Friendship Bracelets: An Update

I heard her boyfriend broke up with her because she did something horrid to him, like cheated on him or something like that. Apparently this happened months ago, but the bubbly personality that Friendship Bracelets once possessed has yet to come back. I see little bits and pieces of it sometimes, but it’s not as constant as it used to be. Some days she sits on the floor, with her head rested in a friend’s lap and her eyes dark and brooding, like her boyfriend’s were that time I saw them together.

She came into class late today, walking with small, cautious steps, her shoulders still, her entire body held very tight. She sat down like she hardly dared touch anything, and her eyes hardly dared look at anything. She was much tidier than usual. She was like a porcelain doll, moving so fragilely and held together so neatly. Every article of clothing seemed perfectly placed, every dab of eyeshadow or mascara, even every golden strand of hair on her head.

Her hair is usually long and free and flowing. Her hair has motion in it. Her hair is hair that doesn’t care what it looks like, where it goes, what other people thinks of it.

But today her hair cared. Today her hair was perfectly still. Her hair was as tidy and perfect as the rest of her, and she had clearly been crying.

Getting through a bad day in high school without showing it is an art, and it’s a difficult one to master. The strategy many people adopt is to go completely still. Just freeze. Make your mind go blank. Some people lay their heads down on their desks, some people look straight forward, some people get out their phones and stare at their empty inbox for five minutes straight. If you let anything distract you, let anything touch you, it could all come crashing down in a second. You just have to go still as a statue, and concentrate on holding it all inside.

That’s the way Doodle Hands does it, the way the Paper Passer does it, and Friendship Bracelets does the same. She can clean herself up as much as she can, she can make herself look perfect, she can stare straight forward in class and pretend to listen. But it’s only so long before her thoughts return to whatever it was that made it start. And then her eyes turn red and shiny, and the frustration with herself just whooshes out of her lungs in a long sigh. She closes her eyes tight, dabbing at the tears with the sleeves of her jacket, and using the edges of her fingernails to fix her eye makeup.