storms of our youth
Title: Storms Of Our Youth
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: As per usual, things would be very different if I were in charge
Category: Lily van der Woodsen, Kirsten Cohen, Sandy/Kirsten, Rufus/Lily, et al.
Spoilers: all material aired in the US is fair game
Summary: “Do you ever wonder if we’re better than our lives are supposed to be?” Or, twenty years of friendship in 4,000 words or less.
Author’s Notes: I tried to stay true to canon story lines as much as possible, except for a few minor details that apparently wanted to write themselves out differently (and hey, I think if I’d had creative control of later seasons of both shows, there would be more awesome and less OMGWTF - Frank Atwood is a good guy? Chuck Bass is the reasonable one? Seriously? What is even going on on Gossip Girl right now?). But anyway, I had the last scene in my head, and it was begging to be expanded. This is the result.
End notes will probably explain more, as usual.
More or less unbeta’d, so all mistakes are mine. Consider this a rough draft until otherwise noted.
xxx
we are some distant tv channel, a lesson grown old
we are rhythm and rhyme, partners in crime, we are fool’s gold
we are free as the wind through the trees, or so we are told
--Thea Gilmore
xxx
Kirsten meets Lily over a bottle of Chardonnay and a tray of hors d’oeuvres, both stolen, at a party where neither one wants to be.
Kirsten’s mother, fresh off a phone argument with an absent Caleb, is drunk. Lily’s mother, fresh off her divorce papers, is chatting up another investment banker who may or may not be wearing a wedding ring.
It’s the Nichol mansion, but in an abundance of places to hide, they find themselves in the kitchen. Pink silk and green satin in a sea of black and white-clad caterers.
They’re the same, but they’re not. Not really. Lily’s just been kicked out of school for the first time (not for lack of trying) and Kirsten is only 0.05 off the pace for top of her class. Never skipped a day in her life (or, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it). They talk about everything and nothing, and for the first time, the conversation isn’t forced. Being a socialite is harder work than you might think.
Both blonde and beautiful, but fractured, too. Fragmented.
The party ends -- too soon, for a change -- and they part with promises they actually intend to keep.
---
Lily never likes Jimmy much.
Their first encounter is when Kirsten drags her to some school carnival. Jimmy shows up, wasted, with some of his friends from the water polo team and comes on to her from behind. Calls her ‘Kiks’ and grabs her ass.
Lily turns around and slaps him across the face. Hard. She leaves a mark.
“JIMMY!”
“Sorry, babe. I thought she was you.”
“Well, I’m not,” Lily scoffs, glaring first at Jimmy and then at the rest of his friends.
When they are alone again, Kirsten shrugs, “He’s not usually like that.”
Two weeks later, Lily meets a sober Jimmy for the first time and discovers that, in fact, Kirsten is right. Jimmy still has a faint purple outline on his left cheek where her hand connected during their first meeting, and she decides that she likes sober Jimmy even less.
A year later, when Kirsten moves to Berkeley with a hollow ache in her belly, she waits for Lily to say ‘I told you so.’
She never does.
---
“Do you ever wonder if we’re better than our lives are supposed to be?” Lily asks one night as they sit down by the beach.
Kirsten traces patterns in the sand with her fingers.
“All the time. But what are we going to do about it? We can’t fight who we are, Lily, no matter how much we want to.”
“We can always fight.”
Lily smiles. Fighting is the only thing she’s ever known.
---
Kirsten returns to Harbor for her senior year. Lily takes her camera and takes off.
A month later, a man’s voice answers Lily’s phone late one night when Lily’s supposed to be in Boston. “Oh, you must be Kirsten,” he answers. “Lily never stops talking about you.”
Unlike Lily and Jimmy, Kirsten likes Rufus instantly.
---
Lincoln Hawk books a show at this new club down by the pier, and Kirsten marks the date on her calendar.
“What’s on the 12th?” Jimmy asks, looking up as he struggles with the buttons on her shirt.
Kirsten pushes his hands away. “Nothing,” she answers. “We should study. We have that physics test on Friday.”
“Kirsten,” he sighs and makes no attempt to hide his frustration.
She shakes her head. “Mom will be home with Hailey any minute now.”
She opens her physics book, pats the bed beside her, and pretends to care about acceleration and net force, or whatever it is they’re learning about this week. But really, she’s counting down the days in her head.
Thirteen days later, she enters The Bait Shop alone (Jimmy, unable to remember their first meeting, really likes Lily who, in turn, likes to make him bear the brunt of a wit that he doesn’t understand). She slides into a table in the corner, wedged between her best friend and several camera contraptions she doesn’t understand, and the conversation flows as though they’ve never been apart.
Kirsten doesn’t remember much about the music, not really, but she remembers the emotion in every song, especially that one about sandalwood and roses. The way Rufus sings as though his life depends on it.
She wonders briefly what it must be like, to be with someone who feels that much.
Rufus comes to town three times after that, and each time Kirsten marvels at how alive her friend is. How happy. It suits her, she thinks.
The problem is, Lily is so happy that she’s too happy. And careless. And then, one night in a bathroom in Indiana, the strip turns pink and everything changes.
(Some two thousand miles away, Kirsten clutches her stomach and retches into the toilet).
---
Celia goes to get some tea and the gossip rags from the newsstand at the far end of the terminal, and Lily chokes back tears.
