Leaving Rhode Island: Philadelphia

                (KELLY and SARAH at a coffe shop.  Mid-conversation.)

KELLY:  …I mean, I’d have to be out of my mind, right?

SARAH:  Well—

KELLY:  I mean, I don’t even know why they bothered sending us that letter.  Who just scraps the last five years of their life and says, ‘Yeah, let’s pretend time travel exists and jump back to 2009?’

SARAH:  Yeah, you’re right.  That’s—

KELLY:  I mean, I was fifteen when I left here.  Fifteen.  I barely remember even living here.

SARAH:  You don’t remember anything before the age of fifteen?

KELLY:  I mean—I remember some things, but not a lot.  You just—I guess you kind of block things out when you go through something traumatic like that.

SARAH:  Of course.

KELLY:  I mean—my parents and I were basically refugees.

SARAH:  You moved to Pennsylvania, right?

KELLY:  Yeah, but, I mean, against our will—like refugees.

SARAH:  I don’t think that’s—I mean, the word ‘refugee’—

KELLY:  They shouldn’t have even exiled kids.  That was so wrong.

SARAH:  Well, it was all random.  They just picked random social security numbers and—

KELLY:  No one’s, I mean, I’m not trying to contradict what you’re saying, but—no one’s entirely sure how they picked who they picked.

SARAH:  I guess the important thing is that you’re doing okay now.

KELLY:  Oh my God, I’m better than okay.  I mean, I’m doing really well.  I would call the whole thing a blessing in disguise, but I mean, my parents really suffered because of it, so it’s—I mean, it definitely benefitted me in the long run, but they still had a hard time of it, so—

SARAH:  They found jobs right away, didn’t they?

KELLY:  Well, yeah, I mean, Pennsylvania had a way better job market at the time than Rhode Island did, but still, it’s just—it was very stressful for everyone involved, you know?

SARAH:  I guess maybe it’s hard to remember stuff that happened five years ago.

KELLY:  Well, it shouldn’t be that hard.

SARAH:  Well, you don’t remember anything before you were fifteen so—

KELLY:  Are you, like, mad at me or something?

SARAH:  No, I just—Okay, to be totally honest—I’m not really sure why you called me.

                (A beat.)

KELLY:  Well, because we were friends.  We were best friends.

SARAH:  I—Wow, okay—I really don’t want to be mean, but—we weren’t really friends.

KELLY:  What?

SARAH:  We definitely weren’t best friends.

KELLY:  Sarah!

SARAH:  Kelly, I’m sorry, but—it’s just not—it’s not accurate to say that—

KELLY:  Accurate?  What are you a mathematician?

SARAH:  Um, no.

KELLY:  I reached out to you because I thought…

SARAH:  What?  What was it you thought?

KELLY:  I don’t know, I guess.  I guess I don’t know.

SARAH:  That’s what I mean.  I’m not sure why you’re here.  You said yourself that you’re doing really well.  And I’m happy for you.  I’m not trying to make it sound like I think being exiled was easy.  I know it wasn’t, but—your whole family is in Philadelphia now, right?  So why bother coming back here?  Like you said, you can’t just…time travel.

                (A beat.)

KELLY:  I guess I was…curious about what I was missing all these years.

SARAH:  Honestly?  Not much.  It’s just Rhode Island.

KELLY:  Right.

SARAH:  A couple new buildings maybe?  Some new people, but other than that--?

KELLY:  Right, right.  Yeah.  I just…uh…

                (A beat.)

I mean, I do remember being happy here.  That I…I can remember that.  And then after we moved, I…I didn’t have that many friends, and I got really depressed, and my parents had me see this shrink—who I still see, by the way, because, I don’t know, I guess, why not, right?  And things are—okay, I mean, I am doing well, but it’s like—I just wonder, you know?  Like what would my life have been like if they hadn’t made me leave?  Would I have been just as depressed here?  Was that just something that was bound to happen no matter what?  I mean, is it a grass-is-always-greener kind of thing?  I don’t know, you know?  I just don’t know.  But not knowing is really hard.  It’s like—you have this big thing, this, I don’t know, not a milestone, but a—something—in the path of your, you know, life, and no matter how well you do for yourself, you can’t help but wonder, like, what would have happened if you didn’t have that thing there in your past.  That thing that made you go the way you weren’t planning on going.  I feel like I’m always looking back at it and just…wondering.

                (A beat.)

