𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐘 • Neil Perry

𝐞𝐩𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞!

EVELYN moved to Greenwich Village in New York. One long train away from Vermont she never intended to take back. It was hard living without her parents. It was hard working a job in a bar filled with beat poets and cigarette smoke and continuously lying to people's faces. It wasn't fun getting away with it. But she did it anyway because she did what she had to do to make ends meet half a world away.

There was a library four blocks away from the apartment she rented. There were friendly faces in the drowning crowds of unfriendly faces. She liked the artistic liveliness that breathed in New York. It was the kind of thing you could smell in the air sometimes more than you could see. But on the note of smells, it was extremely repulsive and a concrete landfill by comparison to Vermont suburbia.

On the days harder than others, she couldn't pretend she didn't miss it. But she couldn't go back.

"What else have they been saying?" Evelyn asked.

She was on the phone to Martha receiving intel right in the belly of Henley Hell. It was a cream wall telephone that came with the place amongst the short kitchen counter just metres away from her bed. There were two doors total—one to her wardrobe and the other to her restroom that was the size of a closet. Her old dorm would have laughed in its face.

"Nothing much," Martha responded. "They're just adamant you took their son away from them."

"They didn't even know me. If they had they would know that I miss him just as much as them if not more. And as for their adamance, they should turn their finger around and start pointing it at themselves. Had they done so a long time ago, none of this would have panned out this way."

"For Neil's sake maybe. But yours? It doesn't have to be like this. You don't have to run away, too, and end your life."

"My life started the moment I got off that train. I mean, how many times have I gotta tell you I'm happy here before you start believing it?"

"When you begin to mean it."

"Suit yourself," Evelyn gave up. Then with the deepest of sincerity, she said, "Thank you for having my back in this."

"As opposed to the manipulative father that drove his own son away?" Martha remarked. "It's sincerely my pleasure."

Evelyn's lips twisted into a slanted into a smile.

"Same time tomorrow?"

"Monday. I have a shift tomorrow."

"All right. Don't get into any trouble before then."

"I'll try."

"Or after for that matter. And trying isn't good enough."

They hung up with passing goodbyes. Sometimes it was hard for Evelyn to adjust to the idea that of all the people she knew, Martha would be the one she ended up confiding in and make a friend out of. It was hard to know if they'd know each other for a lifetime or if Martha's Ivy League future would cut the ties that had barely tightened their knots.

But Evelyn's foresight only went so far.

There was a knock on the door that broke her from her internal monologue. She half expected it to be neighbour, but instead it was a group of boys vaguely her age.

It was hard to tell them apart at first. They were all no shorter than her, except one that wore glasses shaping his face, and they were all fair-skinned and dark-haired. It was hard to pin down any defining qualities until she saw the slanted smirk of the one in the middle wearing the beret.

"Hi," he said. And for a moment ever so brief, she was certain she recognised his voice.

"Hi," she responded unsurely. "Can I help you?"