U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  “I’ll come talk to you later,” I shouted above the heads of the living crowd, and the ghost heard me and she nodded. She pointed at me and narrowed her eyes playfully, you better not be an LA stereotype and flake out on me. Did ghosts know about new stereotypes? I’ve watched them float through the world all my life and I still don’t understand what they know or see.

  “What did you say?” Naomi shouted.

  “I said I could come back later!” I shouted back.

  “No wait! Hold on!”

  The music smoothly transitioned into “Tomboy,” a Princess Nokia song that everyone played at every single lesbian party in all of Los Angeles, and all the women on the dance floor screamed when they heard the familiar opening beat and dropped into sexy wide-leg squats and popped their hips, WHO THAT IS, HOE? / THAT GIRL IS A TOMBOY! / THAT GIRL IS A TOMBOY! / THAT GIRL IS A TOMBOY!

  I grabbed Naomi’s shoulder and pulled her ear close to my mouth. I shouted, “This song isn’t from the fucking nineties!”

  Naomi pushed a little at my shoulder and shifted her head, so her mouth was now near my ear. “The album it’s on is called 1992 Deluxe,” Naomi shouted.

  I leaned away from her, looked her straight in the eyes, and gave a dramatic eye roll. She raised her eyebrows and gave an equally dramatic shrug. It didn’t matter that I was right, she was the DJ so she won. Princess Nokia played on and all the women shouted the lyrics, Who that? / Who that?/ Who that? / Princess Nokia, Baby Phat / I be where the ladies at!

  Naomi gestured for me to lean in again, so I could hear her.

  “Are you okay!?” she shouted.

  We swiveled our heads, so I could speak into her ear.

  “Why!?”

  We swiveled back again.

  “Bea’s all over some girl!”

  “Who!?”

  Instead of responding, Naomi grabbed my shoulders and turned me around so I was once again surveying the whole scene of women dancing, and she pointed deep into a shadowed corner of the porch, at a bench pushed up against the wall to provide seating for any dykes feeling dizzy from too much tequila and gyrating, and at first I didn’t see anything, and then I saw all of Bea’s intimidating friends—the sommelier, the model, the film academic who had been a jury member for the Teddy Award at the last Berlin International Film Festival, the one who had briefly dated Hayley Kiyoko—and then I saw two people kissing and then I saw that one of the people was Bea and then I saw that the girl she was kissing was Georgie.

  At first, the press of their lips didn’t seem real, the way Georgie rubbed her hand up Bea’s thigh was a fantasy; Bea broke the kiss and her smile was so big, and then it was real. Bea has eyes as big and blue as wading pools, and when she smiles at someone it’s like they’re in the sun, she makes people come to life like a field of cacti bursting into bloom after a rare desert rain. When we’d first started dating, I felt like I’d been woken up from a long slumber; one gloomy June morning, about a month after we started getting cozy, I lay next to her in my bed and I told her how much she made me glow. She’d kissed the side of my face, all tender, and she’d said, “You’re my Sleeping Beauty,” and for almost a year that’s what she called me. She addressed my birthday card “S.B.” and in so many 2:00 a.m. Lyfts from a party or a bar to my bungalow, she’d press up against me and call me “Beauty.” She never stopped calling me that, even when we got tired of each other, even when things got bad; I wondered what she would call Georgie.

  Horribly, I was going to cry. My skin and eyes prickled. I was helpless to stop them from shredding my heart, in fact the damage was already done; I didn’t want the pain but I didn’t know how to purge it. It was like being smacked in the head with a brick, there was nothing I could do but sit and suffer until the dizziness receded.

  I counted the sins committed against me: Georgie was fucking my ex-girlfriend, Nozlee had broken Ezra’s heart and our friend group, Ezra had disappeared remorselessly, and Miggy was dead.

  “Don’t you know that bitch!?” Naomi asked.

