by Piper Lennox
“I meant, why are you looking to get drunk this late, after—I assume—driving all the way from the fucking Hamptons?”
While he shut the door and brought me some water (he probably thought I was already drunk), I sank into his couch and shrugged. “Do I need a reason?”
“Guess not.”
We both knew he’d keep pressing for one, but not much. It’s why I drove here in the first place. My cousins and I are always there for each other, few to no questions asked. At least not right away.
He sighed, stretching his arms until his back cracked. “Let me leave a note for Clara in case she wakes up, then we’ll find a place.”
We were silent in the elevator. Wes stood against the doors, openly staring at me until they opened. Instead of dumping him on his ass, they let him flow through with a smoothness he didn’t deserve.
“I’m texting Van,” he said at the intersection. I nodded, not really caring if he was inviting him because it was automatic, or because he wanted two sitters for my impending streak of poor choices.
Definitely the latter. When I glanced at his phone, the message he sent read, “Baby Theo wants a bottle. Says he’s getting wrecked. Must be serious.”
Van wrote back, “Are we getting him drunk or talking him down?”
I turned away and pretended to retie my shoes. Just try and talk me down, I thought. When they finally pried the reason out of me, I had a feeling their advice would run dry while the sympathy shots poured like water.
Which is probably how I ended up here: face-down on Wes’s bathroom floor, someone’s boot digging into my ribs.
“Yo. You alive?”
I groan. Wes chuckles and calls into the hallway, “Well, he’s breathing.”
“That’s great. Now can you please get him out of the bathroom?”
Wes hefts me up. “Fuck, man, get your feet underneath you. I can’t deadlift you like this all the way to the couch.”
I stumble, rearranging limbs at random like a Rubik’s cube, just hoping to get something right. It works: my shoes get a grip on the floor, and I shift some of my weight so Wes only has to guide, not carry, me into the living room.
“Sorry for the wakeup call,” he says, “but you were commandeering our only bathroom, and Clara has to piss like a racehorse.”
“That’s not what I said,” she shouts, punctuating it with an audible door lock.
I lure Bowie off the sofa with a tennis ball, curling up pathetically in his place. My head feels like a fucking war zone. I don’t know how much is the hangover, and how much is...well, shit. Everything else about my life right now.
My eyes come into focus slowly. Van is stretched out on a blanket in front of the TV, playing video games, and looks tired but fine. Wes seems in pretty good shape, too.
“Did you guys drink?”
“Not like you did,” Van laughs. “How much do you remember?”
I take the coffee, water bottle, and acetaminophen Wes hands me, lining my arsenal up on the end table and taking them in reverse order of how I got them. As soon as I’ve got some caffeine in my system, the fuzzy shreds of my memory look a little better. Clear enough to give an answer, anyway.
“I remember the first bar,” I say slowly, shutting my eyes against the gray sunlight no one else seems to find half as blinding, “and that guy that tried to start shit before we left.” It’s hard to remember why, but I think I stumbled into him a few too many times for his liking. My face isn’t smashed to pieces, though, so I’m thinking we got away. “Then the cab ride, getting fries at that diner...” I wince; my headache surges to the back of my skull like an ice pick. “...and that’s it.”
“So, like...nothing, basically.” Wes laughs from the kitchen. He’s frying bacon. The smell makes me ravenous and nauseous as hell. “You left out the second and third bars, the other cab ride where you bailed right into traffic and puked down a storm grate—”
“The crying jag and endless declarations of how fucking awesome we are,” Van adds.
“And,” Wes finishes, leaning on his island and pointing some tongs my way, “a good twenty-minute stretch where you vanished entirely. We found your stupid ass back here in your Jeep, passed out in the front seat. Thank God we took your keys at the second bar. Fucking idiot.”
My nod swings a bag of nails into every lobe my brain hopefully still has. Trying to drive drunk was a definite idiotic move. I’m glad they had the foresight to take my keys.
