Lost Touch

There are two sides to every story

Image by Khusen Rustamov from Pixabay

Holly

I have this picture in my head, like a freeze-frame memory. It’s Leah in the last moment I saw her, before I closed my eyes.

I have photos of her, of course. Some of them I got from my mum, like our first photo together: we’re kneeling side-by-side in the front row of our Year 1 class portrait. Some I saved from Facebook: her mum posts a Memory of Leah’s sweet sixteen party every year. I have my own photos of her from that party, but I’m in the background of her mum’s one. And there are loads of selfies I took with her, mostly from our college years.

She’s smiling in all those photos, but not in my head. In that picture, she’s pensive. She wasn’t sure how I’d react. It was like she didn’t know me at all.

Leah was— Is! She is an hour older than me, and technically we’ve known each other all our lives. Her mum and mine met in the maternity ward, so me and Leah met too. We didn’t meet again until primary school, and that’s when we became something more than friends; more than sisters, even. Soul twins, maybe?

We were inseparable, for sixteen years. We shared classes all through school, we played in each other’s gardens and hung out in each other’s bedrooms, we double-dated as teenagers, we even went to the same university to study psychology together. We double-dated in college, too, although we both lost our virginity separately because doing that together would just have been weird. But we both did it on the same night: we scheduled it, and met for breakfast the next day to compare notes.

We didn’t have dates for our graduation ball. That was her idea, but as soon as she suggested it I knew she was right: it was our night, to celebrate something we’d achieved together, and we didn’t need two boys around who were only thinking about when the evening would end and they could get us alone. It wasn’t a ‘date’, we’d just take each other to the ball, we’d dance together, and we wouldn’t give a fuck for anyone except us. Things were going to change after that night: we’d always keep in touch but soon we’d have different jobs, in different cities, and we might never be together in quite the same way as we had been, so we wanted to make the most of it.

And we did. We had fun. We drank a little, but less than we would have if we were planning to go home with our dates. We danced a lot, more than if we’d been there with boys. Most of all we laughed, so we wouldn’t cry over the end of an era.

The evening was still going strong when Leah whisper-shouted that she wanted to talk to me outside.

She meant outside outside: not just in the lobby, but in the grounds of the hotel. It was this old country house with formal gardens in front and woodland behind. She wanted to talk among the trees. I didn’t know why we had to talk in the woods, but I went with her, because it was Leah.

She set her clutch down by the trunk of a willow, then stood close to me. So close. But she pulled me even closer. And she kissed me. A real kiss. Tongues. Hers, then mine.

Nothing had ever felt so wrong or so right. When she broke off the kiss I was kind of numb, like I was in shock, but at the same time my whole body was tingling. I was there, in myself, feeling the heat course through me, and I was watching from outside, finally seeing who I was.

She said, “Remember when we were kids and we played hide and seek? I want to play hide and seek now. Unzip me?”

She half-turned, so I could unzip her dress. And I did.

I watched her slip one shoulder down, then she told me to close my eyes and count to a hundred.

So I did. I closed my eyes, and I counted. I never counted so fast.

When I opened my eyes, her dress was lying on the ground, and she was gone. I followed the path through the woods — only about twenty metres — and I found her underwear draped over a branch.

I wasn’t sure what would happen when I found her, I just knew I wanted to. I needed to.

But I couldn’t.

I searched. I called her name. I panicked. I went back to the hotel, grabbed a random guy, and pulled him outside with some garbled explanation. He searched, then he went back for his mates. They searched.

I finally thought to check her room. She wasn’t there.

At some point, the police came. I lost count of how many times I had to tell someone what happened. More police came. Twenty-odd officers with high-powered torches couldn’t find her. They called for a dog; she couldn’t find her.

The police called her parents.

Leah hadn’t gone back to her room, or home to her family, she’d just gone.

That was ten years ago, and no one’s heard from her.

She was my best friend, then one day I closed my eyes and she vanished.

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Leah

I don’t remember when I fell in love with Holly. Before I even knew what love was, I think. When I did know, I understood love as how girls felt about boys, and boys about girls. But I was a girl, and Holly wasn’t a boy.