  I jerked; Naomi shouldn’t have been allowed to watch it all with me, fascinated and unemotional about the whole mess.

  “Yes!” I tilted my head back to shout in Naomi’s ear. “That’s my very good friend Georgie.”

  “That’s fucked!” Naomi shouted.

  I maybe heard Naomi shouting, but I couldn’t quite hear her, I didn’t want to hear her, I wanted to cut through the crowd. Two steps down and I was with the people dancing, I was pushing through them; I wanted to be able to push right into Georgie and Bea, to make them look at me, I wanted them to stammer, trying to explain. I wanted Georgie to be particularly spooked, because Bea and I were broken up and technically Bea could fuck whoever she wanted even if her choices were hurtful to me, but Georgie was supposed to be my best female friend, she wasn’t supposed to do things to me. I wanted to watch Georgie perform contrition, I wanted her to literally fall on her knees and beg me for forgiveness.

  As I weaved around the elbows and gyrating hips and popped asses of the dancers, at the last second, I changed my course, not bursting into the carved out area where Bea and her crew were sitting, but moving through the crowd just on the edge of Bea’s zone. I made sure to seemingly accidentally nudge a few of the girls around the edges of Bea’s crowd and shout “Sorry!” loud enough so they could hear it, but Bea probably could not. I did this a few times, then watched with carefully controlled glee as one of Bea’s closest friends, Nicole, turned around to see who had bumped her, then saw me, then her eyes widened, then she turned away and dipped deeper into the crowd of Bea’s friends, and then I quickly made my way off the porch into the bar’s dulled and dark interior. I flung myself onto a barstool. “I need another shot, Jules!”

  He raised his eyebrow like I was taking advantage of his hospitality.

  “I’ll open a tab,” I said, “But also I just saw my best friend kiss my girlfriend, I mean, my ex-girlfriend.”

  “Oh fuck, girl,” Julian said. He poured me the shot and took my card. “The shot’s on me but I’m gonna charge you for a beer.”

  “Budweiser in the bottle,” I said. I didn’t care about the cheapest pint or the most well-balanced IPA, I wanted something comfortable from my childhood, I wanted the beer bottles I saw in the fridge when I was growing up, I wanted the simplicity of Budweiser’s bright and familiar red.

  “Ezra and Bea are hooking up?” Julian asked as he popped the top off the Budweiser.

  “What? No, not Ezra. My best friend, Georgie. That pretty soft butch I run around with,” I said.

  “That makes more sense,” Julian said, “Still fucked up though.”

  “Still fucked up,” I agreed. I took the shot, just as a laughing group of women arrived in the bar area, flipping through the beer list and examining the cocktails listed on the chalkboard. Julian patted my hand, then left me for them.

  The ghost from outside was sitting in a shadowed corner at the very end of the bar; she had a ghostly beer bottle that she sipped from.

  “Come over here,” she said. She was a welcome distraction, something to do while I waited for Bea or Georgie to seek me out. If I was talking to her, I wouldn’t have to sit with any of my feelings.

  I got up and took the barstool next to hers, angling my back to the rest of the bar, so that none of the normal people would see me talking to nothing. She was wearing a long jacket with big front pockets, tailored pants, and huarache sandals; her hair was puffed up into a big pompadour thing; her lips were very dark red.

  “I’m Babs,” she said, with a light accent I couldn’t place.

  “I’m Eve,” I said.

  “I know,” Babs said, laughing, like she knew more than me, which she did. Babs pulled out a ghost cigarette case and lit a ghost cigarette. The smoke curled towards the ceiling, the way it must’ve done when the cigarette was alive and people were allowed to smoke in bars.
I would’ve liked to be alive with Babs in a bar decades ago—I wasn’t sure exactly when she was from, maybe the forties or fifties—passing a cigarette back and forth while we flirted, hiding our attraction behind the pretense of friendship.

  “Have we met before?” I asked, like I was picking up any girl from The Grind.