She spots a pay phone by the arrivals board and, on instinct, reaches into her pocket for some spare change. It rings once, twice, and then an answer, thick accent audible even through static.
“Nichol residence.”
“Hi, Cara. It’s, it’s Lily. Is Kirsten there?”
“No. Miss Kirsten has been out since yesterday, no one can find her. Mrs. Nichol called your family to see if maybe you have heard from her?”
“When she comes home,” Lily clutches the receiver tight in her hand, hanging on as if for dear life. “Tell her that I’ll call her from France. I won’t be back for awhile.”
“Take care, Miss Lily.”
Now boarding flight 1152, direct service to Paris, France.
She hangs up the phone and bites her tongue until she tastes blood, trying to forget the way she felt when he touched her.
It’s for the best, for the best. For the best.
She repeats it over and over, hoping that maybe she’ll learn to believe herself.
---
“I’m not going to USC,” Kirsten announces.
Lily knows the second that her friend answers the phone that something is wrong. This just confirms it.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m not going to USC,” Kirsten repeats. Then, as almost an afterthought (but not really), “I broke up with Jimmy.”
Lily’s free hand falls to the slight roundness of her abdomen. “Oh, Kirsten,” she whispers. “Get on the next plane. Come to Paris, take this year. You can come to Brown with me next fall.”
Half the world away, Kirsten wants to say yes. But then she thinks of Jimmy and the clinic and she knows that she can’t. She’s made up her mind. “I’m going to Berkeley. I need to, I think it will be good for me to get away. A clean break.”
“Not from me, right babe?”
She smiles, even as she wants to cry. “No, Lil. Never.”
---
Kirsten meets Sandy on a sunny Tuesday in early October.
Years later, she’ll tell her son’s girlfriend about how she never imagined herself with someone like Sandy, never before met anyone else quite like him. But it’s not true -- not exactly.
In the meantime, she sits across from dark hair and eyebrows and unencumbered enthusiasm, and she fingers the campaign button as she slips it in her pocket.
Two hours and five cups of coffee later, they’re still sitting in the same booth. Mondale and Ferraro have not come up once, and that suits Kirsten just fine. If asked, she’ll admit that she usually votes Republican, even met President Reagan once at a benefit her parents held. But truthfully she’s never cared much for politics; it reminds her too much of home.
She’s honestly surprised they have so much to talk about, the artist and the optimist, and glances at her watch. She likes that he wants to change the world; Jimmy didn’t want to change dinner reservations.
“Don’t you have to get back to canvasing?”
He shakes his head and grins. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
She tries to pay for her coffee, but Sandy insists because, after all, he had three and she only had two. She laughs at his argument, recants, and even lets him walk her back to her dorm room.
When the door clicks shut behind her, she closes her eyes and releases a breath she does not know she’s been holding. She walks over to her bed and fingers an index card tacked onto her bulletin board, tracing the numbers all the way to France. She’s scared, certain that it’s too soon, and she wants to be independent. Her head quiets her heart.
A week later, Sandy’s knocking at her door and her roommate is running interference while she climbs out the window and scales the fire escape. There’s nothing quiet about it now.
Then, she realizes. He’s Rufus, only more.
(And he’s right, she’s not going to get rid of him that easily. Lily inadvertently taught her that).
The next time he calls, she picks up on the first ring. She came to Berkeley to re-write her story, and that is exactly what she is going to do.
---
Lily likes Brown. Really, she does. But as soon as Kirsten calls, she’s booking her train to New York.
“His sister is graduating and the whole family is going to be there, and I’m not sure. Oh, Lil, I’m not sure about anything.”
“Kirsten, you’re rambling.” Lily laughs and closes the five pound anthology of poems that she doesn’t want to read anyway.
“I know, I’m just worried.”
“You’re sure that you love him, right?”
“You know I do.” “Then the rest of it shouldn’t matter.”
Shouldn’t, does. Lily would be the first to admit that she should never be the one who gives out relationship advice. But when on Friday night Kirsten waits at Penn Station to greet her, plastic ring adorning her left hand, Lily drags her off to Barneys and Saks and every designer store on Fifth Avenue to look at wedding dresses.
And - maybe more importantly - to pass judgment on bridesmaids dresses.
---
Lily marries Keith on a rainy day in August.
Kirsten toasts with Perrier and calls a month later, long after the honeymoon in St. Barts, to make it official. She’s due in March.
Seth Ezekiel is born right on schedule (the one and only time he is ever prompt), and Lily hops the next flight to Berkeley while Keith stays behind.
She slides past Caleb and Sophie in the hallway, loudly disagreeing to agree on a day old child’s religious habits and neither one winning, but hesitates when she reaches the door. Even weary and worn from 20 hours of labor, Kirsten radiates a new mother’s glow that Lily always chalked up to myth. Kirsten cradles the baby in her arms and Sandy just watches in awe and amazement (Lily never knew he could keep quiet for so long). She envies them in that moment, their little family, that they make it look so easy.
Reality, however, is anything but.
“He looks like you,” Lily teases. She takes the padded bundle in her arms and forces her heart down, even as it threatens to rise up in her throat. It was blue the first time, too.
“Is that going to be a problem?”
No, none at all. Just the hole in her heart and the gap in her life and the harsh reality that in another life, she might not spend this time looking in.
