By Audrey Ouh

I’ve never believed in soulmates, but if I’d had to name one person to call mine, it would’ve been Lexi. We’d grown up in the same town, our high schools twenty minutes apart, just narrowly missing each other for the first eighteen years of our lives. Then, when college came, we happened to walk in late to the same lecture and ended up sitting next to each other in the back row for the rest of the semester.

Like every good love story, we didn’t connect at first sight. I thought that she was intimidating at first, back when all I knew about her was that she was one of the prettiest girls I’d ever seen and that she had a following online. She wore Chanel headbands to class, and her white sneakers were always pristine, unmarked by the gray grime of frat parties and years of wear. When she invited me to come over to her place to work on a group
project, I spent an hour getting ready so she would think that I was worth her time.

Despite preparing a three-page research outline for our presentation, our first night together ended up passing with very little schoolwork. The first thing she said when I walked in the door was, “Hey, Amanda, welcome in. Do you drink?”

I nodded shyly.

After emptying the sake bottle her parents bought her as a housewarming gift, we were both warm and relaxed and definitely not in the mood for biology. I felt comfortable for the first time in weeks, not just because of the alcohol, but because it was the first time since I’d gotten to college that something felt so familiar. Maybe the familiarity came in part from Lexi being from the same town as me, and partly from the house itself—clean and private and spacious, with a refrigerator filled with Diet Coke and apples and the TV humming in the living room, so different from the cramped triple room and constant chaos of dorm hallways. Maybe it was from the way that I saw myself in Lexi. After offering me sake, she apologized.

“Sorry you wasted your time coming here,” she told me. “I saw you worked on the slides already. I meant to start, but then my parents called me, and they were saying all of this shit…”

“You’re fine,” I cut her off. “I get it.”

She smiled at me, and we continued to sip our sake, going through cycles of silence and meaningless conversation. Games like Kiss, Marry, Kill and Would You Rather. We asked each other all the polite things, like majors and clubs and “how are you liking college so far?” until we reached the point where we either sat in silence or said something honest.

“You know, when I first met you, I thought you were terrifying,” I admitted finally. The room was dark save for the lights of the city that filtered through the window, and I felt embraced by the shadows that covered my body, safe in my lack of need to be anything but a voice.

“I thought you hated me,” she told me in return.

“Why would I hate you?”

“I don’t know. I feel like everybody hates me,”

Lexi laughed, but even drunk, I could tell it wasn’t a joke.

“What did your parents say to you?” I asked. It was a question that had been on my mind since earlier, but only now, with alcohol blunting my fear of scaring Lexi away, was I able to ask.

“Just, you know, the usual,” she leaned back on her hands and tilted her head up towards the ceiling. “I told them I was really enjoying my film class. Just as a general statement. And then, they started going on and on about how they sent me to this school so that I could do something with myself, to grow beyond these hobbies.”

She stressed this last word, an unconscious imitation of her parents. “I wasn’t even implying that I wanted to study film. But they had to make it something bigger, had to jump on the opportunity to remind me that I’m not what they wanted.”

“If it makes you feel any better, my parents think that I’m only doing English because I can’t handle anything else.”

“You should start a blog,” she said finally. “Gain a million followers, prove them wrong.”

“Is that why you post?” I asked.

“Partly,” she said. “Partly for the company.”

“You know, I didn’t even really want to come to college,” I said. “I wanted to be a pilot. Travel the world for free, get to live a million lives.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“My parents told me pilots were like bus drivers for the sky,” I said. We laughed together, breathless and delirious.

“Sounds about right,” she said.

Eventually, we got to that point in the night when reality fades away, that quiet space when the darkness seems eternal, and the world feels suspended in time.

“I had an eating disorder in high school,” she told me.

“Me too,” I said, and that was it. A shared link, a permanent sense of camaraderie. Because eating disorders, as horrible as it sounds, are grounded in a sense of community. In that moment, intoxicated from the alcohol and this new knowledge, it felt like God had sent this person to me.

Soulmates.

•

I went to my first college party with Lexi, and just a week after we’d become friends, I was bawling my eyes out in a sticky fraternity bathroom. I’d never been good at expressing any type of feeling, but I’d discovered that alcohol made me emotional.