  Babs laughed like that was a line some woman would’ve used to pick her up in the 1940s. Or maybe she’d just heard it from years of hovering over lesbian daytime parties. “We have a mutual friend,” she said. “Nozlee Rostami.”

  “I wouldn’t call Nozlee a friend anymore.”

  “That’s a shame, she still calls you a friend.”

  “Did she tell you to follow me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “She said when you’re mad at people you talk to ghosts because you don’t consider them people. And that you were going to be mad at her.”

  “For the crime of premeditated heartbreak, yes.”

  Babs cocked her head, I’d confused her. I felt a hand on my shoulder and immediately jerked it off, caught.

  “I’m sorry,” Georgie said, like a reflex. I swiveled, I faced her, I was sitting on a stool and I realized my posture was probably very hunched; I sat up straight. I didn’t want her to see me make my body small.

  “Bea said you would leave but I knew you wouldn’t,” Georgie said.

  I hadn’t even considered leaving, and Bea and I had dated for a year, lived together even, what had she even learned about me during that long time?

  “I guess I know you better,” Georgie said. Without asking if it was alright with me if she sat down, Georgie took the seat to my left; Babs the Ghost was still on my right, I saw her watching out of the corner of my eye.

  “Who told you? I mean,” Georgie scrubbed her eyes like she was tired. “I wanted to be the one to tell you, or Bea did.”

  “If we must talk about this, can we go to one of the booths?” I asked. I didn’t want to be overheard by someone Georgie couldn’t even see; I wanted to be able to speak my mind without one of Nozlee’s friends overhearing me.

  “It’s quieter over here,” Georgie said in a low voice, as if to prove her point. The timid booth girls were loosening up, they were doing shots and wrapping their arms around each other’s necks; some girls who were going to kiss each other eventually.

  Babs smiled ghoulishly, her teeth a little whiter and her smile a little wider than a living human’s would’ve been. All ghosts were ravenous; Babs was a thirsting for the dyke drama. Babs reminded me that even the nicest, hottest ghosts were still the hungry undead, transformed from human into creature if they smelled a meal.

  “I know this place isn’t ideal, but can’t we talk now before it festers? You didn’t leave.”

  Though I’d courted this conversation, enticed Georgie into coming to speak to me, her actual presence somehow swapped the power dynamics, so that the conversation belonged to her now and I was forced to submit to something. But I didn’t want to bottom to anybody. The motions I would have to go through to leave (stand up, head for the door, pretend I didn’t hear Georgie calling after me) were so familiar I could’ve done it on autopilot—because I’d already done it so many times this weekend.

  Leaving was an effective way to reclaim power, but it wasn’t my own option: Nozlee once told me she has her moon in Cancer and that meant she was sensitive and nurturing and when she felt she hadn’t taken care of someone properly, she got really guilty. I’d spill everything then, where Babs could hear and report back, to her. I’d throw open all my emotional curtains and shine light on all my raw nerves, and Noz could bathe in her guilt. Georgie, too, could potentially be punished in the same way. If I was going to be forced to speak, I’d let them all know how bad they’d hurt me.

  “Okay,” I said to both Georgie and the wide-eyed ghost with her toothy smile, “Let’s fucking talk then.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t care, I don’t forgive you. Like, what the fuck, Georgie! You’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “Let me just explain, okay?” Georgie had her drink with her, she gulped from it. “It didn’t start while you guys were still together.”

  I hadn’t even—but of course I should’ve worried about that, about them sneaking, cheating, meeting in secret. But then, Bea and I had spent the last weeks of our relationship together for a painful amount of time. We spent a month pushing on a bruise, unable to spend more than a few hours apart, addicted to hurting each other and being hurt. Bea wouldn’t have had anywhere to put a dizzying love affair when we were too busy beating each other up.

  “I know,” I said. I didn’t say anything else, I made her keep talking to me.