---
As an infant, Kirsten worries Lily about how Seth hardly ever cries. Of course, eventually he learns to talk and then proceeds to spend the remainder of his life making up for lost time.
Lily’s little girl is currently the target of his babbling on Legos and pre-K and some girl named Summer but Serena, all of thirteen months, is captivated instead by the plastic horse he holds in his still hand, a gift from his ‘aunt’.
Lily and Kirsten exchange stories over coffee and French pastries while their children entertain themselves. Sandy took the six train up to his mother’s that morning, but he should be returning any minute. Keith took off last week for Barcelona.
He’ll be back, Lily thinks, maybe even sometime before the Cohens return to Newport on Sunday. He’ll bring her lingerie and imported chocolates, and a china doll for Serena that will simply collect dust with all the others.
She ignores the fact that even when Keith is there, he’s really somewhere else. Tells herself it’s okay because even Sandy doesn’t buy Kirsten lingerie (and maybe that’s more than she should know about her best friend’s sex life, or maybe it isn’t).
But then Sandy calls to say he’ll be running late and what would they like him to pick up for dinner, and she looks away because she’s afraid she’ll see her own truth written all over Kirsten’s face.
---
The years pass like this.
A birthday in Montecito, Easter weekend in New York (much to Nana Cohen’s dismay). The Christmas between Klauses, three weeks in Newport. The wedding in the Hamptons, when Lily’s husbands officially outnumber all of Kirsten’s ex-boyfriends once and for all. Sometimes it’s all they can do to find a coffee shop and an hour to spare.
Keith is long gone, and he leaves Eric as a parting gift. It’s a mistake, of course. A cruel joke from a god in whom Lily no longer believes. Motherhood never quite fit her right.
(She knows Kirsten has been trying).
But her children grow, and she grows into them. Serena is her daughter the same way that she is Celia’s, and Eric is her constant. It’s years later when she realizes Eric is the one she should have worried about all along.
---
The summer Ryan comes into their lives, Lily is in Amsterdam.
At first, Kirsten doesn’t call about it because he’s leaving after the weekend (she’ll complain about her crusading husband later on -- when did she become this person?). Then, he disappears into the night and it’s all she can do to keep both of her boys speaking to her. When Dawn walks away with a whisper and a wave, she realizes that she’s okay with this being permanent. More okay than maybe she’s aware.
She has lunch with Sandy, and the boys - she likes how that sounds - head down to the pier. Later that evening, she overhears them in the study. Seth is giving Ryan a lecture: The Cohen Family 101, complete with pictures.
“Is that Kirsten’s sister?”
“You would think, but no. That’s Lily. She’s just as crazy, but at least she calls. It’s the world’s worst-kept secret that The Kirsten always liked her better, anyway.”
That much is true. No matter what corner of the earth Lily follows her men, Kirsten always knows that she’s alive.
---
Lily calls in the middle of the night (she never was good with time zones), and Kirsten spills the whole story from start to finish.
“She just left him here, Lil.” Her voice breaks and, half the world away, Lily thinks she may hear tears left unshed. “How could a mother just walk away?”
The silence that engulfs the telephone connection here is deafening, both so caught up in their own tragic story that they can’t hear the reality they so desperately need.
Because the truth is that they both know what that place feels like. And sometimes you have to walk away because there’s nothing else left to do.
---
Lily returns to New York and pretends she doesn’t see Rufus with a boy and a girl and an Allison running around in Central Park.
What would they possibly be doing out of Brooklyn, anyway?
---
Carter Buckley is a problem. Of this much she is certain.
Her boys have left her, all three of them, for other women, and both of her sisters are gone. She doesn’t mean for it to get out of hand.
Here’s the thing, though. Ryan didn’t get Theresa pregnant but he returns Chino to be the man that Jimmy never could have been (and in both cases, that was her fault). Seth knows this and takes off for Tahiti by way of Oregon. Sandy doesn’t go anywhere but he may as well have. Hailey finally grows up, and Lindsay shakes in and out of their lives, leaving fault lines in her wake. Then Rebecca materializes and Kirsten’s worst nightmare plays out on an endless loop.
(Somewhere in Eastern Standard Time, Allison Humphrey harbors that same fear).
So she never meant for it to get out of hand, but she sort of likes that Carter is there.
The real problem, though, is that neither Carter Buckley nor her Chardonnay love her back.
---
Serena starts high school with a bang, just in time for Ryan and Seth finish it as such.
Graduation rolls around and nostalgia hits Kirsten full force. She’s happy for Ryan that Dawn’s life has stabilized enough to come and be supportive, but she’s a little threatened too. This is her family, her boys, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to give one of them back.
She’s done that already.
The boys are out with Sandy, trying to avoid the influx of caterers staging a coup d’état in their living room, when she finds Dawn squinting at some pictures on a bookshelf in Sandy’s office. She flips on the light. Dawn turns and half-smiles. It’s awkward.
“Tell me about him.”
Kirsten’s heart swells. And so she does.
---
“How did his mother afford to buy him a car?”
“She’s doing better now.”
“Kirsten--”
“We may have helped her, but this was important. This was good for Ryan.”
“You and Sandy are good for Ryan.”
“We try to be,” Kirsten bites her lip. “Enjoy this time, Lil. They leave you too fast.”
Sandy appears in the doorway, home phone pressed tight to his ear.
Kirsten knows that look. Knows it all too well.
“Lily, I’ve got to go.”
