This is Going to be Huge

Winner of the 2022 Bridport Prize in short fiction
and printed in The Bridport Prize Anthology 2022

It was a small thing, but it mattered. On the night that Blair was supposed to go to Sasha’s house for a sleepover, she called to cancel. Blair coughed into the line, and when she spoke, her voice sounded like tape stretching off its spool. She said it felt like strep, and that her mom was going to try to get her into an urgent care clinic first thing in the morning. After the call, Sasha went downstairs, feeling a little glum, a little put out. Her parents were watching something they’d rented, one of the Lethal Weapon sequels, and they paused the tape. Sasha told them what had happened, and her dad reached for his wallet and gave her cash so she could go to the mall and have dinner in the food court. 

She wandered from store to store at a quick pace, as though she were rushing through a to-do list, ticking off each store after briefly looking around. With the cash from her father, she bought the newest Smashing Pumpkins CD as well as a Free Tibet bumper sticker that she planned to pin to the cork board on her bedroom wall even though she didn’t know exactly where Tibet was and why it should be freed. There was enough money left over for a chocolate caramel shake and she sipped it slowly while she sat in a massage chair at Brookstone. An employee asked if she had any questions about the chair, but Sasha didn’t answer him because, at that moment, she saw Blair. She was walking out of an Abercrombie across from the Brookstone, flanked by two tall juniors named Becks and Krista. Sasha ran across the way and called out to her friend. Blair turned around, red-faced, and coughed, a little less convincingly than she had over the phone. She told Sasha that she was still sick but that coming to the mall had been a last-minute thing — specifically to get a fruit smoothie, and she’d happened to run into her friends when she was there.

Sasha didn’t believe this story, but pretended to because she didn’t want to make a scene and there was still the possibility that Blair was telling the truth. For the second time that night she told Blair that she hoped she felt better soon, and when they said goodbye it was tense and awkward and Sasha wanted to die. Walking out of the mall, she felt angrier with each step, and she drove home whispering her side of an imaginary conversation. She went straight to her room and lay in bed and listened to her new CD and every once in a while she looked over at the phone that never rang with an apology from Blair, and it was the first weekend since she and Sasha were eleven that they did not talk on the phone.

*

A lifetime passed, and then it was Monday morning. Blair, between classes, ducked into a nearby bathroom when she saw Sasha walking toward her down the hall. At lunch, Sasha decided to eat in the newspaper office instead of the cafeteria, and get a head start on the layout for next week’s issue. An annoying girl named Casey, who somehow found the time to be a part of every club and was also the editor of the school newspaper, walked in and sat at a computer next to Sasha. After a while, Casey looked over and said that she was sorry.

‘Sorry for what?’

‘I’m sorry about what happened between you and Blair. I heard she changed lockers.’ Casey opened a can of grape soda. ‘I had a big fight with my best friend in middle school, and it really sucked.’ 

Sasha was surprised to hear this about the lockers, and had a hard time finding something to say back. Soon, though, she asked Casey where she’d heard this — about Blair moving lockers. Casey shrugged and returned to looking at her computer monitor. 

‘Everywhere, I guess.’

Later that day, when Sasha walked into Algebra II and saw that all the seats around Blair were taken, she sat in the only empty desk, which was in the back of the classroom, by one of the broad windows, where sunlight bathed the left side of her face. Miss Ledbetter chalked up the board with equations, and then she guided everyone through a lesson on page 199 in their textbooks. She lectured while she worked. Algebra, she said, is about the reunion of broken parts. She was known around the school to be a spiritual person, and in class she made numbers sound like mystical agents in a game designed by God. Algebra is about making things whole again. We are performing grace with variables and functions. Sasha’s mind was elsewhere, though. She couldn’t get over the fact that her best friend had lied to her, but she felt powerless to do anything about it. She was forced to either accept Blair’s version of how she came to be at the mall with Becks and Krista, or become the villain by taking issue with it.

By the end of the school year, they were no longer speaking to one another. And while Sasha wasn’t surprised to hear, after the fact, that Blair had thrown an end-of-year pool party at her house, it still hurt. There was an air of finality to the lack of an invitation. Sasha thought about the things at Blair’s house that belonged to her — a pair of old eyeglasses that she kept around in case she lost a contact, her Adidas sliders, half a bottle of concealer cream, and her Guess beach towel. She wondered if Blair had played Sasha’s Fugees CD at the party, or if they were all drinking some of the orange Gatorades that Blair’s mom Julia kept in the fridge just for her. Were people talking openly about the fact that Sasha wasn’t at the party? That Sasha and Blair weren’t as good of friends as they used to be, or if they were still friends at all? 