  “We ran into each other by accident the day she moved out of your place. We’ve always gotten along—”

  “You’ve always gotten along!?”

  “Yes, I mean, I liked hanging out with her—”

  “So you had a crush on her this whole time!” I said. “All the times we hung out together, you were just laying down a primer, waiting for the very first second our relationship went bad.”

  “No, I—”

  “No!? What then?”

  “Let me get a fucking word in!” Georgie shouted. I was stunned, Georgie never shouted.

  “You act like I’m your best friend and I owe you the fucking world!” she shouted again.

  “You are my best friend!” I shouted back. The music was loud enough that no one around could tell if we were shouting angrily or happily or drunkenly. They left us alone.

  “I am not your best friend, this is such bullshit, Eve.”

  “Well, you’re—”

  “No, you let me talk. I’m your best friend when it’s convenient for you, when you’re mad at Ezra or Noz for some imagined slight.”

  “Best friend is a category, not a title,” I tried to say, but she talked right over me, and Babs’s big eyes grew even rounder and shone. I saw blood in the spaces between Babs’s teeth.

  “You don’t see other people’s side of things. I mean, like you never see my side of things,” Georgie was saying. “I’m always there for you when you’re having a hard time but you never see when I’m having a hard time.”

  “You never tell me!”

  “It’s hard to tell you when you make every situation about what’s going on with you.”

  “I never pay attention to myself. I’m always thinking about other people and what they’re doing,” I said. “I’m always focused on other people.”

  “You might be focused on what other people are doing,” Georgie said. “But you’re the one that writes the emotional narrative.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “It means, you decide what everyone is feeling, and if they try to contradict you, you think they’re wrong or lying.”

  “I don’t do that,” I said.

  “You do that, always,” Georgie said. “I’ve been depressed, did you know that?”

  “Of course I did!” I sort of did.

  “I needed someone and Bea was there. I deserve a big romance, too. I deserve to be loved by someone decent. Bea got completely fucked up emotionally by your relationship.”

  “We were bad for each other, that’s not my fault,” I said.

  “I’m not blaming just you,” Georgie said. “I heard all about it from both of you. You were awful to each other and it’s better for both of you that you’re done.”

  She was winding down, all her angry steam was gone, she was slumping, she made me want to slump. If Bea had told Georgie her side, if Bea’d given her an unfiltered truth that she filtered for me, because of me, like water through a Brita filter, all the toxins taken out—if Bea had given Georgie something real, then maybe Georgie knew more about my relationship than I did.

&nbs
p; “I feel guilty,” Georgie said, “and I hate myself for doing this to you, and I’m sorry you had to find out on the bad weekend. I didn’t want it to be like that. But I’m always going to be a second-string friend to you, and Bea is someone who might love me, one day. Even if not, I have to stop making my life decisions based on how they’re going to make you feel.”

  “I didn’t know you were doing that,” I said.

  “I knew that by dating her I was going to lose you and you know what I felt? I felt like, even if Bea and I broke up, our friendship wasn’t worth not trying this relationship out.”

  “Why?” I asked. I was looking at all the little bubbles in my beer, because if I looked at Georgie’s face I would start crying.

  “You don’t know how to be good to people,” Georgie said. “I know you were closest to Miggy, but he was my friend too. I loved him, and he loved me, and he made me feel loved, and I feel wrecked without him. And this weekend, you’ve run around acting like you’re the only one who is carrying this tragedy with you every day. All weekend, you haven’t answered my calls, you haven’t asked how I am, you’ve acted like you’re the only one that is devastated. I’m devastated too.”

  “But this thing with Ezra,” I said. I sniffled, I was crying even though all I could see of Georgie were her beautiful long fingers. “It’s bad timing, I would’ve been there for you.”

  “The point is,” Georgie said, “No matter what the circumstances are, you expect other people to be there for you. But you aren’t able to give people that same treatment. It’s lopsided, and it’s hurting me.”