---
After Marissa - that’s how Kirsten sees it - there’s a lapse. Messages on the answering machine, because that’s when they call. It’s easier that way. Ryan packs up his grief and escapes to God-only-knows-where, and Serena takes a page from the Lily Rhodes Guidebook and runs away to boarding school.
It’s after the earthquake, while they’re living in the Roberts-Cooper-Townsend household, that she gets the call.
“It’s Eric.”
“Is he... Is he going to be okay?”
“She didn’t know. They were taking him to the hospital. Oh, God, Sandy. I could hear the sirens.” She folds her hands on her eight month belly, and she tries to quell the restlessness that settles. It’s been over a year, but she’ll never forget the moments when it was all uncertain, when the uniforms said they couldn’t release information over the phone but could they please come down as soon as possible.
“Sandy, we could lose him.”
Sandy pulls her in close, not sure which ‘him’ she means.
---
Eric tries to blot out his life in razors and blood red, and Serena hops the next train home, and Lily’s not sure which one of her babies is more foreign.
It takes some time, but Eric is doing better (which scares her even more) and Serena is trying (which is more than she can usually say). She knows exactly who Dan Humphrey is long before he pulls out the Lincoln Hawk flyer.
She knew about the concert, too. But don’t ask because she’ll deny it point blank; she’s good at that.
She’s sitting at the table eating dinner with Rufus at the loft, having almost forgotten that her baby pulled a prison break from the Ostroff Center, when her phone rings. It isn’t Serena, or Dan, or even Eric.
“Hey, Sandy.”
“It’s a girl!”
“A girl? Please tell me this one doesn’t look like you.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“I mean that.”
“I know you do. Her name is Sophie Rose, and she looks just like Kirsten. She’s perfect.”
Sophie Rose, she mouths, inaudible. It fits.
“I don’t expect anything less.”
“How’s Eric?” he asks. Trust Sandy to remember someone else’s kid at a time like this.
She laughs. Rufus is watching her.
“We’re doing fine, Cohen. Go back to your girls. Tell Kirsten I expect to hear from her when the hospital kicks you out.”
She snaps her phone shut.
“Kirsten?”
“My people know her people.”
“Not such a small island anymore. You two still friends?”
“Like that would ever change.”
Lily smiles and nods in affirmation.
It wouldn’t and it doesn’t. It just gets bigger.
---
Rufus spots Kirsten as he leaves the Bass-van der Woodsen wedding festivities. It’s been a good twenty years but he would recognize her anywhere.
She’s standing off to the side, infant in her arms, talking to Eric and a lanky curly haired boy when the sun comes out from behind the clouds and oh God, it’s twenty years ago and he can’t be there one second longer.
He doesn’t know how he ends up back at the loft, but before he knows it his suitcase is packed. The sooner he hits the road, the better.
---
The truth always comes out.
She stands in the hotel room in Boston and finally tells Rufus everything she’s feeling and he kisses her and it’s all over. She can’t hide from this; she’s tried.
It’s a funny thing, this circle they’re in. Because it was Lily who taught Kirsten what she really wanted, and it was Kirsten who showed Lily how to get it.
It just took Lily a little longer to catch up.
---
The ending was always inevitable.
Lily and Kirsten sit side by side on the sofa sipping mochas as their wedding rings clink softly against the Welcome Back Kotter, mugs. Summer and Serena sprawled on the floor and pouring over the Brown course catalog. Seth and Ryan playing touch football with Sophie’s favorite stuffed bear (until she unwraps the other birthday presents, that is). Eric confiscating said bear, while Jenny and Sandy both bemoan the fact that Seth named the bear ‘Rabbit’. Sophie giggles as Uncle Rufus tosses her into the air.
Rufus is the only one who’s an uncle. Then again, he’s also the only one aware of the fact that he’s ‘old’ now.
This is their family, spread out before them. Their life’s work.
---
They laugh and they don’t stop. Sometimes it does them well to remember that the photos followed them long before Gossip Girl ever existed.
Eric, ever-perceptive and almost wise, always the first to notice. (He beats Ryan by half a second).
“They’re up to something again.”
Their husbands smile.
They’ve been at it for years.
xxx
fin
xxx
End notes (or, spyglass_ likes to ramble): I meant to finish this a month ago but anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I’ve been in post-World Series hangover mode for, well, the entire month of November. As usual, this comes with soundtrack listings (I can come up with a zip file if anyone’s interested).
Inverigo - Thea Gilmore (This is my Lily/Kirsten BFFs anthem, hence the fic title)
Shasta (Carrie’s Song) - Vienna Teng
Pretty Thing - Charlotte Martin
Breathe (2AM) - Anna Nalick
Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
Neon - John Mayer
Many the Miles - Sara Bareilles
I originally planned to write more present-day for the characters, but this is where my muse ran out of steam.
And for some nonspecific news, I am challenging myself to write more, and more often. To try out some fandoms I’ve never written before, and to expand on old characters. I’ve been thinking about branching out, etc. since I compiled this list. Look for: more OC (still have two unfinished stories sitting on the hard drive), Bones, Glee, Castle, Friday Night Lights, Chuck, and/or more West Wing. Or something else. Who knows? ;-) Smart money would go on The West Wing or Chuck though, since that’s what I’m marathoning right now.