“Why the fuck are you crying?” Lexi asked me, shaking her head. She laughed like it was a joke, laughed the way I knew I would when I was sober enough to be embarrassed.

“I don’t know,” I told her. What I meant was, I didn’t know how to put it into words. Didn’t know how to package my emotions for other people so that they would understand. All I knew was the physical sensation of my hands tingling and my chest squeezing and the world feeling massive and way too small all at once. “I hate it here,” I said between sobs. “I hate who I am here.”

And then, I told her about everything no one else would listen to. My parents’ disappointment in my accomplishments. My distant roommates. The emptiness I felt in my own bed, listening as they whispered to each other in the dead of night. The way I shriveled when I compared their animated laughter to the silence I experienced when they knew I was listening.

The pressing, universal fear that I was living life wrong.

She didn’t say much, just hugged me tight and rubbed my back. When my heaving sobs subsided, I sat down on the closed toilet seat and looked up at her. “Do you think it’s stupid to major in English?” I asked.

A couple hours before the party, my parents had called to check in on me. When I’d asked them the same question, their silence had told me everything I had been afraid of hearing.

“No,” she said immediately. “I think it’s stupid not to do the things you love.”

“But what if I don’t make any money?”

“You’ll be fine.” She said it with so much finality, with the kind of confidence we could only have at our age. And even though I knew there was nothing to back those words, nothing to justify that confidence besides the distance we had between now and the future, it felt nice to have someone to lean on. Someone to provide reassurance instead of reality.

After that day, we spent the rest of the month strengthening a friendship built on mutually rocky foundations, keeping our balance by leaning on one another. If you were to ask me what my best memory with Lexi was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you because there were so many of them that it became routine; the good days just became a natural part of my life. I got used to her being there, of fighting the loneliness, of navigating college, of navigating independence together. Everything we did or said was fuzzy filler, something I wouldn’t be able to capture the details of looking back, but it made me feel warm and wanted, and I loved her for it.

•

The temperature dropped suddenly in November, and when I got back from Thanksgiving Break, the hot arid October days had given way to a slight chill, to gray skies and beige leaves that piled slowly on the sidewalks. I got a call from Lexi the first week I got back, now two months into college. Both of us hated texting and communicated almost exclusively in person, so I was caught off guard. I put down the dry protein bar that I’d been picking at and answered the phone. My roommates looked over with mild interest. It was nearly 2 a.m.

“Hello,” I whispered. I looked up to see if my roommates were still listening, but they’d gone back to their conversation. “Are you okay?”

“Hiiii.” I could barely make out her voice against the noise in the background. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” my voice came out thinner than I wanted it to, nagging. “Where are you?”

“San Francisco.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah,” she giggled. “I wanted to get some fresh air.”

I quickly checked her location on my phone and pleaded with Google for directions. She was about thirty minutes away at some bar downtown.

“The people here are so nice,” she went on. “I told the guy at the front that I’d been walking for an hour, and he let me in. I got a free shot from the bartender too.”

“Lex,” I hesitated. The worst thing would be to overreact. “Do you need me to come get you?”

“No, no, no, I’m having fun. I just wanted to hear your voice because I missed you.” Her words slurred, but did they slur enough for me to go pick her up?

“If you need anything, let me know, okay?”

“Okay,” she dragged out the word. There were a couple seconds of shouting and then laughter before she quickly said, “Bye, I love you.”’

And then, the phone went silent. I hadn’t realized how loud the background music had been until all I could hear was my own breathing. My heartbeat echoed in my ears.

She’s fine, I decided, but I couldn’t help but check my phone for the rest of the night. I didn’t sleep until it told me she’d gotten home.

•

December marked the last of the falling leaves, and the bare trees provided a weblike mural through my window, the delicate branches crossing over each other and tangling together. The trees looked fragile without their leaves.

