Dialogue

by eliza lamster

The first girl was pale from containing her emotions. Her eyes were wide and bloodshot and her lips, once perfectly pink, were now pursed so tightly that they blended into the whitish pallor of her drained skin.

Next to her sat the second girl. Their bent knees pointed at each other in a comfortable position, as if they had sat like this a thousand times. But the two girls sat apart, their postures magnetic in such a way that anyone could see they wanted to be closer at the same time as they were scared to be closer. Sometimes they would lean towards each other almost imperceptibly and, catching themselves, would straighten immediately. The two girls would each rearrange a lock of hair or twitch a couple of fingers to cover up the movement that had seemed so conspicuous to them but was so inconspicuous to anyone else. An ugly scar had marred their friendship, and yet they still ached for each other’s comfort.

The first and the second girl were quiet, hiding from each other and from themselves, but the third girl was not. She had pulled out her silver phone and was gesturing wildly with it. Her lips moved frantically as she swung her phone around in front of the other girls. Both of them looked at her; neither of them saw her.

The second girl was silent. She was always quiet, but now she was silent. She had a sulky posture, her limbs curled protectively around her body. Headphones fit snugly around her head, and tangled strands of dark hair gathered around them. When the first girl observed her closely, she saw the second girl bobbing inconspicuously to a nameless song. She did not acknowledge the third girl, who carried on talking.

The first girl nodded and mumbled along to the third girl’s conversation. Like a truck on a dirt road, she would be quiet for a while, then make some mumbling noise or jerk her head in this direction or that one and, making sure she had done her part in the conversation, would go back to her own thoughts. They were so loud in her own mind but so quiet to those around her, like the second girl’s music. 

The third girl continued to gesture rapidly. She was showing off some news story, talking about how wrong it all was: all the coverage, all the stupid rumors, how it was just making things worse. But the first two girls didn’t care, or maybe they cared too much, or maybe they didn’t want to care. Whatever the reason, they both drowned out the third girl with their own kinds of music. 

Every now and then, the third girl would move her arms too quickly or push her phone too close to the other girls’ faces, and they would flinch, jerking violently away. When this happened, the first girl’s eyes would go blank for a moment, empty of all their previous contemplation, and the second girl’s music would get louder, just barely, as if she needed more volume to drown out her thoughts. The third girl, after apologizing once or twice, would continue with her lonely conversation.

And so the three girls carried on like this. The first girl was thinking and the second girl was bobbing and the third girl was making her own kind of music, so out of harmony with the rhythms of the other girls.