That’s pretty much it for now. Comments/feedback/concrit is always appreciated.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: As per usual, things would be very different if I were in charge
Category: Lily van der Woodsen, Kirsten Cohen, Sandy/Kirsten, Rufus/Lily, et al.
Spoilers: all material aired in the US is fair game
Summary: “Do you ever wonder if we’re better than our lives are supposed to be?” Or, twenty years of friendship in 4,000 words or less.
Author’s Notes: I tried to stay true to canon story lines as much as possible, except for a few minor details that apparently wanted to write themselves out differently (and hey, I think if I’d had creative control of later seasons of both shows, there would be more awesome and less OMGWTF - Frank Atwood is a good guy? Chuck Bass is the reasonable one? Seriously? What is even going on on Gossip Girl right now?). But anyway, I had the last scene in my head, and it was begging to be expanded. This is the result.
End notes will probably explain more, as usual.
More or less unbeta’d, so all mistakes are mine. Consider this a rough draft until otherwise noted.
xxx
we are some distant tv channel, a lesson grown old
we are rhythm and rhyme, partners in crime, we are fool’s gold
we are free as the wind through the trees, or so we are told
--Thea Gilmore
xxx
Kirsten meets Lily over a bottle of Chardonnay and a tray of hors d’oeuvres, both stolen, at a party where neither one wants to be.
Kirsten’s mother, fresh off a phone argument with an absent Caleb, is drunk. Lily’s mother, fresh off her divorce papers, is chatting up another investment banker who may or may not be wearing a wedding ring.
It’s the Nichol mansion, but in an abundance of places to hide, they find themselves in the kitchen. Pink silk and green satin in a sea of black and white-clad caterers.
They’re the same, but they’re not. Not really. Lily’s just been kicked out of school for the first time (not for lack of trying) and Kirsten is only 0.05 off the pace for top of her class. Never skipped a day in her life (or, that’s her story and she’s sticking to it). They talk about everything and nothing, and for the first time, the conversation isn’t forced. Being a socialite is harder work than you might think.
Both blonde and beautiful, but fractured, too. Fragmented.
The party ends -- too soon, for a change -- and they part with promises they actually intend to keep.
---
Lily never likes Jimmy much.
Their first encounter is when Kirsten drags her to some school carnival. Jimmy shows up, wasted, with some of his friends from the water polo team and comes on to her from behind. Calls her ‘Kiks’ and grabs her ass.
Lily turns around and slaps him across the face. Hard. She leaves a mark.
“JIMMY!”
“Sorry, babe. I thought she was you.”
“Well, I’m not,” Lily scoffs, glaring first at Jimmy and then at the rest of his friends.
When they are alone again, Kirsten shrugs, “He’s not usually like that.”
Two weeks later, Lily meets a sober Jimmy for the first time and discovers that, in fact, Kirsten is right. Jimmy still has a faint purple outline on his left cheek where her hand connected during their first meeting, and she decides that she likes sober Jimmy even less.
A year later, when Kirsten moves to Berkeley with a hollow ache in her belly, she waits for Lily to say ‘I told you so.’
She never does.
---
“Do you ever wonder if we’re better than our lives are supposed to be?” Lily asks one night as they sit down by the beach.
Kirsten traces patterns in the sand with her fingers.
“All the time. But what are we going to do about it? We can’t fight who we are, Lily, no matter how much we want to.”
“We can always fight.”
Lily smiles. Fighting is the only thing she’s ever known.
---
Kirsten returns to Harbor for her senior year. Lily takes her camera and takes off.
A month later, a man’s voice answers Lily’s phone late one night when Lily’s supposed to be in Boston. “Oh, you must be Kirsten,” he answers. “Lily never stops talking about you.”
Unlike Lily and Jimmy, Kirsten likes Rufus instantly.
---
Lincoln Hawk books a show at this new club down by the pier, and Kirsten marks the date on her calendar.
“What’s on the 12th?” Jimmy asks, looking up as he struggles with the buttons on her shirt.
Kirsten pushes his hands away. “Nothing,” she answers. “We should study. We have that physics test on Friday.”
“Kirsten,” he sighs and makes no attempt to hide his frustration.
She shakes her head. “Mom will be home with Hailey any minute now.”
She opens her physics book, pats the bed beside her, and pretends to care about acceleration and net force, or whatever it is they’re learning about this week. But really, she’s counting down the days in her head.
Thirteen days later, she enters The Bait Shop alone (Jimmy, unable to remember their first meeting, really likes Lily who, in turn, likes to make him bear the brunt of a wit that he doesn’t understand). She slides into a table in the corner, wedged between her best friend and several camera contraptions she doesn’t understand, and the conversation flows as though they’ve never been apart.
Kirsten doesn’t remember much about the music, not really, but she remembers the emotion in every song, especially that one about sandalwood and roses. The way Rufus sings as though his life depends on it.
She wonders briefly what it must be like, to be with someone who feels that much.
Rufus comes to town three times after that, and each time Kirsten marvels at how alive her friend is. How happy. It suits her, she thinks.
The problem is, Lily is so happy that she’s too happy. And careless. And then, one night in a bathroom in Indiana, the strip turns pink and everything changes.
(Some two thousand miles away, Kirsten clutches her stomach and retches into the toilet).
---
Celia goes to get some tea and the gossip rags from the newsstand at the far end of the terminal, and Lily chokes back tears.
