islington | summer skylines — benny

LATER  ——

“Not bad.”

Tomie took a couple of steps backward, almost tripping over her skateboard as she did so. She’d gotten it out when painting had lost her interest, and she’d tried to practice tricks even though they were standing on dirt and rocks rather than smooth concrete. She kicked a small rock with the tip of her sneakered foot absentmindedly as she surveyed their work. The brick wall stretched out before her, much more impressive now that it had a brilliant hippogriff painted across it. There were a few little doodles on either side, where she or Benny had been testing a colour out or just scribbling for fun. Still, they’d done a good job.

(Okay, so it was mostly Benny’s).

“Gold was the right choice,” she said confidently, even though she didn’t really know which was better, and couldn’t really imagine it any other way than the way it was. She’d picked gold because of Gryffindor, and because gold meant first place and silver was for the first loser. Tomie bumped her friend’s arm with her shoulder. “Look at you, you basically have your work in a gallery!” Tomie threw her hands up, including the tall trees and the sky in her gesturing. Gallery was subjective, or whatever. She took a deep breath, then gave a big sigh.

"I'm exhausted," she said, as if she'd done as much work as her friend. "Wanna find somewhere better to sit? I have more food," she added encouragingly.

Benny realized he could spend all summer out here doing just this as he worked on the Hippogriff. With the sun hitting them through the trees, and the crickets and the spray paint and his best friend. Benny would be perfectly content to draw in the woods for the next two months and not think about any of the things he didn't want to think about. He softly hummed as he worked; at first, his sprays were timid and blotchy, but as he continued, he learned how to do longer strokes and less stopping and starting. The blending wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either, and in a way, he sort of liked how it looked a bit off. Like it was a statement or something, or like he could pretend he'd done it on purpose anyway.

Tomie had stopped painting some time ago, but it had barely registered as she moved around behind him. He heard the sound of her skateboard as she rolled around on the not-quite-a-path, and when he finished, Benny took a step back to meet her there. "Agreed," Benny replied, his eyes going over the place where the black outline met the gold wings and smiling. The wizard wiped his hands on his shorts, but by now, his palms and the material were covered in paint, grime, and dirt, so it didn't really help. "Our work," he corrected her, bumping his shoulder into hers softly.

"Oh good, I am starving," He said with a chuckle. Benny tried to wipe some sweat from his forehead with the inside of his shirt and hoped whatever she had to snack on didn't require him to use his hands too much because he was pretty sure you weren't supposed to eat the spray paint. "Wonder if many people will see it." The wall wasn't that far from the regular path, but this area was more overgrown than other parts. Benny hoped people would see it, but more than that, he hoped they would like it. And that they wouldn't end up in Azkaban prison for it, but he didn't really believe that, well, not entirely.

“Ours,” Tomie repeated firmly. She slung her backpack over one shoulder and picked her skateboard up with her other arm. “Bridge?” she suggested, but she was already walking over to where he’d dropped his bike. “I hope so. I think they will,” she answered with a nod. Benny meandered after her and she walked backwards slowly while he caught up. A part of her felt like it would always, always be like this, and another part knew that it wouldn’t, and the combination made her feel especially sentimental. She smiled an easy half-smile looking over his grubby hands, arms, face… She was sure she was just as sweaty, just as dirty, just as painted.

The sunlight seemed a little more golden now, and Tomie wondered distantly how much time had passed. She felt tired like they’d been busy all day, when really they hadn’t been much more physical than they usually were. Maybe it was just the heat, she thought, fanning herself lazily with her cap again. She didn’t say much as they walked, happy to sit in the contented feeling that a satisfying project brought, along with the infinite freedom of summer. She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm.

“Up here?” She asked, nodding forward to where the trees thinned on either side of the path, then stopped entirely at the edge of a bridge. The ground rumbled a little as a train passed underneath it. Tomie placed her skateboard up on the thick, bricked wall on one side and climbed up so she could sit on top, her legs dangling over the side. It took a little effort; the wall was taller than she was and she had to scramble her sneakered feet against the bricks to get good purchase. The view was worth it, though. Train tracks stretched out below, and in the distance she could see tall city buildings behind opaque layers of smog. 

“Here,” Tomie said, leaning a bit so she could hold her hand out for her friend and help him up.

Benny's head bobbed as he agreed to the bridge idea, and after a moment, he began to collect the rest of his things. At some point, he'd managed to lose one of the caps for the spray paint cans, and Benny paused to survey the ground around him one last time. No luck. He moved toward his bag, picked up his bike, and followed behind Tomue toward the bridge.

