She Was Trouble by Anastasia Petrenko
A teenager is captivated by her daydreaming new friend, but will she open her mind or hold her back?
I met her in secondary school - the shy girl who sat in the back, her notebook always open but rarely taking notes. For months, I ignored her existence until the day I glimpsed a poem she'd written and left on her desk. Her words unlocked chambers of my mind I didn't know existed.
When I offered her friendship, she accepted with a quiet grace that belied her true nature. Soon I discovered she wasn't the wallflower I'd imagined, but a collage of personalities - outspoken, mercurial, lost in reveries, mysterious in every way.
She lived half in our world and half in the realms of fantasy. On Monday, she was a Sailor Soldier, her head crowned with spherical buns, guardian of the precious Silver Crystal. By Wednesday, she'd transformed into the Queen of the Elves, speaking only in Quenya while our classmates stared. During Thursday's physics class, she sketched an enormous WHY? across her notebook, then conscripted me on Friday after school to help paint that same Socratic query on the fence outside campus - her manifesto against indexed existence.
Being in her orbit was exhilarating and exhausting. Teachers scolded me for our whispered conversations, for arriving breathless and late to class. My grades suffered, but I wouldn't have traded our conspiratorial laughter for top marks. She embodied everything I wasn't - everything I secretly wished I could be.
But as we matured, our differences calcified into fault lines. During senior year, while I buried myself in SAT prep books, she wrote songs about mythical creatures and sketched comic panels in her test booklets. Her dreamy sighs and spontaneous humming became percussion instruments of irritation, disrupting my concentration until every mistake felt like a personal assault on my future.
The breaking point came during one late study session. While I struggled to memorize the chronology of World War II battles, she began humming a melody she'd composed - her next chart-topping hit, she declared, sure to catapult her onto billboards across the globe.
"Get your head out of the clouds!" I shouted, my voice sharp enough to slice through her reverie.
She fixed me with an otherworldly stare, as if I'd spoken in tongues.
"Stop it," I commanded, slamming my textbook down. "Just stop."
The sound echoed like a gunshot. She studied me for a while, then gathered her things and left, her silence more disturbing than any retort.
Six years passed without a word. I moved to a larger city, earned my degree, and secured an internship at a prestigious consulting firm. Sometimes I wondered where she'd landed, whether she still lived in daydreams. I couldn't picture her sitting through lectures or wearing formal attire to interviews. Those thoughts came with a pang of nostalgia - memories of us performing impromptu plays in the backyard or using hair dryers as microphones. But I dismissed them as childish things, relics of a past I'd outgrown.
Barcelona reunited us. I'd moved there four months earlier, working at McKinsey & Company, sharing an apartment with a sensible boyfriend in finance. My life had acquired the polish of success. I'd heard rumors she'd also moved to the city of never-ending carnivals, surviving on artistic scraps and minimum wage jobs. It confirmed I had made the right choice to walk away from her.
Our reunion proved cinematically mundane. During a rare afternoon walk through Ciutadella Park - I'd left work early, seduced by the scent of orange blossoms - I found her on a bench, sipping something luridly colored through a straw,watching pigeons fight over bread crumbs.
I approached. She acknowledged me without warmth and made no invitation to sit. I did anyway, bombarding her with questions about her life. She deflected each one until, surprisingly, she extended an invitation:
"Come to Tres Punts GalerÃa tonight. My friend is exhibiting. Maybe... we could talk more."
The gallery pulsed with artistic chaos - a riot of colors and patterns that made my corporate blazer read like an obituary. I nearly fled, but her touch on my elbow anchored me.
"You made it," she grinned. "Now lose the executive costume. This is an arthouse party, not a shareholders' meeting."
Her laugh, unchanged by time, cracked something open inside me.
That night, I discussed existentialism with Marina Garcés and debated color theory with Yago Hortal. I quoted Latin with wine-loosened confidence: "Ars longa, vita brevis." For the first time in years, I felt complete.
Our rekindled friendship infected me with forgotten glee. At work, I scribbled song lyrics between spreadsheets. At night, I danced with painters and poets until dawn, returning home barefoot and laughing while my boyfriend waited with lectures about responsibility and maturity. He called her "toxic" and "unstable." I defended her until our arguments tapered off in our sterile apartment.
Two months later, we parted ways. We hadn't touched each other in weeks, and truth be told, I'd never loved him - only the security and image he represented.
