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Liam

T he last time I saw Alana Fitzpatrick was the morning of our high school prom.

Before I could muster up the courage to ask her to be my date, Teddy informed me that I would be going with one of the cheerleader twins. Lenny hadn’t been all that bothered by the whole thing when I told her, so I assumed she was fine with the idea of going to the prom on her own. She wouldn’t have been on her own because even though we were saying we had dates, we would have all hung out in a big group. But she also wouldn’t have an official date, and I didn’t want her to be caught off guard by it.

Her indifference to the whole thing made much more sense when I discovered that by the morning of our prom, she knew she was leaving the state before we officially finished senior year.

How she managed to get out of a graduation ceremony where she was our year’s valedictorian, I never found out. But she managed it, and so, with no warning, I had to spend the last few weeks of my high school career explaining that no, I didn’t know where my best friend had gone and pretend that I wasn’t dying inside.

I’d had a mostly great high school career. My senior year was the cherry on top of that particular sundae, but whenever I thought back to those years, I could only remember two things: one, was how good it felt to put a trophy in the high school trophy cabinet, and the second was the look of surprise on Lenny’s mom, Stassie’s, face when I’d called to check on her after prom had finished and she realised she was going to be the one to tell me that Alana had already gone to Michigan for college.

Michigan.

I hadn’t even realised that she had applied to UoM, let alone been accepted and chosen to go.

Suddenly, the future that I had planned was a blank page and I had to figure out how to be a person without Lenny doing life right by my side.

Twelve years ago, I said ‘See you later’ to my best friend not knowing that I wouldn’t see her again. A feat that was especially impressive because I moved to the same city she’d fled to four years ago. I had put a lot of work into avoiding running into a woman who had cut herself cleanly out of her own life. I could only assume that she put equal effort into avoiding me because my arrival in Detroit wasn’t exactly a secret.

I wouldn’t have thought it to be true, given how much time had passed, but it turned out that I could still pick her out in a crowd. I still knew the exact slope of her shoulders, the cut of her jaw, and the way it led into her long neck. That one curl at the nape that never stayed tied up after she singed it off when we were thirteen because she thought having straight hair would make her less of a target to the taunts of teenage girls. I could spot the silver ring she started wearing on her thumb when we were fifteen from a mile off because she was always losing it, and I was always finding it. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was still doing the former and who was now doing the latter.

I hadn’t seen my best friend for twelve years and now we were both standing there, facing each other, in Detroit Metropolitan Airport two weeks before Christmas.