Free Hard by Eve Jagger

how
things are before you try them, how people are before you love them,
or think you love them. I sigh. “It just didn’t work
out.”
    “Why didn’t you call me?”
    I shrug. “I guess I felt like I had gotten myself into that
situation, you know, deciding to move to England with him so quickly,
so I needed to be the one to get myself out of it. That it wasn’t
anyone else’s problem but mine.”
    “No,” Savannah says, shaking her head. “Your
problems are my problems. That’s how being friends works.”
    “I felt bad,” I say. “I felt like, you know, I’d
let us fall out of touch. Like I couldn’t just out of the blue
ring you up after a year and be like, Oh, hey, I know it’s been
a while, but I made a big mistake and can you help me fix my life?”
    Savannah laughs. “That’s basically the script for every
call I get from clients.”
    “But that’s exactly why I didn’t want to make that
call,” I say. “I didn’t want to be just some client
you have to bail out.”
    “Cassie,” Savannah says, leaning across the table, “if
there’s something I know about you, it’s that you can
take care of yourself. Remember that time in tenth grade when Natalie
Burch stole your chemistry journal at the end of the year and turned
it into Mrs. Von Peeble as her own?”
    “Oh my gosh,” I say, smiling. “I can’t
believe you even remember that.”
    “Of course I do. Natalie sat next to me in lab. Every
experiment she’d done the whole year had proved that energy and
matter actually can be created and destroyed, and then somehow she
got an A on her notebook grade.”
    “I had to recreate the whole notebook for the entire year in,
like, a couple weeks so I could something to turn in or I was going
to fail.”
    “And you made a perfect new notebook,” Savannah says,
pointing a forkful of French toast at me.
    “And Natalie got caught.”
    “She’s probably in some women’s prison right now,
trying to cheat Big Bertha at Uno between latrine duty shifts,”
Savannah says.
    “Actually, I think I heard that she has, like, three kids and
lives in Hog Mountain.”
    Savannah waves her hand. “Same thing. The point is, you’re
resilient.”
    “But this isn’t just recreating a chemistry notebook,”
I say. “This is recreating my whole life.”
    “You’re a problem solver. You get shit figured out. Jamie
fucks up, you save his ass. You’re negotiating with Ryder
Cole,” she says. The waiter, our new coffee BFF, refills our
mugs. “I mean, no one fucking negotiates with Ryder Cole. Or at
least lives to tell about it anyway.”
    The waiter and I stare at Savannah, eyes widened.
    “Kidding,” she says, looking from me to him. “I’m
exaggerating.”
    The waiter nods and leaves. “I think you scarred him,” I
say.
    “I’ll leave a big tip. He can put it toward the therapy.”
    I exhale a little, feeling the extra room in my lungs, my heart, and
my mind that telling Savannah about what happened with Sebastian has
created. I mean, okay, it isn’t the whole story, but it’s
more of it than I’d been willing to share yet, and it feels
good to have chiseled away even a little at the boulder I’ve
been carrying around inside. I run my hand over my ponytail. “I’m
sorry I didn’t call you,” I say. “That I just let
us drift apart.”
    “Me,
too,” Savannah says. “These last couple of years, I’ve
just let work take over.”“And I let Sebastian take
over,” I say, shaking my head.
    “But
I could have checked on you,” she says. “My best friend
runs off to another continent with a guy she’s known six
months. The least I could have done was asked how happily ever after
was working out.”
    “Not
so happily,” I say with a smirk.
    “Time
to start a new story, then. Chapter one of the single girl handbook,”
Savannah says. “And I think I know just how it begins.”
     
    ***
     
    Three hours after my last bite of Sunrise omelette, I’m a
brunette. Savannah, her lawyering