal to express them to Emery--so he had kind of expected her to take the easiest route away from them. Still, the way she trailed off, despite being a bit suspicious, actually made him feel more secure that she was telling at least a partial truth. “This….?” he coaxed, wondering how far he could push before her impulsive hotheadedness got the best of her and she poured her coffee on him. “There’s a someone? What are they like?”
Without thinking, he found himself using a gender-neutral pronoun, not because he had any knowledge of Ava ever having had feelings for a girl in the past but because…. Well, he didn’t know. Ava had always felt… free, in an inexplicable, undefinable way. No matter the sex of the person she was apparently crushing on, Arnold doubted he would be surprised. They were quite different people aside from their shared love of art, but somehow, he just felt like he understood Ava. Maybe she understood him too. Or maybe he was completely off-base. Eh, who knew?
Pleased that Arnold had moved on from interrogating her about the one person that Ava was never able to fully state out loud to anyone other than herself in the privacy of her own bedroom, Ava smiled generously at her friend. “Just a friend of my roommate’s,” Ava said, unsure exactly into how much detail she wanted to go into how they had met, how they all hung out. Sure it had been slam poetry that had been the very first meeting, but shortly after that they had gone to a friend’s where Lauren had gotten very high and Ava had gotten very drunk and tried weed for the first time. And even though Ava was happy with where she was in life, being around Arnold and thinking about it almost made her feel something quite similar to...shame.
“She’s a poet,” Ava elaborated. “Really good, actually, we met at one of her readings. But...I don’t know how serious it is... I don’t even know if she’s into me like that. I only just realized it myself a little while ago, I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone about it. It’s just...everyone is friends and I don’t want to mess up the dynamic.” Now that the subject was no longer Emery, Ava felt as though she could freely talk about her feelings. She was unconscious to how her problems regarding Lauren reflected those regarding Emery and if her situation were a novel up for analysis in a lit class, the professor would have been sure to point out that this was one of the reasons she was attracted to Lauren, because even though she and Emery were so very different, at least in this they were similar.
But Arnold noticed, mentally commenting, Well, doesn’t that sound familiar. “She sounds cool,” he replied. “The only way to find out is to just go for it, though. Otherwise, you just have to wonder forever.” So maybe he wasn’t purely commenting on this situation, trying to be subtle. He glanced down at his coffee cup, swishing it lightly and finding, despite having no real memory of drinking it, that it was now empty. The light shining in the window caught his eye next. “Hey, what do you say we get another round of coffee to go and go take a walk? It’s pretty nice out today.” October in Portland could be a bit brisk, but his light sweater was enough for him, and if Ava ended up cold, he wouldn’t mind sharing. “You can tell me all about her. Only if you want to, of course.”