Hearing the trains rumbling ahead, Benny smiled into the sunshine and pushed his bike a little faster to catch up with Tomie. Whether or not people saw their artwork on the wall, Benny still felt accomplished. It was the perfect beat to start the summer, and everything felt possible now. Letting his bike fall to the side next to the wall they would climb, Benny tugged his shorts up before approaching the border.

Tomie had always been the strong and coordinated one between them, so even if by some miracle Benny had reached the wall first, he still would have waited for her to do the climb. Benny watched where she put her feet and took her hand. He scrambled upward, almost reaching the top before one sneaker slipped and skid down against the wall. "Pull me up, pull me up," He said, squeezing her hand as if falling three feet might kill him.

The summer's theme continued as Benny finished the climb and realized the risk had been so worth the reward. "Woah," He said, inspecting the tracks below them and the cityscape beyond. "Cool," He wiped his hands on his shorts for the hundredth time and turned to Tomie, his stomach rumbling.

“Ahh!” Tomie made a dramatic sound as Benny slipped, nearly taking her with him. She was strong, though, and managed to pull him up in the end with some effort. “Theeeere we go,” she said, heaving him up the last little bit. He got settled to her side, and Tomie got comfy too, smiling to herself. She pulled her backpack around and leaned it in her lap, digging around for some random things she’d nicked from the kitchen. Another packet of crunched up crisps. Two muesli bars. One apple. Tomie never went anywhere without a snack, and it paid off on long days like this, when they’d been out for an unknowable amount of time. She dropped her backpack to the ground behind her when she was done, holding out a muesli bar for Benny before opening her own one.

“You know,” Tomie started, her gaze off in the distance. She was nervous to go back to it, but it’d be a lie to say it hadn’t been on her mind since they’d almost talked about it earlier. The mood was different now, though, and while she’d be happy to avoid talking about JR or quidditch or the whole rejection thing forever, the bit about Benny not feeling good enough was like a little prickle in her sock or something; it demanded attention.

Plus, they were best friends. Even hard things were doable together, right?

“JR and me,” she said — another attempt at starting. “We have lots of stuff in common, like quidditch obviously, but it's all really competitive — and that's fun — but there's a kind of... I dunno, like these walls because of it too? Or maybe because we’re really similar but our lives are so different. Or something, I dunno." Tomie shrugged, conscious of making things weirder or being too open about her thoughts. She looked at Benny briefly, thinking about the things they had in common.

Tomie thought of their parents. Immigrants. South East Asians, specifically. Working class families. North Londoners. She and Benny had lived in the same house, gone to the same places all their lives since they were babies. Tomie wanted to say some of this, but she couldn’t think how to word it without being too sappy or too weird, or explicitly talking about being poor or “not exactly from here”, which wasn’t something they really did. “You and me get each other,” she said instead, which felt very reductive. It was shorthand; She thought she and JR got each other too, but in such a different way that she couldn’t begin to explain. This was different.

“I wish we hung out more last term,” she added, taking another bite of her bar.

Benny felt relaxed while sitting on the wall, with his legs hanging below him and the sun hitting them from a different angle. He was hungry and tired, but in the same breath, he felt excited by accomplishment. Tomie reached into her bag and began pulling out snacks, and the excitement grew. She was always prepared with food, and Benny always appreciated it. He'd never remember the snacks; if it were up to him, they would probably starve.

"You know," Tomie began, "Yeah?" Benny answered as he used his teeth to open up the muesli bar. The foil tore quickly, and he pushed the sticky bar up from the bottom to avoid touching it with his fingers as he waited. "JR and me," Benny's eyes darted up to hers and then away just as quickly. Thankful for the excuse of a very chewy snack bar, Benny was silent as Tomie continued, and while everything she said made sense, it didn't make him feel better the way he thought she might have intended. Not at first, at least.

Benny had always felt bland compared to JR, and he wondered if that was what Tomie meant. JR was different, and that was exciting; he came from somewhere else, knew different things, and was better at other stuff. Tomie and JR had something in common that Benny and Tomie didn't, and he supposed he understood. He felt that way about Wendy and Trudy; they were new friends. "So... what your saying is... JR is like a new comic, and I'm like one you've read already?" Benny knew he was oversimplifying it, but talking in terms of comic books and superheroes was more fun.

