This is the fourth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
Everyone said that Jen had run off with Lucy’s boyfriend, though she had not run off with Lucy’s boyfriend: he had run off with her. Also, it happened a good three months after he and Lucy had broken up.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Sharon said. “He was Lucy’s.”
He really wasn’t, but Jen found she could not say as much, because Lucy had locked herself in a toilet cubicle and people said that she was throwing up in there, she was so upset. Lucy was in love, and Jen was maybe not in love. So he was Lucy’s because Lucy said he was, and everyone agreed with that. Everyone except the guy, who was called John Dolan.
John Dolan said that Jen was the one he’d wanted all along.
He had broken up with Lucy at Christmas; they all knew that. It was supposed to be a time of joy and good will, not of ghosting and dumping, so the holiday had been ruined for everyone, especially for Lucy’s mother. And it was March when he got with Jen, a full—count them—thirteen weeks later. And, by the way, she wanted to remind people, he made the first move. A move that felt so right, it did not occur to Jen that he had once wrapped his arms around Lucy the way he was now wrapping his arms around her, saying, “So, hey?”
“Hey,” she said back.
Later, she did mention her friend. She said it after they’d finished their first, long kiss, which took place outside, against the trunk of a huge, budding tree. She nestled into his shoulder and looked back at the house, where everyone partied on, oblivious. And, with a sudden, unforeseen pang, she said, “What about Lucy?”
He was so surprised, he started.
He might have said, “Who?”
Later, when it was all a big drama, he folded Lucy back into the story, as if she had some role in their getting together.
“It was you all along,” he said.
They were in his mother’s car, up in the hills, where the darkness was huge. Saturday night was happening elsewhere, and it felt as if they were hiding from everyone they knew.
“Really?”
Jen thought this was a bit of a lie. She thought it would be more truthful to say that he’d never wanted Lucy in any serious way. Or that he used to like Lucy and then he didn’t like her—these things happen. What did “all along” mean, anyway? John Dolan was talking the way Lucy talked, as though people belonged to other people. You could be involved in other people’s wanting, whether you knew it or not.
He leaned in and whispered into her hair.
“It was you I liked.”
She could hear the melancholy in the lie, as she looked at the city lights spread below. All his sadness opened out for her.
“Really?”
Jen felt a tiny, lifting sensation in her chest. She would sleep with John Dolan. She had been reluctant but now she would give in, not because her body wanted it (so much!) but because of this new, sweet untruth. He had loved her all along.
This was when they were in the last year of school and everyone was panicking about final exams. Lucy was so upset about John Dolan that she tanked biology, so it was actually really serious, because first Jen stole Lucy’s boyfriend and then she stole her future as a veterinarian. Jen had ruined Lucy’s life.
So that all happened in 2004 and now it was 2024. No one knew where John Dolan was and no one cared. There were hundreds of John Dolans on LinkedIn; it was hard to know if he was even online. Lucy popped up, whether you wanted to see her or not. Many snaps of her three children, who, Jen thought, always looked perfect and never looked happy. Also pictures of her lovely house with its coffered wooden ceiling and its color scheme in a pale yellow that Lucy called “primrose” and Jen called “omelette.”
Jen was online a lot in 2024 because she was in a nervous breakdown, or a time of transition, or whatever you wanted to call it. Her marriage was over. She had one fabulous spark of a child, who, according to his school, had behavioral difficulties, a raging, grieving boy who hated his mum and missed his dad. Her job was unsatisfying but well paid, and she despised—that is not too strong a word—everyone in the yoga class where she went to calm down, especially the wisp of a woman who leaned both hands on her knees in Baddha Konasana and said that tightness in the hips was sometimes trauma-related. It just wasn’t, Jen wanted to say, and all the scented candles in the world could not tell her otherwise.
She was crying in Savasana one day, or releasing water down the sides of her perfectly still face, when she saw Lucy pick her way through the mats, on an early exit from the room. It was just a glimpse as Lucy passed above her, looking about ten feet tall, her thigh long and planar like a sculpture of a leg, her hair in a swishing ponytail, and her face oddly blotched, which, Jen decided later, might have been a problem with her filler.
She scrolled all evening, eating pizza from a grease-stained box. Everything in Lucy’s life was sunny and right. A man, presumably her husband, cooked on a barbecue. A daughter in a tulle skirt twirled on a green lawn. No sign of a job or a profession (but why post about that?).
A few weeks later, Jen glimpsed Lucy through her own legs, in a downward-facing dog, and was relieved when Lucy did not recognize her dangling there. Lucy floated into Chaturanga in a way that was beautiful and unreal. Later, she lifted a leg and swung it to the side without a wobble. This was before her three-minute headstand, during which she looked a little worried and her face flushed red. Her filler was definitely a bit lumpy, upside down.
Jen felt stuck to the mat as she waited for Lucy to leave at the end of class, but she seemed in no hurry this week, and they were both still for a very long time. And, because she had nothing else to do, Jen began to survey her body, the way she had been instructed: fingers, wrist, forearm, shoulder, up over her scalp, all the way down to her toes, which she relaxed one by one. Before. During. After. All along. She found it was women she was counting. The other women in her ex-husband’s life twitched into her mind, toe by toe. The silly one, the one who did not matter, the one who would not leave him alone. She thought of his voice as he lied to her, how she wanted to fill that hollow melancholy with her love as, for some reason, her heart now rose to do, filling the silent room, its many supine women and two stunned men, the wisp at the front with her prayer bell, the light-filled window, the street beyond.
She let her hand loll sideways onto the wooden floor, which was slick with the condensed sweat of all their bodies but also nicely cool.
He really was Lucy’s boyfriend. That had been a wrong thing to do.
“Oh, my God!” Lucy was standing right over her, whisper-squealing, her hand doing a tiny, private flutter of hello. “How are you? Sh-h-h. How are you? It’s me. It’s Lucy.”
“Oh, my God! How are you?”
“I am so good,” Lucy said. “Don’t you love this class? It is so nice to see you. Oh, my God!” ♦
