I Kissed Alice

by Anna Birch

  But I belong to Sarah tonight—not Cheshire—so I allow myself one last message before I put my phone away for good.

  I-Kissed-Alice 8:42p: I have to go. More soon. <3

  With a kiss popped onto my darkened phone screen, I throw the thing into the console and unlock the car doors.

  “Petty much?!” Sarah shrieks when she falls face-first into the front seat. “Jesus Christ on a cracker, it got chilly fast.”

  In the rearview mirror, I catch Iliana glowering at the seat warmer controls.

  “Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, Sarah,” Iliana snips. She squints at the numbers on my dashboard. “Besides, it’s just sixty-seven degrees. It’s only comparatively colder than it was before the sun went down.”

  I turn on the radio, and Sarah turns it off. We ride back to Sarah’s house in utter silence.

  The car may be quiet, but tension screams in the air around us.

  Comment 11: I-Kissed-Alice 11:43p: OH MY GOOOOOD.

  Comment 12: I-Kissed-Alice 11:43p: You literally lifted that word for word from our direct messages the other night

  Comment 13: Curious-in-Cheshire 12:15a: Are you ok? Was I not supposed to use that? You didn’t say …

  Comment 14: I-Kissed-Alice 12:15a: It’s fine. It’s perfect.

  Comment 15: I-Kissed-Alice 12:15a: I’ll be in my bunk

  * * *

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:42a: last night was a nightmare

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:42a: it’s in the water, apparently

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:42a: you too??? Jesus Christ, what gives?

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:43a: you know the saying, “you don’t pick your family”?

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:43a: yup

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:43a: you ever feel like you don’t pick your friends, either?

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:44a: all the fucking time

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:44a: wait why are you up so early

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:44a: work.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:44a: why are *YOU* up so early

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:46a: I snuck out for my therapy appointment because I didn’t want interested parties to know what I was doing. So.

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:46a: therapy isn’t until eight, I thought.

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:46a: mom likes to grab breakfast first

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:47a: ah. Well tell your therapist I said hello.

  I-Kissed-Alice 5:47a: tell your boss I said to suck it

  Curious-in-Cheshire 5:47a: xoxo

  * * *

  CHAPTER 3

  ILIANA

  Username: Curious-in-Cheshire

  Last online: 3h ago

  It was the end of our junior year when everything between Rhodes and me came to be as it is now.

  It was May, and we were at a pop-up installation on the edge of campus. Clouds of heavy, weed-scented smoke hung up around the light fixtures of an old gas station with bars on the windows, and rain was falling in through a spot where the roof had caved, leaving puddles on the dirty tiled floor.

  Behind each ancient cooler door was an installation: women with tape over their mouths. Women with their hands bound. Women dressed like schoolgirls, and dressed like moms, and dressed like frumpy old ladies with curlers in their hair. There was a gas station attendant behind the dilapidated old counter, a girl barely older than us with shiny red lip gloss and breasts begging to escape from a Playboy Bunny costume. Word around campus was that participants had to be eighteen so they could sign the liability waiver provided by the lead artist.

  Men wandered from one cooler to the next, shopping quietly, selecting someone to take with them along with six-packs of beer and packs of beef jerky.

  Rhodes and I had become friends, sort of.

  We weren’t talk-on-the-phone friends, or even text-on-occasion friends.

  But Sarah had been my best friend since the third grade, and Sarah and Rhodes had become completely symbiotic during their first and second years as roommates at the Conservatory. It had taken weeks of begging for Sarah to even suggest to Rhodes that I come along—no matter what I did, Rhodes thought my work was “pedestrian.”

  She didn’t think I’d understand the show—called Quickies at the Kwickee Mart, clever them—or that the art installation would speak to me the way it spoke to her and Sarah.

  But by some force of nature, I had been the one to win a scholarship at the Savannah College of Art and Design only a week before. My art wasn’t an existential crisis played out with paint and canvas, and it didn’t make any grand political statements, but it was going to pay for my college—and apparently it meant I was allowed to play with the big girls now. Only two days later, Rhodes invited me along herself.

