The Last Night Before

The boxes were winning. That was the honest truth of it. I'd been taping all day and the room still looked like cardboard had exploded.

I sat down on the floor between a box marked BOOKS and a box marked MISC DON'T BREAK, and I just looked at the walls. Bare walls. The nail holes from four years of posters. The little paint scuff from when I moved the couch wrong. Ten years in this city and I was leaving it in the back of a rented van in two days.

Ten years. I was twenty-eight now and Oakland was all I had of my twenties. Art school, first job, first apartment, the whole mess of it.

"Knock knock, it's open, I'm coming in."

That was Olive. She never waited for an answer.

She came through the door sideways because her hands were full. Pizza box balanced on one arm, bottle of wine in the other hand, purse swinging. Her hair was down tonight, dark and past her shoulders, and she had on these big gold hoop earrings that caught the light from the hallway.

"You look terrible," she said, looking around at the boxes.

"You look great, thanks for asking."

"I look amazing. But that's not news." She kicked the door shut with her heel and put the pizza on top of a box labeled KITCHEN. "Which of these is your bed?"

"That one. Under the blanket."

"You really went all out on the packing, huh."

"I packed. I did. I packed everything I own. Then I sat down and I haven't moved in an hour."

She dropped her purse on the counter and came over and sat down on the floor next to me, right next to me, shoulder against my shoulder like she always did. Thirty years old and she still sat on floors like a cat. I am twenty-eight, and she never let me forget I was the baby of the two of us, by two whole years.

"Montreal," she said. "Say it out loud so I can hate it."

"Montreal."

"Ugh. Yeah, I hate it."

"It's a good job, Olive."

"I know it's a good job. I'm allowed to hate it anyway. That's what best friends are for. We hate your good decisions on your behalf so you don't have to feel guilty about them."

"Thank you for your service."

"Anytime." She reached over and smacked the pizza box. "Eat. You've been eating sad moving food all week, I can tell. There's a crusts-only energy in this apartment."

"It's called moving famine."

"It's called you not taking care of yourself." She opened the box and pulled out a slice and handed it to me first. She always gave me the first slice. Ten years of that.

So. Olive. I should say the thing everyone says eventually when they meet her, and I'll say it fast and get it over with. She's trans. She came out three years ago, and I watched her go from scared to furious to just, herself, over about a year, and it was the bravest thing I've ever seen anyone do up close. None of that changed anything between us. It just meant I got to keep my best friend and watch her actually become her.

We met in art school. Freshman year. She was in my drawing class and she stole my good eraser and never gave it back and that was basically the whole friendship founded right there. Ten years of this. She's my person. That's the simplest way I can put it.

And there was one night, four years ago, when we were more than that for about six hours. We were both a little wrecked about other things, her breakup, my dad's surgery, and it just happened, slow and quiet and honest, and in the morning we got breakfast like normal and never talked about doing it again. Not because it was bad. It wasn't bad. It was because we were scared of what it would mean, I think. Both of us. We never said that out loud either.

She was wearing those earrings tonight.

I noticed it when she sat down. The big gold hoops. She had them on that night four years ago. I remember because I kept looking at them while she talked, the way they moved when she laughed. I don't know if she kept them for the memory or if they're just earrings, but my chest did something anyway.

"So what's the plan," she said, mouth half full of pizza. "When do you actually drive out?"

"Friday morning. Lease is up Sunday but I want to get an early start. It's like five days of driving."

"Five days alone in a van. That sounds like a punishment."

"It sounds like a podcast opportunity."

"You hate podcasts."

"I'm going to learn to love podcasts. New city, new me."

"Shut up." She bumped her shoulder into mine. "New city, same you. That's the whole point of you."

We ate for a while. The neighbor's TV was doing its usual thing, some game show, applause at weird moments. The walls in this place are paper. I've heard every argument that man has had in four years. I won't miss that part.

"Okay but listen," Olive said, and she turned to face me, cross-legged, wine bottle in her lap. She'd opened it at some point without me noticing. "Are you actually nervous? Real question. You keep doing the joke thing."

"I'm not doing the joke thing."

"You're doing the joke thing right now!"

I put my slice down. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm nervous. It's a whole new country. I don't speak French. I don't know anybody there. I'm twenty-eight and I'm starting over from zero and I keep thinking, what if I used up all my good luck on this decade."

"You didn't."

"You don't know that."

"I know you. You don't use up. You make more. It's annoying, actually, how much more of you there always is."

I laughed. She didn't. She was looking at me with that face she makes, the serious one, eyebrows low, like she's working on a problem.

"What," I said.

"Nothing. I just keep thinking this is dumb. You being a whole country away."

"You could visit. You're a freelancer, you can work anywhere. That's the whole thing about freelancers."

"I could. Yeah." She poured wine into two plastic cups, because all my glasses were packed, and handed me one. "To Oakland, then. Ten years."

"To Oakland."

We drank. The wine was cheap and a little too warm and it was perfect.

"Hey, Sherman. Can I say something weird?"

