Nine layers of snow

It was probably all a joke. We were at that age when everything we did was a joke, though. Except for when we were actually joking. 

‘I'm going to this place, you coming?’ was how most conversations between Clara and me started. She’d message me sometime before lunch break, we’d meet in the hallway and go wherever she wanted to go together, in the unapproving eyes of other anxious, lost, cruel teenagers. They’d spread these rumours in front of me before we became friends, things went from she used to date seven boys at the same time to she already had two abortions. Now they just looked at both of us with a certain kind of disgust. People would lament the fact that the nerd girl who was obsessed with going to remote places and reading books is going down the slope with the slut of the school. Fine for me, I thought. I never liked any of them, and none of them really knew me or liked me.

I didn’t know how exactly Clara and I became friends, though. One day she talked to me in the hallway - we were not in the same class and we had one common friend who didn’t particularly like either of us. She looked at me walking around with a world globe in the hallway and asked me if there is a place on earth that I’d like to go to, so I pointed at the Shetland Islands. I don’t know what’s there, I said to her, but it looks far away so I’ll take it. What about you? She looked at me and then at the globe, said that I always feel that I’ll end up going nowhere at all. I said I’ll make you a list of places that you should go. The next day I went to her classroom to give her an old copy of Lonely Planet for Norway. She probably still has that book. 

Rumours about her were all over the place long before I got to talk to her; I assumed that everyone had the faint idea that none of those rumours were true, but they wanted to believe in them anyway. After all, she was a pretty girl with no friends and didn’t even seem to be bothered by either the rumours or the absence of friends. She had charming foxy eyes, glowing skin, and she had one boyfriend after another who’d give her diamonds or the latest iphone for her birthday, and she didn’t even look like she was trying to please them to get those gifts. She looked mildly bored almost permanently, and those boys would go, Clara, do you like this? My sister went to France in the summer and I told her to buy this for you in Paris. Hmm, why, thank you. She always walked slightly ahead of her boyfriend, whichever it was. 

To me it didn’t make sense for my schoolmates to call her a slut even before I befriended her. They said you’re a slut when you sleep with too many boys, but they also say that if you go on a date with a guy and you agree to go somewhere a bit private, you’re also a slut if you refuse sex in the end. Sex was a weird topic anyway, and I never managed to understand the rules. Some said you should marry as a virgin, others say you can’t blame a boy for jumping on you, they’re teenagers after all - as if boys were the only teenagers around. No one seemed to care about what girls wanted from sex, if we ever wanted any sex. In any case, I wasn’t going to have any sex - I went on a date with a boy before the beginning of high school, and he showed me on his phone gallery photos of girls in our middle school, all in weird sexual positions, saying it was something that boys were sharing between themselves, then he looked at me in an incomprehensible way - I guess it was his way of asking me if I wanted to join the hall of fame. No thank you. Plus, right before that conversation, when we were in the cinema, he did start to touch me under my T-shirt and my skirt, claiming that I was ‘very excited’ - honestly I felt nothing but discomfort, but he said it with such confidence that I thought it’d be impolite to correct him - and if that was supposed to be part of sex or the preparation of it, I thought, I really hope that I’d never have sex at all. 

I just wanted to hang out with Clara  - god knows what I wanted from her, maybe because she looked a bit less bored when she was with me, and it just made me feel good. The entire school couldn’t entertain her, neither the ones who tried to get her hand and heart nor the ones who tried to see her downfall, but when I talked to her about all the places that I wanted to go to when I graduate, she looked interested - amused even, her eyes almost beaming. Maybe  I was just hallucinating. Maybe I wanted to feel special and she made me feel special. When we were together it wasn’t less stressful though - I was constantly worrying if she’d lose interest in me, and I’d lose the last person on earth who’d listen to me. But at least we were never talking about weird gossip at school. We’d go to places that she wanted to go, I’d wait for her and tell her stories as she got her hair and nails done, made her listen to  Amy Winehouse; she took me to see all the superhero films that I didn’t want to watch in the first place, but I didn’t mind watching with her. One day during lunch break, in the nail salon, I looked at those nail artists painting her nails bright crimson, and she’d ask me, you don’t want any? I’ll pay for you. So I hesitated and said I wanted the same as hers. That night when I got home I hid my hands from my parents for the whole night, but the next morning when I went school, this teacher - old man with unwarranted ideas about how each and every group of people in society should behave - saw it and decided to call me a whore in front of the entire class. That evening my parents told me to remove the red nail polish, which made me cry for around two hours in silence. They couldn’t understand it, neither could I. 

