A Different Kind of Us

Chapter 2

It wasn't fair. It wasn't goddamn right. She had made so much progress in getting over Ada. Her first year of college, she hadn't been able to go a day without thinking about her, even though they were hundreds of miles apart and hadn't spoken since the summer. Her stomach had felt punctured every time she walked to class or sat down to eat in the student center. Even with all the new friends she was making, she had still felt so lonely--like they would never understand her the way Ada had.

But Sutton had forced herself through all that. By her sophomore year, Ada had become a thing of the past. A phantom. Sutton had filed away all her photos of her. She had even deleted her phone number.

And then she had reinvented herself into someone Ada didn't know. It was the ultimate healing tactic. She met new people, pushed herself to try new things, listened to music Ada would have spurned. Late in college she had started hooking up with girls and, somewhere in the back corner of her mind, she felt a sweet satisfaction knowing that Ada would never know.

By the time she'd started law school, she had forgotten Ada all together.

But this morning, when Ada had walked into the conference room, it was like none of that evolution mattered. Suddenly Sutton was 18 years old again, flailing in Ada's presence.

It was too much. Sutton needed to talk to someone who would understand.

"Hello?" Amber's voice said through Sutton's iPhone.

"Tell me how old I am," Sutton said.

"What?"

"Tell me how old I am."

"Er--dude, I don't know, didn't you just turn 25 last month?"

"Hold on, are you actually uncertain about that?"

Amber laughed with that old familiar laugh she'd had in college--the same one she'd had when Sutton first met her. "You're the one who's asking how old she is," Amber said. "What's going on?"

Sutton flopped onto her old bed and stared up at the ceiling, where a faded poster of Fall Out Boy remained taped to the plaster. 

"Fall Out Boy is fucking stupid," Sutton said.

"What? Sutton, are you on something right now?"

"No. Sorry. I'm staring at a picture of them that I taped to my ceiling when I was, like, 15. Which was a long time ago, right? I'm not still a teenager? I really am 25?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Sutton let out a big breath. "Do you remember me telling you about my friend Ada? From high school?"

"That girl you were like obsessed with?"

"I wasn't obsessed with her."

"If you say so, boss. What about her?"

"She works at Cyntera."

Amber was silent on the other line, waiting.

"I saw her today," Sutton continued. "On my first fucking day of work. She just waltzed in to the company meeting we were having, looking exactly the same, except older."

"Damn. What'd she do when she saw you?"

"We stared at each other like Oh fuck and then we both looked away. I have no idea what the rest of the meeting was about."

"Is she still as beautiful as she was in those pictures you had?"

Sutton let out a mirthless laugh, remembering the 18-year-old Ada who had adorned her freshman dorm walls. "I think she's even more beautiful."