There are too many things people don't bother to warn you about.

This, November thinks, is one of them. Waiting for your best friend to show up so you can celebrate your birthday together and she doesn't show up. (She's even coined a term: platonic ghosting.)

The glass door behind her opens, and her mother delicately steps out onto the coldness of the balcony. "I don't think she's coming, Ember."

"She has to." She moves her glasses to the bridge of her nose and fixates her gaze on the front entrance to the condominium. "She can't not. I went to hers, remember?"

"Oh, very much so."

"And yet, she's not here." She turns to glance at her mom, who appears to be holding back a sigh.

"Well, come in. It's cold out here, and I think your father managed to light your candles without burning himself for the second year in a ro—"

"Alicia!"

"That's on me, I jinxed the man. Coming!"

This has to be a joke. Jessie would be here by now.

If she was going to be late, November would know. They're closer than the HM Cancri, and those white dwarfs orbit each other every five minutes.

It's going to be fine. She'll show up. She'll be here.

She checks her phone. The last conversation she had with Jessie—before her 'hey, are we still on for tonight?' text sent forty-two minutes ago, which wasn't even read, let alone replied to—was on Friday. The thirteenth. Jessie had jokingly told her to watch out for ladders, and November had replied saying she wasn't superstitious, to which she had replied with 'you can lie to yourself all you want, November, but don't you dare lie to me.'

(Which, retrospectively, was a weird response in an otherwise lighthearted conversation.)

She only gets up when a neighbouring condominium starts setting off fireworks. Thanksgiving was last weekend, moron.

"It's okay that Jessie's not here, you know," her father says as she enters the kitchen, holding a cold washcloth over his hand. "You have countless birthdays, and thanks to Doctor Gilbert and her team, so does she."

She stands eye-to-eye with him. It's almost funny, really: she's tall for seventeen and he's short for thirty-six, yet they're the same height.

"Yeah, but like, not really."

Her mom—who had been putting the cake on the table—places the lighter cautiously on the counter before giving her a worried look. Before anyone can say or do anything, she launches into a tone-deaf rendition of 'Happy Birthday.'

Her father makes the unfortunate decision of turning it into a round halfway through, giving November an extra ten seconds to suffer.

She blows out the candles, her parents cheer, and then they all have some cake.

(Not all. Jessie's still not here.)

"So I received a...shall I say rather interesting email from school this afternoon," her mom says through a mouthful of cake—rainbow sprinkle, the most colourful flavour.

"Oh?" November replies, raising an eyebrow while jabbing her fork into her slice. "In that case, before you say anything, Jaxon got only what he deserved and nothing more, and that I didn't technically make contact with him in any way."

"I—what?"

Oh, boy. "I take it this isn't about Jaxon Martin's pre-graduation revenge senior prank in which Jessie and I toilet paper his car, watch his reaction? Which ends in a mob of girls beating him up after he tries to run us over?"

"No. Oh my God, no. What. Are you okay?"

"Oh, pshh, we're both fine. I have the video if you—"

"Yes!" her father says as her mother says, "God, no."

"Anyway," she continues, snatching November's phone from her husband. "This email was regarding a grasshopper infestation. Everything will be remote until further notice. Does this have anything to do with Jessie's—"

"Science project? Not in a single way."

"Uh-huh."

She's serious. That grasshopper looked pretty dead when she killed it. Oh, God, was the project to dissect a living grasshopper? She was just there at the time as her math class hadn't been able to find a substitute, so she wasn't sure. Though she's sure she saw Jaxon Martin with a cockroach, and it wasn't dead. Why couldn't it have been a cockroach infestation? Then he wouldn't have been able to get away with this like he does everything else.

"Should've been cockroaches," she mutters before stuffing the final bite of cake into her mouth.

On the other side of the table, her father gags and spits his cake out. "Can we not have this discussion at the table?"

Where's Jessie?

"Did Cameron tell you Jessie wasn't going to come?" November aims at her mother, who looks appropriately disgusted at the whole situation.

She shakes her head. "Cameron hasn't spoken to me in months. Not since I called her out for trying to get me therapy appointments she knows I can't afford. She knows."

"Everyone needs money, Mom."

"Not that much money. Not from one person. Ah," she says as her phone rings. "Speak of the devil. Still in the same tax bracket, Cameron."

