56. a girls' girl

                                    

                                              
It was still just late September, but the weather had begun to cool down enough that the thick polyester material of my blazer was no longer enough to keep me warm on that sunless midafternoon while an early autumn chill crept over my cheeks and turned my fingers cold down at my sides while I leaned against the fender of Jun's pastel blue convertible, although it seemed she had elected to use the soft top that morning, perhaps finding one of the first frosts of the season on her windshield like my mother did before dropping me off at school and perhaps, like my mother, she might have used her credit card to scrape it off, as her dual-ended snowbrush was somewhere around here but a cursory look in the trunk left her emptyhanded before she started rummaging around in her purse. 
I still hadn't seen Jun since the homecoming game last weekend, or more like not since I left during halftime to get us all pizza slices from the concession stand but ended up taking compromising photos of Blane Harding with Thea Foster in the dugout instead, and promptly left the game without telling her, then posted said pictures to my Instagram account. 
I was going to text her that night, before I had become so distracted with the fact that Blane had followed us in his car or that his uncle was the chief of police, and soon after that my mother confiscated my phone for the weekend, and my head was still reeling from unearthing Leo Navarro's secret identity and overhearing that Thea was trying to convince someone as deranged as Jenna Brookes that I might've been the one to kill Bridgette that night. 
But I was determined not to ruin this, the one friendship I had managed to salvage after all these years, so I utilized my lunch period lurking around her social media accounts to find something I might be able to latch onto, casually mention to spark a conversation or even just demonstrate that what mattered to her mattered to me too. I soon learned that she had added Korean and Chinese dramas to the lengthening list of foreign television shows she watched, remembering a joke she had once made about how she almost never streamed anything without subtitles, and I discovered through her highlighted Instastories that she liked the series A Love so Beautiful. 
In preparation for this conversation, I had watched the first episode the night before but, unlike Jun, I was not adept at reading subtitles and missed almost half the plot while trying to research reliable sources for my upcoming AP English paper, but I planned to tell her that I liked what I had seen so far—which was true—and hoped that some part of this might remind her of when we first met at that clam bake as middle school students, her scrambling with an uncharged phone and a telenovela cliffhanger in desperate search of an outlet. 
Then it might remind her of when our friendship didn't feel this insecure, so fragile that I tiptoed around it and cradled it delicately in both hands, so afraid that the slightest movement would spook it back out of sight, and then somehow I would find myself transported back to that dirt road worn into the overgrown grass at the bluffs but the taillights were retreating from me this time, left to be the next one the darkness swallowed whole.   
I heard the echo of the metallic creaking of the school's entrance doors as it drifted out with the windchill toward the parking lot where I had busied myself and my numbing fingertips by fidgeting anxiously with the buttons down my blazer, only mildly concerned that I was loosening their threads each time I unbuttoned then rebuttoned them over my midriff when I glanced up from my hand, about to undo the second button, and noticed that Jun had finally emerged from inside the school after almost fifteen minutes and was in the midst of maneuvering herself in between the narrow distance of two closely parked sedans before the strap of her backpack snagged on one of their sideview mirrors. 
I straightened myself, then curled the sleeve of my blazer over my palm to rub away any smudges I might have left on the shimmering pastel blue fender.