Lychee Cosmos
Growing together from afar
Article and art by Leyla Kramarsky
Sophia came to high school orientation wearing mascara. It was clumpy and thick, but to fourteen-year-old me, it signaled something profound. My best friend had grown up over the summer. She had kissed boys and gotten dizzy off an alcoholic seltzer and when she pushed her hair behind her ear, I noticed the shining gold of a cartilage piercing. I glanced down at my sneakers, sterile with the white newness of a purchase made specifically for the first day of school. My mother and I had spent an hour in Foot Locker the week before trying to choose the perfect trendy (yet versatile) sneaker. I loved them, and opened their box every afternoon to peek at their black Nike swooshes. But, standing in the school lobby, they looked embarrassingly self aware next to Sophia’s perfectly scuffed platform converse. She hugged me and she smelled like sweet perfume.
Sophia had always been pretty in an easy way. Where my nose intruded on my face, too large for my young features, hers sloped delicately. Where my limbs grew clumsily from my body, wielded as if they were somehow too heavy, she moved gracefully like the ballerina she was. It never mattered. It was like, until that September morning, neither of us had noticed.
We left for our school orientation trip—a feeble attempt to encourage bonding among an incoming freshman class that had been attending school together since kindergarten. She put eye makeup on me while we sat in a summer camp cabin. It felt heavy on my face, and I wiped it off in the bathroom after she left, leaving a dark shadow underneath my eyes. I was painfully aware that I was being left behind, so two weeks later when she asked me to get dinner on a Saturday night, it felt like a chance to prove my legitimacy as a high schooler. When she asked if I wanted to go to a place that “didn’t card,” I felt something shift in my chest. I hoped that my “sure!” was cool.
The restaurant was an ugly sushi place on the Upper East Side. A chandelier dripping in plastic crystals hung from the ceiling and linoleum tiling lined the floor. It looked like someone had accidentally ordered a few pounds of raw fish to a diner and panicked, desperate to sell it to oblivious customers before its expiration. But, as Sophia assured me, the draw wasn’t the sushi. The draw, it turned out, was two decadent lychee cosmos each, the canned juice almost masking the sharp sting of alcohol. Halfway through my first one I felt my body slide into newness. A rush of warmth to my face. An awareness of my pulse in places I had never known it existed. Halfway through my second, words were falling out of my mouth before I knew what they meant. The strange buzz in my formerly gangly limbs had turned into the arms of someone sophisticated and worldly. Nerves shifted into adrenaline, taking on a life of their own.
We stumbled into the New York night as if we had lived our whole lives perched in the sticky, red booth, giddy with the enormity of adulthood. Standing on the street corner, teetering on the precipice, I was ready to take on whatever adventures lay in store for me before my ten o’clock curfew. But unfortunately and appropriately, the thing about being a drunk fourteen-year-old is that you are fourteen, and there is not very much to do. So, we got cookies.
Sophia moved to Seattle after sophomore year. Through empty promises of reunions and a failed attempt at an “olden times” pen pal relationship, I began to miss the moments that filled her life. I missed her acceptance into one of the best dance companies in the country and her initial encounter with her first boyfriend. I missed when she moved out of her parents’ home and into her own apartment. I missed when that first boyfriend became her first heartbreak. And she missed mine. She missed my first braceless smile, running my tongue over smooth teeth and examining a reflection in the mirror that maybe, one day, could be pretty. The mascara I had once rubbed off my face became familiar. My uncomfortable limbs grew strong when I realized that I loved to run. Wine convinced me to spend a night on a friend of a friend’s couch crying over a boy who I thought could never like me. Tequila convinced me to kiss him. She missed watching as that first drunken night transformed into weekends of parties that I slowly learned to navigate, harnessing alcohol’s synthetic confidence to befriend people that had intimidated even Sophia. But never, not once, did I miss her birthday. And she never missed mine. Our texts now are a series of exchanged birthday messages, increasingly simple as each year passes. But, on every June 7th and December 23rd, I remember our lychee cosmos. I remember running down the street with her, hysterical laughter scoring our steps, the feeling that I would never be as old as I was right then. I remember, most of all, strolling into school the next day armed with a secret that the whole adult world shared. Somehow, Sophia has whispered it in my ear, showing me that growing up is not an exclusive club. There’s no password, no indiscernible language. There is, instead, an amalgamation of firsts and of lasts. And that first, with her, proved to me that I was capable of learning adulthood, of choosing when to be drunk, when to be beautiful, when to be old. So, our birthday texts mean something to me. I don’t know anything about adult Sophia, college Sophia, Sophia now. But I do know that we continue to grow up together, year after year. And for that, I am grateful.