He serves up a shot, tells me if I get sloppy and in trouble, it’s on me but I don’t think that’s entirely true. I toss the shot back, grimacing at the kick, and wait for it to hit. There’s this perfect line between sober and blurry that softens my stutter. When I drink myself to it, it’s easier to talk. I scrub my hands through my hair and ask for one more and throw that down too, relishing the sting of it. Then I figure I’ve paid for the privilege of asking some questions.
Before I can start, I’m distracted by a man and woman, halfway down the bar. I can’t see his face but I can see hers, the perfect cut of her pale cheeks, her thin blond hair pulled back with a pink clip. She’s wasted. She can barely hold her head up. She reminds me of my mother. My mom met Keith in a bar. Joel’s. She got drunk and he brought her home. I picture it sometimes, their meeting, her telling him, in her muddled voice, soured by drugs and booze, how hard she had it raising two little girls all on her own. Keith, suddenly interested, asking her their names. In my mind, she has to think about it, her glassy eyes fixed on nothing.
Then she offers us up.
The bartender swipes away my empty glasses before moving down the bar.
“H-hey.” I call him back. “You know those k-kids?”
The bartender nods. “Sure.”
“T-tell me what you know.”
“Well, two of ’em belong to Si Baker. The two with ’em are their friends.”
“You know S-Silas B-Baker?”
He laughs. “I know of him, sure. He owns this bar. But a guy like him don’t hang around here. I don’t deal with him direct. I wouldn’t even know those were his kids if they weren’t so set on telling everybody.”
I make a noncommittal noise and turn back to the group and watch them until Javi seems to sense it. He raises his head and starts scoping the room. I duck away, to the bathrooms, because I feel like this isn’t how I want to be seen. I examine my reflection in the cracked mirrors over the sinks. It took me long enough to drive out here that my sunburn peeled into a tan that could almost look like it belongs with them. I find a rubber band in my pocket and knot my hair into a messy top bun. I roll the bottoms of my shorts until they’re as far up my thighs as I can get them and then I knot my T-shirt at my waist, tight. I stretch my arms up and watch as the skin of my abdomen peeks through. My stomach gives a poorly timed gurgle, desperate for something to digest. I pinch at my cheeks and bite at my lips until I see color in both.
When I push back through the door, the band is taking fifteen and the sound system is filling in, the song over its speakers dreamy and slow. I guess it’s not to the crowd’s taste because they scatter back to the bar. I glance over at their booth and Kendall’s eyeing the floor. Noah, Javi and the other girl all seem to be trying to push her out of the booth and maybe that video I saw, the one of Kendall dancing, wasn’t just some wonderfully unexpected moment in time, but a moment she makes happen over and over again.
What would happen if I took that moment from her?
Kendall climbs over Noah but by then, I’ve already taken her place. I’ve moved myself to the middle of the floor. Kendall stops when she sees me. I don’t think she’s used to being stopped. I stand there long enough, with her eyes locked on me, and then their eyes locked on me.
I feel the heaviness of everyone’s curiosity.
Kendall’s perfect mouth forms a perfect, What the fuck?
And this girl.
What’s she going to do?
I hold my arms out to my sides and sway. I close my eyes and I let the music own me, turning myself into the idea of a girl, or an idea of an idea—a Manic Pixie Dream, I guess, the kind everyone says they’re tired of but I don’t know that they really mean it. The girl nobody ends up loving long or loving well, but nobody wants to give up either.
I open my eyes and Kendall looks like murder. Noah and the brunette look uncertain. Javi takes a swig of his PBR and leans across the table, murmuring something to Kendall. She shrugs and he pushes himself out of the booth and makes his way over to me. My pulse quickens. I know your name, I think. I know your name and you have no idea who I am. He’s taller than I thought he would be. He looks nervous. I reach my hand out to him and he swallows visibly before taking it. His palm is sweaty. I lead him farther out onto the floor and guide his hands to my hips and somehow they find the softest parts of me, parts I didn’t realize were there to find. I bring my hand to the nape of his neck, the tips of my fingers teasing the edge of his hair and wonder over the sensation because I’ve never touched anyone like this before. He smells sweaty, but it’s nice, and when I meet his eyes, he’s looking at me like he’s thinking this is unreal, this is right out of a movie he made but never dreamed of starring in—except he did because who doesn’t want to be the boy mysterious girls are made for?
Who doesn’t want a love story?
I wish this was a love story. A love story about lovers whose mouths meet like two puzzle pieces fitting perfectly into place, about the electric feeling of one person’s name on the other’s tongue because no one has ever spoken them out loud like that before. About people who spend the night together looking at the stars until entire constellations exist within them. Everyone is perfect in that indistinct way most characters are and every perfectly constructed scene in their fictional lives is somehow more real than anything you’ve known or lived. Love stories, romances, leave a person secure in the knowledge they’ll end Happily Ever After and who wouldn’t want a story like that? I wish this was a love story because I know how it goes in one like mine, where the only moments of reprieve are the spaces between its lines. But here’s the thing I tell myself to dull the sharp edges of everything that’s surely left to come: The worst has already happened.
The song ends.
“Hey,” Javi says, and his voice is deep, soothing.
It makes me shiver.
I know your name.
“H-hi.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Y-yeah,” I say, and then: “I st-stutter.”
His mouth breaks into a warm smile.
“Cool,” he says. “I’m Javi.”
“So you’re new,” Kendall says, after we’ve all introduced ourselves.
Her voice is older than the rest of her, the kind of voice you earn by years of drinking whiskey and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. I don’t know how that happens to some girls, but it just does. She’s feeling me out in that pointed way girls do, but I’m used to people looking at me twice, from the stutter. I don’t like it but it’s something I know I can withstand. Kendall doesn’t look like she’s used to being withstood, and for now that’s my advantage.
I’ve told them my name is Lera.
“Y-yeah,” I say. I’m squished between Javi and the other girl, whose name is Carrie Sandoval. His thigh touches mine. Carrie’s doesn’t. I have to believe the contact, and the lack of it, is on purpose. “J-just m-moved in.”
I take a swig of the Pabst Javi bought me and it tastes like piss, but between it and the shots, I’m humming and wondering why my mother couldn’t have ever stopped at a feeling like this because this is when it’s good and you still have control. I remember the first time I drank just to see if I could. May Beth tried to scare me away from it, told me that what Mom had was a catching thing, a passed-down thing, a sleeping disease that works its way through bloodlines and if you’re lucky, it won’t wake up, but why ever tempt it? I did. I had to. And guess what? I didn’t turn into a junkie. Maybe that was the real reason May Beth never wanted me to try; it was just one more thing I’d never be able to forgive my mother for.
“And you just … ended up … here?” she asks. “Cooper’s?”
“W-well.” I pick at the label on my beer. “Your Instagram m-made it look like s-some kind of p-place to b-be.”
Noah smirks. Javi’s mouth drops open and he ducks his head. Kendall and Carrie share an incredulous look. Kendall says, “Did you just admit to Instagram stalking me?”
“W-wanted to see how you h-held up a-against your own hype.”