“Your breath smells like grass,” Thalia accused. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously at her friend, who was making it a point to stare at the ground as if it held precious knowledge.

“You’re weird,” Nayah retorted. Wow, this grass was scarily green… Either the groundskeeper was breaching the drought restrictions, or they were practising magic. There was no way this grass should be that green.

“Have you been eating grass again?” Thalia’s question hung in the air like a persistent mosquito. Nayah did not appreciate her tone.

An accusatory finger entered Nayah’s view. She watched, silently outraged, as the finger poked the shirt of her uniform.

“Nayah…” her partner teased. “We’ve talked about the whole ‘eating grass’ thing.”

“Wha - I - You -” Nayah sputtered indignantly. After taking a deep breath to centre herself and untie her tongue, she continued, “I do not have an ‘eating grass thing!’ That fact that you think I do is weird - maybe you’re the one with a thing!”

Thalia remained unimpressed and unmoved. She responded to Nayah’s petty tantrum with the silent raise of a perfectly manicured eyebrow.

After a tense moment of silence, she finally spoke, “You realise that is the most childish and ineffective retort you could’ve produced, right?”

Nayah cast her gaze to the lush turf in shame. Yes, she knew. She’d take back the primary-school insult if she could. It didn’t represent the best of her neurons firing. Quite the opposite, actually. But, at this point, it would be easier to admit defeat.

“Okay,” she sighed. “Fine. I’ll admit it. I may have had a nibble at a few specimens SIMPLY to make a complete and accurate judgement about the quality of the sample. It was far too green to be following water restriction regulations!”

Thalia’s eyebrow remained raised. She dared to allow a small smirk to occupy her face. Rude. Desperate to fill the silence, Nayah felt words vomit from her mouth,

“And I was right! It was for a purpose! This is not organic grass! They’ve added pesticides, and watered it far more than regulations allow! The blades should not be this hydrated!”

… Silence. If it weren’t too cold for crickets, Nayah thought they would have been a fitting audience to her destruction. She closed her eyes as regret and guilt overtook her mind. Why did she have to do that? How could she be so idiotic? Who eats grass? Even a dedicated environmental investigator as herself? Eating the grass? Really?

“Nayah…” Thalia’s soft call pulled the blonde from her internal downward-spiral. The girl in question raised her deep brown eyes to meet her companion’s. She breathed a long sigh of relief at the kind-hearted amusement she saw there.

“I can see your mind going into overdrive. Chill. We've known each other for pretty much our entire lives - my love is unconditional,” the brunette paused as she searched Nayah's face curiously. “And even if it were conditional, this wouldn't be one of the conditions.”

Nayah released the breath she didn't know she was holding. Thalia was right, as always.

Her life before befriending Thalia was insignificant. Unimportant. They met in Grade 4… Okay, well, technically they met in Grade 3, but their friendship bloomed in Grade 4. They both found themselves playing on the same hockey team in a desperate attempt from both sets of parents to ‘build character’ and potentially even inspire an interest in physical activity.

It didn't work. Well, not for the parents’ original intended purposes. But Thalia and Nayah gained something much more valuable than character or a predilection for exercise; they found each other.

A friendship for the ages bloomed on that poor, hacked-up hockey turf. Thalia accepted and celebrated all the weirdness and quirks of Nayah. The reserved introvert often found herself watching in awe as Thalia laughed at something she'd said or done; when hanging around Thalia, Nayah found the confidence to be unapologetically herself. She learned how to let loose - to savour sugar-fueled moments chaos that fueled inside jokes for years to come.

Thalia also benefited from their friendship, much to Nayah’s surprise. From deep conversations in the early a.m., well before the sun rose on their many sleepovers, Nayah learned that Thalia felt grounded by her presence. Nayah made Thalia feel smart - made her appreciate her own worth as a knowledgeable being. She viewed Nayah’s instinctual formal, academic language as opportunities to expand her own vocabulary. Thalia felt safe to explore philosophical topics and debates with Nayah that fell flat in her other friendships.

Thalia had been the first person Nayah came out to. She remembered lying on the all-too-familiar mattress on her friend's tiled floor. She remembered pulling the top sheet up to her chin, for comfort, more than warmth. A rare, but comfortable, silence had befallen the pair as they wavered on the precipice of sleep.

“Thalia?” Nayah had called, her whispered voice timid in the dark.

“Yeah?” came her friend's reply.

Nayah had inhaled deeply, urging the words she'd kept back for so long.

“I’m gay.”

The silence that followed had, realistically, been a few seconds. A reasonable amount of time for an almost-asleep Thalia to process what had been said, and respond.
To Nayah, though, those seconds had stretched like hours. She regretted pulling the sheet over her body since the nervous sweat made it far too hot inside. She didn't want to pull the sheet down, though. She lay there - frozen - heart hammering through her chest, and waiting for Thalia to say something.

“Thanks for telling me, Nayah. It's cool,” Thalia had responded, relaxed in true Thalia fashion. She yawned, “I like girls too. And guys. Everyone, really. People are hot.”

With that, she had rolled over and promptly fallen asleep. The speed in which Thalia could go from talking, to snoring, had always been impressive.

Returning to the present moment, Nayah nodded to herself. This was Thalia. Her best friend. Who'd accepted all of her weirdness with open arms. Who placed a level of trust in Nayah that she didn’t in other friendships.

Eating grass? That wasn't even the weirdest thing Nayah had done. If Thalia loved her through everything else, she wouldn't let something like grass eating stop their friendship.

“Nayah, are you still with me?” Thalia’s perfectly manicured hand filled Nayah’s vision temporarily.

She grunted in agreement and swatted the offending hand away.

“Good,” came Thalia’s reply. “We're cool. You know that.”

A moment of comfortable silence. Nayah's thoughts returned to the job they'd been sent here to do. She pulled a face as she remembered the clipboard lying forgotten on the passenger seat of their van.

“But, I mean,” Thalia’s voice broke through teasingly, “if you were hungry, you could’ve just said something…”

Nayah scoffed at her friend's devious grin that came to rest within breathing distance of her own. She shoved the face away with an eye roll as Thalia cackled with glee.

“Yeah yeah. Now that you mention it, I could eat. How about that cafe on the corner of Gordon Street?” Nayah offered.

“You sure you still have room?” was Thalia’s smirking reply.

Nayah flipped her friend a middle-finger salute as she stalked towards their parked van.
© O.M.A

Note: the first 3 lines of dialogue in this story are direct quotes from a conversation I overheard my students having; kids say the strangest things

#shortstory #story #friendship #humour #fiction #lgbtq #writco #writcoapp #platoniclove #bestfriends