“Of course,” Chelsea said. I pulled a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket and tried to hand it to her but she waved it off. “You got us last weekend,” she said.
I shrugged and did a line. U Up? “I did some yesterday, so I’m not going to do too much.”
“Very wise,” Chelsea said, took the rolled bill from me and leaned over the table.
She passed the bill to Tommy, then they passed it to Georgie, and then we were all up. The coke made me more panicky, but it also made me happy, and for the first time all day my frantic energy inside seemed in tune with the world outside my body. I was relieved by the sudden symmetry and loved everyone around me fiercely. I deserved to bask in something good, for a change.
The muffled music turned to buzz, probably something from that 2010 era when fuzzy guitar rock took over the California indie music scene, something we could all be nostalgic about together.
“So babe,” I said to Chelsea. “You texted with Ezra today?”
“A bit,” she said. “So what?”
“What did he say?”
“That he wasn’t coming.”
“Did he say why?”
“He didn’t answer that question, which I definitely tried to grill him on. Do you know how hard it is to grill that motherfucker via text? He just ignores.”
“I know,” I said.
“Did he tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“Very interesting, unless you’re lying, you’re not lying right? No, of course not, what reason would you have to lie? Unless Ezra was being shitty about me throwing half-birthday parties. But no, he says that kind of shit to my face. So what is it?”
“He didn’t tell me,” I said.
“I heard he and Noz broke up, it’s probably that,” Tommy said.
“Who told you that?” I said.
“The woman herself,” Chelsea said. “Noz texted us last night.”
“I saw online that she’s still going to the desert, though,” Tommy said.
“Probably she wants to wallow a bit.” Chelsea said.
“Why?” I said. “She was the perpetrator.”
Chelsea shrugged. “Doesn’t mean she’s not feeling some kind of way.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Not on her side?” Tommy said. “I thought you guys were close.”
“I just don’t get why she’d break our darling Ezra’s heart for no good reason,” I said. “Anyway she chose to take a solo vacation to the desert instead of celebrating you, Chelsea, so you should maybe be mad at her too.”
I waited for someone to respond. For a long second—especially long-feeling because we were all amphetamined—but no one did.
“Please baby,” Chelsea said, finally, “No more hateration in this dancery. Georgie, come over here for a moment please.”
Georgie stepped over me and I felt stepped over.
From across the coffee table, Tommy gestured to me, curled their two fingers, come here. Thank god for that, for something nice and warm the second I was feeling cold. I scooted away from the couch and around the table; Tommy wrapped their arm around my shoulders and pulled me into their chest. They leaned their mouth to my ear and whispered:
“You doing alright? I know this is a rough weekend for you.”
“It’s a rough weekend for everyone,” I said. I felt them squeeze me, felt them shake their head.
“Sure, we’re all fucked up about Miguel, but we all know it’s extra-hard for you and Ezra. We can all tell. Not in a bad way! Just, we see how you’ve been wilding out and we want you to know that we’re here to give you as much room to wild out as you need.”
I squirmed and when Tommy didn’t immediately let me go, I elbowed them a bit.
“Sorry,” I said, scooting a few inches away. “I know you’re just trying to be nice, I just don’t want to think about Ezra or Miggy right now, okay?”
“I get it,” Tommy said. “You didn’t have to physically attack me.” They were trying to be light and it wasn’t working.
“Do you mind if I do one more?” I said, gesturing to the lines on the table. Tommy nodded so I bent down, inhaled through my left nostril, then wrapped Tommy into a big apology hug. “Thank you, I’m sorry.”
Tommy patted me on the back, and then I stood up, intending to drift back into the crush of the party.
“Eve.”
Georgie sat up on the bed, staring at me with big eyes.
“Yeah…”
“I have to talk to you. Remember?”
“Oh yeah, sorry, I’m sorry, G,” I said. “This stuff makes me stupid. Let’s leave these lovebirds to their canoodling and go pee.” Tommy had crawled onto the bed and was halfway into wrapping Chelsea in a cuddle.
Georgie stood up and we slipped out of the bedroom and into the nearby bathroom, locking the door behind us. The floors and walls were all white tile and the mirror was very tall and long, broken into three segments so you could see the back of your head if you angled it the right way; it could be a very intense space, full of echoing mirrored versions of yourself, but both Georgie and I instinctually pushed the mirror into its flattest position, checked our nostrils for stray clumps of white powder or unruly boogers, then turned away from our single reflections to look at each other.
“Did you go to dinner with Lydia at Condor today or was that a tbt?” Georgie asked.
“Yeah, no, it was from today,” I said.
“Look!” Georgie thrust her phone into my hands, her text convo with Lydia open. “I know you’re going through it today, but I need you to look at this.”
I scrolled up searching for the start of the conversation.
Lydia
Eve seems, like, really upset.
And Ezra is probably just off fucking Nozlee somewhere
We have to double team her and make her realize she’s just spinning out and nothing is really wrong.
“Thanks for that, friend,” I said, showing Georgie her own screen. “I’m spinning out?”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything! I said basically the same thing to your face in the bar, didn’t I?
