Like Air

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds come out to dance with the blushing sky. Soo was never one to make an obsession of watching for a change in the colors. Whatever is meant to happen the next day will happen, regardless of whether she sees the warning. But Lucia likes the colors. Now that they’ve been taken from her, now that Lucia sees the world in black and white, Soo can hardly refuse to answer the question she asks each night she spends in Soo’s room.

“What are the colors tonight, Soo?” Lucia tucks the final strand of hair into her braid, pinches the end between two fingers, releases. Pushing off from where she’s been leaning against the dresser, she plops onto Soo’s bed instead. She finds what remains of the braid, unravels it, and begins again. She’s always been a whirlwind of movement, of sound, of restless hands and feet. Back in the infancy of their friendship, when they were deskmates in fourth-grade English and Lucia still had colors, Soo’s hands would itch with the desire to close over Lucia’s, to clamp over her mouth. They pause over her laptop keys now as Soo turns toward the room’s single window.

The curtains are still drawn back, allowing pink light to wash over Lucia’s crisscrossed legs, to paint the empty walls. From her desk, Soo can’t make out the clouds, but the blush of the sky is enough; there’s never one without the other at midnight. “Pink and purple.”

A pause, a breath released. Lucia’s next words hold a smile. “Every night you don’t see red and yellow makes me more sure it was Ryan. You should’ve looked.”

It wouldn’t have changed anything. Soo blows her bangs off her forehead and doesn’t answer. She hits a period, finishes one paragraph and starts on another.

Lucia sighs, but the opening notes of the cheery ringtone Soo’s sister chose for herself cut through the air before she can say more. It’s nothing urgent, despite the late hour, just Jia’s customary call between shifts at the hospital. Soo waits for the music to play out before moving to switch Do Not Disturb back on—when did she turn it off? Her hand runs into Lucia’s on the way, and Soo looks up.

“You sure?” Soo’s chair dips toward Lucia as she perches on an armrest and curls her fingers over Soo’s fist. Her hair, loose down her back for the first time since Soo sat at her desk, glints golden in the lamp light. She taps Soo’s knuckles one by one until Soo’s nails leave her palm. “You haven’t talked to her in a while. She probably just wanted to check you’re okay.” There’s something in Lucia’s voice, a note behind the lightness, that sends Soo’s teeth into her lower lip.

She exhales and relaxes her hand, slips it out from under Lucia’s. This time, Lucia doesn’t stop her when she reaches for her phone. “I’m okay,” Soo says. Her eyes drop to the sociolinguistics textbook beside her laptop before the weight of Lucia’s gaze draws them back. “What?”

“I was thinking.” Lucia’s hands clench and flex at her sides, then disappear into her sweater pockets. “About visiting Peter tomorrow. I haven’t seen him for a while, but I can feel it—he still misses me.”

It takes more than just missing her to be able to see her. There are so few left who can. He used to regularly find Soo outside their shared linguistic classes, knowing she was his best bet at seeing Lucia, as much Soo’s shadow after life as during it. Lucia didn’t used to need to seek him out herself. Soo’s been with her through every realization that another has moved on, and she’ll be here when Peter does too. It will be soon; they both know it—but it doesn’t need to be tomorrow.

“No,” Soo says. “Not tomorrow. Stay with me, okay, Lu?”

Lucia’s lips tremble at one corner, a smile that dies before it can live. “Okay. I’ll stay.” And she turns her eyes to the window, to a sky full of colors she can’t see.

*

Soo flicks wet bangs away from where they’re dripping onto her glasses, into her eyes. After a week of sunlit days and clouds only at midnight, checking the weather before leaving her dorm didn’t even occur to her. Toes half frozen inside her soaked sneakers, she almost trips hooking one shoe around the leg of her seat to pull it out. She darts a glance around the lecture hall, but instead of catching any sniggering underclassmen, she runs into a pair of eyes she hasn’t since the last time she avoided them. Starting, she bites her lip against the prick of guilt in her stomach. Soo never explained why she stopped speaking to him, right when their friendship was teetering on the precipice of something else, something more. But at least he’s stopped trying to ask. She looks down, shoves her backpack under Lucia’s seat.