  A week after that, we stood side by side, stoned beyond belief and attempting to make sense of the little theater that played out in front of us. Some of the girls in the cases were seniors at the Conservatory, and I knew about half of the people standing around us from campus as well. The rest were unimaginably sophisticated, worldly looking artist types—people with ink-stained hands and tattoos that crept up from under the collars of their shirts and onto their necks.

  If my perception hadn’t been completely altered, I would have thought to be a little embarrassed by my own clothing choices. I felt so metal sneaking out in my tattered-on-purpose Slipknot T-shirt and my tattered-on-purpose acid-washed shorts and my tattered-on-purpose pink-and-white-striped tights.

  “It’s, like, feminism—” Rhodes said.

  Her brows were knit together; her cogs were turning.

  She didn’t understand. I didn’t want to tell her otherwise, to ruin the night like I always do. It wasn’t enough to say it was about “like, feminism.” Anything can be about feminism, because in everything there’s an imbalance of power. There will always be one person in the room that has more privilege than the rest, and that person is almost always an Ingram.

  It didn’t surprise me that Rhodes didn’t understand then, and it doesn’t now—she doesn’t really know what it means to be a little further down the food chain than everyone else. I’m not much further down than she is—I’m just as white, Christian-adjacent, abled, and straight-passing as she is—but I’m aware of it.

  “Yeah, just, you know—” Sarah’s pupils were blown out. She held on to me for dear life, the way Rhodes’s barely younger brother and then-dance-track student, Griffin, clung to Rhodes’s arm. Sarah liked Griffin then—she was infatuated, really. I think she thought he’d be an easy segue into being a fixture in Rhodes’s life forever.

  She thought wrong.

  “The motherfucking patriarchy,” said Griffin.

  The motherfucking patriarchy. As if that phrase in and of itself wasn’t the purpose of the installation, the fact that women are continuously victims of sexual violence in Western culture, so much so that it has permeated our patterns of speaking and even the way we curse.

  Rhodes sighed, and nodded appreciatively.

  Sarah sighed, and nodded appreciatively.

  Griffin sighed, and nodded appreciatively.

  This is art, they communicated, with stoops in their shoulders and ennui-burdened frowns. This is life.

  This is suffering.

  Pot only ever makes me more philosophical. Everyone around me was melting into puddles, and I was practically writing ninety-nine theses on third-wave feminism on the back of a fifteen-year-old Kwickee Mart napkin that had been stuck to the bottom of my boot.

  Griffin wobbled on Rhodes’s left. He was transfixed by the swirling lights against the far wall—reds and whites, then blues.

  I stumbled, and then tripped over myself, even though I hadn’t taken a step in minutes.

  Whatever was in the air was strong, and apparently it was all part of whatever the lead artist was trying to communicate to the audience. It occurred to me in a detached way that maybe I should be afraid I’d be next in the cooler.

  Around us, the installation shifted quickly. The women in the coolers broke character, made e
ye contact with their would-be purchasers. The girl behind the counter turned to whisper to someone dressed in all black, invisible where they stood in a dark corner. People began to scramble, and unbind themselves, and dart for doors that led into back offices and alleyways.

  “This is so realistic,” Rhodes mused. “I wonder what the shift means.”

  “This must be the end of the second act,” Griffin said. As a dance-track student, he wasn’t watching the installation like an artist. He was watching it like a performer.

  The pulsing music overhead squealed to a stop, but tinny, familiar sirens continued—a higher pitch than those on a police cruiser, or any kind of emergency response vehicle. It felt like an entire lifetime later that I recognized the sirens from the Conservatory security team’s safety vehicle.

  “Rhodes.” It sounded like my voice was coming from outside my body.

  She didn’t hear me.

