Casey is supposed to be making friends.

She’s at the bar, wearing the closest thing she owns to a clubbing outfit—dark jeans, dark boots, dark jacket, white tee—with the coworkers who always invite her to sit with them at lunch. The bar is crowded, dimly lit, and noisy with laughter and hard rock.

It’s not her scene at all, but Charlie and Asa invited her out. When she found out Casey’s typical Friday night is spent home alone, Charlie insisted she meet some new people.

Casey dreads meeting new people, but she likes Charlie and Asa, and she worried they wouldn’t like her anymore if she refused their invitation—even as she worried they wouldn’t like her anymore once they’d hung out with her outside the safety of the office.

Casey did not say this. She said, “Sure! I’d love to!” and raced home in a panic to see if she’d have to rush out again to buy something to wear.

She still worries, as she nurses her sangria, but it helps that Charlie screamed with excitement when she arrived and hugged her as if they hadn’t just seen each other a few hours before at the office. It helps that Charlie dragged her to the bar counter and started asking questions about her interests, her favorite movies, her preferred kind of birthday cake. It helps that Asa complimented her outfit, the corner of her mouth turning up as it so often does when she looks at Casey.

Casey feels pretty good as the evening wears on. She answers Charlie’s questions without hesitation. She grins whenever Asa snorts at something Charlie says. She’s almost stopped thinking about how weird and annoying and stupid she always feels, how much she’s dreading introducing herself to a stranger as Charlie wants her to do.

And then Madison Eleanor Leigh walks through the door.

Her eyes snag on Casey’s.

Something swells in Casey’s chest. For just a second, she forgets. Forgets the sixty-seven days since she last saw Mads. Forgets that Mads blocked her on Snapchat without warning. Forgets the weeks of canceled plans before that.

It feels like she’s been waiting for Mads. She expects Mads to grin and stride over and roll her eyes because seriously, Casey, this is your going-out outfit?

Casey’s fingers twitch, ready to wave in greeting. Then Mads’ eyes leave hers. She grins at someone else, strides over to them, and Casey remembers.

The swelling in her chest bursts, caving her ribs in. Her eyes prickle. Her skin, too.

Someone touches her shoulder. She flinches.

“Case?”

She flushes. Charlie’s hand hovers at her shoulder.

Asa runs a hand through her undercut hair. “Everything okay?”

Casey swallows down the prickling, the cave-in, and pastes on a smile so they don’t realize she’s having a panic attack in the middle of a bar. “Yeah, of course.”

Her coworkers exchange a glance. Casey grips her sangria tight, trying not to read anything into it. Trying to convince herself the glance isn’t saying, Oh god, why did we invite this girl out? She’s a total buzzkill.

Logically, she knows this probably isn’t the case. They eat lunch with her every day at work. They invited her here. Charlie’s spent the evening asking questions to get to know her better; Asa paid for her sangria. They didn’t have to do that.

But Casey also knows that people can be kind, can seem to like her, only to suddenly drop her.

Mads taught her that.

“Okay,” Charlie says, though a little crease has formed between her brows. “I was just asking if you’d want to go to the movies with us next week? There’s a new Marvel movie playing, and you said you like—”

“Yeah, I’d love to,” Casey blurts out, and she means it this time, but oh god she interrupted Charlie in the middle of an invitation to another social outing, and Charlie is probably already regretting asking. “Superhero movies, yeah, totally my jam. I’d love to...next week. Yeah. That would be great.”

She lets her smile disguise her bone-deep desire to bash her head into the counter. Oh my god, what is wrong with me?

But Charlie grins and says, “Great!” and pulls up showtimes on her phone. Asa gazes at Casey a moment longer before leaning in to look at Charlie’s phone.

Casey drops her smile, lets out a breath. Everything’s okay.

For, like, a second.

Then Mads is there, dragging her new friends up to the bar. New friends she probably made before she even dumped Casey, because Mads has always had an excess of friends. Casey only ever had her.

Casey’s stomach churns as they jostle Charlie aside to order their drinks. Asa raises an eyebrow at them. Casey’s heart pounds.