“Thanks.” I wet my chapped lips. They taste like copper. Probably cracked from mouth-breathing after puking all night. “For going with me, keeping me safe. All that.”
They wave me off. My gratitude’s a formality, just like them having my back. I’ve done the same for them many times.
Still, I am grateful. Drinking Ruby away on my own would’ve ended very badly.
Ruby. Fuck. Every thought of her I drowned in liquor tumbles back into my head, even more jumbled than before.
Wes brings us our breakfast. Up-close, the eggs make me want to get sick right into his dead aloe plant by the balcony door. I stick to the bacon, then chug the refill of coffee he gives me.
While we eat, Van keeps playing and Wes leads Bowie through a gambit of tricks to earn a few scraps, but I’m not fooled. Something’s weird. The air’s got a charge to it.
I must have told them.
“What’d I say?”
“Not a lot,” Wes answers, tossing a strip of bacon into the air. Bowie leaps and catches it. “Enough for us to get the gist.”
“Enough,” Van adds without looking away from the television, “for us to decide, ‘Fuck keeping him sober,’ and let you drink like a damn fish.” He glances at me. It’s a split-second, but it’s got a year’s worth of pity in it. “Super fucked-up story, man. I’m sorry.”
The grease stings my lips. I wipe my mouth on my sleeve and nod, silent.
“Has she contacted you at all?”
“No idea.” I pat myself down. Wes tosses me my phone from the other end table, explaining that he took it from me as soon as I confessed my real reason for drinking.
I’m as grateful for that as I am for them taking my keys. There’s no telling what I might’ve texted her if I’d gotten the chance: nasty bullshit, incoherent ravings...or, worst of all, some long message confessing what I felt for her.
What I think I still might, even though I wish like hell I didn’t.
35
The guys tell me to stay in the city for the day. I’m hesitant. My social meter’s running on fumes.
All I want is to be alone, but when I actually start picturing what I’d do back in the Hamptons—stay up all night, catch some broken sleep during the day, and fill my time with video games until my dopamine production is good and broken—I rethink rushing home.
I stop thinking of it as home.
Then I wonder when I started to think of it as home at all. When I realize it was sometime after meeting Ruby, I get so depressed I tell Wes and Van that sure, I’ll stay. Miserable and distracted beats miserable and bored anytime.
We watch movies for the first half of the day, then meet up with the rest of the group for dinner at the restaurant where Van works. Right away, I know the guys told their girlfriends about the Ruby situation, and that Clara told Georgia, because whatever sympathy I got from Wes and Van hits me tenfold from the girls.
Clara gives me some bright-side advice about finding out the truth sooner rather than later; Georgia insists I plot some revenge of my own, because that’s sure as shit what she would do. Juniper is quiet while the rest of the booth gets divided in two: Wes and Georgia saying fuck yes, I should get even, while Clara, Van, and Rylan say it’s just not worth it, and that I should dust myself off and move on.
I take a bite of the steak Wes forced me to order, then look at Juniper through the chaos. “Tell me.”
She shifts uncomfortably while everyone quiets down to listen. “You won’t like it.”
“I know. That’s why I want
to hear it.”
Blushing, Juni glances at the others before straightening up and taking a breath. “Honestly? I kind of get why she did it.”
There’s a beat of silence. Even the din of the restaurant seems muted.
Then the booth fucking erupts.
“Are you kidding me?” Georgia booms, slapping the table. Wes can’t stop laughing, while Van elbows her and gives her this look like, “Should’ve kept that to yourself.” Clara and Rylan look thoughtful, like they might agree, but even they start shaking their heads.
The only thing that settles the chaos is our waiter, returning with another pitcher of beer. Georgia refills our glasses to nearly overflowing and says, “Juni, you’ve lost your mind.”
She sighs, then looks back at me. “It was still wrong, what she did—I can’t sit here and pretend I agree with that whole ‘revenge’ angle.”
“Juni and her great karmic balance,” Van chimes in, earning an elbow to his ribs.