When I was old enough to know how boys really felt about girls, I let them, but it was Holly’s lips I wanted to feel, and Holly’s hands.

When Holly planned to lose her virginity, I didn’t: I had no plan, and no interest. But I couldn’t let her do that alone, so I found a willing boy. Jack, I think. Or James? I forget now. Some J name.

The next morning, over breakfast, I wanted to tell her how I’d felt, and who I wished had been in my bed, but I didn’t. I kept quiet. I let her tell me how she felt, then said I’d felt the same way. But I didn’t. She told me she wanted to make love again, right now, and I burned to shout, “Yes! Right now!”

But I didn’t.

I didn’t do any of those things because I was scared… until the graduation ball. Graduating would change everything, so I knew I had to change too. I had to be brave.

Graduation was the last time Holly and I would be together. We’d still see each other afterwards, of course, but meeting would need to be agreed and arranged: it would become an agenda item in our adult lives, something ticked off our to-do lists.

Holly had fun that night. I hope she believed I did too, but I was faking it. I was too sick with nerves to truly enjoy myself, because I knew what I needed to do.

I had so many little speeches prepared, so many lines and lies, but when the time came, I just asked her to come outside with me, and she did. If I’d been a boy, she would have known what I wanted. But she was my friend.

I didn’t say anything. I just kissed her, passionately. She was surprised, I felt that, but only for a heartbeat, then she kissed me back. She found her own passion, and she shared it.

I don’t know why I wanted to play a childhood game. I’d just graduated with a degree in fucking psychology and I didn’t even understand what I was thinking, much less what Holly might be. Maybe I wanted to be pursued, or discovered, or uncovered. Maybe I wanted to recall the early, innocent days of my love for her. I didn’t want to be innocent, but maybe I wanted to feel that way.

If I did want to feel innocent, I chose a novel way expressing it… or maybe it was the oldest one: being naked in a garden. When I asked Holly to unzip me, she did, and even though I’d told her to close her eyes, I kept my back turned while I slipped my dress off.

She was counting fast: she wanted to see me, to find me, to catch me. But I wanted the chase and the surprise, so I ran. I stopped as soon as I turned a corner, so I could step out of my underwear and hang them on a tree branch like a trail marker.

There was a chill in the air that night, but I didn’t notice it until I hid behind a tree and waited for Holly. My heart was racing, pumping heat through my body, and my skin tingled with anticipation, but I had goosebumps on my goosebumps. Not all my shivering was nerves.

I didn’t know what would happen when Holly found me, and I didn’t want to know. I wanted everything to be a surprise, to be spontaneous and dynamic and shocking and free and it didn’t matter what I wanted, because she never found me. I hid, but she didn’t seek.

It’s hard to judge time when you’re standing naked in the moonlight, but I waited a few minutes. I know I did. I counted to a hundred in my head, then I counted again, more slowly. I counted to a thousand. Two thousand. Three thousand. I never even heard her looking.

I found my underwear where I’d left them, so I picked them up. My dress was still in a heap on the ground, but Holly wasn’t standing beside it. I shook the dress out, put it on, grabbed my clutch, and walked back to the hotel.

Holly wasn’t there, either. I asked a classmate if they’d seen her and she said no, but she stared at my underwear in my hand.

I tried the toilets. She wasn’t there. I tried her room, but if she was there, she didn’t answer.

I didn’t sleep that night. I knew I’d upset her, and I understood why, but for her not to say anything, not to contact me even to say, “Don’t contact me,” that scared me. So I sat on my bed, and I worried, and I waited for breakfast, believing things would look different in the morning because they always do. She’d talk to me then. She might say goodbye, but it would be something.

She wasn’t at breakfast.

I asked at reception, and she hadn’t checked out. I waited until the last checkout time, and she still didn’t check out. I called her parents, in case she’d gone home. She hadn’t.

Her parents called the police. The cops opened a missing person case, but they didn’t actually do anything. She was an adult, they said, and as there were no indications of foul play there was no urgency. She was probably “celebrating her graduation in someone’s bed.”

Maybe she was, but she’s been celebrating for ten years now, and no one’s heard from her.

She was my best friend, then one day I turned my back and she vanished.

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