by Arvin Ahmadi
That is, unless I’d already gone crazy. I stepped into the bar, and the city’s chaotic soundtrack faded out, replaced by a familiar ’90s tune: “I Want It That Way.” The Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t just the playlist. I looked around and realized I had entered a literal playground. To my left, a wall covered in Etch A Sketch pads. To my right, an entire corner dedicated to Mario Kart—leaderboard and all. There were pinball machines, dartboards, and, directly under my feet, a hopscotch court. I kind of felt bad for walking right over it.
There was no way I was in the right spot. I took a hop and a few steps back outside to double-check the awning. Sure enough, it said Thomas Foolery. I went back inside, hesitant, and took a seat at one of the Etch A Sketch tables.
I should have known from the name, Thomas Foolery, that it would be a silly establishment, but I thought adults were subtler about these things. I figured they’d just serve fun drinks, and the bartenders would wear striped bowties or something. Instead, this place had more Etch A Sketches than I could count. I grabbed the one at my table and shook it clean. I turned the right knob and just like magic, a horizontal black line appeared on the gray screen. Then I turned the left knob and a vertical line appeared. I turned the knob the other way and it drew back over the line I had just drawn. This was so cool. Why didn’t my childhood involve more Etch A Sketches? What if I was on the verge of creating an Etch A Sketch masterpiece? This might have been my calling all along—the reason I felt an impulse to run away to DC and befriend Trent and end up in this kids-themed bar.
Right as I was figuring out how to make diagonal lines, I heard a jingle from the front door. I looked up and it was not Trent.
“Saaket?”
It was Fiora.
“Fiora?” is what I should have said. Instead, I said nothing. I looked down at my Etch A Sketch and made another diagonal line.
She came up and tapped me on the shoulder. “Uh, hello. What are you doing here?”
I looked up slowly. Fiora was wearing a black tank top and camouflage parachute pants. At least half her forearm was covered in bracelets—multicolored, beaded, gold, spiked, eccentric—and they jingled as she waved her hand in front of my dazed and confused face.
“I’m waiting for Trent,” I finally said. I was trying my hardest to act calm. “Who speaks very highly of you.” I couldn’t help that part. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see Trent, too,” Fiora said.
“That’s a weird coincidence.”
For a second we were both puzzled, looking around the bar for an eight ball or something with an answer. Then, out of nowhere, Fiora started to laugh uncontrollably.
“What?” I asked, kind of annoyed. “What’s so funny?”
Fiora kept laughing, bending over to catch her breath.
“I never thought Trent had the balls to do something like this,” she said.
“Ah. Hm. I think I see what’s happening . . .”
“So for what do I have the honor of this blind setup? How’d you even meet Trent?” Fiora suddenly grimaced. “Wait, are you in love with me?” I rolled my eyes. “Oh my God, you’re in love with me, so you tracked down my friend and convinced him to set us up on a date! Saaket, this is getting out of hand.”
“You remember my name,” I said.
Fiora looked at me with puppy-dog eyes and mouthed an awww. I shook my head furiously. “Wait, no. I’m totally not, not, not in love with you,” I said, making sure to use an odd number of nots in case she felt like twisting my words.
“So what is it, then? Why are we here?” she asked, taking a seat at the table.
“You really can’t figure it out, can you?”
“Nope. I’m stumped. Why did Trent feel the need to trick the two of us into meeting?”
“Because, Fiora.” I emphasized her name because I was about to be blunt, and I wasn’t typically a blunt person. “You tricked me. Obviously Trent set up this meeting so you could apologize to me.”
“Oh, come on, Saaket, don’t be dramatic.”
“No, seriously. Do you see the cuts on my arms and face?” I showed her my arms and turned my chin to show off the full extent of my injuries. “I got them from the guy you stole that bike from. He chased me all around the city, and I was biking ridiculously, dangerously fast to lose him, since I had no fucking clue who he was or why he was after me. And then I finally lost him, but I kept biking and ran into a phone booth, which is where Trent found me in a pool of blood—”
Fiora gave me a look.