  Somewhere on the surface, I was panicking. I knew my stomach should be falling through my butt, and my hands should be shaking, and I should be screaming in the faces of the girls next to me.

  There was a Savannah College of Art and Design scholarship with my name on it, and the ink had barely dried. It had been the kind of deus ex machina blessing that only happens in the movies and never to the people who need it in reality—people like me, whose parents were filing for bankruptcy literally the same day as the scholarship winners were announced.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  To my right, Rhodes and Griffin had disappeared. Sarah was gone, too, and when I ran out the front doors of the old gas station, their car was empty. They left me. All that was left was the panicked-looking Conservatory security officer blocking my view of the parking lot.

  From that moment on, everything was different.

  * * *

  Sylvia’s Diner has always been exactly what it sounds like.

  Everything is oak veneer. Everything. The walls, the ceiling, the Formica countertops, the fronts to the refrigerators and stove.

  Every. Thing.

  The menu is relatively small, and half of the items are sold out in perpetuity because Sylvia (the woman who owns the place) refuses to order the random ingredients she needs for us to throw it together. None of us have food permits, and the only reason the health board hasn’t shut us down is because they like Sylvia’s sweet potato pie too much.

  Sarah and I have been working here since the summer before we transferred to the Conservatory, and in two years nothing has changed—even if everything else in our lives has.

  “You can’t hate Rhodes forever,” Sarah says, for what feels like the eight millionth time. “You didn’t hate me forever, so I know you’ve got it in you.”

  She turns to check her lipstick in the microwave door behind her, a shade of magenta-purple rendered ungodly against her ashy-pale skin. “It wasn’t on purpose—you were behind us, and then you weren’t. Her parents paid your legal fees. Are they supposed to pay for your college, too?”

  I don’t want to answer her.

  She isn’t wrong—I did forgive Sarah.

  I know Sarah wouldn’t have left me behind on purpose.

  But Rhodes has been trying to get rid of me for as long as she and Sarah have been friends, and I really have a hard time believing that Rhodes was innocent, too. It would have been too convenient for her if the Conservatory had succeeded in kicking me out.

  And plus? I just don’t like her.

  I don’t want to like her.

  I don’t want to forgive her, because I don’t care about my relationship with her.

  “Tubes of lipstick aren’t lollipops. You aren’t supposed to suck on it.” I poke her cheek, and she swipes the extra lipstick off her teeth with the hem of her apron. I don’t say this to her, but I’m so pissed she’s even talking about this right now.

  This morning before work was such a weird, delicate thing—we found Rhodes getting ready to dash out the front door at 6:30, mumbling something about chores and darting off to where Griffin was idling at the curb before we could ask any questions.

  Sarah was desperately hurt.

  I couldn’t decide if I was angry for Sarah or happy for myself.

  The rest of the morning has been a gauntlet of keeping Sarah’s spirits up—we painted each other’s nails before we left the house this morning, and I promised that we’d give each other DIY facials and pedicures after work. We’re going to back to my place, where my mom will be babysitting my little nieces and have a tea party.

  We’re going to listen to Sarah’s God-awful new music as much as she wants.

  I was already exhausted from all the planning by the time we got to work, and yet Sarah was still defending Rhodes’s honor.

  “You can suck on it.” She slides me a smile, then turns to open the dishwasher seconds before it starts to beep.

  Behind us, an old man sitting at the counter chokes on his country fried steak. His eyes drift downward—down, down, down—and rest on Sarah’s ass as she bends to pull the dishwasher basket out to heft it onto the prep counter against the wall.

  The man still has his fork in his hand when I swipe his half-full plate and chuck it into the sink.

  “Hope you enjoyed your meal.” I stare at him with as much fire as I can muster, and it takes exactly three seconds for him to lift his eyes from Sarah’s ass to my face.

  Pervert.

  I don’t say it out loud, but I think it loud enough that it drips from my words.

  I smack his receipt onto the counter and turn my attention to Sarah next to me. “How did you even know I was thinking about Rhodes?”