Later that night Clara called me at around 1am. I wasn’t sleeping, and I rolled myself in my curtains so that my parents couldn’t hear me - never knew if it worked. It was that time that she told me that she never had sex with any boy. It didn’t sound like she was trying to clear the rumours with me, though, she should know by that time that I couldn’t care less. Ok. I didn’t really know what to say. She said, you know what they say about me having a girlfriend when I was in middle school? Yeah, I’ve heard of her. I replied in a way that I thought was calm enough to not reveal the fact that I’d been stalking that ex-girlfriend on SNS for three weeks. Well, I - I did do it with her, but you know it’s like a joke or something. In my middle school it was a trend, or something. But it was all a joke. 

I just listened without making any comment. She was talking strangely fast. The curtain felt dusty. 

Well the thing is, you know my boyfriend. He’s been saying that my first time should be with him. 

But - but it’s not your first time, technically? 

Yeah - well for him, it is. He agrees that if I did it with girls, it doesn’t count.

He - he agrees -, I was struggling to find words at this point - well I don’t know what counts or what doesn’t, but do you like him?

He gave me a Macbook Air for my birthday.

Sure, so what?

I mean I think he was expecting this when he gave me that? 

No I mean do you like him?

She sighed, but I could feel her smiling on the other side. Well, she said, the guy is very ugly. But I received too many gifts from him.

That doesn’t sound like a good reason. I mean, if you don’t want to do it. 

But isn’t it normal for me to sleep with him?

I don’t know what normal is, but that doesn’t feel normal to me. 

Other people will say it’s normal. 

I really don’t understand. 

No, I guess you don’t. She sighed again, this time not smiling. You know, I want to be like you sometimes. You’ve got your good grades and your globe. you’ll go to places and you’ll be alright. 

Not knowing how to react, I just said, hey, I don’t have a monopoly on globes, you know. I can give you one for your birthday. You can find a place you’d like to go, too.

Hmm. She was smiling again, what’s up with you and those islands, so? Are you going to Scotland? 

For university? I don’t know, I’ll probably go to England, my parents aren’t against it. 

Can I go to visit you? If you go to England or something?

Of course. I don’t think I’ll be rich, though, I want to be a journalist or an artist, but I’ll find a nice place to stay and you can visit me in London, then we go to the Shetland Islands together. 

Ahh, Chloe. She sighed once again. 

Hmm? What? 

I don’t know, I just think you’ll do nice things in the future. And you’ll find my life very boring.

No Clara, I’ll never find you boring. 

It was getting late, and I was still rolling in my curtains. We talked for another hour before we hung up, during which she talked about her boyfriend’s plan of coming to her place over the weekend as her parents were almost always out of town. I had no positive or negative sentiment for that boy. I’d met him several times, and to this day I can’t recall his face. He might not be that ugly, after all. Just totally unremarkable. In fact, I never got to ask the one question that I really wanted to ask. 

