Free Without Scars by Ayla Jones

morning. I loved the solitude of the very early A.M., because I usually hit my stride then. Fallon’s meds made sleep just a small hump to get over when I wanted one page of a script to become ten. Ten to become whatever. Write. Write. Write. Until it was right.  I reread what I’d written when I got in my car.
    It was never right. It was never, ever right.
    After a defeated sigh, I drove to Fort Lauderdale to meet up with Samira, and the traffic put me there about forty-five minutes later. She was sitting at a table on the patio of a restaurant along the A1A beach strip, bouncing Lux on her lap. Samira and I met during an Accepted Students event at Miami City Prep School. We paired up during freshman orientation a few months later, and we’d been friends ever since. We got co-dependent enough over the four years of high school to apply to the same ten colleges. Then we emailed our decisions to go to Leeward together…together. She was my Work Wife but also my Life Wife. Our friends always joked that Lux was secretly my child.
    “Hey, Booger!” I took her from her mom, who had barely pulled her arms away before Lux almost wriggled out of mine. Shit! Why Samira thought I was the best person to raise her kid if she and Patrick died (when I couldn’t even manage holding all twenty pounds of her) was as big of a mystery to me as the universe.
    “Be careful with her,” Samira said, brushing her dark, curly hair from her face. “She’s the muscle if the Hillington guys get fresh. Aren’t you, Sweets? And isn’t Sweets a much better nickname than Booger?” Lux giggled when Samira tapped her on the nose.
    “Maybe, but you like everything your Uncle Charlie does, don’t you?” I kissed the top of her head.
    “Don’t worry. Patrick’ll be here soon to get her.”
    “Good. Then you can check out the new stuff.” The waiter set a plate in front of me with all my favorites piled on. Samira had ordered for me.
    “You wrote more? ” she asked as I retrieved the script from my bag. I pushed it toward Samira before Lux could tear it apart.
    “Yeah, twenty pages…”
    “You…what…twenty…what? What?” I could’ve typed twenty more. Brody had to tell me at one point this morning that I’d written one long paragraph, single-spaced, across several pages.
    “I changed what I sent you, too.”
    Sometimes, Samira looked at me like I was responsible for the existence of the stars. “How’d you even get this done?” Other times it was this snarl thing she was currently doing.
    Drugs. I smiled. “I got inspired…”
    “You don’t say…” The pages fluttered against her thumb.
    “Everyone wants Sami and Chuck to have sex right away, but what if we just played the friendship out a little longer?” I shoved eggs and bacon into my mouth; nearly swallowed them whole. “She crawls into bed with him. She’s crying her makeup off, and her dress is twisted up around her thighs, right? They have a heart-to-heart in bed—something completely not sexual—but they’re in this completely sexual position, and completely unaware of it. Completely. I mean, wait, no, they are aware, but they finally have this intimate talk about what they mean to each other, but it’s platonic. Just two friends. Talking. But. But. But there’s this stuff you have to read in between the lines for…that safety they find in each other, no matter what.”
    I remembered the urge to hold Nikki last night when she thought her sins were too big. Damn, her pain had burned the air. Like I always did with people, I invested the minute the words left her mouth. Judgment was never my first instinct. I tried to put things into perspective and see the big picture usually, but like most people, there was something about hearing that someone drank themselves stupid and then got behind the wheel of a car that got to me.  Still, I saw someone remorseful when I looked at her last night. I might’ve thought differently about the whole thing if people