“Fine, maybe it wasn’t a pool of blood. But I was covered in blood and cuts and bruises,” I said. “That’s when Trent found me and helped me get cleaned up.”
“Well, you’re welcome,” Fiora said smugly.
“What?”
“I gave you your first adventure in DC. You’re welcome.”
I should have known Fiora would twist my catastrophe into an initiation, what with her free-spirited, life-is-an-adventure-so-carpe-freaking-diem perspective. But it still killed me that she didn’t feel even an ounce of remorse.
“You’re welcome?” I repeated.
“Yes, you’re welcome. It sounds like I gave you one heck of a joyride. So what happened to the bike?”
“I don’t care about the bike, Fiora!” I burst out. There was a couple sitting at the bar, and you could tell they were trying their hardest not to stare. “You stole it. Do you know what that means? You took something from someone—your teacher, of all goddamn people—and gave it to someone else. That’s worse than stealing. That’s conning.”
“Technically he’s my boyfriend.”
“You’re dating your . . .” She nodded. “Wow, Fiora. I’m past my limit.” I leaned in closer and whispered, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Saaket, I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t call me that. It’s Scott. I don’t like it when people call me Saaket. Not my friends, not my parents, and especially not you.”
My words were sharp daggers, catching even myself off guard. I could see them tearing into Fiora’s skin with punishing force.
“You were fine with it earlier,” she muttered. “I . . .” Her words trailed off.
Fiora, the stranger who could always play it cool and make everything larger than life, had shrunk before my eyes. And you know what? I didn’t know what to say, because her shrinking didn’t make me feel any bigger. I shouldn’t have cared if she used my real name. So we sat in silence for a few seconds and forgot how big or small we were in this world, and especially to each other. The entire bar went quiet. I reached for the Etch A Sketch and fumbled around with its knobs to make a diagonal line.
Then Fiora spoke: “Look, I can walk out of this bar and forget we ever met. The ball’s in your court. Alternatively, you can accept me for who I am, baggage and all, and how that might rub off on you or bruise you or whatever, and we can get a drink—”
“We?”
“I can get a drink,” she corrected. “We can sit here and catch up like sane people.”
I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t pick up and leave, either. So Fiora, in all her presumptuousness, got out of her seat and walked over to the bar.
“Hey, douchebag,” she yelled at the bartender. “Give me a fucking gin and tonic, and a goddamn root beer for my freak of a friend over here.”
“Fiora? Are you all right?”
“It’s angry hour, Scott. You get a dollar off drinks if you order with your finest angry voice.”
I giggled the way you’re supposed to giggle at a kids-themed bar. It didn’t strike me when Trent mentioned “angry hour” that it would actually be a thing.
“Fiora?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“You can use my real name if you want.”
“Sure thing, Saaket.”
THOMAS FOOLERY’S BUSINESS mo
del was simple. Nostalgia. It linked fond memories of childhood to an adult world without rules. You could raise your voice without getting punished! Sketch your night away and erase it with a few shakes or shots! Play pinball on a buzz. Hop some scotch and drink it, too.
For better or worse, that strategy was never going to work on me. My childhood sucked. Thomas Foolery brought me back to my worst days, when the playground was a war zone. Like any post-trauma victim, I had blocked most of the memories but I remembered bits and pieces. The name-calling, for instance. “Suck It” was by far the most popular. “Sucker Punch” was a close second. There were plenty of other names. Nerd, wimp, immigrant, terrorist, bookworm, teacher’s pet, Goody Two-shoes. I got made fun of for listening to different music, eating different snacks. I got pushed off the jungle gym by Jack Vance in the third grade. I scraped the mulch off my bleeding arms and legs and looked up at his crew as they snickered, feeling nothing because I’d come to expect it all.