Over the summer, she got a job as a hostess at a Mexican restaurant called El Potro, and after a couple of weeks was promoted to waitress; the employees were always quitting or they were being fired for too many no-shows. One Friday during lunch, Blair walked into the restaurant accompanied by a group of girls Sasha hadn’t seen before, and the hostess, by sheer luck, sat them in a different section. Sasha took her break and hid in the kitchen, where she could watch Blair. Sasha had heard that Blair’s parents were sending her to a new school in the fall, and that she would no longer be a Tiger. She already looked like a different person; she had bleached her hair and she was wearing clothes Sasha had never seen. She carried herself like someone else; her body language and even her laugh were unrecognizable. She seemed to have a new level of cool and confidence, and commanded the attention of the others at the table in a way that seemed foreign to Sasha. Sasha was paralyzed. What had become of her old friend. She couldn’t leave her post in the kitchen, couldn’t stop watching Blair — until Blair slowly turned around and looked in Sasha’s direction. They made eye contact for a brief moment, a second of a second, and then Sasha panicked, backed out of the kitchen and hid in the manager’s office until she was certain that Blair was gone. 

*

After high school, Sasha attended college in Western Pennsylvania, and she heard that Blair had stayed in Boston for college, though no one could say for certain which school. Sasha joined Facebook when membership expanded from Ivy League-only schools to anyone with a .edu email address, and the first person she searched for was Blair. But there was no Blair Lanham on Facebook, not even an Alexandra Blair Lanham, her full name, or Alexandra Lanham or even Alex Lanham. Sasha was hungry for information. She logged in to Yahoo Messenger, but Blair’s old screen name was inactive. She trawled MySpace, Xanga, and then LiveJournal, but Blair didn’t have accounts with any of these social networks. Then she tried looking Blair up by using Yahoo and Google, but both search engines only led to a web page for the school where Blair had attended her last two years of high school, specifically an index of the track and field athletes and their meet times, the names accompanied by blank squares with red Xs where there had once been photographs.

Finally, Sasha decided to send her an email, to the only email address that she’d known Blair to ever have. The message was short, cordial and curious. She wrote that she’d been wondering how her old friend was doing, and, if she had the time, to write back and tell her how life had been treating her. She hit send, and - seconds later - it pinged back. Blair’s email address no longer existed. And for a long time, that was the end of that.

After college, Sasha moved back to Massachusetts and got a job working for a personnel firm. She shared an apartment in Brookline with a girl named Adina and a lot of IKEA furniture, and she felt like she was back at college, with the division of chores and Adina’s orderly labeling of all the food, laundry soap and toiletries. At night, when it was quiet, and when the windows were raised, she could hear the green line trolley from a couple streets away, and it comforted her. She didn’t particularly care for living in Boston, but she wanted the city close by, just in case. This dictated where she would live for the rest of her adult life, and every apartment and house after the one on Garrison Road were always city-adjacent, even after she was married and had two children and at thirty-six had witnessed all of her old friends move an hour or more away from the city, decamping to bigger houses and lots of land on the south shore or the Cape. She wanted to remain close to Boston, but could never say why.

*

And then Sasha heard something about Blair that was impossible to believe.

One night, she was having after-work drinks with people in her office — a social event that she usually turned down. But that night, her daughters happened to be staying over at friends’ houses and Grant was in the basement working on his newest batch of home-brewed beer. Sasha hadn’t wanted to spend the evening eating dinner by herself on the couch, so she said yes to work drinks, which she now regretted as she stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a trendy bar downtown barely able to hear her colleagues. She leaned in closer. Daughter-in-private-school Jamie was talking to marathon-runner Jamie about a compositing initiative she wanted to implement at the office. And then marathon-runner Jamie began to compare the cost of composting companies in Boston, because, she said, she and her husband had recently looked into this themselves. How was it possible, Sasha thought, that the people she worked with were even more boring after having alcohol? Her mind wandered, and she fantasized about walking out of the bar without explanation. What would her colleagues say. And what would happen if she turned her phone off and walked around the city, aimless, for hours. What kind of people would she meet. What if she went home to a different house, and a different life. 

