For several days, his feelings, his new strategy, and his whereabouts were unknown to me. After such a discussion, being cut off from him made me feel like I was on a desert island, and I spent much of my free time, in all the metaphorical sense, kicking up sand, pacing about the shore, and cursing to myself in frustration. I was trying to decide if I preferred this to the old days, when I had no idea why he would stop responding to me. No. I never preferred, in any way, when he left me like this. In fact, I grew to be even more angry than I ever had before when I considered the circumstances. Any time I was mad, he would follow me, because he could follow me, but he had set it up so if he wanted to sulk about something or other forever, I couldn’t stop him.

When Giry texted me late Thursday night, I figured she just wanted to catch up. "If it's okay, I'd love to talk soon,” seemed to suggest nothing else. At the time, however, I’d been contemplating using my key to go up to the theater’s attic and stare out the window until I saw someone arrive. I’d already planned it all out – if anyone besides Erik started climbing the stairs towards that room, I’d hide in the wardrobe. I told Giry, vaguely, that I might try meeting him, but she wasted no time responding, and she seemed bent on it. She said she was already at the school, finishing a project, and that if I could just walk up there, she’d get “right to the point.”

So I went up the hill. I stared down the theater road to an empty parking lot, surrounded in trees yielding to wind. My hair was flapping just about everywhere, but it didn’t bother me as much as it usually would have. I wanted to know what this was about. I was in control of what I knew, today, and I wasn’t going to take it for granted.

She was already there, up front, waiting to drive away, when I came sprinting for the front doors, expecting to find her in the entrance hall, or somewhere obvious. I turned around and came to her when she called my name. I opened the passenger door and lowered. I smiled and greeted her. “You wanted to see me?” There was no smile on her face.

“Yeah,” she answered. She turned her key in the ignition, then asked if I minded us going back to her house. I didn’t mind. She pulled out just after I said so, looked both ways, and turned onto the main street.

“So-“

“What did Erik say to you last time you saw him?” I gave her a clear question of why she wanted to know in my face, and she picked up on it when driving permitted her to. “I think we should compare notes.” She found I took too much time trying to word it and said, expressionlessly to the road in front of her, “he knows you’re talking to Mariam, doesn’t he? And he's not happy about it.”

“No. Did he tell you this?”

“He’s told me a lot of things, lately, and it’s getting kind of… Well, first, I’d like to know what it is he’s said to you.”

I was taken aback by the authority in her voice as she asked me to do something that I had told myself many times I would do carefully, or not at all. And yet, the tone told me now was the time to stop holding back. She knew something. She knew enough that what I said wouldn’t be news. I somehow felt it.

She was watching the road, but I looked at her anyway, and I said as calmly as ever that Erik despised Mariam, and he told me quite clearly that he would become as territorial as she did friendly. “He’s taking everything the wrong way, and he thinks I’m letting go of him because I’m worried our relationship isn’t practical. He wants me to choose him and only him, and I told him I wouldn’t, and now he hasn’t spoken to me all week.”

She may have acknowledged what I said, but she concentrated on getting us through the neighborhood and into the driveway, where she stepped out and eyed her surroundings before proceeding, as if she worried we were being watched. I knew to follow her up steep wooden steps to her porch, and she gestured for the upstairs when I stopped at the doorframe, holding her screen door open behind me. The curtains were closed, and they left the room in a shadow beside the kitchen. She didn’t open them when she joined me, but she lit a lamp on the table by the couch, and she sunk in to the seat, first facing straight forward, then shifting suddenly to my direction.

“Are you worried about him yet? Please tell me you are.”

I tried to dissolve my own inhibition under her stare. I crossed my arms and said, simply, “of course.”

“Good. Because you should be,” she replied.

“Why are you suddenly telling me this?”

“I’ve just had enough¸ really.”

“You guys talk more often than I thought, then-“

“I’ve heard enough from him to last me a lifetime.” The comment seemed to make me uncomfortable, and she caught me growing stiff. “I’m really, sorry, Lily. I know the kind of thing you’ve had with him, I just don’t-… I’m convinced now that he’s more trouble than good.” My eyes widened.

“What happened?” I asked, and I felt myself slide to the end of my seat. She was sitting rather far away from me, I realized.

“Well, you know I’ve gotten texts from him here and there, for a while, and I text him.”

P.S. The first time I saw this I was like "oh geez, Lily and "Erik"."