Like all struggles in life, my worries about the future slowly lost their edge, and I was gradually finding my footing in my new life. When finals rolled around, I’d been adopted by a new group of friends during a time when all the friend groups were supposed to be settled and impenetrable. Although they were technically my friends, I was still at the stage where I felt indebted to these people, grateful to be included. Two of the guys were cooking in the kitchen, supplied by the only sophomore in the group, and everybody else drifted aimlessly in the living room, making conversation, setting the table, pulling out board games to play later. We were doing a late Friendsgiving, and the smell of turkey drifted through the space. The whole room was steeped in sunlight and the scent of warmth and the holiday season. I heard someone say my name.

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Outside maybe? She said she needs to take a call,” someone responded.

“Tell her to get in here; the food’s almost done.”

A couple seconds later, Helen joined me on the balcony, sidestepping through the already open doorway.

“Everything good?” she asked.

Helen tapped lightly on my arm, and I felt a surge of love and gratitude. I’d met Helen at a club event, and unlike me or Lexi, she was the type of person to actively reach out, the type of person who wasn’t afraid of rejection or intimacy. She asked me to lunch sometime after, and her willingness to put her pride on the line allowed us to get close. She was the reason I was here. Around Helen, I saw my own faults clearly as well as who I wanted to be. She lived boldly, honestly, and most of all, she radiated stability. In herself, her goals, her relationships.

“Yeah, give me like one second,” I told her with a smile.

Unlike us, Lexi had gone home for Thanksgiving break, and she’d called me sobbing the last two days. Back under her parents’ roof, I could see the way that she shrank and could see more pieces of the person she had been in high school. The person who had gotten therapy for an eating disorder and whatever had caused it in the first place

“My parents hate me,” she said on the phone. “I’m a failure.”

As much as I felt for her, this was a conversation we’d had too many times. My sympathy felt slightly stale from overuse, and all I could do was repeat what I’d said time and time again.

“You’re worth more than their opinion of you.”

But we talked in circles again, because no matter what I said or how much I tried to make her feel better, it didn’t matter unless she believed me.

Through the open balcony door, I could hear the chaos of people talking and moving over the steady hum of the oven. Helen leaned on one foot, glancing back and forth between me and the door. I recognized her conflict—to be inside, with the food and conversation and the buoyant laughter of happy people, and to be there for someone who probably needed her more.

Half in and half out. These days it felt like I was acting a part in both groups, always half present.

“Lex,” I interrupted when there was a pause in her conversation.

“Yeah?”

Helen looked at me, tilted her head towards the door. Ready? She mouthed.

The smell of food had now made its way outside, and I could feel my stomach tighten in response. From inside, somebody shouted that dinner was ready.

“Amanda?” Lexi’s voice sounded fragile. “Is something wrong?”

I sighed.

“Never mind,” I said into the phone. “You were saying?”

To Helen, I shook my head and waved her back inside. I watched her back as she was swallowed by the party inside, feeling wistful and angry.

At who though? I wasn’t sure.

•

Right before my birthday dinner, I told Helen that I felt overworked. It was February now, and the cold had become aggressive, blowing through Helen’s dorm window and drifting over my skin to call up goosebumps.

“Is it school?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. I was sitting on her bed, and she watched me from her desk chair, eyebrows furrowed.

“I think it’s everything. School. People. I feel like I’m stretched too thin.”

“I mean you are taking a lot of classes,” she said. “Are your parents still on you about your grades?”

“When are they not?” I said. I let myself fall back onto the mattress, legs hanging off the edge of the bed frame

“Maybe you should drop something if you feel overcommitted. You do seem kinda off lately.”

Even though I nodded, I knew that wasn’t what was bothering me.

“What?” Helen asked when I didn’t respond.

I hesitated. The words that I wanted to get out carried the kind of importance that made them heavy, and that weight anchored them in my lungs and made them stick to the walls of my throat.

“Nothing,” I said finally. “You’re right. I think I’m just tired.”

Helen nodded, not completely satisfied.

“Alright,” she said slowly. She opened her mouth to say something else, and I could hear the moment the words hitched in her throat. She sighed. “If you ever need anything, you can tell me, okay?”

I nodded, a sign of appreciation for the offer, but I didn’t bring it up again.