I did.”
She hadn’t, really.
“Anyway it’s not the point,” Georgie said, “Scroll down.”
It wasn’t a bad enough comment for me to stay mad, I was feeling so coke-happy anyway, I scrolled.
Lydia
And Ezra is probably just off fucking Nozlee somewhere
We have to double team her and make her realize she’s just spinning out and nothing is really wrong.
Wanna grab dinner?
I’m hungry for tacos
I think I’m gonna stay quiet until chelseas thing tonight
I’m tired and I must recharge
“Okay,” I said, “So obviously she lied.”
“Did you invite her to dinner or did she invite you?”
I hated to be so deep inside the mess of someone else’s relationship, a key witness. Did I protect Lydia or Georgie? Gun to my head, whose back did I have when I couldn’t have both backs? Georgie was plaintive, and she’d been so sweet to me in the bar while Lydia had riled me up at dinner, and she was just trying to hold on with both hands to love she had thought she didn’t have to worry about losing.
“She invited me,” I said. “I didn’t know she’d texted you this, I swear.”
“Fuck,” Georgie said. “I told her to talk to you, so I thought maybe, you know, you’d reached out and she’d taken the opportunity. Fuck.”
“She probably just got a second wind and decided to do what you’d asked,” I said.
Georgie plopped herself down on the closed toilet seat and ripped a big piece of toilet paper off the roll on the wall. She blew her nose so hard her eyes
watered.
“That’s bullshit and you know it,” Georgie said. “Lydia is bullshitting me, I can’t take it from you either. I feel gaslit as fuck right now.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t know.”
Georgie stood up fast. “Don’t tell her we had this conversation, okay?”
“I’m not going to lie to either of you.”
“Okay fine, if Lydia directly asks you if we had a dramatic conversation about her texts in a bathroom you can tell her the truth, but could you at least not volunteer the information?”
“No, of course not, I would never.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do.”
Georgie’s hands looked shaky and I reached out. We hugged hard, her chin digging into my shoulder. “I need a minute,” she said, stepping out of my arms.
“I’ll just be outside if you need to talk or get weird or whatever,” I said.
Georgie nodded, already her gaze was turned away from me, to her own reflection. I left her with it, whatever it was she had. When I was back in the hallway, I heard her lock the door after me.
Instead of heading back into the party, I slipped back into the bedroom. Tommy and Chelsea were gone, back into the crush of the party to chat with their guests, the coke cleaned up and taken with or hidden somewhere so people couldn’t just wander in and devour it. I glanced around the room. I was looking very specifically, and I was lucky: Tommy had left their phone behind, on the nightstand, plugged into a charger. If they’d been playing with it within the last ten minutes, it might still be unlocked, I might not need to put in a passcode; I was lucky again. I swiveled so my back faced the door and my body blocked Tommy’s phone, so I could pretend I was coke-addled or just checking the time if someone caught me. I opened their messages app and scrolled to their exchange with Ezra:
CHELSEA AND EZRA
Today 2:54 PM
Ezra:
Heyyyy guys sorry but I can’t make it out to the party tonight
Have a shit ton of fun without me
Capitalized first letters of each text probably meant auto caps, which probably meant he’d been texting from his phone, which meant…what? He’d unlocked it and still refused to text me? My hands shook a little; maybe I was just freaked and paranoid because of the coke? I knew I shouldn’t have done it when I was already anxious, but when I’m already anxious it’s hard to resist doing anything.
I went immediately to find a drink in the kitchen. I took a shot of tequila out of a familiar green shot glass shaped like a cactus that said Tucson, AZ, on it in garish colored lettering. I held onto the glass cactus while the tequila burned down my throat and my mouth watered ungracefully, trying to remember where I’d last seen and held and drunk from this small cup. At Miggy’s apartment, I remembered; it had been his. An echo of every single drink Miggy and I shared, warm and communal, a bright pattern abruptly halted; my solo shot could be a version of many past moments with him, but no future moments.
I wanted to see Miggy at forty-five, black hair speckled with gray, still with that seventies mustache but not trendy anymore, dad-like in an uncool way, like badly fitting shorts. I imagined all of us at this house, but more subdued in our old age, grilling instead of getting fucked up, laughing together on the back porch. If he’d survived, if that scene could somehow come true, his laugh might’ve been genuine, or it might’ve been a laugh signaling a single moment’s respite from the constant tug of his depression, dragging him down into a dark abyss that, from inside, felt like an inescapable cage. Left alone for one second, Imaginary Old Miggy could deflate with the weight of his own black depression, the way Real Young Miggy had done, probably a lot, though I’d only caught him a small handful of times. Maybe he was happier as my phone ghost, but fuck him for leaving anyway. So many people try to kill themselves and are caught, saved, 5150’d, living on. Why did it have to be my best friend who beat the odds and made it happen?
