The Science of Growing Apart

4- Eleanor

I didn't think that I would be nervous to reunite with Eleanor until I parked on the curb outside of her house. I've known Eleanor since I was fourteen and she helped me through the hardest time of my life. My dad, at no fault of his own, had been arrested for something he didn't do and I was thrown into the foster system.

She helped me make sense of the things that were happening and acted as a mentor figure for me throughout my teen years. I was excited to see her again after not having seen each other, or spoken outside of the Instagram comment section, in a year.

However, as I stared at the front door, I wondered if Casey would be there too? I knew he didn't live with his older sister, but he could be visiting. He lived nearby, it was possible. My weird relationship with Casey was the reason I wasn't close with Eleanor anymore.

We were the best of friends all the way through high school. He was the most empathetic, smart, and protective person I'd ever met. Just like his sister. And what I needed most when I was fourteen was to feel protected. He made me feel safe and he reminded me that although there is a lot of bad in the world, there is a lot of good too.

I thought he cared about me as much as I adored him, but when he went to Massachusetts to study at Harvard, it was like he fell off the face of the Earth.

Phone calls were distracted and short, texts came off as bored and uninterested. I knew that having a long distance best friend would be hard, but I didn't think that it would be impossible. I thought we'd both fight for our friendship, because it meant so much to us. But when the phone calls faded into nothing and my texts got left on read, I realized that maybe it only meant so much to me.

It had been six years since we'd spoken at all other than a quick small talk conversation at Eleanor's wedding four years ago, and the only updates I got about him were through his sister's social media. I knew he graduated from Harvard really early and then even picked up some national attention when he received his doctorate degree last year, at only twenty-three. Eleanor posted last year that he got a job at an environmental lab downtown and had moved back home.

Eleanor was always clearly confused and disappointed that my and Casey's friendship didn't last, but I never asked her why. I didn't think she even knew either. I didn't want to cling to a friendship that wasn't viable anymore, so I never asked her about him. If he wanted me out of his life, I had to take that hurt and accept it rather than annoy Eleanor with it. But it was exhausting to be around her without asking her a thousand questions about how Casey was doing and why he ghosted me during freshman year of college.

So, slowly, I lost contact with her too.

Until today.

I wasn't prepared to give Eleanor the news about Shiloh, to inform her that she had a long lost little sister in the world, but I knew that it had to come from me, straight from the source. I'd spent all of my free time that week doing research, corroborating Shiloh's story, and from all of the sources I could find, I was all but certain that she was telling the truth.

I just had to knock on that front door and give Eleanor the news.

It took longer than I was willing to admit to give myself enough of a pep talk to get out of the car and start walking across the street to the house.

I had been to the house a few times, and the brown stone and beige paneling of the upper middle class house looked familiar. They had a nicely landscaped lawn with a flower bed of purple and white flowers, some organized bushes, and a cement snail that stared at me as I approached. Through the slats of the blinds on the wide front window, I could see a cartoon playing on the TV inside.

I knocked on the looming black door three times, held my breath, and waited.

There wasn't much of a wait until it was swinging open and Eleanor's familiar face stood across from me, only the screen door separating us.