“But,” she goes on, “when you think it through objectively, it makes sense.” She motions to Georgia and Wes. “Here you two are saying, ‘I’d get even with anyone who did what she did.’ Wouldn’t you also get even with anyone who did what Theo did?” She glances back at me. “What she thought you did, I mean.”
They get silent again. Wes shrugs. Georgia nods, very reluctantly.
“Exactly. So, yeah...what Ruby did was bad. But it’s also understandable.”
Juni sips her drink and stares at me over the rim. The group’s outburst, at some point, knocked the lamp over the booth; it’s still swinging, the shaft of watery green light bouncing between her face and mine.
“And,” she finishes, “it doesn’t sound like she intended to go through with it.”
“Based on what?”
“The way she felt about you.” She points at me, as though I’ve got a tableau of my short-lived relationship stitched into my clothes. “From what you’ve said, it sounds like she was developing real feelings for you.”
“Key phrase is ‘sounds like,’ honey,” Georgia scoffs. “That’s what liars do. They lie.”
They bicker back and forth a little, while Van, trapped in the middle, chugs his beer and stays out of it. I can’t decide who I actually agree with.
If Ruby was that good a liar, it means I fell for somebody who didn’t even partially fall for me, and that I’m a bigger idiot than I thought. It means I’m mourning something completely unreal.
And if she wasn’t...it means I’m giving up what might have been the most real thing I’ve ever had happen to me. Which would also make me an idiot.
I’m betting the answer lies somewhere in the middle, though, and that makes me feel so sad and pissed off, I finish my beer in thirty seconds flat.
It takes most of the meal, but the topic slowly shifts off me and onto their lives. I’m relieved. Nobody’s advice made me feel better.
Juni’s does stick with me, though. I’m not sure why. It’s not even advice. Just another viewpoint on the fucked-up mess that is my life.
When we’re all talked out—though I hit that wall way before we arrived—the group disbands with hugs and stumbling laughter. Clara decides to spend the night at her place tonight, in case I want “guy time,” and leaves with Rylan and Georgia, while the rest of us walk back in the biting cold.
“They’re calling for snow,” Wes says, breathing into his hands at a crosswalk. We don’t wait for the light, instead hauling ass as soon as there’s a reasonable gap in the traffic. “You should crash at my place another night. Leave in the morning.”
“Snow’s going to be even worse by then.” Going back to the Hamptons still sounds awful, but now the shimmering lights of the city are just as depressing.
“You could take my bed in the music room,” Van offers. “I’m sleeping at my place tonight.” He chuckles to himself, squeezing Juni’s gloved hand before yanking her into an embarrassing kiss. “Well: your place.”
“My mom’s place,” Juni corrects. They’re both right, technically. Van pays the rent, Juni’s mom lives there, and Juni occupies the only bedroom. It’s complicated.
That’s another reason staying in the city has lost all appeal: seeing my cousins with their girlfriends isn’t easy. Despite their own complicated beginnings, Wes and Clara made it work. So did Van and Juni. Watching them together is like seeing your entire platoon make it through the same obstacle course that just kicked your ass.
It starts making me think stupid shit. Like how, if they could get past the complications, maybe Ruby and I could, too.
New York isn’t good for me. It’s built right into the city: that naïve feeling that anything is possible. I need to get back to the Hamptons and that cold, ugly harbor. Someplace that looks how I feel.
Outside Wes’s building, we say goodbye. Van goes up with Juni into their building, shivering and calling through chattering teeth for me to drive safely. Wes, probably suffering hypothermia in nothing but a leather jacket, punches his fists into his pockets and leans on my Jeep.
“I’ll be fine.” I nod at the starless sky. “No snow in sight.”
“Not worried about that,” he snorts. “I’m worried about you sitting alone in that huge fucking house, getting wasted again, and doing something you’ll regret.”
“I’m not calling her.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Yeah, sure.” I laugh and climb into the driver’s seat. The heater pumps freezing air right into my face. I knock the vents off to the side, then roll down the passenger window so he can lean in. “You’ve been listening to Juni too much.”