There was a lull in the conversation, and Sasha excused herself to the bar to get another glass of wine. While she waited to get the bartender’s attention, she heard someone say her name. She looked in the direction of her colleagues, but heard a voice to her right. Sasha turned, but didn’t recognize the woman talking to her.

‘Hey! It’s Gabby. Gabby Frye?’

The double-barred doors of memory opened, and there she was: Gabby, driving her white Mustang with the top down; Gabby, arguing in the hallway with Aaron, her longtime off-and-on-again boyfriend; Gabby on stage at graduation sticking out her tongue between her fingers. The two women embraced, and Sasha apologized for not recognizing her right away. 

Gabby tugged at her own hair. 

‘Well, it’s fair. I wasn’t this blonde back in the day.’ 

They caught each other up on their lives. Gabby was also here with friends from work, and she lived close by, in a high-rise in the West End. She was divorced and childless, and she didn’t ask if Sasha was married or had kids. They took turns listing off the people they still talked to from the old days, but it was an uneventful swap of information; both women revealed themselves to be bad about staying in touch with friends from high school and ambivalent about social media. Finally, Sasha asked the question that had been nagging her. 

‘Do you ever hear from Blair Lanham?’ 

‘No, but I did hear something interesting recently.’ Gabby took a sip from her cocktail. ‘I heard she’d joined a cult.’ 

Sasha laughed politely and Gabby insisted she was serious. 

‘I recently ran into - do you remember Sarah Moore? - anyway, she told me that, apparently, Blair had been living with some weird group in Vermont for a while that had, like, taken over her life or something. Anyway, she said that there had been an intervention and lawyers and everything, and now Blair’s living back at home with her parents, who have, like, a conservatorship over her. It’s all really sad.’ 

Someone from Gabby’s group was calling to her, and she told Sasha that she should get back to her friends. They made tentative plans to get coffee one of these days and said they’d find each other on Facebook. But Sasha knew that they would not get coffee and they would never see each other again, unless it was by accident. Sasha and Gabby had never been friends in the first place, and owed each other nothing. They had only known one another because they had been thrown together at the same place and time, and saying hello tonight at a downtown bar was an obligation to the past. It was as if they’d been veterans of the same war, and were compelled by an old code to pause and say hello.

After they parted ways, Sasha couldn’t stop thinking about what Gabby had told her. It was like hearing that Blair had joined the military and was now a high-ranking officer. Or that Blair had robbed a bank and was now in federal prison. It lingered in her mind after she had gotten home and changed into a t-shirt and sleep pants and drank half a bottle of Grant’s newest pilsner. She pretended to show interest in the various label designs he was working on, but what she was thinking about was what Gabby had told her, and how it made her feel. She was surprised by her reaction, because it wasn’t her business what Blair was doing with her life, and she wished that it could remain that way. After all, she thought, it was Blair who had transferred schools and disappeared off the face of the earth, and it was Blair who had been a bad friend. But this feeling of unease continued into the weekend and the weeks that followed. At work, at the grocery store, at one of her daughters’ soccer games, she couldn’t help but dwell on what Gabby had told her, despite the fact that she shouldn’t have cared. It should have been one of those things that someone tells you that you shrug off. It was about Blair, so it mattered.

*

For Halloween, Sasha and Grant dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster and Bride of Frankenstein, and sat on the front porch with an ice bucket full of Grant’s beers. Children walked up and helped themselves to candy from a bowl that sat on a bale of hay, leaving Sasha and Grant to drink and talk uninterrupted. And they talked about how nice it was to talk. Even though Josie and Quinn were older now, there was still little time for Sasha and Grant to have a real conversation. He opened up about a problem he was having at school with one of his students, a boy named Jacob who was disruptive, and who picked on other kids, but apparently had responded to Grant’s sternness by telling his mother that Grant was singling him out in class, humiliating him. Now the mother was angry, she was what Grant called capital-I Involved. The administration’s response had put him in a double bind, he told her, and it was the reason he’d not been sleeping well. Sasha saw in his green-painted face how difficult it had been to share this. It wasn’t often that Grant talked about work, and she was moved by this revelation. When there was a break between trick-or-treaters, she decided to open up, too. She told him about a childhood friend of hers who, if you can believe it, had been part of a cult. Grant was astonished, and it distracted him from the blues of his own story. He said he’d never heard this happening to anyone he knew. He asked the basic questions. Sasha said that she’d fallen out of touch with Blair the summer before junior year, and that they never heard from each other again. She didn’t tell him about the lie that Blair had told, and the days of avoidance that followed. Decades later, bringing it up would have seemed as if she were holding a grudge. It had taken her some time - and having girls of her own - but she now understood that what had happened between her and Blair wasn’t uncommon. And she also understood that the end of their friendship hadn’t entirely been Blair’s fault.