"You say weird things constantly. It's your brand."

"This is a new weird." She turned her cup in her hands. "Do you remember the last night? That one night?"

My stomach dropped, in a good way and a bad way at the same time.

"Obviously," I said.

"Okay. Good. Because I was starting to think maybe I invented it. In my head. You never brought it up and I figured, well, either it didn't mean what I think it meant, or he's being polite about it, and both of those are fine, but."

"It meant what you think it meant."

She looked at me. The hoops caught the light again.

"Okay," she said, quiet.

"Okay," I said.

The game show next door applauded. Somebody in the hall dropped something and swore. The city going on without us, like always.

"We should pack," she said. "That's why I came. Pizza and packing. Emotional support."

"Right. Yes. Packing!"

Neither of us moved.

"You first," she said.

"I'm not moving first."

"Coward."

"Absolutely," I said, and I picked up a roll of tape, and my hands were not steady at all, and she saw that, and she smiled, small, and got up to start on the books, and I watched her the whole way across the room.

She kept the earrings on. That's all I could think. She kept them on.

We packed for an hour. Books mostly. She'd hand them to me and I'd stack them in the box marked BOOKS and we'd fall back into talking without noticing we'd started.

"Remember Durfee's class," she said. "Intro to Color. You turned in that painting that was all one shade of green."

"It wasn't one shade."

"It was one shade, Sherman. He held it up and asked if you were making a point."

"I was making a point."

"You got a B minus for a point."

"A B minus is a good grade."

"It's not, though." She laughed and handed me another stack. "God, we were babies. First week of freshman year I stole your good eraser and you didn't even get mad. You just started drawing with a bad eraser like it was fine."

"I was scared of you."

"You should've been."

That was ten years ago now. She was twenty then. I was eighteen. She was older, always older, two years, and for the first month I thought that meant something. It never did. We just fit. That was the entire secret of us, we just fit, and neither of us ever figured out why so we stopped asking.

She sat on the floor and stretched her legs out and looked around the room. Bare walls. The nail holes where her mural print used to hang. She gave me that print for my twenty-sixth birthday. It was packed now. MISC DON'T BREAK.

"You know what I keep thinking about," she said. "The night before your dad's surgery. You came over at two in the morning and didn't say anything, just sat on my couch, and I made you eggs at two thirty in the morning like that was normal."

"It was normal."

"It was. That's what I mean." She turned her cup. "Four years ago."

"Yeah."

"And now Montreal!" She said it flat. Not a joke. I waited for the joke and it didn't come and that was worse.

"Hey," I said. "Weird question back at you. Do you ever regret it? The night. Not talking about it after."

"No."

"Quick answer."

"Because it's true. I don't regret it. I regret that we never..." She stopped. Recalibrated. "Okay, actually, here's the thing I was going to say earlier. I'm glad we never got together. Like, for real. Boyfriend girlfriend. I'm glad."

That landed wrong and I didn't know why yet.

"Okay," I said.

"No, listen. We would've been terrible. We would've been one of those couples that fights about nothing and stays together out of stubbornness. And then it would've gone bad and I would've lost you. I'd have lost the eggs at two thirty in the morning. I'd have lost this." She waved her hand at the room, the boxes, me. "The friendship is the good thing. The friendship is the best thing I have. I'm glad we never risked it."

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, you're right."

My voice did something on the second yeah. Went thin. She heard it. I saw her hear it. She didn't say anything about it and I loved her for that and hated her a little for it too.

"You're right," I said again, and it came out even thinner, and now there was no way to pretend it hadn't.

"Sherman."

"I'm fine. It's the packing. Dust."

"It's not dust."

"It's a little dust."

She put her cup down on the floor and didn't reach for it again. The game show next door cut to a commercial and the apartment got quiet in a way it hadn't been all night. Quiet enough to hear the street. Someplace out there a siren started up and faded going south.

"Can I ask you something real," she said.

"You've asked me like six real things tonight."

"One more."

"Go."

"Are you scared?"

And the joke thing was right there. It was right there, loaded, ready. Something about being scared of Canadian weather, something dumb, and I opened my mouth to say it and it just wasn't there. I looked at the box of books instead. My hand was flat on the tape roll.

"Yeah," I said.

"Okay," she said. Quiet. She waited. She was always good at waiting.

"I've been scared all week. That's the dumb part. Everyone keeps asking if I'm excited and I keep saying yeah, excited, and I'm not. I'm not excited. I'm nothing. I've been nothing all week. I pack a box and I feel nothing. I sold my couch and I felt nothing. I said bye to my guys at the print shop on Tuesday and Brad almost cried and I felt nothing and I thought, that's broken, that's a broken thing, I should feel something about Brad."

She didn't touch me. She just sat there with her legs crossed and her hoops hanging and let me go.

"And then you walked in with the pizza," I said. "And it was the first thing all week that felt like anything. That's the honest answer. You want the real answer? The only thing that feels real right now is you sitting on my floor. That's it. That's the