"Yeah, me too," He replied because it was easy to agree about wishing they'd hung out more this year. Shifting a little, Benny was careful not to call from the wall. He was uncomfortable talking about this stuff, but it was getting easier the more they did it. There had never been a topic they couldn't talk about before, so it was a relief to find that this hadn't been the first.

“No, no, no,” Tomie repeated quickly, shaking her head. Her dangling legs kicked impatiently. It was more like Benny was her favourite comic, but she read other books sometimes and sometimes they were good too, or... Something? “Yeah, familiar, but not boring. I mean, look…” She gestured to the length of their bodies, drawing attention to the paint and the dirt. She wasn’t feeling poetic enough to try to stick to the metaphor, so she was more straight-forward as she went on.

“No one will ever know me like you do, Benny,” Tomie said seriously. They might only be thirteen, but thirteen years was a pretty long time to have been best friends with someone! Tomie felt like she had the authority to speak so dramatically, anyway. “You know,” she continued, sensing that he wasn’t totally convinced yet. “There’s like Tomie and Benny world—” She drew a little circle on one of the bricks between them, beside the apple she’d set down. “—And there’s eeeeeverywhere else.” Tomie drew a bigger circle in the air, then pointed right back at the place she’d drawn the first one, her fingertip touching the brick. “And right here it’s just us and we can just... be. Ourselves, or whatever.”

Be yourself sounded trite, but it felt more weighty right in this moment. She loved school, and she loved her friends but being here with Benny was totally different. No pressure to impress, no pressure to be someone she wasn’t. Tomie sighed, feeling a twist of regret, or something, in her tummy. She wanted to say more, be more open, but it was tricky, even when they felt close like this. There were things, secret and uncomfortable things, she might have shared with him, if they’d had more moments like this during term… But they didn’t have more moments like this because she’d been too busy with quidditch or JR or any of her other friends. Her fault. She frowned a little, wondering if he understood the feeling she was trying to convey.

As Tomie continued, Benny realized that being a favorite comic book wasn't the worst thing in the world. He might not have been fresh and new and someone she wanted to call a boyfriend, but he was comfortable and trusted and a best friend, and he could be okay with that. It'd be a lie to say it still didn't sting to think about the fact that shed told him no and JR yes, but Benny was working past that too. Benny liked the sound of their world, and it made him smile a little as she spoke. It made him feel better as she explained the circle she'd drawn on the bricks.

In this bubble, Benny felt invincible. He felt brave, enthusiastic, and capable of just about anything. There was a certain confidence that came from knowing someone as well as they knew each other. Benny knew what Tomie found funny, and he recognized the look when she was too hungry and was going to start getting mad, and he trusted her. And more than anything, he understood what she meant.

Starting Hogwarts had been frightening and incredibly overwhelming, but Benny had always felt immeasurably lucky because he hadn't been alone. He'd had his best friend right beside him, and he should have done a better job remembering that. Even if she wasn't his girlfriend, she was still his best friend, and that was enough. Not to mention he didn't know what it meant to have a girlfriend yet, anyway. As Tomie finished explaining the circle, Benny nodded and found the courage to meet her eyes. "I get what you're saying...." He started and then paused; it was still a little bit painful, but Tomie's reassurance felt like armor, and Benny felt stronger. "I guess I always..."

Benny didn't understand a lot of things about what it meant to be in a relationship, but he had plenty of time to figure those things out. And a part of him had always assumed they would figure them out together, the same way they had every other big thing in their lives. When Benny had learned to ride a bike, Tomie had been right there running beside him. When he lost his first tooth, Tomie had been the one who threw the ball that loosened it up. She'd been there for so many firsts, and it was easy to expect she'd be there for more. "Well, I always assumed you would be my first kiss, is all. "

They did everything together growing up, so he'd thought this first would be the same. Maybe Benny had assumed that because Tomie made him feel brave, and this stuff was scary.

Tomie glanced at him sharply when he finished his sentence, surprised. She hadn’t ever really thought about first kisses like that, she thought. First Kisses. Capital F, capital K. She’d thought about kissing, of course, but First Kisses hadn’t really seemed that weighty until she was kissing Shelby in a circle of girls. She could still hear Hazel’s gleeful shriek when she actually did it. Did the Shelby kiss count, though? Since she was a girl? Tomie and JR had “kissed” but only a couple times on the lips, and only little pecks. That probably counted more, she thought distantly. The whole First Kisses thing ws dumb anyway, she thought, feeling a litlte defensive.