She spots a pay phone by the arrivals board and, on instinct, reaches into her pocket for some spare change. It rings once, twice, and then an answer, thick accent audible even through static.
“Nichol residence.”
“Hi, Cara. It’s, it’s Lily. Is Kirsten there?”
“No. Miss Kirsten has been out since yesterday, no one can find her. Mrs. Nichol called your family to see if maybe you have heard from her?”
“When she comes home,” Lily clutches the receiver tight in her hand, hanging on as if for dear life. “Tell her that I’ll call her from France. I won’t be back for awhile.”
“Take care, Miss Lily.”
Now boarding flight 1152, direct service to Paris, France.
She hangs up the phone and bites her tongue until she tastes blood, trying to forget the way she felt when he touched her.
It’s for the best, for the best. For the best.
She repeats it over and over, hoping that maybe she’ll learn to believe herself.
---
“I’m not going to USC,” Kirsten announces.
Lily knows the second that her friend answers the phone that something is wrong. This just confirms it.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m not going to USC,” Kirsten repeats. Then, as almost an afterthought (but not really), “I broke up with Jimmy.”
Lily’s free hand falls to the slight roundness of her abdomen. “Oh, Kirsten,” she whispers. “Get on the next plane. Come to Paris, take this year. You can come to Brown with me next fall.”
Half the world away, Kirsten wants to say yes. But then she thinks of Jimmy and the clinic and she knows that she can’t. She’s made up her mind. “I’m going to Berkeley. I need to, I think it will be good for me to get away. A clean break.”
“Not from me, right babe?”
She smiles, even as she wants to cry. “No, Lil. Never.”
---
Kirsten meets Sandy on a sunny Tuesday in early October.
Years later, she’ll tell her son’s girlfriend about how she never imagined herself with someone like Sandy, never before met anyone else quite like him. But it’s not true -- not exactly.
In the meantime, she sits across from dark hair and eyebrows and unencumbered enthusiasm, and she fingers the campaign button as she slips it in her pocket.
Two hours and five cups of coffee later, they’re still sitting in the same booth. Mondale and Ferraro have not come up once, and that suits Kirsten just fine. If asked, she’ll admit that she usually votes Republican, even met President Reagan once at a benefit her parents held. But truthfully she’s never cared much for politics; it reminds her too much of home.
She’s honestly surprised they have so much to talk about, the artist and the optimist, and glances at her watch. She likes that he wants to change the world; Jimmy didn’t want to change dinner reservations.
“Don’t you have to get back to canvasing?”
He shakes his head and grins. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”
She tries to pay for her coffee, but Sandy insists because, after all, he had three and she only had two. She laughs at his argument, recants, and even lets him walk her back to her dorm room.
When the door clicks shut behind her, she closes her eyes and releases a breath she does not know she’s been holding. She walks over to her bed and fingers an index card tacked onto her bulletin board, tracing the numbers all the way to France. She’s scared, certain that it’s too soon, and she wants to be independent. Her head quiets her heart.
A week later, Sandy’s knocking at her door and her roommate is running interference while she climbs out the window and scales the fire escape. There’s nothing quiet about it now.
Then, she realizes. He’s Rufus, only more.
(And he’s right, she’s not going to get rid of him that easily. Lily inadvertently taught her that).
The next time he calls, she picks up on the first ring. She came to Berkeley to re-write her story, and that is exactly what she is going to do.
---
Lily likes Brown. Really, she does. But as soon as Kirsten calls, she’s booking her train to New York.
“His sister is graduating and the whole family is going to be there, and I’m not sure. Oh, Lil, I’m not sure about anything.”
“Kirsten, you’re rambling.” Lily laughs and closes the five pound anthology of poems that she doesn’t want to read anyway.
“I know, I’m just worried.”
“You’re sure that you love him, right?”
“You know I do.” “Then the rest of it shouldn’t matter.”
Shouldn’t, does. Lily would be the first to admit that she should never be the one who gives out relationship advice. But when on Friday night Kirsten waits at Penn Station to greet her, plastic ring adorning her left hand, Lily drags her off to Barneys and Saks and every designer store on Fifth Avenue to look at wedding dresses.
And - maybe more importantly - to pass judgment on bridesmaids dresses.
---
Lily marries Keith on a rainy day in August.
Kirsten toasts with Perrier and calls a month later, long after the honeymoon in St. Barts, to make it official. She’s due in March.
Seth Ezekiel is born right on schedule (the one and only time he is ever prompt), and Lily hops the next flight to Berkeley while Keith stays behind.
She slides past Caleb and Sophie in the hallway, loudly disagreeing to agree on a day old child’s religious habits and neither one winning, but hesitates when she reaches the door. Even weary and worn from 20 hours of labor, Kirsten radiates a new mother’s glow that Lily always chalked up to myth. Kirsten cradles the baby in her arms and Sandy just watches in awe and amazement (Lily never knew he could keep quiet for so long). She envies them in that moment, their little family, that they make it look so easy.
Reality, however, is anything but.
“He looks like you,” Lily teases. She takes the padded bundle in her arms and forces her heart down, even as it threatens to rise up in her throat. It was blue the first time, too.
“Is that going to be a problem?”
No, none at all. Just the hole in her heart and the gap in her life and the harsh reality that in another life, she might not spend this time looking in.