"This isn't about you, Alicia," she hisses. Her mother rushes to turn the speakerphone volume down as November flinches. "Jessie's not feeling well. She can't make it to whatever you had planned."

November throws her chair back with enough force that it chips the kitchen's crimson wall.

"November?" Cameron questions. "Is that you?"

"Bowling," she states clearly. "We had bowling planned this morning at ten for a ninety minute time slot. I gave it up to a five-year-old who was bowling for the first time. Then, if it was nice enough—which it was, for your information—we were going to have lunch at Somerton Park. And then, we were going to hike the three kilometre trail at Bayhill Heights, before going back to my house and hanging out here before cake. But we just cut the cake, and my parents just sang a horrible rendition of 'Happy Birthday' like every year, so screw you."

She can't bring herself to say anything worse. And if she could, she wouldn't.

"November," her mother mouths as Cameron presumably comes up with a suitable reply, "go to your room."

"Hey, you said yourself that your singing s—"

"Go."

She stands up and starts walking. But she stops in the living room, just out of sight, and leans her head on one of four slate coloured walls around her. The opposite wall—just above the couch—has dozens of pictures. Of her, her and her parents, one parent, both, her and Jessie. The latest one was taken last February, on Jessie's seventeenth birthday, after finding out that after six years (and two relapses), there were no more cancerous cells in her body. The party that followed was reckless, chaotic, and something she doesn't entirely remember to this day.

"November's not here anymore, Cameron, so it wouldn't help you to say anything."

November hears the faint but familiar three beeps. Her mother gets up, puts her plate in the sink, and pauses, tilting her head into the living room, making direct eye contact with her daughter. "Didn't I tell you to go to your room?"

She glides in one near-silent motion towards her bedroom, slams the door shut with anger she does not feel, and throws herself onto her comforter with a disappointment she is not unused to.

Her mother's slightly louder footsteps follow her in, along with her straightening the mirror on the back of the door.

"I know I was mean." November starts the speech she knows she wants to hear.

She clicks her tongue. "I'm glad you're aware."

"I was hoping today would be a good day. Especially since it's on the weekend. It's never on the weekend."

"You know you were born on a Sunday, right?"

"Mom, please," she says into a pillow. "That's not the point and you know it."

"What was that, anyway? Why did you do that?"

"What do you mean?"

She knows what her mom means. Why did you say those things, why did you say anything? Why can't you accept that not everything is the same every time, and that friendships fall apart, and that you need to learn how to move on?

She turns around to stare at the ceiling. The walls enclosing her are a dark burgundy. (It was a compromise, really. She wanted black, but her father was persistent in having the room painted in at least one colour, despite her protests that black is, indeed, a colour, even if not considered so officially. Sure. Yes, Dad, a shade. Whatever.)

"I'm sorry." It's both something November knows she's waiting for and said because of something she genuinely regrets, a rare combination these days.

Her mother sighs deeply. Once, twice. "I know." She looks down at November—something else uncommon. "Hey, you know what? Your father and I have to wait here for this Zoom meeting—why they do it at night on a Sunday night, I don't know, but God forbid we have time off—how about you go to the library? Your bus driver buddy should be working today," she finishes with a curled lip.

Kevin Berkeley is what her father calls a strange fellow. He drives the city bus on weekends and some weekdays, and works at the local animal shelter whenever he's not driving. He lives at an old cottage by Lake Bluehorn (which is probably the 'strange fellow' part—nothing else about him is unusual in the slightest) with his partner and their cat, Kelsie.

The only reason they let her be friends with him at all is that they both went to school with his husband.

"I'm good, thank you."

"What. Okay, I'm sorry about Kevin. Why don't you want to go?"

"Library route goes past the hospital."

Her mom's lips make an 'O' shape and she moves to sit down on the edge of the bed. She runs her hand through November's jet black strands of hair. "But honey, you know Jessie isn't sick anymore."

November ruins the moment by grabbing one of the many half-finished plastic water bottles from her nightstand and drinking the remainder, hoping, without luck, that it'll help with her dry mouth.

"I know that. But it doesn't make it not the hospital."

She gets up and slowly begins emptying bottles into other bottles, and putting the empty ones into the mostly unused recycling bin under her dresser. "Try to think of all the good things that happened there. Jessie was born there, and sure, that may be where they diagnosed her, but they also treated her there."

"Mom, Mom, that one has a half-chewed Advil in it."

