June watched the video on Monday morning with her tea going cold beside her.
Ruby wore the blue shirt she used to borrow from June. There was no music. She sat very still until her voice broke, then pressed her lips together in a way June had seen when the washing machine overflowed and when an audition went badly. It was a familiar face doing something unfamiliar.
“I thought loving someone meant learning what they could bear,” Ruby said. “I kept making myself smaller so we could both fit inside his life.”
June stopped the video.
She had written that sentence.
Six months ago, after Sam had made everyone at a party laugh by saying June would marry a man for remembering her milk preference, she had tried to explain to Ruby why the joke had hurt. It wasn’t only the party. It was eighteen months of wondering whether wanting to be included counted as wanting too much.
She had written several pages, late at night, and sent them to Ruby because spoken explanations kept turning into crying. Ruby had come round the next morning with breakfast and had read them while June sat beside her. When she finished, she had said, You don’t have to make it funny for me.
June remembered how relieved she had felt.
She restarted the video.
The birthday dinner was there. A man who hadn’t come. Ruby waiting while a waiter removed the second wineglass. Later, a joke about women who wanted a ring before they wanted to know you. Sam’s joke had been different, but the laugh afterwards—the pause Ruby described, the way she had joined in before knowing what she was laughing at—was June’s.
“You can be embarrassed in a room full of people and still be alone,” Ruby said.
That was hers too.
The final part was new. Ruby said she had put a box of his things outside his door and had walked away without knocking. June had spent her last afternoon with Sam dividing books and pretending the practical work made the rest easier.
She watched to the end. Then she rang Ruby.
“I need to see you today.”
“I’m at work until two.”
“After that.”
Ruby was quiet for a second. “All right.”
June went to work herself, where a customer needed to know whether a subtitled film would have too much reading. She answered him, took his money, and forgot what she had said as soon as he left.
At three, Ruby came to the cinema. She had a bag from the clothes shop where she worked and a paper cup with a lipstick mark on the lid. A customer there had recognized her too. June could see Ruby trying to decide whether to mention it.
“Can we sit somewhere?” Ruby asked.
They went to the narrow bench at the far end of the foyer, under a poster for a film that had come and gone before either of them was born. June sat at one end. Ruby left room between them for the shop bag.
“You used what I wrote about Sam,” June said.
Ruby set down her cup. “Some of the words.”
“The sentence about making myself smaller.”
“Yes.”
“And the room full of people. And laughing before I realized the joke was about me.”
Ruby touched the cup, then pulled her hand away. “You said it better than I could.”
“It was private.”
“I know it was.”
“Did you use all of it?”
“No. June, no. I borrowed a few phrases. I didn’t use your whole account.”
June looked at her. She had expected surprise, perhaps a protest that the words were ordinary and belonged to anyone. Ruby admitting it made the space between them feel stranger.
“You didn’t ask.”
“Would you have said yes?”
“You don’t get to find that out by doing it.”
Ruby bowed her head. A strand of hair fell across her cheek. She pushed it back impatiently.
“You’re right. I should have asked.”
“Who is the man?”
“I can’t name him.”
“To me?”
Ruby stared at the bag. “It’s complicated.”
“Then tell me a complicated thing.”
People were coming out of the afternoon screening. June let an older couple pass before she continued.
“Last night you said you were protecting someone. People think that man you did the clip with is your boyfriend. Is it him?”
Ruby had made a short comic video a few weeks earlier in which she asked a man outside a café to rate her date outfit. He had looked over the top of his glasses and said he was going to need to see how it handled stairs. June had smiled at it and kept scrolling. Now his face was under Ruby’s breakup video in replies, put there by people who knew him or thought they did.
“Eli,” Ruby said.
“Is he the person you’re talking about?”
“I didn’t name him in the breakup video.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“He was part of how I told it. The thing that hurt me was real.”
June leaned back against the poster frame. “You’re making it very hard to understand you.”
“Because if I tell you one bit, you’ll want all the bits, and I’m trying to get through the day.”
“I want the bits that are mine.”
Ruby looked at her then. She reached across the bag, but June kept her hands in her lap.
“What do you want me to do?” Ruby asked.
“Tell people you changed it. Tell them those words weren’t yours to use.”
“They’ll think the whole thing is fake.”
“It has things in it that didn’t happen.”
“It has the way it felt.” Ruby’s voice lifted. She lowered it again when someone glanced over. “I’m not pretending to be upset. You know me.”
June did. She knew Ruby had worked a whole shift the morning after a rejection and then cried because her lunch had gone missing from the staff fridge. She knew the wrong small thing could make real hurt spill out. She also knew that Ruby could turn a damp bus ride into a story so good June wished she had taken the bus with her.
“I believe you’re upset,” June said. “I don’t know what happened.”
Ruby’s face changed, as though June had offered a hand after all.
“Could you say that?”
“What?”
“That you know I’m telling the truth about being hurt. Just something from you. People know we’re friends.”
“They’ll hear you’re telling the truth.”
“You can word it how you want.”
“I’m not confirming the dinner. Or the joke. Or anything else in that video.”
“You wouldn’t have to list everything.”
June stood up. That made Ruby stand too, knocking the cup with her wrist. Coffee ran across the plastic lid but stayed inside. Ruby righted it and laughed once, without amusement.
“Brilliant. That’s about right.”
June nearly said something kind out of habit. She stopped herself, and disliked how deliberate that felt.
“I’m on a break,” she said. “I need to go back.”
“You’ll think about a statement?”
“I’ll think about what I can honestly say. That may be nothing.”
Ruby picked up her bag. “I thought you would understand before everyone else.”
“I’m trying.”
They usually hugged when one of them left. Ruby waited a beat, then stepped forward. June let her. The familiar perfume caught at her throat.
Outside the cinema doors, Ruby turned left toward the bus stop. June stayed under the awning, finishing the last minute of her break in air that had begun to smell of rain.
A man came out of the little coffee shop across the street. He paused when he saw Ruby, then watched her walk away. June recognized the glasses before she recognized his face.
He crossed when the traffic stopped.
“June?”
She didn’t answer at once.
“I’m Eli. I know this is a bad way to introduce myself. Can I talk to you?”
“About Ruby?”
“Yes.”
June glanced toward the bus stop. Ruby was looking down at her phone.
“What do you want to tell me?”
Eli took off his glasses. There was a red mark on his nose.
“We were never together.”