Then their drinks are ordered, and they sit at the bar, and they’re laughing together, and Mads is telling a story about the time she was swinging on a makeshift swing by the lake when she was ten, and the rope snapped, and she fell in, and they had to fish her out. Only she’s leaving out that Casey was the one who fished her out, who waded into the lake in a panic to rescue her. As if Casey wasn’t there. As if Casey’s not sitting three stools away from her right now—

Don’t panic. This is fine. It’s less self-reassurance, more dog-in-house-on-fire dot gif. No. It’s actually fine. Don’t panic.

Too late. Every muscle in her body is tensed up like a deer ready to flee: shoulders, arms, lungs, jaw. Her chest heaves. She can’t get enough air. Because Mads is there. Because Mads saw her. Because she saw Mads.

Because Mads is sitting three stools away, cutting Casey out of her stories like they’re pictures.

“Hey,” Charlie says in a low voice. “Are you okay?”

Casey stares at the counter as Asa’s eyes rove over her. She doesn’t want them to see her panic.

“I’m fine,” she says hoarsely.

Charlie bites her lip. “Are you sure? You look—”

“Where’s the bathroom?” Casey wants to crawl into a tiny stall and curl up on the floor with her arms over her head and possibly never come out again, no matter how gross it is in there.

“Case—” Charlie says, but Asa cuts her off.

“Back there. In the corner.”

“Thanks,” Casey mumbles, and she flees.

In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face and stands there awkwardly, because she realizes too late that the bathroom has hand dryers but no paper towels. She wipes her face on her sleeves.

She refuses to panic again. She refuses to let Mads ruin this for her.

Only then the bathroom door opens, and Mads walks in.

She pauses in the doorway. Her eyes flicker toward Casey, and suddenly the bathroom’s too tight: walls looming overhead like they’re a hundred feet tall, Mads too close but too far away, impossible for Casey to bridge the gap between them. She’s painfully aware of how damp her face still is because this stupid bathroom has no paper towels. Her chest tightens.

Mads leans over the sink and does her lipstick in the mirror as if Casey isn’t there.

The air punches out of her.

She hugs herself, wrestling her panic under control. She’s not letting Mads do this to her.

She leans against the bathroom wall like it’s no big deal. Like she’s not aware of her damp face. Like the walls aren’t closing in on her.

“You look nice.” Her voice echoes off the walls, too loud. She flinches and reels it in. “Is that a new top?”

Mads pauses. “Yeah.”

She returns to her lipstick.

Casey deflates. Hugs herself tighter. Takes a shaky breath.

“That’s a nice color on you. The lipstick.”

“Thanks.”

It’s not gratitude; it’s a shutdown. It almost works, because it takes everything Casey has to stand here while Mads ignores her, instead of hiding in a stall until Mads leaves.

But until sixty-seven days ago, Mads was always the one telling Casey to stand up for herself.

Casey shuts her eyes briefly. “Your friends seem—”

Mads caps the lipstick, throws it back into her clutch, snaps the clutch shut so forcefully the sound echoes around the bathroom. “Casey, don’t. Don’t, okay?”

Casey’s breath stabs out of her. “What?”

“This.” Mads gestures at her in a way that makes Casey flinch. “Whatever this is. Just stop.”

She strides toward the door, heels clacking against the tile. The sound rings in Casey’s ears.

She lurches into Mads’ path, her arms tight around herself.

“What happened?” she asks. “Why aren’t we friends anymore?”

Annoyance flashes in Mads’ eyes. She shrugs. “Sometimes people move on.”

She pushes past Casey and reaches for the door. Casey can’t breathe. Her voice squeaks out.

“Mads, please.”

“Leave me alone.”

Desperate, Casey grabs Mads’ sleeve.

“Please.” She hates how frantic she sounds but can’t help it. Tears pool in her eyes. “Please. We were friends forever. You don’t just move on from that. Was it me? Did I do something wrong? There has to be a reason, there has to be.”

Mads wrenches away from her, whips the door open.

“Well, there isn’t,” she snaps, and she’s gone.

The door creaks closed behind her. Casey’s alone in the bathroom with her panic and her damp face and her memories.

There was the summer Mads taught her to ride a bike, because Mads had graduated from training wheels months earlier and Casey was still scared to ride without them.

The year Mads learned about secret codes and refused to make straightforward plans: she insisted on leaving secret messages in chalk on the Evans’ porch, which Casey had to decode to find her.

The way Mads took care of her when her dad died.

The way she took care of Mads when her mom left.