---
As an infant, Kirsten worries Lily about how Seth hardly ever cries. Of course, eventually he learns to talk and then proceeds to spend the remainder of his life making up for lost time.
Lily’s little girl is currently the target of his babbling on Legos and pre-K and some girl named Summer but Serena, all of thirteen months, is captivated instead by the plastic horse he holds in his still hand, a gift from his ‘aunt’.
Lily and Kirsten exchange stories over coffee and French pastries while their children entertain themselves. Sandy took the six train up to his mother’s that morning, but he should be returning any minute. Keith took off last week for Barcelona.
He’ll be back, Lily thinks, maybe even sometime before the Cohens return to Newport on Sunday. He’ll bring her lingerie and imported chocolates, and a china doll for Serena that will simply collect dust with all the others.
She ignores the fact that even when Keith is there, he’s really somewhere else. Tells herself it’s okay because even Sandy doesn’t buy Kirsten lingerie (and maybe that’s more than she should know about her best friend’s sex life, or maybe it isn’t).
But then Sandy calls to say he’ll be running late and what would they like him to pick up for dinner, and she looks away because she’s afraid she’ll see her own truth written all over Kirsten’s face.
---
The years pass like this.
A birthday in Montecito, Easter weekend in New York (much to Nana Cohen’s dismay). The Christmas between Klauses, three weeks in Newport. The wedding in the Hamptons, when Lily’s husbands officially outnumber all of Kirsten’s ex-boyfriends once and for all. Sometimes it’s all they can do to find a coffee shop and an hour to spare.
Keith is long gone, and he leaves Eric as a parting gift. It’s a mistake, of course. A cruel joke from a god in whom Lily no longer believes. Motherhood never quite fit her right.
(She knows Kirsten has been trying).
But her children grow, and she grows into them. Serena is her daughter the same way that she is Celia’s, and Eric is her constant. It’s years later when she realizes Eric is the one she should have worried about all along.
---
The summer Ryan comes into their lives, Lily is in Amsterdam.
At first, Kirsten doesn’t call about it because he’s leaving after the weekend (she’ll complain about her crusading husband later on -- when did she become this person?). Then, he disappears into the night and it’s all she can do to keep both of her boys speaking to her. When Dawn walks away with a whisper and a wave, she realizes that she’s okay with this being permanent. More okay than maybe she’s aware.
She has lunch with Sandy, and the boys - she likes how that sounds - head down to the pier. Later that evening, she overhears them in the study. Seth is giving Ryan a lecture: The Cohen Family 101, complete with pictures.
“Is that Kirsten’s sister?”
“You would think, but no. That’s Lily. She’s just as crazy, but at least she calls. It’s the world’s worst-kept secret that The Kirsten always liked her better, anyway.”
That much is true. No matter what corner of the earth Lily follows her men, Kirsten always knows that she’s alive.
---
Lily calls in the middle of the night (she never was good with time zones), and Kirsten spills the whole story from start to finish.
“She just left him here, Lil.” Her voice breaks and, half the world away, Lily thinks she may hear tears left unshed. “How could a mother just walk away?”
The silence that engulfs the telephone connection here is deafening, both so caught up in their own tragic story that they can’t hear the reality they so desperately need.
Because the truth is that they both know what that place feels like. And sometimes you have to walk away because there’s nothing else left to do.
---
Lily returns to New York and pretends she doesn’t see Rufus with a boy and a girl and an Allison running around in Central Park.
What would they possibly be doing out of Brooklyn, anyway?
---
Carter Buckley is a problem. Of this much she is certain.
Her boys have left her, all three of them, for other women, and both of her sisters are gone. She doesn’t mean for it to get out of hand.
Here’s the thing, though. Ryan didn’t get Theresa pregnant but he returns Chino to be the man that Jimmy never could have been (and in both cases, that was her fault). Seth knows this and takes off for Tahiti by way of Oregon. Sandy doesn’t go anywhere but he may as well have. Hailey finally grows up, and Lindsay shakes in and out of their lives, leaving fault lines in her wake. Then Rebecca materializes and Kirsten’s worst nightmare plays out on an endless loop.
(Somewhere in Eastern Standard Time, Allison Humphrey harbors that same fear).
So she never meant for it to get out of hand, but she sort of likes that Carter is there.
The real problem, though, is that neither Carter Buckley nor her Chardonnay love her back.
---
Serena starts high school with a bang, just in time for Ryan and Seth finish it as such.
Graduation rolls around and nostalgia hits Kirsten full force. She’s happy for Ryan that Dawn’s life has stabilized enough to come and be supportive, but she’s a little threatened too. This is her family, her boys, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to give one of them back.
She’s done that already.
The boys are out with Sandy, trying to avoid the influx of caterers staging a coup d’état in their living room, when she finds Dawn squinting at some pictures on a bookshelf in Sandy’s office. She flips on the light. Dawn turns and half-smiles. It’s awkward.
“Tell me about him.”
Kirsten’s heart swells. And so she does.
---
“How did his mother afford to buy him a car?”
“She’s doing better now.”
“Kirsten--”
“We may have helped her, but this was important. This was good for Ryan.”
“You and Sandy are good for Ryan.”
“We try to be,” Kirsten bites her lip. “Enjoy this time, Lil. They leave you too fast.”
Sandy appears in the doorway, home phone pressed tight to his ear.
Kirsten knows that look. Knows it all too well.
“Lily, I’ve got to go.”
