It was the four of us— me, Hannah, Aaron and Kyle— sitting around in Hannah’s living room after a board game night that probably ended with me making Aaron so mad he packed everything away. I had lots of tricks for that. Like moving my little piece off the board when we played Monopoly as a protest of capitalism, or reclaiming America for my Indigenous ancestors in Risk, and then refusing to conquer any other continent.

Hannah and Aaron had only been dating a year and some change at that point, so pissing him off was still a bit of a sport for me. Kyle and I had already broken up.

We were all home for winter break our freshman year of college, bringing back a weekly high school tradition just to have a reason to see each other, and something to talk about other than “how are classes going”, and, “so are you seeing anyone new”.

Aaron, who was sitting on the floor, tipped his head back against the couch by Hannah’s thigh and said, “I need to put air in my tires.”

Hannah said, “What, like right now?” which I agreed with on principal, but didn’t care enough about to get involved in. Secretly I was hoping he’d go. They picked their college together, so I never saw her without him anymore. I missed her chronically. Even when she was sitting just a few feet away.

I was laying on my back with my legs above my head, bare feet pointed up towards the ceiling. Every so often Kyle would swat at my ankles, and I’d kick his chair.

“Well I should do it before I forget,” Aaron said about his tires. I agreed, and Hannah glared at me because she knew what I was doing.

“I’ll go with you then,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me anymore.

“...And just leave Devon and Kyle at your house without you? Dear, you’re the one hosting.”

Aaron was a boy scout, and it showed. He had an innate understanding of The Way Things Should Be Done that eclipsed all other agendas, including spiting me. It was something that, if pressed, I might have admitted to admiring about him.

“We could all go,” Kyle offered, because of course he did.

“...you all want to come... to watch me put air in my tire?”

“Twin-gers gotta stick together!”

They were both gingers. It was the center of a lot of their bonding. When Kyle and I were going out my mom used to announce his presence at the door by shouting “Meghan, Prince Harry’s here to see you” through the house. She also, less flatteringly, used to call him Wonder Bread. His dad thought I was a fag though, and despite it being (half) true I figured that made us even.

“I’ll go for the car ride,” I said, “but not if I have to put shoes on.”

Hannah shook her head, “It’s freezing out. I’ll get you clean socks to borrow if you don’t want to put your own back on.”

“It’s not about the sock thing, I’m not putting on shoes for this bullshit.”

“You’re going to get hypothermia on the way to the car.”

Kyle grabbed one of my ankles.

“I’ll carry you. To the car. If you want.” he said, because of course he did.

“Deal.”
Aaron drove an impractically large orange pickup truck held together by duct tape and prayer. He and Hannah took the driver and passenger seat respectively. I walked to the shoe mat and stood in the doorway, and Kyle turned around just on the other side and squatted to let me jump onto his back. He caught me behind the knees, hitched me up so my forearms weren’t digging into his adams apple. We did this more often now than we had before the breakup.

“Did you lose weight?”

“Probably.” Definitely. Though, not on purpose. I couldn’t stand college dining hall food. My parents were both fantastic cooks, and a spoiled childhood had left me picky. Kyle knew this theoretically, despite never having eaten with my family. He found anything more elaborate than pizza and chicken tenders “too spicy”, so to save myself the embarrassment I never had him over around meal times.

The door handle was a struggle, when we made it to the truck. He had to knock my knee into the side of the car to grab it, and even then he could barely hook his fingers under the lip. There were a litany of ways I could’ve made it easier for him, but he didn’t ask for my help, so I chose to complain instead about how long it was taking, and the few times he came close to letting me fall. When he finally managed it he turned around, and I let go of his neck and landed on my back across both seats. Aaron was shaking his head like he wanted to laugh, but wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. Hannah was staring dead forward. Her reflection in the windshield looked less amused.

“Not so hard,” Kyle said, climbing in after me, “she weighs nothing these days.”

I kicked him, even though he thought he was paying me a compliment.