I could try erasing my failures, but I couldn’t erase my insecurities. Places like Thomas Foolery brought them back in powerful snippets. Just like the flakes of Raisin Bran I leave at the bottom of the bowl, the shitty parts of my past were always going to stay with me.
My life was a cluster-fuck of remainders.
“I like this place,” Fiora said, walking back from the bar with our drinks. She handed me my root beer and took a prolonged sip of her gin and tonic. “Because it’s all games.”
Fiora leaned in. Her hands were clasped and her fingers interlocked, uncommittedly so, like I could unknot them if I wanted to.
“Huh?” I was paying more attention to Fiora’s body language than her actual language.
“Because it’s all games,” she repeated. “Tom’s Foolery is exactly the kind of bar this town needs.”
“And why is that, Fiora?”
“People in DC treat life so seriously,” Fiora moaned. “Every day they pretend to make an impact with their entry-level job on Capitol Hill or at a think tank, when in reality they’re just pushing paper. Or worse, they’re running the whole fucking office, so they’re actually creating more bullshit in the world.”
“So . . . politicians?”
“Not just politicians. Lobbyists, lawyers, quote-unquote think tanks. Men!” she said, slamming her glass down. “Let’s be honest, they’re all men. They create bullshit at work, and then, after work, they make dinner plans and brag about the law they passed or the pamphlet they wrote—the one only four people will ever read.”
I thought about Jack and Kevin, who wanted nothing more than to pass those laws or write those pamphlets. If only they could have met Fiora.
“When they’re at work,” she continued, “they can’t wait for dinner. When they’re at dinner, they can’t wait to get away and go home. And you know what they do at home? This human being who used to read books and play board games and maybe even build model airplanes? They watch the news. The news. They finally have a few hours away from the bullshit of DC, and they choose to consume the world’s bullshit before going to bed and hitting repeat on this whole cycle.”
Fiora took another sip of her drink. She fiddled with my Etch A Sketch’s knob and sighed. “That’s why I like this place. It doesn’t take itself too seriously.”
“Okay,” I said, smiling. “But isn’t that what college is for? Being a real person without all the seriousness of the real world?”
“Clearly you haven’t spent any time at GW, Saaket. There are two types of people at this school.” She tapped two of her fingers on the table. I noticed the bartender watching out of the side of his eye, entertaining himself with the Fiora Show. “First, you have your future dickheads of America. The political science majors doing Capitol Hill internships, the premeds spending all their time in GelHell.”
“GelHell?”
“Gelman Library. Second, you have your sorority girls and frat bros, who are even worse. At least the future dickheads stress over crap that matters to the outside world. The latest uproar in the Greek community was over a Kappa who wore lime-green flats to a Sigma Chi formal. I’m serious. Not-figurative-but-literal shoes. You’ve got to give them credit, though, because the almighty Panhellenic Council got involved and promptly squashed the controversy before the Greeks could claim any human casualties. Thank God for authority, right?”
“Sounds pretty dumb,” I said.
Fiora nodded slowly—a bow for her spontaneous monologue. Brava.
“How am I supposed to pretend like nothing matters, though?” I pleaded. “These days it feels like every step I take is setting me up for the rest of my life.”
Fiora smiled and bounced out of her seat, making her way to the chalkboard. She picked up a piece of chalk and drew a long, horizontal rectangle on one end of the board, dividing it into eight squares.
“See this row?” she said. “This is me.”
I walked up to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and drew something else:
“This is you,” I said.
“Okay, smart-ass. Just listen, I’m trying to make a point. Pretend this long row of squares contains all of Fiora Buchanan—who I am, what I was born with, my brain, my hair, my lips, eyes, everything.”