•

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Lexi’s house look like this. I’d been in that house every day that it had slowly devolved to this state, pretending not to notice. When Lexi’s clothes started to pile up on the furniture, I helped her move our half-finished puzzles off the table and onto the floor. When the fruit in her fridge went bad, I waited three days before throwing it out, picking bruised apples off the empty shelves in between asking her questions about her day. Usually, the changes in space didn’t seem so important when compared to the changes in Lexi—the faint pink lines on her arm, barely scratches but still visible. Her dark circles and dark humor seemed to worsen every time I visited.

Today though, for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to just quietly fold her clothes, to organize her fridge. Lexi watched me from the couch, curled under a sweatshirt so big on her that she could fit both her legs inside, and said nothing.

“Lex, you can’t just keep leaving things like this,” I told her. I hated having to be this person, the one that nagged, the one that played parent in a place that was supposed to be removed from supervision. But I couldn’t just say nothing.

“This place looks terrible.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. That was the way our conversation always went those days. Apology after apology after apology.

“I’m sorry.”

Sometimes, I wondered what we would talk about if sorrys didn’t exist. If we’d even have anything to say to each other anymore.

•

It was April, and I sat at the head of a full table, enjoying the smell of marinated meat and smoke wafting through the restaurant, the jumbles of Korean and English smushed together into a cacophony of noise and movement. The way my friends shouted and reached over each other to get to the food, one mass of smiles and bodies and warmth, a moving picture of all the things I loved about my new life. Enjoying the knowledge of the cake in Helen’s trunk, pink and tiny and calligraphed with my name and the words “Happy Birthday.” I’d seen the cake a couple hours ago, on accident, when Helen had given me a ride to pick up some packages from the post office.

Right before the phone rang, I thought, “I am so lucky.” And for a second, I’d let myself forget everything outside this room. The shame, the guilt, the anger. The sinking feeling that I was a bad person.

And then, the spell broke. I picked up the phone and heard Lexi crying on the other end of the line.

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said quickly, standing up from the table. My friends watched me, puzzled expressions following as I moved outside.

“What’s wrong?” I said into the phone.

“Nothing,” Lexi got out between quick breaths.

“I just wanted to hear your voice one last time.”

I just wanted to hear your voice one last time.

I cannot capture in words how alarming it is to open a phone call to this line. There are maybe two opening lines that would be scarier—I just killed a person. I’m going to kill you.

I’m going to kill myself. Essentially, this was what it means to want to hear someone’s voice for the last time. And it was a special kind of horror to hear something like that, chilling and slick. It froze me in place.

“Lexi, where are you right now?” I tried to hide the urgency in my voice, tried to sound warm and inviting instead of petrified.

“Home.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

There was a long pause at the end of the line.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…

“Sure.”

Okay. This was going to be okay.

•

When I got to Lexi’s house, I was greeted by the sound of running water. Internally, I felt so much movement—the shaking in my hands when I dialed her number, the rising pace of my heartbeat when she didn’t pick up, the shallow breaths powered by panic and frustration and guilt. Inside Lexi’s house though, it seemed as if the world had gone still. Besides the sound of water, there was a staleness to the air and the environment that was impossible not to notice. The takeout container on the counter, still three-quarters full, looked like a plastic version of a meal, hardened in place. There were clothes strewn on the floor that now held their wrinkles, looking like sculptures rather than fabric because of how little they moved.

Without her in the room, there was nothing to look at besides these objects, and I felt a sense of loss. The whole place felt like a museum, commemorating memories and experiences long gone.

“Lexi!” I yelled out, partly in hopes of a response but mostly as a reflex from some subconscious belief that by saying her name out loud, I would preserve her existence.

What if she’s just taking a bath? I don’t want to intrude.

Are you stupid? You need to do something now.

What if it makes her feel like I’m surveilling her?

What if she pushes me away?

What if…

The thoughts all blurred together in the moment, more an impression of an emotion than anything truly coherent. I hovered outside the bathroom door, breathing heavily and doing my best to hear what was going on inside without actually pressing my ear to the door. For some reason, despite knowing that she couldn’t see me, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything beyond what would plausibly be normal. Part of me felt like as long as I didn’t overreact, nothing bad would happen. That by closing the distance between me and that door or bursting in to check on her, I would manifest what I feared. So instead, I ran through all the scenarios in my head, dealing with the consequences of action and inaction over and over and over again in my imagination.

