By J. M. Williams

It took all of one week after my best friend checked out of rehab for us to stop talking.

I picked Anya up the day she got out. She was glad for the sunshine so we drove with the top down. I kept the radio off to make sure she didn’t get bombarded with get-rich mumble rap or ads for ambulance chasers. The first place she wanted to go was our favorite microbrewery.

I laughed, furious with her. “I think we’ll be okay if we miss a Friday. You just got out.”

She scoffed, opened her hand sanitizer, shot up with a vigorous rub of the palms. “Get real, Ed” she said to me. “Beer’s not what put me in there.”

We pulled in just seven minutes down the road. I too hated the idea of missing a Friday. Missing out would have only confirmed that things were no longer normal. The moment we walked in, we were consumed by the scent and swelter of hops and barley. Regular customers approached the bar for their regular pulls, paying with tokens they had bought at the door because our state cannot help but forbid direct payment for consumption on the property. We caught up, running on a deficiency of each other even after only three weeks apart.

“What’s next for you?” I asked, eyes on my phone, swipe texting story ideas that had come to me while I was driving. 

Anya chugged the last of her beer. She always held her bottles by the neck, her fingers pinching it the same way I hold my pencils. “Same as last time,” she said. “What’s new with you? What did I miss?”

I scratched my cheek, bashful about sharing good news on the heels of her hard times. “Actually, an online lit mag picked up one of my short stories.”

She slouched with an open-wide smile. Her tank didn’t fit her frame the same way it did just three weeks prior. “No kidding? I’ll drink to that!”

We clinked bottles.

She called me the next day, fuming. I was at my computer when I picked up the phone, rewriting my cover letter for a story that had been rejected ten times already.

“Why the hell did you write that about me?” she said. 

“I didn’t,” I said, though I understood how she came to that conclusion.

“The main character’s best friend is an addict. I’m not an idiot.” Something slammed on her end of the line. 

“I know you’re not,” I stammered. “Every character’s got friends and family. They gotta come from somewhere. Doesn’t mean they’re my friends. My family.”

“Can I quote you on that? To all the people that are gonna friggin ask me what I thought about Ed’s story? Cause they’re all gonna think it’s about me.” She was slurring her words. Not the earliest in the day I’d ever heard her like that.

My fingers hovered over my keyboard. “Anya. This isn’t about you. I know it came out at a bad time, but just look at the banner on the top of the webpage. It’s fiction.”

Another slam. “Oh, like that means a damn thing. You said it yourself. Characters gotta come from somewhere.”

“I wrote that thing like three months ago.”

“You didn’t have to post the damn thing.”

The screen glowed with my digital blank page. On the corner of the desk was my mason jar filled with IPA bottle caps bashed in like heads, all craft at the bottom, more mainstream toward the top. 

“Yeah, actually. I think I did,” I said.

She hung up. 

I was left with the memory of the time in second grade when I first met Anya, when I first decided I wanted to be a writer. I came home from school. I had just written my first story for a school assignment. It was called “Dad is Sad,” about a little girl named Fran, colored in orange, who has much more fun at the park than her father, George, colored in blue. My mother took my story in her hands, five different colored sheets of construction paper hole-punched and bound with yarn. With each page, her smile fell. She trembled. With a pout, she threw my story into the kitchen trash can, then stomped off to her bedroom. The corner of my story landed in a puddle of leftover pasta sauce, but I cut around it and hid the clean part of my story under my bed. The next story I wrote for school was “My Brown Dog.” Even so, my mother refused to look at it. I set it on the dining room table for her to read when she was ready. Once she did, it got a fridge magnet seal of approval. 

I went to college for creative writing. My father called from Reno to express his disappointment. Picturing him with a coke tray in his room helped me deal. Anya and I talked on the phone every Friday night. I learned to find something real within myself to channel into every story, even the fiction. I collected a bottle cap for every new beer I tried. My professor, a grad student I fancied despite her long pinky nails and dramatic flair, stormed into our workshop saying, “So what if they see yourself in the mirror you hold up to the world?” I dropped out to focus on work, but kept writing in my spare time. Anya dropped out of her own college for different reasons, but we both found our way back home. 

Two years passed. I thought of a story that would let me explore my thoughts on drug addiction in short form. On a Monday two months later, I drove my best friend to rehab. We put the top down on the way to let the wind in our hair, blasting our new favorite song on the radio as we sang along, all smiles.

                                                              *  *  *

J. M. Williams is a writer and educator in Atlanta, GA, where he lives with his wife and their cat. He can be found in local bookshops, cafes, and move theaters, and his short fiction can be found online at the Saturday Evening Post and forthcoming on Manawaker Studio’s Flash Fiction Podcast.