"There are generations of Adams who were born there. Hathaways, too," she adds. "Not just your father's family." She holds up the half-eaten pill. "Can you take it while soggy?"

"I'd rather not try."

"You were born there, you know. Yes, yes, in the cafeteria. I was young. I didn't know how long labor would last, and you don't have any right to shame me."

November moves her science textbook out of the way. "This did not help. I really just want to go to bed."

"Go to—it's barely seven!"

"It's Sunday. I have—oh, no. No, I do not. Fine. I'll go."

—

Ten minutes later, November—heavily drenched from (and very unprepared for) what appears to be an uncalled for rainstorm—gets on the bus.

"Oh, didn't you hear?" a way-too-familiar voice says as she lifts her head to step on. "Unscheduled rainstorms are all the rage these days."

"Hi, Kevin."

"Did your birthday end well?"

She drops the toonie into the coin collector and checks her jean pockets for the remaining two quarters. "Jessie didn't show."

He taps the steering wheel with his fingernails. "That's too bad. Where're you headed?"

She drops one quarter in and takes a look around to find the bus is otherwise empty. "Library, hopefully."

"Hmmm. They had one of their sales yesterday."

"Oh?" Two dimes. Five cents short.

"Yeah. Didn't find your book. I found someone who bought it, though. One Darlene Hathaway. Heard of her?" He questions when she raises an eyebrow at the name.

"My cousin."

"The one whose mother isn't speaking with your own?"

"You got it." She spots a nickel on the floor—odd, she had checked for change when she got in—and scoops it up, allowing Kevin to close the rain-soaked doors behind her.

"The next stop is Blanchard Street at Carpenter Drive," the automated voice says as November takes a seat.

This is her favourite part of the day, as much as she refuses to admit to her parents. The feeling of being in a bus all by yourself as rain falls around you, and you have few worries in the world.

The only thing wrong is the slowly growing dread in her chest. The feeling that something unknown was wrong, that something bad was going to happen.

She feels it constantly (which is one of many reasons why she avoids world news, for the most part) but this time it feels personal. A personal tragedy.

"Hey, can you, like, drive slower?" She calls to Kevin.

"You know I always do."

So that's not it. (But it's not not it, either.)

She watches as Kevin flicks some dandruff off his chestnut hair.

"The next stop is 18 Carpenter Drive."

She fishes for the cards in her jacket pocket and randomly picks three. Four of clubs, three of hearts, ace of spades.

Hey, pi, November realizes with a chuckle. Just in a different order.

If her transportation of choice was less bumpy, or if the ride was longer, she'd set up a game of solitaire, but this will have to do for now.

She plugs her earbuds in and opens the 94.7 CJCQ-FM app. She's close enough to the station that it should work.

Five songs and one three minute ad break later, Kevin makes a sharp turn. ("Meyer at Savage.")

And savage it is, with speed bumps every half-kilometre and gravel scattered everywhere.

"The next stop is Savage Boulevard at St. Julian's Hospital."

November pauses the radio and sits up. She scans the bus. There's new ads: for stopping a nicotine addiction, for those stair lift chairs, for drug addictions.

She pulls her medication out and takes one. She shouldn't be worried. The hospital didn't give Jessie cancer, and even if it did, she's not facing it, so why be nervous?

Kevin comes to a complete stop, and opens the doors as if they're about to be hit by a train. "November, get out."

She stands, putting her phone back in her pocket. "What's wrong?"

"Battery just died. Get out."

She does. And she sees why he's so terrified.

The bus just died in front of the entrance to the busiest hospital in town.

He sees the oncoming ambulance before she does. He throws himself—holding onto her—into the ditch next to them just as the ambulance unrelentingly drives into the front bumper of what was Kevin's part-time job and November's preferred mode of transportation.

"Are you okay?" He asks. He's not muddy, having fallen into remaining dirt-covered snow, but the rain will take care of that soon enough.

November nods, but doesn't take her eyes off the bus. Like the saying, or whatnot. She doesn't, not when all three emergency services show up, not when Kevin guides her to the cops so she can answer questions, not when her parents show up.

It's only when she's driven out of sight, with her mother's hand on her knee, does she turn around.

She doesn't know who she's supposed to tell this to, but Jessie was the one in the ambulance.

word count: 2493 (wattpad) / 2613 (google docs)