"Oh my gosh so tell me everything that happened again," Rosa flails her hands around like a stereotypical teenager. Her blonde hair sways along with her excitement. "So I can tell when you'll get married."
"What?"
"Oh my goodness like this totally means she's into you. You're totally gonna get married. I get first dibs on bridesmaid dresses, right?"
Mrs. Davis pokes her head through Rosa's door frame. "Is there anything I can do for you two? Ollie? We have your favorite, fruit snacks."
Fruit snacks actually do sound pretty good right now. "Sure, I'll have some fruit snacks," Rosa eyes me with playful confusion, even though she knows my favorite food is fruit snacks. They have been for the past eighteen years, I guess. Mrs. Davis leaves with a sincere smile, eyeing Rosa and I mischievously.
"Wait. Wait, wait. Woah. You don't know what this means, do you?" Rosa's eyes light up. She lets out a little squeal and then calms down, her hands folded neatly in her lap. "Okay. There's a couple possibilities of what could have happened in the library today. Option number one is that she could have seen something that caught her eye at the same time that you helped her get up. Option two is highly likely, though. She could have seen," she stops talking, as if she is trying to decide whether or not to tell me. The fruit snacks are gone, so I don't have any suspense food to nibble on. I settle for my fingernails. Rosa grabs the side of my head, moves it closer to hers, and cryptically whispers, "The color."
"What?"
"Color. She could have seen the age-old myth, color. My parents told me that they saw this thing called color when they met for the first time, and I've always believed them, since I was a little girl. I never thought it could be real!" Rosa gets up from her bed and does a little dance. She paces the room nervously.
"Okay," I say, nodding my head. Color. Yeah right. I've heard about it a couple times, in books and those sappy romance movies that my mom made me watch when I was eleven for some reason. It was always treated as a legend. "How would you know this? You've had so many crushes I don't even know where to start. There's no way you could have fallen in love with your soulmate at...what? Eighteen? Nineteen?"
She sighs dramatically. "Nineteen in October. God, it's like you don't even know me!" Rosa punches me in the arm, and I'm ashamed to say it kind of hurt. "Plus, I do know this because I think I might have seen a glimpse of color about three months ago, when I went to the McDonald's on Woodham. It was so weird because like when the guy at the drive-thru window gave me my bag of food, I dropped my debit card and we accidentally touched hands. In that moment, I knew Adrien
from McDonald's was the one for me. I've mapped out his shift schedule, and," she pulls this time-sheet out of nowhere, and it is organized to the tiniest detail. Just like I thought it would be. "I can make it every other Tuesday from six to nine for the next three weeks, but then he switches to the morning shifts on Wednesdays and Fridays for the next few months. Also, I've heard that he might have to work from nine to-"
"Okay, I understand. You like this guy."
Rosa giggles again. "Yeah," she says with a shudder, and her eyes flicker shut for a moment. "I just want to make sure I get it right. Carmela's guy-" She tries to hold back tears. A few tears escaped from her eyes that were clamped shut. "Her best friend turned out to be the one for her. They were ecstatic for years, and were itching to get married when they got of age to legally say the two words that tie you down forever, but when he got to be about seventeen, he started to spiral deep into chronic mental illness. No one knew what was going on until the night before the wedding, which was on her eighteenth birthday. They were going to have the perfect wedding. There were to be flowers, and beautiful music, and everything she and her best friend wanted. It was going to be a great day for both of them." She takes a deep breath. "They discovered his body the morning of the wedding, and ever since that dreadful morning, Carmela has vowed never to treat anyone as lesser than her, because she knows anything could be the last time she speaks to them. I love her so much for that."
"Oh, I had no idea." Carmela seems like the sweetest person in the world. Now that I know why she is how she is, I appreciate her even more than ever before. But, why didn't I hear about this earlier? I'll ask later.
"It's been four years, and she hasn't backed down from her promise. We haven't fought in so long, and she is so happy. I don't know how she does it. I would fall apart. Grief isn't pretty. It isn't like... like in the movies, where you walk around in the beautiful black dresses, where you hide away, and...emerge, and instantly everything is okay. Grief is a bloody mess. Grief hunts you down, and... and strikes you with all the force it has. It is merciless, and when think it's gone, it... it shows itself in the smallest things, in the smell of his shirts, in the movies he used to watch, in the jokes he used to tell. Once it thinks you've suffered enough, it... it goes out hunting for its next victim."
"Woah, there, Rosa! You got very deep very quickly. Did you come up with that?"
"Nah, I read it somewhere. I think someone shared it in creative writing. You like it?"
"Yeah. Look, that's not the point. The point is," Inhale. "Why didn't I know about this before? We've been best friends for as long as I can remember."
"I'm sorry, Ollie. I just never thought you were the type of person that would like to hear me ramble on about it. I don't know..." her cheeks flush with a darker shade of
[unfinished chapter]