---
After Marissa - that’s how Kirsten sees it - there’s a lapse. Messages on the answering machine, because that’s when they call. It’s easier that way. Ryan packs up his grief and escapes to God-only-knows-where, and Serena takes a page from the Lily Rhodes Guidebook and runs away to boarding school.
It’s after the earthquake, while they’re living in the Roberts-Cooper-Townsend household, that she gets the call.
“It’s Eric.”
“Is he... Is he going to be okay?”
“She didn’t know. They were taking him to the hospital. Oh, God, Sandy. I could hear the sirens.” She folds her hands on her eight month belly, and she tries to quell the restlessness that settles. It’s been over a year, but she’ll never forget the moments when it was all uncertain, when the uniforms said they couldn’t release information over the phone but could they please come down as soon as possible.
“Sandy, we could lose him.”
Sandy pulls her in close, not sure which ‘him’ she means.
---
Eric tries to blot out his life in razors and blood red, and Serena hops the next train home, and Lily’s not sure which one of her babies is more foreign.
It takes some time, but Eric is doing better (which scares her even more) and Serena is trying (which is more than she can usually say). She knows exactly who Dan Humphrey is long before he pulls out the Lincoln Hawk flyer.
She knew about the concert, too. But don’t ask because she’ll deny it point blank; she’s good at that.
She’s sitting at the table eating dinner with Rufus at the loft, having almost forgotten that her baby pulled a prison break from the Ostroff Center, when her phone rings. It isn’t Serena, or Dan, or even Eric.
“Hey, Sandy.”
“It’s a girl!”
“A girl? Please tell me this one doesn’t look like you.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“I mean that.”
“I know you do. Her name is Sophie Rose, and she looks just like Kirsten. She’s perfect.”
Sophie Rose, she mouths, inaudible. It fits.
“I don’t expect anything less.”
“How’s Eric?” he asks. Trust Sandy to remember someone else’s kid at a time like this.
She laughs. Rufus is watching her.
“We’re doing fine, Cohen. Go back to your girls. Tell Kirsten I expect to hear from her when the hospital kicks you out.”
She snaps her phone shut.
“Kirsten?”
“My people know her people.”
“Not such a small island anymore. You two still friends?”
“Like that would ever change.”
Lily smiles and nods in affirmation.
It wouldn’t and it doesn’t. It just gets bigger.
---
Rufus spots Kirsten as he leaves the Bass-van der Woodsen wedding festivities. It’s been a good twenty years but he would recognize her anywhere.
She’s standing off to the side, infant in her arms, talking to Eric and a lanky curly haired boy when the sun comes out from behind the clouds and oh God, it’s twenty years ago and he can’t be there one second longer.
He doesn’t know how he ends up back at the loft, but before he knows it his suitcase is packed. The sooner he hits the road, the better.
---
The truth always comes out.
She stands in the hotel room in Boston and finally tells Rufus everything she’s feeling and he kisses her and it’s all over. She can’t hide from this; she’s tried.
It’s a funny thing, this circle they’re in. Because it was Lily who taught Kirsten what she really wanted, and it was Kirsten who showed Lily how to get it.
It just took Lily a little longer to catch up.
---
The ending was always inevitable.
Lily and Kirsten sit side by side on the sofa sipping mochas as their wedding rings clink softly against the Welcome Back Kotter, mugs. Summer and Serena sprawled on the floor and pouring over the Brown course catalog. Seth and Ryan playing touch football with Sophie’s favorite stuffed bear (until she unwraps the other birthday presents, that is). Eric confiscating said bear, while Jenny and Sandy both bemoan the fact that Seth named the bear ‘Rabbit’. Sophie giggles as Uncle Rufus tosses her into the air.
Rufus is the only one who’s an uncle. Then again, he’s also the only one aware of the fact that he’s ‘old’ now.
This is their family, spread out before them. Their life’s work.
---
They laugh and they don’t stop. Sometimes it does them well to remember that the photos followed them long before Gossip Girl ever existed.
Eric, ever-perceptive and almost wise, always the first to notice. (He beats Ryan by half a second).
“They’re up to something again.”
Their husbands smile.
They’ve been at it for years.
xxx
fin
xxx
End notes (or, spyglass_ likes to ramble): I meant to finish this a month ago but anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I’ve been in post-World Series hangover mode for, well, the entire month of November. As usual, this comes with soundtrack listings (I can come up with a zip file if anyone’s interested).
Inverigo - Thea Gilmore (This is my Lily/Kirsten BFFs anthem, hence the fic title)
Shasta (Carrie’s Song) - Vienna Teng
Pretty Thing - Charlotte Martin
Breathe (2AM) - Anna Nalick
Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
Neon - John Mayer
Many the Miles - Sara Bareilles
I originally planned to write more present-day for the characters, but this is where my muse ran out of steam.
And for some nonspecific news, I am challenging myself to write more, and more often. To try out some fandoms I’ve never written before, and to expand on old characters. I’ve been thinking about branching out, etc. since I compiled this list. Look for: more OC (still have two unfinished stories sitting on the hard drive), Bones, Glee, Castle, Friday Night Lights, Chuck, and/or more West Wing. Or something else. Who knows? ;-) Smart money would go on The West Wing or Chuck though, since that’s what I’m marathoning right now.
That’s pretty much it for now. Comments/feedback/concrit is always appreciated.