The Way We Learned to Love ✓

12 - lily

march-june 2014 : 6 years and 3 months ago

Ben didn't make the mistake of bothering Lily ever again. The fight was all people wanted to talk about for a few days, but even the most dramatic of events wouldn't change the fact that high schoolers had really short attention spans and never focused on one thing for too long. It was quickly forgotten as everyone moved on to whatever the newest gossip was.

The rest of the school year was fairly uneventful. As the weather warmed back up again, it became Henry and Lily's routine to hang out and go grab McFlurries once a week. He would even let Katie tag along if she wanted to, which she usually did - neither girl was one to turn down free ice cream. Lily enjoyed seeing Katie and Henry start to warm up to each other a little bit. After all, they were her two best friends.

As she sat in her backyard with them, soaking in the sun and listening to Henry talk about some book he just read, it was hard to believe that they ever weren't friends. The person she had thought Henry was, hostile and cold, was becoming more and more of a distant memory. A figment of her imagination. It still baffled her that the boy who used to be so mean to her was the same one who now patiently put up with her Taylor Swift music in the car and constant desire for attention and hugs.

Those irritating noises she heard at night wouldn't go away and she began to have more trouble concentrating in school. Her brain didn't seem to want to latch onto any piece of information for more than a few seconds. She asked her mom to get her some melatonin, reasoning that her lack of sleep must have been the root of the problem. It helped somewhat and Lily managed to persevere through the rest of the school year. Her grades didn't slip enough for anyone, herself included, to think it was anything too significant.

And then, at the very beginning of June, came Henry's graduation. She tried not to let on how bittersweet she was feeling - she was proud of him, of course, but he hadn't even left for college yet and she already missed him. She was scared of being left behind and their friendship slipping between the cracks of everything else he was going to be busy with. She really loved their year at school together, even throughout the complicated parts, and it felt like a cruel joke played on her by the universe that they finally got to be friends and finally came to love each other only for it to immediately be time for him to move on to bigger and better things.

The college acceptances had started coming in early April. One by one, he was accepted to every single school he applied to and was offered huge amounts of scholarship money by most of them. She was purposely avoiding any conversation about the topic at all costs, but the last she overheard was that he wanted to go to Chicago.

Chicago. That was a seven-hour drive away. There was no way he would have the time to come see her before Thanksgiving. She didn't know how to handle going from seeing him almost every day to only once every few months.

But she didn't want to ruin his excitement, so she was keeping her mouth shut about it for as long as possible and praying he wouldn't notice. She tried her best to ignore the tightness in her throat every time she thought about saying goodbye.

Henry's June birthday made him one of the youngest kids in his grade; his eighteenth birthday didn't come until shortly after his graduation. Lily woke up late that morning after yet another night of sleeping poorly. She was tempted to go back to sleep, but it was nearly 11:00 already and she needed to call him. She was surprised that neither of her parents had woken her up, although they had been letting her sleep in a lot more now that school was out. She sat up in bed and grabbed her phone.

Lily clicked on his contact in her phone (his name had been changed to simply "loser") and cleared her throat with the full intent of launching into a fabulous rendition of "Happy Birthday" but was met by a weird buzzing noise when he picked up.