I resisted texting Miggy “Fuck you for leaving me.” But I couldn’t be in the kitchen anymore. I fished a fresh-cracked can of Bud Light (the regular kind, not a Rams can) from the fridge, and ducked into the narrow hallway off the kitchen that led back to the bathroom. It was unoccupied, Georgie having apparently finished her solo sulk, so I went in, shut the door, cutting off the sounds of my trap music and all the girls talking to each other and grinding on each other on the dance floor.
I peed, then sat dripping on the toilet; I opened Instagram. We were all thirsty, we were all giving each other pictures of our faces, and with the pulse of tequila and beer coursing through my body, I was so grateful to get to see all my friends’ faces. My friends are so beautiful; flawed and messy, angry at me sometimes, angry at each other, but beautiful; they are looking to live a ripe life. We try to live inside our own nice pictures. I suddenly felt like they’d posted them just for me, for a moment I couldn’t see the absence of Ezra.
Standing, I felt a disorienting tilt of dizziness, I steadied myself with a hand on the wall. The lights got soft, then sharpened. I felt the pucker of my mouth drying out, and after washing my hands, I slurped water out of them; water would take my edge off. I teetered out of the bathroom.
I pushed my way through a small crowd that had gathered in the kitchen doorway, through the kitchen, outside, in the cool night air. I saw someone sitting alone on the far corner of the porch, where no one usually sat because the couch there was the worst. I knew Clara by the back of her head, her unruly cascade of pale tangled hair, under the tan baseball cap she wore frontwards during the day and backwards at night. She swiveled and I saw the empty cup in her hand; she tapped her fingernail against the glass; she was alone; a male ghost who was so weak he couldn’t even tell living humans were around hovered unnoticed over her head.
Clara had gone to Barnard with Noz and me and I’d had a devastating crush on her freshman year, from one drunken weekend after finals when she’d tugged me into a stranger’s dorm room and kissed me once on the mouth. After that, she’d seemed as far away as a cloud, running with a crowd of fine arts major straight girls who wore stylish glasses and talked theory in the cafeteria. I thought she thought she was too cool for me, until about two years ago, when she’d moved back to Los Angeles and I realized she’d just had a raging social anxiety disorder; she’d broken up with her live-in girlfriend four months before Bea and I split. I’d invited her to sleep on my couch for a few nights, which she didn’t accept, but which unexpectedly was one of the things that ultimately did Bea and me in. I didn’t really understand what had made Bea so angry about me offering my couch to Clara, she was usually into helping out one of our friends when they were having a rough time.
I knew Clara liked whiskey and being alone, but I decided to respect one preference more than the other. I ducked back into the kitchen and filled two clear plastic cups with an overshare of scotch, then hurried back out to the porch and plopped into the empty seat next to Clara. She jumped then, oh yes, smiled when she saw it was me and that I was thrusting a newly filled cup towards her.
“I was starting to think I was desperate enough to go back into the party,” Clara said, her voice husky and low from smoking cigarettes, and shouting all day at her elementary school teaching job, and organizing the crowd at her community action events focused on ending homelessness in Los Angeles, and singing in her band that was getting more gigs at Hi Hat and Lot 1 and other venues all around the east side of the city. She was wearing a white t-shirt and a thin gold chain hung down her chest, between the small slopes of her barely there breasts. The fabric of her shirt was too thick for me to see if she had a bra on, or if her nipples were hardened in the chilled air.
“Eve to the rescue,” I said, knocking my plastic against hers. “What the fuck is up? How’s thotting it up in Highland Park?”
“How’s fucking your way through West Hollywood?”
I gasped with mock outra
ge. “I hooked up in West Hollywood one time.”
She leaned forward and sniffed at my neck, “And I can still smell the men’s cologne all those butches wear.”
“How dare you,” I said, darting forward and tickling her briefly, gently, under her left arm.
Clara giggled, yelped, scrambled back, spilled scotch on her fingers, and tried to lick it off while laughing.
“Stop it,” she said, “Stop it. I’m trying to sit alone in the dark and you’re ruining my vibes.”
I shrugged, sipped my own cup.
Clara went quiet again, bit at her cuticle, shook her hand under the light and I could see that she was gnawing herself raw.
“You’re having a bad week?” I phrased it like a question. Her breakup had been weighing on her, and everybody knew it.
“The kids are restless and it’s stressful. And all of our friends are being so sweet to me, which is somehow excruciating, much worse than if everyone was being shitty to me.”
I nodded.
“I want to, like, hug everyone and talk and hang out,” Clara said. “But I hate everything too much. Every time someone’s nice to me, I experience it as an attack.”
I nodded.
“Then I feel shitty and guilty and it’s my fault because I’m the shit one.”
“You’re not,” I said.
“And I try to will myself into being nice and I look like a fucking psychopath,” she said. She flashed me a truly terrifying forced smile that did in fact make her look like a psychopath.
“Stop it,” I said, joking gently. “I brought you liquor, I don’t deserve this.”
She softened into her real smile, laughed a little while looking down, then looked back up to me, then scooted closer. We hadn’t so much as kissed since that first year of college, but now, our thighs were touching.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and the way she said it, I knew she was flirting.
U UP? Page 12
