Matilda rubbed her eyes, hard. The hold music was driving her insane. She tapped her pen against the stack of essays that had her pet, silent but no less needy, and smacked her jaw as if she was chewing gum. A click, a blessed moment without music, then a young man's voice. Matilda spelled out her name.

"Huh, oh, any, why," said the service representative. It spoke to Matilda's distraction that it took her a good five seconds to realise that he had understood her. "So how can I help today, Miss Honey?"

"Ms," said Matilda, the sound buzzing against her teeth like a wasp had flown into her mouth. "Yeah, I just need to cancel the subscription, please."

"All righty, can I confirm that you are the account holder?"

"No, J Honey. Um, the account holder." Matilda couldn't bear to use any tense.

"Jay, J-A-Y?"

"No, Jennifer."

"I won't be able to discuss the details of this account with you, only with the account holder." Matilda took a deep breath.

"But the account holder has died. Is dead." That issue with tense again, oscillating between then and now. "Hello?"

"I'm just finding the page..." Matilda blinked rapidly at the ceiling, held her phone away from her mouth and did the breathing she saw women do on TV when they were in labour. "Right, okay... I'm sorry for your loss."

"Yuh-huh." Another silence.

"God, that's so young for these days." He must have found Jennifer's date of birth.

"Mmhmm." If she touched it, she would break, so she just wouldn't today. They rested in the pause, like they happened to both be visiting the Grand Canyon, standing side-by-side, looking into a natural chasm.

"You're gonna need to fill in a form. A real one, on paper."

"Can you just forward it to my office? The Vera List Center, 66 West 12th Street, can you find the rest, sorry, I have to go."

Matilda tapped the screen repeatedly to hang up and put her hand to her chest as her heart pounded at her ribcage like a stranger at her front door, begging to be let in.

"Hon," said Matilda, because that is what they had settled on. They had found it, sounding it out in the everyday cooing of their conversations. "Can I talk to you?"

Jennifer folded her glasses away, the framed print of Kathleen Hanna beaming above her head.

"Always, come here." She patted the spot on the couch next to her. Matilda took her place.

"Well, you know how I'm twelve now." Jennifer properly smirked. "I know from biology class that this is when people start to develop, not just puberty but also, like..." Matilda swallowed hard. "You start to get feelings for other... People."

"It's okay if you have feelings for girls. You know that I'm... Well, there's the official term but you're smart and you know that Caro isn't just my friend, right?" Matilda nodded and sputtered.

"But that's the thing, Hon, I'm not... Getting feelings. Like, I don't feel that way about anyone. But I can't find it in any books. So what's wrong with me?"

Jennifer turned her whole body towards Matilda, flooding her in a strange, fiery gaze.

"Matilda, I need you to understand this because this is really important. Just because you don't read about someone like you in a book, just because you don't see or know someone else like you, it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you."

She hadn't heard Jennifer speak like this to her. Over the phone, maybe.

"And who writes books?"

"Authors?" Jennifer rolled her eyes with endearment.

"People, Matilda. People write books. All sorts of people. Anything you don't see, you can put in a book one day so someone else reads it and sees themselves. That's how it works."

Sometimes the way Jennifer spoke made Matilda feel like she was eight again, sitting upright in her classroom. It wasn't a bad way to feel.

Caro didn't come to the funeral, which wasn't hugely surprising. The pandemic was an undeniably real thing - but it did give a bunch of people a whole lot of cover for their cowardice. Matilda knew she wouldn't ever be able to tell which was which but this simple fact wasn't enough to let go of that gap in emotional accounting. Caro had sent flowers, a note that didn't address Matilda by name. Matilda learned quickly that people couldn't speak to grief in straightforward family situations, so anything that involved adoption really flummoxed them. She cringed at the awkward attempts at condolences. Matilda felt messy enough. She needed grown ups or nothing.

Mikey was the outlier. If anyone could swagger in text, he could. It was their main form of communication. The band took Mikey on the road a lot - a small miracle of his determination, that both cemented and challenged his punk values - but rarely on the east coast. They shared the burden of Zinnia and Harry over the occasional diner bitch session. Conversation was drier than a desert on any other topic. Their trauma bond from their family of origin was too rich with in-jokes and eye rolling for Matilda to sever entirely.

yo

Hey, Mikey. What's happening?

just to warn ya, Z and H might know about the cottage

That it's sold? Wild, how?

swear I didn't tell them
they hawk Zillow

Thank you for the heads up. They've got no claim but of course that won't stop them trying, huh?

fr
like kicking back on other people's dime
isn't enough for them
just like everyone else in Florida baybeeh 🤩

You reacted with HAHA

It was the tail end of a Fancy Day in the city. Scaldingly hot coffee. Some French play that was impenetrable. They'd had bloody steaks and pomme frites to keep the theme going. Jennifer, syrupy on two medium glasses of unctuous red wine, leaned closer and rearranged her elbow to stop it from slipping off the table again. Matilda wasn't sure how they'd got onto the topic of her "special gift", especially as she hadn't acted out telekinetically for about a decade.

"I guess... It never felt like I was moving anything. It was like I could ask the thing that could move stuff to do it for me. Like gravity but the opposite? And it's been so long and maybe it was a phase. Sometimes I miss it but mainly, it's one less thing to hide, so... I dunno, sorry, I'm not that articulate when I try to talk about it." Matilda drained her glass before daring to make eye contact with Jennifer again. "Hon, don't cry."

