Spence fidgeted with her shirt, and began to sway awkwardly, much like a nervous child meeting a strange adult for the first time.

“Hey. I was worried you left, or something.”

Ash leaned back, placing her arm up against the back of the couch. It rested there a second, then landed back into her lap.

“No. Um, sorry I didn’t answer right away, I was just…you know, thinking.”

Spencer glanced at the floor, her head bobbing in acknowledgement.

“Oh.”

The ceiling creaked, alerting both girls to Dodger’s presence. Ashley had assumed he had left, although she had no idea why she would have thought that. Dodger would never leave. Even if she asked him to he would drive a few feet down the block, park, and wait in the car until she called him or the house set on fire.

A breeze blew outside, smacking the ferns of a tiny palm tree against the large glass window across the room. Spencer looked over towards the noise then back down at the floor and sighed.

It was as if the moments in the pool had occurred years and years before, a faint memory they would look back upon and smile, perhaps share with their grandkids, only to find their voices fading away half way through, a fierce cold rising within their chest, as the true meaning behind it all threatened to swallow up the memory entirely.

Ashley always found that strange. How perceptions of events can alter through the perils and rough terrain of time. She would visit her parent’s graves, a few years back, sitting on the lawn, her hands shaking as she attempted to read her writing through a thin haze of tears, the drops smacking onto the paper, the tiny patches of ink running towards the bottom of the page, where they trickled off into the grass, having escaped purgatory, a creation not their own. After having been forced to sit there, representing the pain and sorrows of another, made to experience something they have no memory of doing, like being born into a family of racists, forced to proceed forward with hate, not being given a choice to recant.

She would look back at Aiden, in his black suit, leaning against his new car, a gift from grandpa’s inheritance, this cement column that would support her through the next natural disaster, taking the brunt of the force because he knew he had to; it was his duty, his pledge to a most unusual friendship. He would cry hot tears, and she would know, but he refused to take off the sunglasses, not wanting her to see his pain for her.