Grant asked why she’d never mentioned this friend before. She said that Blair had been one of those people you forget about, until someone brings them to mind, and then you can’t stop thinking about them. He said that he had a few friends like that. College friends, an old boss, the brother of an ex-girlfriend. After a while, he and Sasha were both quiet. 

And then she said, ‘I think I’m gonna go see her.’

*

She still remembered the number to the landline at the Lanhams’ house. It was lodged deep in her memory like old commercial jingles and the feeling of her first kiss. Blair’s mother answered the phone almost immediately. Sasha reintroduced herself, and Julia responded by laughing, as though it had been only yesterday that she was there. and told her that she remembered her. 

Sasha asked to speak with Blair, and Julia said without hesitation that Blair couldn’t talk on the phone, but that Sasha was welcome to come over to the house anytime. She said that Blair could use the company, and that she herself and Mike would love to see her. Sasha asked if the next day was okay, maybe after work. Julia said she would make chicken parmesan, that she remembered how much Sasha used to love it.

The driveway had been repaved and the house was painted a different shade of blue, but pulling up to the Lanhams’ house still felt like coming home. Inside, she was embraced by Blair’s parents. She looked around and took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of a previous life. The house still smelled like oatmeal; it was permanently a part of the fabric of the house, caked into the curtains and carpeting. Sasha removed her shoes, a force of habit, and placed them next to a pair of faded red Converse low tops — Blair’s, she guessed. Sasha marveled at being back in their house, a place she never thought she’d see again, and her obvious delight seemed to please Mike and Julia. They asked about her life now, and Sasha told them about the company she worked for, and she told them about her daughters and about her husband. Julia lowered her voice and whispered that she was proud of her. 

Down the hall, in the direction of Blair’s room, a door opened and then closed. Sasha heard soft footsteps approaching, and then Blair walked out. She was thin, her hair was short and she wore a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt that said Williams College in purple letters. 

The two women held each other’s gaze for a moment.

‘Sosh?’

After dinner, Sasha and Blair excused themselves to Blair’s bedroom. Not much about the room had changed in the past two decades; there were still ticket stubs and photographs and award ribbons in the vanity mirror. A poster for the movie Romeo + Juliet still hung on the wall, its little tears exactly where Sasha had remembered.

They sat on the floor, backs against the bed.

‘I can’t believe twenty years ago was twenty years ago,’ Blair said. 

‘It’s surreal to be back here.’ 

‘When my parents told me I had a surprise visitor, I wouldn’t have ever guessed it was you. But I’m glad it was you.’

Sasha ran her palms over the familiar piling of the carpet. 

‘I feel like we should be watching Ethan Hawke movies and eating Taquitos.’

‘I think my parents still have all my old tapes somewhere.’

‘So are they in charge of everything about your life?’

‘Some things are my own. Like, I choose what I wear, and I read whatever I want, even though I don’t always feel like reading. But that’s about it. And group therapy is about the only place I go without one of my parents there with me. So, I never miss a session.’

‘What’s group therapy like?’

‘Mostly it’s just sitting around with other quote-unquote survivors and we talk about our experiences, about adjusting to quote-unquote normal life.’ Blair cracked her knuckles. Her fingernails were bitten down and the skin on her hands was dry and red. ‘It’s on Tuesday mornings in this church basement, and Mom waits upstairs and does crossword puzzles.’

‘My oldest, Quinn, she loves crossword puzzles.’

‘Oh, you have a daughter.’

‘Two, actually. Quinn’s thirteen and Josie is eleven.’