"I'm not, I'm not," she said, though her voice trembled. She fanned her face. "You just burn so brightly and I'm not sure you even see it." She gestured to the candle on the table, creating a little wind system. Matilda caught it before the wobble became a chain of events to send to an insurance company.

Jennifer cried often because she was easily moved. She did feel sadness and injustice but then, she'd sigh. Tears came when she was happy or in awe. Matilda would trail behind her in galleries at a security guard distance as she took it all in. The world looked sweeter and kinder through Jennifer's watery hazel eyes. She let good things have a devastating effect on her and didn't apologise for it. Matilda wanted to keep her safe, to protect this sensitivity, which felt fucking impossible because of how expansive it was. Witnessing it made Matilda seem stern but someone had to keep it together when they were in public. How else to tell predators not to fuck with this fawn of a woman? For all of this fluid emotion, Jennifer had never put anything of her own shit onto Matilda.

Well, apart from those two times.

Matilda knew when she walked in the door that Agatha had died. The cottage air had an alien thickness to it. Jennifer was sitting there on top of the couch with the soft quilt, completely silent, while her body heaved. Matilda sat next to her, trying to keep her bag and keys from making a sound, as if Agatha could hear them both. They stayed like this for some time until Jennifer made this guttural noise, like she was gargling the ocean.

"I've thought about this happening for most of my life and I thought... I thought I would feel more." Matilda nodded as Jennifer's face collapsed into itself. She put her hand over Jennifer's and wondered once more about what the details of Agatha had put Jennifer through could have been.

The abuse that Matilda suffered - she still struggled to frame it that way, to use those words - was that of casual neglect. In Matilda's reckoning, it was the cause of her independence, the thing that she liked the most about herself. The idea of someone else treating a kid the way that she had been treated angered her, yes. But it was a different beast entirely to the full blown fury that scorched through her when she intimated what Agatha had done to Jennifer.

They woke up in the same spot the next morning, having fallen asleep on each other like a couple of kittens.

The other time made Matilda wince. She'd been in the city all of two weeks. Her roommates - all five of them - were cute and colourful. She eased into living with anyone other than Jennifer surprisingly well. She still didn't have the terminology but none of them minded that she "just didn't date". Classes were engaging. The streets swelled with people. She got to be alone but was never, ever lonely. Finally, adulthood.

It was the second Games Night. The first one happened pretty organically, with Settlers of Catan, and that grew arms and legs, of course, and now there was discussion of setting up a D&D campaign over Monopoly, as a light appetiser. The off-key bell rang.

"Maybe that's the pizza!" said Stacey, who Matilda was sure had got high on her way back from class but wasn't smoking in the living room, and that was enough for her.

Jennifer stood in the doorway, back-lit by the grimy sconces in the hall.

"Surprise!"

"Ahh-ahh!" replied Matilda, nonsense sounds matching the inflection of Jennifer's voice.

"I'm in the city for a conference and I thought, no time for a Fancy Day but what about a little Fancy Night?" Matilda's throat and guts slithered to her feet.

"Jenni- Hon. It's actually Games Night and we're trying to make it a regular thing because everyone's schedules are different and... Please, call next time? I really don't want to miss you and-"

"Matty, it's your turn, come quick or I'm gonna cheat!" came a voice from inside.

"Matty?" said Jennifer, a little incredulously.

"I'm not really a Tilda," she offered.

"No, no you're not." Jennifer smiled, her eyes shining.

"Can I take you for dinner tomorrow?"

"Straight to the airport after the conference. They're not giving us much of a break, in any sense."

"Matty? Pizza?"

"It's not the pizza, Stacey," Matilda whiplashed behind her, "Shut the..." She turned to Jennifer, stopping just in time before she crashed into profanity.

"I should have called," said Jennifer. "Don't worry, don't worry. I don't want you to miss your turn, go!"

"I'll call you tomorrow, before your flight. We'll figure out a whole weekend. I'll come to you!"

She stepped forward and took Jennifer into the ransom of a giant, hard hug. Her body was so small in contrast to Matilda's these days.

"Bye, Hon. I'm sorry again."

Jennifer shook her head and swiped her hand through the air in protest. Matilda watched her walk along the dingy hall to the rickety elevator. They waved at each other right up until the doors closed.

Games Night lasted all of three weeks after that.

Matilda pushed her shoulders into the rough wooden floor of her apartment to remind herself that she could. She'd lost track of how long she'd been lying there since hanging up that call. Why was it that the moments where she and Hon clashed, when she had let Hon down, felt the most vivid? They stung because they were so rare. She wished that she could live forever replaying the detail of those thousands upon thousands of easy days.

Beep.

Did you read the Bad Art Friend thing? What do you think? I can't get enough of it but no one will know what it is in... Oh, I bet three weeks.

Beep.

I've never sung Happy Birthday so many times in my life and I was an elementary teacher!

Beep.

I love you, see you tomorrow.

She could live for a while replaying voicemails, at least. Hon's voice shined throughout the empty apartment. But it wasn't Hon. It wouldn't ever be Hon again. The centre of her world had gone. No, not just the centre. She was living on a different planet now. A planet that seemed indifferent to this loss. No one knew how good they had had it when Jennifer Honey had been breathing.

It was dark now. Matilda found that her body had taken her up onto her feet, lurching her around her apartment, trying to grasp onto anything solid. She clutched her phone hard to her heart, wanting it to slow down, just for a second. Suddenly, her hands were empty. There was no thunk. She opened her eyes.

At her line of sight, her phone was softly hovering in the air.