She supposed everyone had always thought she and Benny would get married or something, and while Tomie protested the assumptions, of course she could think of worse husband material. “Why, who’d you kiss since November?” She teased, nudging his knee with her own, almost bumping the snacks off of the wall. He looked like he didn’t get the joke. “Because you said — So why couldn’t I—? Never mind.”

Tomie glanced away, eyes back on her dangling feet. The light had changed some more; the smog was a different colour now and there were pinkish clouds in the sky. Golden light flooded the tracks below as the sun slowly closed the distance to the horizon. It was so much later than she thought; no wonder she was hungry.

Well, if they were trading confessions… “Can I tell you something?” she started, nice and clear. As the sentence went on, though, her words got a bit mumbly. She placed the soles of her sneakers flat against the brick wall, scuffing them a little. “I want to, but I’m… I’m nervous that you’ll think of me different. Or something,” She tacked the end bit on to try to soften it, but once she’d said the words she knew she’d spun up a little mystery in his mind. She knew she’d have to explain.

Tomie made a joke, and Benny tried to push out a laugh, but he felt awkward instead. His half forced crooked smile didn't reach his eyes, and Benny shrugged when she continued. He hadn't kissed anyone, but he already knew that she knew that. Or, at least, he assumed. Now that they had left Hogwarts for the summer and they were back in "their world," as Tomie had put it, Benny felt like they had never missed a beat. Despite not speaking for days, some weeks, and spending more time apart than they ever had before during the term, Benny felt like they'd been right next to each other the whole time.

Memory was funny that way, and as soon as they'd left Hogwarts, it was as if the atmosphere changed entirely. All of the weirdness and tension at the end of term was wiped away and replaced with a fresh summertime feeling full of freedom and possibility. Even the tough subjects like this didn't seem so challenging anymore. There was no more distance, and in Benny's mind, it was like there had never been. And so, when she asked who he'd kissed, he assumed his best friend already knew the answer because she'd have been the first person he told if he had.

Tomie looked away, and Benny felt a little bit of the tension creeping in again, but he bit it back and nodded. "Course," he answered quickly, his need to change the topic and let her guide the conversation coming out with urgency in his single-word answer. "Go on then, whatever it is, I'll bet it's not that bad," Benny couldn't imagine what Tomie might have been holding back, but if it were more embarrassing than him expecting her to be his first kiss, then he would be surprised.

Besides, Benny couldn't possibly think Tomie was anything but dynamite. She was simply the coolest, no matter what she said next.

“It’s not that bad,” Tomie agreed, even though she didn’t mean it at all. She couldn’t meet his eye now. “I just don’t want you to — I mean, I’d think about someone different if — like, not bad, I guess, but…” She should really just say it, instead of the mumbling lead in. Tomie frowned a bit, wishing she had something to throw off of the bridge while she spoke. Or maybe it was herself she wanted to throw off of the bridge. Ha.

Her cheeks felt warm now, and she wondered how she could have thought this would be easy, given how twisted up she’d felt about it for the past… However long it’d been since she’d started thinking about it. Sometimes the picture formed slowly in her mind, and she could just avoid it altogether. But after things with JR, and the speech she’d just given Benny about how no one would ever know her like he did…

“Who’ve you had a crush on in the past year, B?” Tomie asked. After a beat, she looked at him, still frowning just a touch. “Like, have you ever had a crush on someone you never thought you would?”

The more Tomie spoke, the less she said, and Benny gave her a look. Whatever she was trying to get at, Benny didn’t understand, and he’d been just about to question her when she finally said something. []Oh[/i], he couldn’t help but feel a little on the spot from her question. Well, hadn’t he just told her he’d had a crush on her? Did she expect him to have more than one crush per term? Benny wondered if he was supposed to have more than one, and if so, what was the proper amount?

“Other than you?” Benny finally answered after a moment of panic and a deep breath. If he was supposed to have a long list, then once again, Benny had fallen behind. It seemed that he did everything on his own time, and his timing was typically just a little bit slower than his mates. “I guess…” Benny thought about how he had felt about Tomie when he asked her out and how he’d gotten a nervous stomachache in the days leading up to finally shouting the question at her. And if he thought about that fluttering feeling, he remembered feeling it one other time.

“I think maybe Wendy, too,” Though the second part of Tomie’s question confused him, and Benny wondered ‘who he was supposed to crush on,’. He wondered if the fair-skinned witch who liked princess stories was a good answer. “How about you?” – other than JR, but Benny though that went without saying.