  “Because you get this look in your eyes whenever you think about her,” Sarah says, oblivious. She wipes one coffee mug after the next with a damp washcloth. It’s already wet, so it’s doing nothing to wick the condensation from the mugs before she stacks them one at a time on the shelf over our heads. “It looks like you’re thinking about murder.”

  “Maybe I am,” I say.

  The man and I are nothing but eye contact now—him with his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish, me with my hands on my hips and swelling to every centimeter of five whole feet tall. He’s eavesdropping on our conversation, and he deflates a little.

  The man tosses a five and two ones on the table, then a dime and three pennies.

  Exact change. He stands, placing an old black-and-white houndstooth fedora on top of his head before he turns for the door.

  “Hey!” I call after him, “Are you tipping or not?”

  “I didn’t finish my dinner. Ain’t nothin’ to tip, young lady.”

  “We’ve gotta eat around here!” I shriek. He’s the only one in the restaurant right now, so it only serves to rattle the dusty blinds that hang over the windows. “You old bastard!”

  The tip wouldn’t have been mine. It would have been Sarah’s, if she hadn’t forgotten about him in favor of clean dishes. But still, she’s been buying her own toothpaste lately. If she doesn’t get tipped because of my mouth—and the loss of his dinner—I won’t forgive myself for the rest of the night.

  “Here’s your tip, sweetheart—” he says with a flourish. “Do something about that attitude.”

  I throw him a short, pudgy middle finger. The sleigh bells clattering against the glass are a cry for help when the front door crashes back into the frame, and the man disappears into his crusty old Buick.

  “His check was, what, seven bucks? Eight? It doesn’t matter.” Sarah turns to lean against the counter, frowning. “I’m gonna live another day without a dollar-fifty.”

  The frustration scatters over my skin like electricity. “It’s the principle of the matter—”

  “‘The principle of the matter’ doesn’t matter,” Sarah says. Her palms are warm and moist when she presses them against my cheeks, and she says it again: “The principle. Of the matter. Doesn’t matter.”

  This isn’t just about the old man with the money. I know what she’s saying to me:

/>   Please, for the love of God, let it go.

  Let Rhodes go. Let the past go.

  Let. It. Go.

  “You can’t keep making everything about … her,” I say, and bat her hands away from my face. She blinks once, twice, then returns to the dishes.

  I don’t have to say her name; it hangs around my neck like an albatross in perpetuity.

  “We don’t even have a year left,” Sarah says. “It’s going to be November soon. We have eight months together, tops. Quit making me split my time.”

  “I’m not making you split your time.” It’s easier to have this conversation without looking at Sarah, so I turn my back to sling a bleach-soaked washcloth up onto the counter. I work at where I imagine the man’s fingerprints to be, as if I’m clearing a crime scene. “I’m making you choose.”

  “Choose. Really?” I don’t need eyes in the back of my head to know she’s scoffing at me. “She’s my roommate, I can’t just—”

  “I got fucking arrested, Sarah! I lost my scholarship because of her! You can absolutely ask the school for a new roommate.”

  It’s the right thing to do.

  It had been less than forty-eight hours since The Incident the first time I said it when Sarah showed up on my front porch crying off her eye makeup onto her hands as if we were all equally victim to some great existential plight. She’d been grounded for the rest of the school year and the entirety of the summer; Rhodes’s family had gone radio silent, and rumor had it both Rhodes and Griffin were being shipped off to one of those high-end rehabilitation centers set up in a McMansion with a live-in caterer the minute classes were over.

  They all managed to get away, and the worst of their problems was dealing with their parents.

  I hadn’t heard from the Savannah College of Art and Design yet, but I knew the other shoe would eventually drop: They’d read about it in the newspaper, or the school would be required to inform them, or someone would read about it on social media and tip them off. My parents wouldn’t take my computer away because I used it for homework, but I spent the entire summer on house arrest.