I found myself sitting in a park next to Clara’s home for an entire afternoon on Saturday. It was a cold autumn day, early October, the small park was almost empty, and I sat on a rusty broken swing looking at my phone. Not that I could stop her boyfriend from going into her building, but I wanted to be there, nevertheless. The air smelt of dust and food from nearby restaurants, my jeans were a bit too long for my legs. On my phone I searched for Clara’s ex-girlfriend again. I could barely tell that she was a girl, and people say that that was a girl who really likes girls. Clara was a fraud because she had long and luscious hair; she did it with a popular, boy-looking girl for clout and is now sleeping with boys for diamonds and new laptops. Even if I ignored the fact that she wasn’t sleeping with boys as they claimed, I still couldn’t understand why her supposed sex with boys wasn’t considered fraudulent – that girlfriend never gave her any lavish gifts, from what I know. She created playlists for her, and she stole the keys from the school library so that they could go there and make out after school. She also had five other girlfriends at the time and was stealing money from Clara’s wallet. Why were boyfriends supposed to be Clara’s ‘real thing’? If anything, it looked to me that her relationship with the girl was more genuine. Anyway, I didn’t have anyone to ask these questions to. As it got dark, I left that park as if I’d failed at an important mission. I thought about how Clara told me that I’d be all right. I had no idea what she was talking about. I had no other friend, no proper dream other than going to some remote islands, I didn’t even know why someone like Clara would want to spend time with me, but it was the only thing that I was looking forward to every day.

I didn’t ask her whether the boyfriend went to her place, or whether they did it. I wasn’t dying to know - and she never talked about what happened during that weekend. On the following Monday she told me that she got her ears pierced and wanted me to go to her classroom to help her to disinfect during recess. Her classmates looked at me for a second as I walked in but seemingly lost interest soon after. Her ears were red with infection – she told me she got them pierced on a booth in a market on a whim, to which I said, ‘are you crazy’. Then I said I want to have them pierced too. She said sure, I’ll take you to a nice place this weekend. Something that was soothing to me about Clara was that even when I was doing what she was doing right after her, she somehow knew that I wasn’t trying to copy her. I mean, I was in fact copying her, but I wasn’t trying to be a copy of hers, and she knew it. Can I choose your first earrings? She asked as she gasped when I put alcohol disinfectant on her right ear. Sure, I said. Choose whatever for me.

Days were getting shorter and colder, but on weekends we were still eating ice cream. I liked to have vanilla ice cream, and she always had chocolate flavour, she’d take a small lick of my ice cream and leave some faint red lipstick on it. I wasn’t wearing any makeup unless Clara decided to put some on me, and she was always fully made up, people looked at her with all kinds of eyes. One day she said to me, you should kiss me now just to see those two grannies over there faint over. I don’t know what kind of face I made at this suggestion, in any case she quickly said don’t worry, I’m joking.

Do you know why every joke at 17 was suffocating, and why every suffocation at 17 was a joke.

I had bought a polaroid camera at the time, and I only took her photos. For someone who was pretty and knew how pretty she was, she was strangely shy in front of cameras. I put all her photos on my wall, she was always hiding a part of her face. Hiding one eye with a hand, hiding her mouth with a book. She said she didn’t like to be photographed, but then she never told me to stop taking her pictures. Sometimes lying on my bed I could feel her looking at me in those polaroids, and I’d want to talk to her, about whatever. But she was always calling me. I never knew when was a good time to call her, so I just sent her messages. An image of a church on the top of a mountain in Georgia, a new Lana del Rey song. Sometimes she’d call me right after my message, sometimes she’d not react until several hours later. I hated the wait, but she’d always say, sorry, I was busy with this or that. And I could almost cry. 

Her boyfriend - the laptop gifting boy - would usually pick her up by the time I was supposed to go home. One Saturday afternoon though, when we were eating our ice creams in our usual place, he appeared, and she didn’t seem to be expecting him. She quickly recomposed herself though, and said to him that Chloe would stay at my place tonight. He looked at me with no significance, just nodded and left, looking somewhat scary to me, but Clara didn’t explain. Instead, she just asked me if I could actually spend the night at her place, and I said sure. My parents were not too pleased, but they said it was fine so long as we were only girls. We had pizza for dinner, then we walked across the city to go back to her home. She walked slightly ahead of me, and her ears looked red as if it was still infected, but it was just the cold. Cold winter air was filling my lungs, and she pointed at one of the cars on the street saying that one day I want my boyfriend to buy me something like that. I asked her if she liked cars, she said no. She asked me what my type of boy was, and I said well, someone like you. She looked at me for a second, and I said I meant to say that just someone who’d walk around with me and talk to me. Haha. Joke. 

God I hated myself.