“She didn’t say you should give Ruby another chance,” he says. “Just that her revenge shit kind of made sense.” He leans his chin in his hand, elbow perched on the ledge. “And technically, she didn’t even do it. She just started to.”
“And? You think she wouldn’t have followed through?”
“No idea. You know her better than I do.”
“That’s the whole fucking problem, man. I don’t.” My head hits the seat and brings back my headache from this morning. I almost welcome it. Physical pain numbs the rest. “She lied to me from the start. How do I know the rest wasn’t a lie?”
“How do you know it was?”
I stare out the windshield. Down the block, a bunch of shredded fast food wrappers get kicked up in the breeze, looking like snowflakes stained with piss. Kind of amazing how one city can be so inspiring and disgusting at the same time.
“I’ve never seen you like this.” He nods at me, I guess to encompass how much of a sleepless, dazed wreck I am. “You don’t owe her a phone call. You owe it to yourself to get some closure.”
I turn this idea over in my head, then tell him no way. Closure is another one of those naïvely optimistic ideas. Just because you deserve something, doesn’t mean you’ll get it.
Besides—what possible closure could I get? Nothing’s going to make me feel better short of a goddamn time machine. I’d stop myself from ever going in that hardware store.
Wes tells me to think about it. I nod, but I don’t think I mean it.
We slap hands through the window. I promise I’ll text him when I’m safely back in the Hamptons, and then I’m gone.
A few miles out of Brooklyn, I check my rearview. The lights of the skyline shrink until they blur into singular little beads. They almost look like pearls.
I grab the mirror and twist, so that all I can see is the backseat.
36
“Are you fucking serious?”
While Frankie laughs herself stupid on the floor, I burrow deeper in my bed and continue scalding my mouth on the drink she brought me: a cinnamon flat white, my favorite seasonal beverage. It tastes like licking an envelope seal and a Big Red wrapper, which is actually an improvement. What little else I’ve consumed today has tasted like cardboard.
When I called out of work again, she knew something was up. Now, after spilling my guts and recounting every detail to her, I watch
her die of laughter and wish I’d stuck to my cover story of having the flu.
“Thanks for the support.”
“I’m sorry,” she cackles, “but it’s you. You! Never in a million years did I think you’d be the type to cook up some revenge scheme like that. I’m impressed.”
“Well, don’t be.” I take the stopper stick from my drink and jam it back in the now-empty cup, then pitch it at her head. She flips me off. “I didn’t have the guts to go through with it, and I didn’t have the guts to come clean. So I fucked up every possible outcome. I didn’t get revenge, and I didn’t get....”
Oh, God, more crying. I’m so damn tired of the crying.
I didn’t get the guy. Same old shit. Story of my life. I may look and act totally different from who I was seven years ago, but I’m just as spineless as ever. Maybe Mom was right with all that “the only thing that matters is what’s on the inside” crap.
Frankie sighs, her sympathy taking over. I know she was only laughing at the situation, not my pain; that’s actually how she makes me feel better, most of the time. She’s good at finding the humor and absurdity in any situation. Just not this one.
“Hey,” she says soothingly, climbing into the bed beside me and pulling me against her, “I wasn’t making fun of you, or whatever. I just found it funny that, the one time I’m out of town, you actually go and do something bold for once.”
“It wasn’t bold. It was stupid.” I mop my face with the top sheet and roll away from her. “And I’m not just crying because I lost Theo. I’m crying because I was wrong. Because I’ve spent years hating him for what he did, and then I find out he didn’t even....”
“If that’s even true.” Frankie digs through the pharmacy bag at our feet and produces two giant boxes of Dots candy, her favorite. She tears one open, pours some into her palm, and picks out the yellow ones for me before shoveling the rest in her mouth. “Maybe he was the one who filmed it. You don’t know.”
“That’s the thing.” I sit up and pull my knees close, rolling the candy back and forth in my palm. “Even when I still thought he did it...I’d started to not care.” I look at her. “He wasn’t that person, anymore.”