SARAH:  I was sort of jealous of you.

KELLY:  Really?

SARAH:  Yeah.  I always wanted to leave, but—there was never any reason to, so I stayed here.  I guess, maybe, I was scared too, if I’m being honest.  But you—you got to move away.  I thought—Well, this is really insensitive, but—I thought it sounded like an adventure.

KELLY:  Well, when my mother accidentally packed her Xanax with the silverware and had to do the entire road trip to Philly stone cold sober, so that was definitely an adventure.

SARAH:  You know, I didn’t mean to make it sound like we can’t be friends now.  If you want a reason to visit, you’re always welcome to, you know, get coffee with me, or something.

KELLY:  I don’t know, Sarah.  A six-hour drive for coffee is a little outrageous.

SARAH:  There’s also, you know, the phone.  The computer.  Carrier pigeons.

KELLY:  I appreciate that.  I’d appreciate it even more if you could tell me what I was like back then.  I mean, if you remember anything about me.

SARAH:  You really don’t—

KELLY:  Barely anything.  My therapist says I need to start…exploring that part of my life.  She thinks I’m just afraid to because I’ll find out that the person I was back then is the person I’m supposed to be, and that I’m nervous I won’t be able to, you know, find that again.

SARAH:  Well, it’s like I said, I don’t remember much either.  2009 feels like—

KELLY:  I know, isn’t it weird?  It’s like forever.

SARAH:  Maybe it’s more like fifteen was forever ago.  Fifteen to twenty is a pretty big patch of somebody’s life.

KELLY:  Yeah.

                (A beat.)

SARAH:  I do remember going to your house for your birthday party.  You invited the whole class, that was nice.

KELLY:  Oh right—at the end of freshman year.

SARAH:  There were, like, a hundred kids running around your backyard, jumping in the pool, making out underneath your deck.

KELLY:  Making out at fourteen?  Wow.

SARAH:  I think you were one of them.

KELLY:  I—Oh yeah, Brian Terasanni.  You’re right.

SARAH:  But that was the day my little sister was born.  Fourteen years apart—my mother says that why you should never go on a second honeymoon to Lourdes.  Miracles might happen.  Anyway, my mom and dad were at the hospital, and my sister was coming a month early, so they were panicked, and they completely forgot to pick me up.  I was the last one at your house, but you were being so cool about it, I didn’t even feel weird, even though we didn’t really know each other all that well, you acted like I was your sister or something.  You were that nice to me.

KELLY:  Maybe that’s why I remember us being so close.

SARAH:  When your parents found out what happened, they said I could stay the night, and you let me wear your pajamas, and we stayed up all night watching movies and talking about how weird it was going to be for me to have a little sister who was so much younger than me.  And we talked about high school, and all the stuff coming up—the semi-formal, and proms, and, you know, everything.  We planned out everything.

KELLY:  Isn’t that funny.

SARAH:  The weird thing is—all that stuff still happened.  I still went to the semi and both my proms.  I still graduated.  None of it happened the way I thought it would, but it still happened.  It just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.  And then that becomes a trend, you know, that you sort of experience and re-experience your entire life.  Just a series of things happening in a way that’s less than what you would have imagined, until finally your entire life is like that—this one big thing that doesn’t feel right, because it’s not what you planned on, you know?  So one day you’re sitting with this person who you felt related to once, just because she was so kind to you, who you thought you were eventually going to be best friends with, and now you’re just…It’s like, why couldn’t it all just go according to plan, you know?

KELLY:  Yeah.

SARAH:  Because it was a really good plan, wasn’t it?

KELLY:  (Laughs a little.)  I mean, I don’t remember it exactly, but it sounds nice.

SARAH:  (Laughs a little as well.)  It was.  It was really nice.

KELLY:  People don’t really talk about plans that way, huh?  Like boys.  Like nice boys that you should have dated, but didn’t.  Like, ‘Oh, he was such a nice boy, what happened?’

SARAH:  ‘Why was I such an idiot?  I should have stuck with him.’

KELLY:  ‘He made sense.’

SARAH:  ‘He was good for me.’

KELLY:  ‘I’d be happy now if I was with him.’

SARAH:  ‘He had it all figured out.’

KELLY:  ‘So what happened?’

SARAH:  Right.

KELLY:  Yeah.  Right.

SARAH:  What happened.

KELLY:  How in the world did we end up here?

                (Lights.)