Fake Barking

"Can you believe we've known each other for more than a decade?"

Caitlin looks up from her book, muffles, "Yeah, weird," brushing off Liv, and goes back to A Moveable Feast.

"I mean, like, it's crazy that I remember that far back. Like, sometimes I can't even remember something that happened last week, but then at the same time I can remember when we used to have swim practice at Lake Bluff pool and your mom would pick me up, and I'd always forget my towel, and—"

"Yeah, it's nuts, Liv."

Liv gets up from the kitchen bar stool she'd been sitting on. "Anyway, I just thought it was weird," she says defensively.

She closes the IKEA catalog she'd absently been flipping through, then she adjusts her sweatshirt, which had gotten bunchy from sitting.

Caitlin's eyes follow her. Liv's doing that thing where she wants to talk, and Caitlin's doing that thing where she doesn't want to talk. It has nothing to do with the other, just on different wavelengths this morning. It's Saturday.

"Sorry, Liv," Caitlin says. "I'm—"

But before she's done, Liv cuts in, "It's fine. I'm just being dumb."

"You're not. I'm just tired." She thinks to herself, it's 10am, and says, "Well, that's not an excuse—"

"Except that it is."

"Right."

"Right," says Liv.

"I don't want to fight with you, Liv."

Caitlin gets up from the couch. It's a New England red, the kind that mens J. Crew shorts are colored to look like, almost like they're covered in dust.

"Do you remember that guy in the car yesterday?" Caitlin asks.

Stopping in the space between her bedroom and the hallway, "When we were walking?" Liv asks.

"Yeah."

"I remember." She was neither smiling nor frowning, but her face was mute because she didn't know where this was going.

"And he was yelling so much, so loudly and we could hear it all."

"Yeah."

There was a guy who was driving a silver Lexus SUV down Windsor. There was a passenger in the seat next to him. The girls couldn't tell if the passenger was a man or a woman, and frankly it didn't matter. Not because the person looked like either, the SUV driver was going too fast, and it was an odd angle, even when he had to stop at the red light. The driver was yelling so loudly. He was yelling about how much he loved the person sitting in the passenger seat. He was yelling, and he was exasperated, and it was hard to understand because Caitlin and Liv hadn't ever felt that kind of 'frustrating, over the top, I can't deal with you because I love you too much kind of love.' The couple was fighting because they couldn't spend as much time together as they wanted to, the very best kind of terrible fight, because it means they care, and they want to continue to care, and it's hard. It's the hardest kind of fight.

"No one should fight like that," Caitlin says. "That was the kind of fight, if you're going to have it, that you shouldn't have while operating heavy machinery." She was laughing now.

"It was funny," Liv agreed. They thought it was funny because they couldn't identify with it, not really. Their reaction was inappropriate for the situation, like laughing at a funeral, or something less trite.

"God, that uninhibited rage," Caitlin giggled. "Maybe rage isn't even it."

"Yeah, maybe it's more like unwarranted frustration."

Mock holding an invisible badge, Caitlin uses her policeman voice, "I have a Warrant For My Frustration."

"Officer, please, come on, you know me," Liv plays along.

"Like that time my mom was so mad at us for both forgetting towels at swim practice, and we just were so soaking wet and sat in the backseat and we looked like wet puppies."

"And she was like, 'Girls, I just got this.'"

"And, we were like, just, like barking?!"

"Arf! Arf!"

"Arf!"

And the two spiraled into a bark session.