“He’s still looking.” Lucia’s voice is loud in the quieting hall—no point in lowering it for those who didn’t know her before and can’t hear her now. Political science is the one general education requirement Soo delayed until she couldn’t anymore and now the one class she shares with a sea of freshmen. Well, mostly freshmen. Her face burns with the weight of a stare that’s yet to drop.

Soo powers on her laptop. “He’ll stop eventually.” It’s not as though the clouds bled in a golden sky the midnight before she first met him. Not that she saw, anyway. That was before she bothered checking, before the world turned black and white for her best friend.

“You don’t have to let him, Soo.”

“Yeah.” She reaches to her right, finds Lucia’s fingers and squeezes them between her own. Once, twice. “I do.” Ryan’s not worth the risk of losing Lucia. No one is.

*

Four missed calls while she was at school: one each from her mom and sister, two from her brother. It’s been a while since her dad gave up on her. Her mom and Jia are used to the slow replies, the silences, but Min is only twelve and still clinging to the fear of being forgotten that first seized him when Soo left for college. She types out a brief text, just enough to reassure him without encouraging a conversation she’s not having. Not now, not any time soon.

“I wanna watch something.” Lucia’s first words since they reached the dorm, maybe longer. Dragging a pair of beanbag chairs from where they’ve been collecting dust bunnies under the window, she throws her arms out to either side and falls backward into the white one. The black she leaves for Soo.

Soo shuts off her phone and abandons any attempt at talking herself into finishing her sociolinguistics paper tonight. It’s not due until Monday anyway. Her motivation to be productive on Friday nights is already weak enough without encouragement. “Okay.” She crouches in front of her DVD rack. “Watch what?”

Lucia has made a ball of herself, legs tucked into her chest, wrists crossed over her ankles. “Surprise me, Soo Soo. But!” She raises an index finger, eyes wide. “Not The Little Mermaid again!”

Soo’s laugh is muffled against her bent knees. “Good idea, Lu. It’s been a while.”

“Not long enough.” Lucia likes to pretend she’s sick of their childhood favorite movie; it’s as much a part of their viewing tradition as the beanbags. She whines as Soo dims the lamp, clears the coffee table of paper and textbooks, sets up her laptop. But when Soo sinks into her own beanbag, Lucia, still a ball, tilts into her side, head finding Soo’s shoulder.

“Idiot. It’s still your favorite.”

“Maybe not after fifty rewatches, it’s not,” Lucia says and pinches Soo’s elbow until she’s pushed off.

They were never the popcorn types, always used to spend a movie handing a bowl of M&M’s back and forth between them instead. There’s a party-sized bag buried in the kitchen cupboard, behind packs of ramen and dried fruit, but a bowl sitting in her lap alone, never passing to Lucia, feels heavy. Wrong. Soo decides to go without. She prefers the empty feeling sitting in her stomach.

Normally, Lucia would provide a running commentary on anything they’ve watched more than twice, but halfway through the movie, she’s yet to say five words. Maybe she slipped off to visit Peter earlier today after all. It wouldn’t be the first promise she’s broken. With Lucia’s head pressed to her shoulder, Soo can’t see her face, not without twisting her body at an awkward angle. She squeezes Lucia’s fingers and waits for her to reciprocate. Lucia does so after a beat but still doesn’t speak.

She hasn’t asked. It’s ten past midnight, and she hasn’t asked. Maybe she’s forgotten; maybe she’s stopped caring. But then a breath, a pause, and the question is murmured against Soo’s shoulder: “What are the colors tonight, Soo?” Lucia lifts her head so that Soo can stand, can cross to the window and push the curtains back and wash the room in pink light. Except this night it’s not pink. It’s black. Black clouds against a black sky. She’s never seen a night so dark. But Lucia has.

“Black, Lu. They’re all black.”

Soo is going to die tomorrow.