"Finally," she said when I told her the news, then casually dropped her own bomb. "I met someone. A writer. His words heighten every frequency of my being. He's leaving for Peru - says only the Inca ruins can give him the energy he needs. Barcelona's too tame now. He asked me to go with him, and I said yes. I know you'll call it irresponsible, but my mind's made up. We leave on Saturday."
She smiled that dreamer's smile, already looking over the horizon of possibilities. My opinion meant nothing; her future had already taken flight.
I looked at my life - the suffocating job, the empty apartment, the dreary tomorrow - and started packing.
On Saturday, I was on my way to Peru, no longer painting questions but living answers.
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
When I offered her friendship, she accepted with a quiet grace that belied her true nature. Soon I discovered she wasn't the wallflower I'd imagined, but a collage of personalities - outspoken, mercurial, lost in reveries, mysterious in every way.
She lived half in our world and half in the realms of fantasy. On Monday, she was a Sailor Soldier, her head crowned with spherical buns, guardian of the precious Silver Crystal. By Wednesday, she'd transformed into the Queen of the Elves, speaking only in Quenya while our classmates stared. During Thursday's physics class, she sketched an enormous WHY? across her notebook, then conscripted me on Friday after school to help paint that same Socratic query on the fence outside campus - her manifesto against indexed existence.
Being in her orbit was exhilarating and exhausting. Teachers scolded me for our whispered conversations, for arriving breathless and late to class. My grades suffered, but I wouldn't have traded our conspiratorial laughter for top marks. She embodied everything I wasn't - everything I secretly wished I could be.
But as we matured, our differences calcified into fault lines. During senior year, while I buried myself in SAT prep books, she wrote songs about mythical creatures and sketched comic panels in her test booklets. Her dreamy sighs and spontaneous humming became percussion instruments of irritation, disrupting my concentration until every mistake felt like a personal assault on my future.
The breaking point came during one late study session. While I struggled to memorize the chronology of World War II battles, she began humming a melody she'd composed - her next chart-topping hit, she declared, sure to catapult her onto billboards across the globe.
"Get your head out of the clouds!" I shouted, my voice sharp enough to slice through her reverie.
She fixed me with an otherworldly stare, as if I'd spoken in tongues.
"Stop it," I commanded, slamming my textbook down. "Just stop."
The sound echoed like a gunshot. She studied me for a while, then gathered her things and left, her silence more disturbing than any retort.
Six years passed without a word. I moved to a larger city, earned my degree, and secured an internship at a prestigious consulting firm. Sometimes I wondered where she'd landed, whether she still lived in daydreams. I couldn't picture her sitting through lectures or wearing formal attire to interviews. Those thoughts came with a pang of nostalgia - memories of us performing impromptu plays in the backyard or using hair dryers as microphones. But I dismissed them as childish things, relics of a past I'd outgrown.
Barcelona reunited us. I'd moved there four months earlier, working at McKinsey & Company, sharing an apartment with a sensible boyfriend in finance. My life had acquired the polish of success. I'd heard rumors she'd also moved to the city of never-ending carnivals, surviving on artistic scraps and minimum wage jobs. It confirmed I had made the right choice to walk away from her.
Our reunion proved cinematically mundane. During a rare afternoon walk through Ciutadella Park - I'd left work early, seduced by the scent of orange blossoms - I found her on a bench, sipping something luridly colored through a straw,watching pigeons fight over bread crumbs.
I approached. She acknowledged me without warmth and made no invitation to sit. I did anyway, bombarding her with questions about her life. She deflected each one until, surprisingly, she extended an invitation:
"Come to Tres Punts GalerÃa tonight. My friend is exhibiting. Maybe... we could talk more."
The gallery pulsed with artistic chaos - a riot of colors and patterns that made my corporate blazer read like an obituary. I nearly fled, but her touch on my elbow anchored me.
"You made it," she grinned. "Now lose the executive costume. This is an arthouse party, not a shareholders' meeting."
Her laugh, unchanged by time, cracked something open inside me.
That night, I discussed existentialism with Marina Garcés and debated color theory with Yago Hortal. I quoted Latin with wine-loosened confidence: "Ars longa, vita brevis." For the first time in years, I felt complete.
Our rekindled friendship infected me with forgotten glee. At work, I scribbled song lyrics between spreadsheets. At night, I danced with painters and poets until dawn, returning home barefoot and laughing while my boyfriend waited with lectures about responsibility and maturity. He called her "toxic" and "unstable." I defended her until our arguments tapered off in our sterile apartment.