She asked again, added ‘be serious’ at the end of the sentence. So I said that I wanted a very good-looking boy who looks a bit like a girl, skinny, agrees with everything that I had to say, do as I told him to, give me all his money without asking for anything back. She asked me if I was afraid that I’d never find a boyfriend if I kept standards like that. You should try, she said, you’re pretty, you just need to be realistic. Some boys in my class asked me if you were single, you know. I said that I didn’t care, and I didn’t want a realistic boyfriend. Do you want me to find a boyfriend? I asked her. She didn’t answer, instead she asked me, is there anything that you really want to do? I said I just wanted to go away. Very far away. 

Why do you want to go away? 

I don’t know, I just hate it here, and I guess… just curious to know if the rest of the world is as bad as this place. 

The Shetland Islands. Who knows, maybe it’s much better than here. In fact, I’m sure it’s better. You’ll be happy there, I hope. 

And you? I asked, where do you want to go? 

It depends on where my parents want me to go. They’ll find a university for me to go to, and they’ll get me a job. The kind of job that won’t need too much effort, stable and safe. 

I knew by then that her parents were wealthy, and she didn’t look depressed in any way. But the concept of living a life designed by one’s parents still sounded worse than death to me. 

We weren’t walking particularly fast, and some silence passed by in the wind. I wasn’t sure if she heard me saying, you know, I don’t want any boyfriend. I think you know. Is that why you ask me about my type of boy? 

Later that night in her seemingly endless apartment, she asked me if I found her life plans boring. I said that I don’t know, I don’t think I could do it, I just wonder if she wanted to do anything else instead. She said I don’t know, that’s the thing, even if I wanted to tell them that you can go to hell with your plans about my life because I’m going to pursue my dream or something, I just can’t - I just don’t have any dreams. I nodded and said nothing. We didn’t even turn on the light in the living room, moonlight was glacial and somewhat merciful at the same time. We were on the sofa, and she just laid her head on my lap almost too casually, too naturally. She said in a muffled voice, I want to have some kind of island that makes me want to move. Or just stand up and do something. I just don’t feel motivated by anything. Like something drained all my energy away and I don’t know what that is. I said maybe it’s this place. Maybe you should just go somewhere else. She said nothing.

I tentatively stroked her hair and I could feel the warmth of her silent tears. I ended up hugging her and kissing her forehead as she cried silently, and she accepted it without a sound. I couldn’t find any words, so I just listened. I wanted to tell her that one day she’d be alright, but it felt like a lie. I had no idea what the future would look like, for me or for her. We spent most of the night on that sofa, then we took turns to shower - she gave me some clean pyjamas and underwear to change into, and helped me to dry my hair. Lying on her bed, I realised that my hair finally smelt the same as hers, and I wanted to ask her if she could kiss me. I wanted to beg her to kiss me. For some reason I thought about the boy that I went out with before high school, and I felt like a fraud for wanting her to kiss me. I guess I was crying, and Clara turned to me and put her hand behind my neck. You’ll be alright, she said. No, I won’t. She didn’t ask why, just slowly drew me close to her chest. Listening to her heartbeat gave me this harrowing feeling that she might die one day, so I just cried even more. Just kiss me, would you? We’ve all cried as much as we need, I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been, if I could want one more thing, I want this. But she just hugged me tightly without a sound. We stayed like that for as long as I could remember, and in the morning when the sun woke me up, I was still in her arms. I felt drunk, even if I never even had any alcohol. Morning, the perfume of her shampoo, her apartment - huge and lifeless somehow, the ceiling, bright white sunlight. I could die. Of course, I still wanted to go to some ridiculously remote islands. But if someone asked me to choose a place and time to die, I’d choose there and then. If Clara was to wake up and kill me, I’d tell her to go ahead. 

She didn’t kill me. Or kiss me. Our life just continued as it was supposed to, she continued dating that laptop boy, I continued following her whenever she asked me to, until I eventually left that place to not go to the Shetland Islands. I didn’t go to the UK at all. I found myself in Paris, and one day I received a phone call from her, telling me that she was pregnant. I guess I congratulated her. And it's fine. It'll all good. We're all good as long as we say we are.