Orange Jacket Armor

The orange jacket was my armor. Bright enough to blind, loud enough to scream "I'm here" even when I felt like disappearing.

"You look like a traffic cone," Maya said, not looking up from her phone as I walked into her room. We'd been best friends since sixth grade, back when orange was just a color and not a statement.

"It's called main character energy," I shot back, dropping onto her bed. "You should try it sometime."

Maya finally looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time in weeks. "What's with the vitamin gummies? You literally never eat anything that didn't come from a vending machine."

I fished the bottle from my jacket pocket. "Mom thinks I'm deficient in literally everything. Vitamin D, B12, joy..." I forced a laugh.

The truth: I hadn't been outside in days. The orange jacket was for show. Inside, I was still wearing my pajamas, still thinking about how Maya and I had somehow become strangers who shared a lunch table.

"My therapist says—" Maya started, then stopped herself.

"You have a therapist?" I asked too loud.

"Since January." She picked at her neon blue nail polish. "My parents are getting divorced."

The vitamins in my pocket suddenly felt heavy. All this time I'd been convinced she was ditching me for the popular kids, for Brooklyn and her endless pool parties I kept seeing on Snapchat. Meanwhile, Maya was drowning while I watched from the shore, resenting her for swimming away.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, my voice cracking.

"You seemed so busy with your..." she gestured at my jacket, "your everything. You're so vibrant, Riley. Sometimes it's hard to be around that much light when you're busy being a mess."

I looked down at my orange armor. It wasn't protection anymore. It was a wall.

"I'm not actually," I said quietly. "I pop vitamin D because I haven't left my house in three weeks. I bought this jacket hoping someone would notice me. Notice that I'm not okay."

Maya's eyes softened. She reached across the space between us and took a vitamin gummy from the bottle.

"These taste like fake cherries," she said, smiling slightly.

"Gross, right?"

"Terrifying."

We stayed like that for hours, two people in technicolor armor learning how to be friends again in the messy in-between. The orange jacket stayed on, but the walls came down.