Fiora drew two more squares onto the row:
“This new column, the one with three boxes? That’s my parents. They were the first intersection, or rather, the first piece of baggage life threw into my grid.” She kept adding new rows and columns, each one intersecting the last. “This one is their divorce. These are all my dad’s new wives. This one’s summer camp, and here’s the junior counselor I ended up kissing there. This one’s Trent—a handsome row of squares . . .” She went on and on with even more squares until half the chalkboard was sufficiently gridded.
On the opposite end of the board, Fiora drew another long rectangle and divided it into seven squares. “This guy is you, Saaket.”
“You have parents, right?” Fiora asked.
My eyes leapt. She might as well have asked if they were dead or alive.
“Um, yeah,” I said.
“Okay, good. Here’s your parents,” she said, drawing another row that intersected the first one like a cross—
—followed by a bunch more rows and columns that intersected. “And this is all the other shit in your life.”
Fiora drew one last row of squares to connect the two clusters. “And this, my friend, is where our paths intersected on that bus yesterday.”
“You drew a crossword puzzle.”
“Precisely,” she replied.
“Fiora, the cruciverbalist, conveys the profound metaphor that life is a puzzle,” I said, using my finest sarcastic voice. Did Thomas Foolery have Sarcasm Hour? I deserved a drink special.
“No, Saaket, I’m just explaining why I don’t have my panties in an existential bunch like you.” She moved from the chalkboard back to the table. “Our lives aren’t so different from a crossword puzzle, sure. But the thing about life is we don’t get to draw the grid; we take the rows and columns we’re given. Our bodies, parents, mental health issues, all that. What we do get to do is fill the cells. And rather than filling mine with anxiety over medical school or Greek politics—instead of feeling trapped by my circumstance—I fill them with arbitrary words. An eight-letter word for ‘snowstorm’ or a three-letter word for ‘soda.’ Silly shit that’s true but doesn’t mean anything. I can live with my downs and acrosses; I accept the larger truths of my life. But I don’t take the cells so seriously.”
I accepted Fiora’s analysis, even if I wasn’t convinced the content of my cells didn’t mean anything. We went up to the bar, and Fiora persuaded the couple to join us in a game of Cards Against Humanity. She played some alarmingly disrespectful cards, like the one with Oprah crying into a Lean Cuisine. I had a few drinks, too, because the bartender got involved and turned it into a drinking game. Then we left
.
“Cobble,” I slurred. We were back on the street where my bike chase had happened the day before, and I chuckled. “Sunderland Place is very cobbley.”
“It’s not cobble. It’s brick,” Fiora said.
My first alcoholic drink ever. And my second, and my third. I couldn’t believe how it happened, where it happened, with whom it happened. It was dark outside; the shades of black and gray and dusky charcoal spun before my eyes. Nighttime befuddled my senses. My feet were floating along. I was too buzzed to feel anything but good.
“It’s cobble!” I asserted.
“Brick, Saaket. Cobble is a sedimentary rock you find in pebble form.”
“Cobble,” I repeated. “Cobble, cobble, cobble.”
Fiora laughed. “Now it just sounds funny. The more you say it, the funnier it sounds.”
“Funny!” That was a pretty funny word. I wanted to say it again. “Funny, funny, funny. Funnnnyyyy . . .”
“Stop it! You’re stealing all the words!”
We reached the end of the street. Instead of turning, Fiora grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Saaket,” she said in a very play-serious tone. “I think you’re drunk.”
I always thought my first time getting drunk would feel momentous, like I would savor every sip and wear a permanent grin from ear to ear. In fact, yes, I was grinning, but I think that was from the alcohol, not the fact that I just drank alcohol for the first time. The actual drinking part had been weirdly casual. I didn’t think much of it, and I certainly wasn’t thinking that a few drinks would get me plastered.
“So what’s your plan?” Fiora asked.
“Well, Fiora, it’s funny that you should ask. I’m going hooowwwme tomorrow.” I tripped over my own ankle somehow and nose-planted into Fiora’s shoulder. I shouldn’t be allowed to get drunk, ever.
“What happened with that grit professor?”