“Yeah,” Tomie replied. Obviously she meant other than her. Duh.

He was taking her question too seriously and Tomie felt impatient waiting for him to answer. It was only supposed to be demonstrative; she assumed that he’d have told her if he’d had any serious crushes. (Well, aside from that obvious one…) “I dunno,” Tomie answered immediately. It was the stock answer, but it was unfair to put him on the spot and give him nothing in return. “Um, JR,” she said, looking away again, but the answer was a throwaway one; she didn’t linger. She’d started out so confidently and now she was frustrated with herself for not having a clear path from A to B.

Wendy, too, he said. No, she was NOT going to be that explicit. Even being as explicit as she was was going to be difficult, especially because he'd understand why it was so complex. She wasn't even sure if it was okay or not, no matter what her dormmate with her stupid two mums had to say about it. And her parents...

She sighed. “What would you do… If you woke up one day… And you liked JR as more than a friend? Or Bean, or. I dunno. Simon?” The particular boy didn’t matter; she threw the names out like cards, one after the other. "And you still liked me or Wendy," she tacked on. "But..." She kicked her legs a bit, eyes ahead.

Benny’s nose scrunched up when she mentioned JR, but he took a bite from his snack to cover it up. Even though he felt better now than he had a few months ago, it was still kind of a sore spot for the young wizard. He supposed it would be for a while but talking about it had helped a lot. When Tomie’s sentences became more and more fragmented, Benny had trouble following along. He recognized how her thoughts were half-formed, her phrases even less so, and realized she was more nervous than he could remember seeing her… well… ever. Usually, Benny was the apprehensive one between the two of them. Tomie wasn’t afraid of anything, Benny had thought.

She continued, and Benny couldn’t help but smile at the hypothetical she brought up. “Oh, no, I could never,” he answered without a thought, but he meant no harm. Bean was too quiet, and JR was too opinionated, though; after a beat, Benny realized the Slytherin quidditch player was the wizard version of Tomie -- and that twisted his brain up a little. And now he couldn’t help but wonder; what would he do if he woke up with a crush on JR? The thirteen-year-old didn’t know why he liked Tomie, but Benny supposed it was because she was pretty and strong and enjoyed almost all the same things he did. And he concluded JR had two out of the three of those qualities too.

“Well, I guess I don’t know….” Benny thought about her question more critically than he probably needed to, and after another moment of quiet reflection, he finally realized the point. It wasn’t about him; Tomie wasn’t accusing him of liking too many people or wondering if he was jealous of JR for other reasons; she was talking about herself. It was very Tomie-like to explain things to him this way, to put Benny in the right pair of shoes to understand properly, but it didn’t mean he got to the punch any quicker than usual.

“Hang on, do you mean… you like Wendy, too?”

I could never.

Yeah. That was how she felt about liking girls, too — the incredulity, the humour, and especially the distance between her idea of herself and the idea of being someone like that. The difference, though, was that she did, (ugh) even if she’d only barely thought it so explicitly. Even only reluctantly.

Tomie finally shut up but he was taking a while to get to the main point of it and her impatience was slowly shifting to frustration. It was frustration, first, then soon it’d be anger; that was the way all of her intense, bad feelings tended to go. She’d been fighting with herself a lot this past year, and doing her best to keep it all tucked away.

“Ugh, no,” Tomie said immediately, frowning. She felt a defensive gut reaction at the accusation, even if he was basically accusing her of something she was trying to admit in this very conversation. “No,” she said again, because even though he wasn’t really far off of the mark, she simply couldn’t bear the thought of the abstract thing she was trying to say taking such defined form in his head. No, it wasn’t Wendy. Wendy was only a piece of it. A small, irrelevant piece.

That wasn’t the way she’d felt last year at camp, but she didn’t say so now.

“I’m not a lesbian,” she said, and the word came out with just a touch of a dark kind of distaste. It was the same way she said Matthew Maverick’s name. The same way she’d exchanged glances with Benny right after she’d made up some excuse not to go to one of JR’s rich-people events because she and Benny couldn’t afford to. “And I’d never like, date a girl,” Obviously.

“But.”

Tomie glanced at him, then glanced away. Her throat felt tight, and she really would throw herself off of this bridge if she started crying now. She swallowed hard, then looked back at him again, impatient for him to ask a question, or make a comment.