Two months later, we parted ways. We hadn't touched each other in weeks, and truth be told, I'd never loved him - only the security and image he represented.
"Finally," she said when I told her the news, then casually dropped her own bomb. "I met someone. A writer. His words heighten every frequency of my being. He's leaving for Peru - says only the Inca ruins can give him the energy he needs. Barcelona's too tame now. He asked me to go with him, and I said yes. I know you'll call it irresponsible, but my mind's made up. We leave on Saturday."
She smiled that dreamer's smile, already looking over the horizon of possibilities. My opinion meant nothing; her future had already taken flight.
I looked at my life - the suffocating job, the empty apartment, the dreary tomorrow - and started packing.
On Saturday, I was on my way to Peru, no longer painting questions but living answers.
This story uses the unusual though by no means unheard of technique of naming none of its characters--unless I missed them; it is, after all, 3am here in the States. The poignance between the two disparate personalities is palpable and one knows that they cannot coexist simpatico forever. When the split comes--with the narrator studying SAT tomes and her friend speaking or doing apparent nonsense--the fracture is real.
ReplyDeleteWhen they reunite years later, they've both reaped what they felt they wanted, but are drawn almost magnetically back together. Reunited with her friend, he narrator newly relishes speaking Latin and considering existentialism and discussing color theory (whatever that is), while an insourciant lifestyle for the other woman continues apace. We feel relief and genuine pleasure when the first woman decides to follow her friend and her friend's new love interest across continents to bask in the glory of a foreign land, knowing that she won't feel or be regarded as an interloper.
The most prescient thing that can be said about the narrator is that, following graduation and securing prudent employment, she finds for herself a "sensible boyfriend." Which is perhaps the epitome of faint praise. My favorite line of this wonderful story is: "The gallery pulsed with artistic chaos - a riot of colors and patterns that made my corporate blazer read like an obituary."
Congratulations on a terrifc, really fun fiction, Anastasia. And on your name: if it's really yours, then it's very pretty; otherwise, it makes for an outstanding nom de plume.
My favorite line is ALSO “ a riot of colors and patterns that made my corporate blazer read like an obituary”…brilliant! I feel like I’ve been both these women, alternately, in my life. The scene of their original break up is poingnant…silence often is, right? Painting “Why” on the fence was alive. What a fantastic story!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this well written story. The protagonist is stifled by her safe life choices, and decides to follow her more adventurous friend to Peru. But was this the best choice for either of these women? The adventurous friend is following a man to the Inca ruins. The protagonist is following the couple. What will happen next? Will both women continue to develop there artistically? Will the adventurous friend waste her life as a muse to an artist? Does this artist have any talent at all? Is it smart to follow him to the other end of the earth? Will the protagonist and/or the friend run out of money and inspiration and return to the west? Anything can happen here. A story set in Peru about these three people could be very interesting. Well done, Anastasia.
ReplyDeleteDifferent stokes. I'm skeptical about the future of three.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this narrative for its lively pace through a multi timeline. Her blazer looked like an
ReplyDeleteObituary! Fresh and unique. Excellent storytelling.
It’s an old observation that a good story consists not just of what it includes, but what the author chooses to leave out. This is clearly a well-honed work, without an ounce of fat on it. I’m envious of how effortlessly it condenses time and says so much in the space of only a few hundred words. Probably because I’m very much a “putter-inner” as Stephen King calls it, and still have trouble “murdering my darlings.”
ReplyDeleteWell-done.
There is something mythic about the storytelling style here, almost Borgesian, and no worse for that! You cover such a lot of narrative ground so economically without losing focus. I did almost wonder if the friend the narrator speaks about is real and is just a manifestation of her own ambitions but the story loses nothing even if that is totally off the mark! Nice work.
ReplyDeleteNot quite toxic sapphism but definitely toxic attraction, which is woven so tightly into the narrator and makes me yearn for what comes next, even if it might destroy the story.
ReplyDeleteLovely sense of a renewed friendship, the feeling that nothing haa changed after all this time. Really get a sense of the friend and her messy, chaotic, exhilarating life.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed the friendship between these two quite different personalities. I was glad the mc packed up and went to Peru. I was worried they were going to part again, but now I have a feeling the adventures are just beginning. Well done!
ReplyDelete