Say It by Jack Lennon

My flatmate is threatening to move out if I don’t stop watching Twilight on repeat in our living room. I don’t want her to leave, and more importantly, I don’t know how I’d pay the Edinburgh rent without her. But I can’t stop. At work I sneak my phone under the counter to watch Bella and Edward staring at each other in the meadow, the subtitles blank beneath their vacant faces. I do it in the bath, on the toilet, eating dinner. During sex. The girl threw my phone into my bookshelf when she realised I was trying to balance it on top of her head. The movie kept playing embarrassingly while she gathered her clothes. It was the scene where Bella finds out Edward has been watching her sleep. One of my personal favs. After she left I stayed in bed, listening to Bella and Edward’s first kiss. When I closed my eyes I could see it, shot for shot.

Julie, my flatmate, comes home after her shift at 3am and I’m watching Twilight in the living room. ‘Hey!’ I shout. She doesn’t reply. For a while she slams things in the kitchen then, after a moment of silence, she sticks her head round the door. ‘Are you ever going to watch Eclipse?’ The point of watching Twilight isn’t to watch all of Twilight, I answer. In fact it’s best when you just watch the first movie. It has the best vibes. ‘Yeah, the vibes are fucking stellar,’ Julie leaves to slam a saucepan on the hob. Beans on toast. Again. I know what’s happening before I smell it. I pull my jumper up over my nose and mouth. Sure, it’s fine for her to make one of the most disgusting foods on the planet every night, but when I watch a masterpiece of early 2000’s teen supernatural romance I’m the problem. 

Why did I keep living with Julie? And why did she keep living with me? I ask myself that a lot. In all honesty we both don’t have many friends. We were part of a larger friend group at uni that had gradually disintegrated until there were only two of us left. She’s like a sister to me, if sisters had weird, overly intense, homoerotic friendships for years before settling into the kind of slow-simmering resentment usually reserved for unhappy married couples. We don’t really talk anymore, when we do she holds me at arm’s length, like she barely knows me. 

The night I came home after it happened she didn’t even say anything. My makeup was all smeared and running down my face, and I couldn’t stop shaking. It was summer but I was freezing. I pulled a jumper over my jacket. ‘You’re not cold, surely?’ She barely looked up from Made in Chelsea playing on her laptop. She refuses to use the TV, because it’s mine but also because she “doesn’t watch TV”. I’d told her a thousand times just to plug in an HDMI but she wouldn’t do it. I watched the rest of the episode with her, only speaking to ask who people were and what their relationship was. She loves when I ask that but acts annoyed every time. That night I cried in the shower and she knocked on the door to see if I was alright. When I answered no, actually I’m not, she said ‘Okay then,’ and walked away. 

I watch Twilight while I’m brushing my teeth in the morning. On the bus, through my headphones. Standing outside waiting for my manager to open the shop. At work the owner catches me at it again and says next time he can’t let me off with it. I don’t see how it’s an issue. I can do my job and still watch Twilight. He says I ignored him for a full five minutes until he spoke to me. He said he was sorry, that he liked me and didn’t know what was going on with me, but if I didn’t stop watching Twilight during work hours he’d have to let me go. As he’s talking, my eyes are drawn back to my phone screen. It’s the scene where Edward is saving Bella from getting hit by the car at school. Bella’s face, expressionless and pale as she stares up towards Edward, then to the dent in the car door. He gets up quickly and walks away from her, eyes blazing, hair soft and solid and perfect.  

Julie moves out at the end of the month. She sends me a clipped, neatly paragraphed goodbye text, stating her reasons for leaving, with a list of the different dates she asked me to change my behaviour and the dates she caught me watching Twilight again. It’s as though she thinks these messages might appear in court someday. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, or that she’ll miss me. She asks me not to be in when she comes to collect the rest of her stuff next week. For now, her parents have come to collect her lamp and sofa. They rent a van and stand around the couch debating the best way to get it out, smelling of fabric conditioner and warm tea. I stand awkwardly to the side and realise I haven’t seen my own mum in three months. Julie’s mum gives me a strange, reassuring half-pat when she leaves. It feels incredible and it scares me. 

After they leave, I go into Julie’s room. It’s horribly blank and empty with the big light on, so I turn it off and lie down in the middle of the dark carpet. I open up my phone and watch Twilight. Think about where I’m going to be when Julie comes next week now that I don’t have a job. Maybe I’ll sit in a coffee shop, or a park. Park is better; it’s free. My eyes are glued to the screen. It’s the scene where Bella almost gets attacked by a group of men in a car park. I go to fast forward through it, like I usually do, skipping ahead to when Edward saves her and peals away with her in his expensive car. But this time I sit through it. And when I can sense that Edward’s car is about to come roaring round the corner to save Bella, I pause. My phone goes to sleep after five minutes, but I don’t until many hours have passed.

Illustration by Laura Darling