Aaron drove to the Wawa on 206. There were closer gas stations, but none of us could agree on which ones had free air pumps. That meant going through the circle that Aaron drove loops in after prom. I was always a little hopeful he’d do it again, though I knew he wouldn’t because it made Hannah furious. She couldn’t stand careless drivers.

The sky was blueing on the edge of black, evening about to be night, but it felt much later. We were all feeling that “second wind” sort of awake. More alive than we’d been by daylight, or maybe just a bit wired. The Wawa sign was bleeding yellow light. I lay on my back to look at it from below, how it illuminated the streaky fingerprints on the window.

Aaron got out to fill his tires, which took so little time it made the drive feel ridiculous. I spent some time needling the other two people in the car, though I ran out of steam for it quicker than I’d’ve liked.

We were across the street from the Vincentown Diner. Aaron pointed it out when he got back in the truck.

“They have a really good Reuben,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s what you got the other day.” Hannah said to him, and then turned around in her seat to face Kyle and I, “We’ve started going there for lunch like every week. It’s on the way when we’re driving home from Arcadia.”

Kyle said something nice, and, I, for once, said nothing at all. It wasn’t as if I enjoyed upsetting her. But more than that I was starting to hate the way she looked at me when I got snarky or cutting. Equal parts exasperation, which I could tolerate, and pity, which I could not.

Kyle sighed, “Awe man, now I’m craving a Reuben.”

“I could go for another one.”

Kyle nudged my shoulder, “What do you think, you hungry?”

“Not really, but I fucking love diner hot chocolate.”

“Oh my god it’s the best! I don’t know what makes it so much better than any other hot chocolate, but it is.”

“Right?”

“So we’re going?”

Aaron shrugged, “I don’t see why not.”

Hannah, who had been volleying between the three of us with a look that screamed how are you missing the incredibly obvious problem here, took a deep breath, blew out sharp through her nose, and said, “Devon’s not fucking wearing shoes.”

I looked down, and curled my bare toes experimentally. Somehow I had honestly forgotten. Aaron sighed.

“Dammit, Devon.”

“Well it’s not like I planned to get out of the car!”

“Who leaves the house without shoes on? It shouldn’t matter what the plan is!”

“I bet I could get away with it,” I said, and the car got quiet. “I bet no one would actually notice, if I didn’t make it a whole big thing.”

“Absolutely not.” Hannah glared at me, then at Kyle, who seemed to be considering the idea, “I go to this diner once a week. Do you know how hard it is to find a diner that does good gluten free food? Absolutely not.”

“I’m serious! I really think if I just... walked with confidence. I mean, who’s going to be staring at my feet?” I really wasn’t hungry, but I was quickly becoming enamored by the idea of getting away with something.

“If you get me kicked out of this diner I will kill myself,” she jabbed a finger in my face, “and then the rest of you will have to die too because our friendgroup has so many fucking suicide pacts that there will be no one left standing.”

Kyle raised his hand, “Um, I’ve never made a suicide pact with anyone.”

I shrugged, “Fine then, guess you get to live on alone.”

“Ah fuck it. Kill me before you kill yourself?”

“Deal.”

“Dear,” Aaron put a hand on Hannah’s arm, “I really want a Reuben.”

“If we get kicked out I will just fucking die. I mean it. I’ll ruin everyone’s Christmas.”

“Technically I’m Wiccan now.”

“It’ll ruin Yule too.”

“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile, “if I get caught I’ll pretend not to know you.” Which seemed to satisfy her well enough.

The plan we came up with was for Kyle to carry me from the parked car to the entry ramp, just out of sight of the windows. This minimized both the amount of time I’d spend walking barefoot through a freezing parking lot, and the corresponding likelihood of me stepping on anything dangerous. This plan was Kyle’s idea. Because of course it was.

I was laughing the whole way through the parking lot, thrilled by the mild indecency of our adventure. Kyle wasn’t helping any, hamming it up, speeding up just to stop abruptly, and threatening to drop me every few feet. By the end I was shrieking, we could not have been more conspicuous had we tried. He set me down just out of sight of the window. Hannah and I locked eyes.