The Saturday she waded into the lake to fish Mads out because the rope on the swing had snapped.

Twenty years of sleepovers and study sessions and sitting together at lunch and whispering secrets to each other in the old tent in the Evans’ backyard and starting jobs together and quitting a few months later because Mads insisted the jobs sucked. All of it runs through Casey’s head, and then she locks herself in a stall and cries.

Her breath hitches and stutters. She gulps down air until breathing stops feeling like a workout. Blows her nose until it stops feeling like a backed-up sink spewing gunk. Presses wads of toilet paper to her eyes until they’re raw and red and itchy. Sits in the safety of the stall until she’s hollow. Washed out.

Casey cracks the stall open, peers into the bathroom. It’s empty. She turns on the sink and rinses her eyes—just her eyes, this time; she doesn’t want to dry her whole face with toilet paper. She practices smiling in the mirror until it looks natural.

She leans on the sink. She’s exhausted. Wants to go home. She’s not sure she can work up the energy to have fun with Charlie and Asa now; she’s certain she can’t work up the courage to meet someone new. She may never want to meet someone new again.

If twenty years of friendship can end with no warning, for no reason, what’s the point?

Not letting Mads ruin this, she reminds herself.

Casey doesn’t quite believe that now, but she walks back out to the bar anyway. Mads’ eyes flash in her direction, but then she turns her back and continues talking with her new friends.

Casey straightens and clenches her jaw. She doesn’t care. She does. Not. Care.

“There you are.” Charlie sounds relieved as Casey rejoins them. “Are you okay? You were gone a long time.”

Casey smiles tentatively, her arms going back around herself before she can help it. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just some...stomach trouble.”

She blanches. Why did she say that? Now they probably have all sorts of gross ideas about what she was doing in the bathroom.

“Oh my god, why didn’t you say something?” Charlie rummages through her purse, pulling out a travel pack of tissues, a box of bandages, a sudoku book, some maxi-pads, a bundle of pens all rubber-banded together. Casey stares. Asa bites back a laugh. “Okay, you should probably stick to water for the rest of the night. I have painkillers in here somewhere. Or we can just leave. Do you need to leave?”

Casey’s heart stutters. She’s never had many friends. It never mattered, because she had Mads. Now she’s realizing maybe it did matter, because someone jumping in to take care of her like this shouldn’t be a big deal. It shouldn’t make her feel this way: all stuttery and achy and yearning for something she can’t quite name.

“No, that’s okay.” Her voice wobbles. “I don’t want to leave. It’s just, um...cramps.”

“Oh, gotcha.” Charlie shoves a maxi-pad and a bottle of aspirin into her hands. “Just in case. For real, though, if they get too bad, let us know, okay? We can bounce if you need to.”

She piles everything back into her purse and puts an arm around Casey’s shoulder. Casey leans into her before she can think about it.

“But,” Charlie says, “if we don’t bounce, I still want you to make a new friend.”

Casey’s stomach clenches. “I don’t know.”

“I do.” Charlie nods toward a corner booth where a young woman about their age sits alone. A book is open in her hands, but her eyes keep flickering toward the door. “Target acquired. She’s been sitting there for, like, twenty minutes now. I think someone stood her up. You’re going to invite her to join us.”

Now Casey does feel like she has stomach trouble.

“How?” she croaks. “I can’t just go up to someone and say, ‘Hi, I’m Casey.’”

She’s never been good at making friends to begin with, which is precisely why she’s at a bar with work friends, instead of people she met...however adults meet people.

“Why not?” Charlie says, and honestly it’s hard to argue with that logic, but Casey shrugs, because she can’t. “Okay, well, I’m going to go up and say exactly that to the cute guy at the end of the bar. Okay...not exactly that. Because. You know. My name isn’t Casey.”

She claps Casey’s shoulder and goes forth to introduce herself to a stranger.

Casey leans back on her elbows. “She makes it sound so easy.”

Asa rubs the back of her neck. “Charlie doesn’t know how not to make friends. I don’t think she realizes how hard it can be for some of us.”

Casey’s eyes train back on Mads like Mads is magnetic. A pit hollows out her stomach.

Asa follows her gaze. “Ex-girlfriend?”

“Ex-best friend.”

“I wondered.” Asa leans on the bar beside her. “What happened?”