Sasha pulled out her phone and showed Blair photos of her family, and Blair seemed to be taken aback by the fact that Sasha had a husband and two daughters and that Josie and Quinn looked so much like her. But as Sasha swiped from photo to photo, she didn’t feel the pride that she ordinarily did when she showed off her kids; instead, she felt strange and a little displaced, as though Blair were stuck in time and still sixteen while she herself had grown up and lived a life and had come back to tell Blair what it was like to be an adult. The unevenness of their respective lives felt unfair and even wrong, like a math problem that had been solved incorrectly. Sasha thought that she and Blair should have been on the same footing; weren’t they both just a couple of girls still figuring out the world?

Blair elbowed Sasha.

‘Hey. Guess what still works.’

She went into her closet and pulled out the star projector that she’d had since she was a girl, that Sasha remembered from sleepovers, both of them looking up at the ceiling and talking about the things that they could only talk about in the dark. Blair turned off the ceiling light and turned on the projector. It threw constellations onto the ceiling, and they listened to the motor of the projector whir and watched the stars slowly rotate around the darkened ceiling light. 

‘Didn’t we count all these once?’ Sasha asked.

‘I think we thought we did.’

‘I wish I could remember what number we ended up with.’

They fell silent and Sasha wondered if Blair was counting the stars on the ceiling or if she was doing what she herself was doing, which was replaying the events from twenty years ago in her head, trying to figure out how the two of them had gone from one thing to another. Sasha wanted to bring up what happened that night at the mall and tell her that it seemed so trivial all these years later.

‘I think it’s really cool that you haven’t asked about it,’ Blair said.

‘Asked about what.’

‘The Link — that’s the name of the people in Vermont that I’d been living with.’ She rolled over on her side to face Sasha. ‘It’s all anyone wants to talk about. No one ever asks about anything else that I did.’

‘I want to hear about everything,’ Sasha said. ‘What if I stayed the night, like old times, and you can tell me whatever you want.’

Blair let Sasha borrow a pair of sweatpants and a faded t-shirt from a turkey trot on Cape Cod. Then she rolled out two sleeping bags on the floor and brought in a spare pillow from the linen closet. They got into their pajamas and settled into their sleeping bags and looked up at the stars on the ceiling and it felt like they were kids again. 

‘I’m sorry about everything that happened to you.’

‘It happened to me as much as I happened to it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you know Newton’s third law of motion? A lot of people think gravity is just some magnetic force coming from the core of the earth that attracts objects to it. When really, gravity’s just the word we use to describe the attraction between any two masses. If I drop a balled-up sock to the ground, the force that draws the sock to the ground is equal to the force that draws the earth toward the sock.’ Blair cleared her throat. ‘Or this, right now, you and me, finding ourselves together again after all these years.’

‘I like that.’

‘I was studying astrophysics at Williams. This was, like, before everything.’

‘Do you ever think about going back?’

‘All the time.’

Sasha suggested that they see each other regularly, that maybe it was what both of them needed, and that maybe Blair could eventually meet Sasha’s family. And while she told Blair more about Josie and Quinn and how they were doing in school and what their interests were and also about how Josie was, right now, going through the brand-new experience of being liked by a boy, Sasha yawned and felt her eyelids grow heavier and heavier, and she felt the sensation of sleep overcoming her, like a curtain being drawn around her mind. 

In the morning, she woke up and saw that Blair was already awake and out of her sleeping bag. Sasha could see through the glow of the mini blinds that it was early dawn, which meant that out of habit she hadn’t overslept at Blair’s house and missed Quinn’s soccer game. She rolled over and picked up her phone. There was a message from Grant, asking her if she could pick up bagels and coffee on her way to the game. And there were the usual amount of work emails on a Saturday morning, and she glanced at them to see if they needed her immediate attention. Like Grant’s text, the emails could wait. Then she stretched and walked down the hall to use the bathroom, and this time when she washed her hands, she used one of the pristine bars of decorative seashell soap that she’d always been hesitant to use. When she walked out of the bathroom, she saw that Blair still wasn’t in the bedroom. Sasha quietly roamed the house, hesitant to wake up Mike and Julia. But Blair wasn’t in the living room or the den, nor the converted garage, nor the sun room. And then Sasha noticed that her car keys were missing, no longer sitting on Blair’s bedside table next to where she’d left her phone overnight. And even though she knew that Blair was gone, along with Sasha’s Outback, and probably halfway to Vermont by now, Sasha still rushed out the front door as though Blair would still be in the driveway, and Sasha could catch her, and join her.