Even before anything happened, I was exhausted.

Finally, the water turned off, and I could hear her crying in the bathroom. Softly at first, then loud wails, the kind meant to get other people to notice. I knocked on the door.

“Lex?” I said. “Can I come in?”

I opened the door slowly, hovering inside the frame. She was hunched over the bathtub, hair wet and half-clothed, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask what she had been doing. With her shirt off, I could see the contour of her spine, and for the first time, I registered just how small she’d gotten. The protruding caps of her shoulders, the bone so prominent that it looked detached from her body. Once upon a time, I would’ve found it beautiful.
Would’ve admired every harsh line and wished to be the
same.

Instead, I just stared at her, at this person I didn’t recognize. She stared back, and there were so many words between us just waiting to be summoned. I kept looking at her, willing her to break the silence.

“Hi,” she said finally.

I don’t know why this word triggered me. Maybe it was the way she said it, so softly, like she’d already given up. Maybe it was the guilt that had compounded in the car ride to her place, fueled by all the times I had chosen to hang out with Helen instead of her, by the words. I had almost admitted out loud earlier that day.

I was tired of being there for her.

My face crumpled.

“You scared me,” I said, and then, I was sobbing, loud, ugly cries.

This shouldn’t be about me, I thought. I shouldn’t make this about me. But there I was, being selfish once again. Lexi came over to hug me, and I felt even worse.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her soggy hair heavy against my back. The water seeped through my sweatshirt until I felt it on my skin, cold and damp. “I’m sorry.”

The rest of the night passed quickly. I waited for her in the living room as she changed her clothes, sitting on the edge of the couch, the only space not swallowed by trash or discarded things. I looked around at the places that held so many memories and tried to recall the feelings that I’d had at the beginning of the semester. The feelings I’d had back before hanging out with Lexi felt like work, before I came to like a version of myself that only existed apart from her.

“Are you gonna stay?” she asked me from her bathroom as she brushed her teeth.

I stood awkwardly in the hallway, and she saw my hesitation.

“Stay. Please.”

One second of silence. Another.

I nodded and joined her.

When it was time to sleep, we crawled into her bed together, and she fell asleep quickly. When her breathing was steady, I finally took out my phone, finally allowed myself a little distance from the situation that had just unfurled.

I had six missed texts from Helen.

“Where are you?”

“Are you okay?”

“ANSWER”

A picture of the cake I didn’t get to eat. A video of the group singing “Happy Birthday” to the camera.

“We missed you,” said her final text.

I scrolled through my assignments list, mentally marking all the deadlines that passed at midnight. I emailed my professors, asking for an extension for the ones I missed.

Next to me, Lexi slept soundlessly. I thought about everything that had happened that day. Thought about what I could’ve done differently. Should I have left the party earlier? Should I have celebrated my birthday with Lexi instead? The questions circled around in my head, over and over and over again until they’d chased out everything besides the single thought.

I’m tired.

Embraced by the darkness and silence, I remembered that first night in her house, that total privacy that had made me feel so safe and comfortable.

In that same space, I allowed myself a little bit of honesty once again.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I climbed out of bed and called an Uber to take me home.

---

“Growing Pains” by Audrey Ouh and the artwork titled Empty Stomach by Leslie Pagel appeared in Issue 44 of Berkeley Fiction Review.

Audrey Ouh (she/her) is a junior at UC Berkeley studying English, Art, and Creative Writing, and she has previously had work published in Scholastic’s Annual Art and Writing Gallery. As a Korean-American who grew up in LA, she hopes to explore themes of family, womanhood, and mental health in her writing as well as use narrative to connect and come to terms with the different parts of her identity.

Leslie Michel Pagel-Alcaraz (she/her) is a Queer artist from Tijuana, Baja California. She’s inspired by Queer love, bright colors, and Maximalist compositions. While digital and mixed mediums are her favorite forms of medium, she is always learning new ways to create art