The pit gnaws at Casey’s stomach.

“I don’t know.” She runs her hands through her hair. “We grew up together. But then we started college, and she started pulling away. And now we aren’t friends anymore.”

Asa considers her. “It happens sometimes.”

Casey shakes her head. “No it doesn’t. People don’t stop being friends for no reason.”

Even though that’s what Mads said. Even though there’s no reason they’re not friends anymore: they just aren’t.

“It doesn’t,” Casey repeats.

“Why not?” Asa says. “People in relationships break up for no reason.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No?”

“No.”

Asa shrugs. “Sometimes people fall out of love. And sometimes people fall out of friendship, too.”

Casey sucks at her remaining sangria. The ice has melted. The sangria is watery and room-temperature, but having the glass in her hands comforts her, and bending her head to the straw means she doesn’t have to look at Asa, or Mads, or anyone else.

“It’s not like the movies,” Asa says gently. “Some people are lucky enough to find their BFF when they’re kids, and they grow old together. And that’s great. But it’s not like that for everyone. People move or change or hurt each other, or they just stop being friends, and you never know why.”

The pit in Casey’s stomach widens, spreads to her chest. She lays her head on the counter. She’s so tired.

“I tried,” she whispers. “I tried so hard to hold onto her.”

Asa sits beside her. Touches her wrist. “I know.”

Casey’s sigh flutters her hair around her face. The corner of Asa’s mouth turns up.

“Oh, I forgot,” she says. “There’s another explanation: sometimes people are just dicks. Which I think is probably what happened in your case.”

Casey laughs despite herself. Asa’s smile widens. She scooches her stool closer.

“Look,” she says, “some things are scary, but they’re worth doing anyway. Like...asking someone out.”

Casey flushes. She’s not a whole lot better at that than she is at making friends. She clears her throat. “That’s different.”

Asa laughs. “You keep saying that.”

“It is,” Casey insists. “If I start dating someone and it doesn’t work out, it sucks, and it hurts, but I can tell myself it wasn’t meant to be, and that I’ll find the right person someday, and after a while I’ll move on.”

Asa tucks a strand of hair behind Casey’s ear, her fingertips brushing Casey’s face. “So why can’t you tell yourself that about friendship?”

“Because,” Casey starts, and then she shuts up, because she’s not actually sure.

Asa’s mouth twitches. She stands, shoves her hands in her pockets.

“I’m going to go remind Charlie she’s supposed to be out with friends, not finding a new boyfriend.” She nods toward the girl in the corner booth. “Whoever she’s waiting for still hasn’t shown up. You got this.”

Asa slips through the crowd to find Charlie. In the corner booth, the girl’s book is still open, but now her chin is propped on her fist and she’s not even pretending to read. One of her sneakers taps gently on the floor in time to the music.

Casey rises from her stool but doesn’t move away from the bar. Something squeezes her lungs.

She can’t. No matter what Charlie says, she can’t go up to a stranger and say hi. The girl will think she’s weird. Too forward. Too quick to insert herself into someone’s space, too quick to make assumptions about a person sitting in a bar alone.

Or maybe the girl will like her. They’ll become friends.

And one day, for no reason, the girl will decide they’re not friends anymore.

Casey scrubs a hand over her face. She could keep standing here like this, afraid to say hi to someone in case it hurts her someday.

Or she could get over herself, because Asa’s right. Sometimes you do everything you can to bridge the gap between you and a friend, and you hit a wall instead. Sometimes things fall apart for no reason.

It doesn’t mean you’re wrong, or broken, or that you can’t move on.

Casey lets out a breath.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay. You can do this. You can do this.”

She tugs her jacket straight, smooths her hair, and strides over to the booth, walking fast so her anxiety can’t catch up.

The girl looks up as she approaches. Casey considers sliding in across from her but changes her mind, worried it’ll be too pushy. She stands beside the table instead, smiles tentatively. The girl smiles thinly back. The thought that she might be at least as uncertain about this as Casey is makes Casey feel marginally better.

Her smile relaxes slightly.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Casey.”

——————

E.M. Anderson (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent writer. Her work has appeared in Wizards in Space, Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction, and SJ Whitby's Awakenings: A Cute Mutants Anthology. Her debut novel, The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher, is forthcoming from Hansen House Books in April 2023.