“Do. Not.” She mouthed, and I smiled like I didn’t know what she meant.

Hannah rarely liked my decisions, but she loved me. It was the one irrefutable fact of my existence. There was nothing I could do that would stop her loving me, my frequent tests of her patience notwithstanding. That’s what it meant to have a Best-Fucking-Friend since third grade. We’d grow old together, and die together, and she’d love me whether she liked me or not.

Hannah and Aaron went in first, Kyle and I just behind them. I linked arms with him, and tried to tuck myself so far into his body that no one could see my feet even if they were looking.

“What are ex boyfriends for, I guess,” he said, as I tried to angle myself out of view from the hostess.

“Shut up, meat shield.”

I slid into the booth before him, and tucked my feet under my thighs. The hostess walked away and I smiled like a cat, “Told you.”

The waitress came and took our orders. I was smiling too wide and Kyle couldn’t stop laughing, and someone kicked my knee under the table, but the waitress didn’t go around doing a shoe check or anything, just scribbled a few short notes on her pad and left. Both Kyle and Aaron ordered burgers, which set Hannah off about the whole reason we came in at all. I was giddy, nearly lightheaded. I couldn’t stop laughing. Kyle was staring at me with all the wonder that had once made me think I’d love him.

“I can’t fucking believe you.”

“What?”

“How the hell did you just... I can’t fucking belive you’re sitting here!”

“It’s all about confidence,” I said, but Hannah shook her head.

“No, it’s about your sheer dumb luck. Everything just sort of working out for you is basically your superpower.”

I shrugged. She was right. My entire life up until that point had been an object lesson in gliding.

“You’re incredible,” Kyle said. It sounded so kind, but it wasn’t a compliment. Or at least I refused to take it as one.

We ate, and we talked about the mean girl from high school whose boyfriend left her for the Marines— or maybe it was for her sister, which is how we got onto the fact that Kyle went out with sisters before me. I said that he only ever dates girls who seem likely to set his car on fire. He said are you including yourself in that? and I said, equal parts sincere and adamant, yes. We talked about which classes seemed unnecessarily hard, and which professors had it out for us and why. Aaron said something a little snide about my art major, and I thought about calling him a trust fund baby again— he barely spoke to me for a week the first time, until Hannah threatened to lock us in a band practice room for our whole lunch hour— but I summoned up the fledgling scraps of my college-fed maturity and decided against it.

When the food was done and Aaron had paid (and subsequently refused to accept cash. I’d hide a twenty somewhere in his car later) we left the diner with far less care than we entered, nearly sprinting for the door. Kyle scooped me up onto his back on the threshold. It was pitch black out now, and cold.

“You’re something else, you know that?” he kept saying while I laughed, “You’re really something else.”

I took our picture. Just my face over his shoulder with the parking lot light glowing orange overhead.

“This is good practice for when you have kids, Kyle,” Aaron said as he tried to maneuver me into the truck’s back seat. That thought sat a little funny with me, so I tried not to hold onto it.

Aaron got the truck started, the heating system rattled and wheezed to life, while we all sat there rubbing our hands, my finger curling over my frostbitten toes. Hannah turned around to smile at me.

“Either God loves you, or the devil needs you for something.”

It was something a teacher had said about me once, that she felt bore repeating. I did my best to look devilish.

“Whatever works, right?”

Aaron pulled away. I watched out the window as we left behind the diner, the Wawa, The White Dotte which was closed for the season, and the massage parlor that was closed for a prostitution scandal. Then it was all bald corn fields and empty pastures, and a line of black silhouette pines on the horizon that I refused to feel nostalgic for.

“You can really get away with just about anything, can’t you?” Kyle asked the back of my head. In the split second before thinking better of it I replied.

“For as long as you’ll let me.”

-Devon Borkowski

Devon Borkowski is a writer, artist, and actor from the New Jersey Pine Barrens. She graduated from Rutgers New Brunswick class of 2022, with a BFA in Visual Arts. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Dillydoun Reveiw, The Closed Eye Open, and Room Magazine.