“She’s sick,” I say to Anne then. It’s the very best I can come up with on the spot. Esther would do this for me; I know that much is true. “Bronchitis,” I say, “maybe pneumonia.” And I describe in detail a croup-like cough. I tell her about the phlegm, a yellow-green, and how for over twenty-four hours now Esther has been unable to get out of bed. There is a fever. There are chills. “She was going to try and make it into work today,” I say, citing Esther’s conscientiousness and industrious nature; she was going to try to go to work despite the fever, despite the chills. “She must be feeling really lousy not to go.”
But despite all this Anne says that she should have called in sick, sure to tack on, “She seemed fine on Saturday,” as if maybe, just maybe, Esther isn’t sick at all.
“It came on very quickly,” I lie. “Knocked her out cold.”
“Well, I’ll be,” is what she says, but what she means is, You’re full of shit.
*
If the coffee shop has a name, I don’t know what it is. To me, it’s just the one on the corner of Clark and Berwyn. That’s what I call it. It’s a place Esther and I like to hang. To us, it doesn’t even need a name. Let’s meet at the coffee shop, we’ll say, and like magic, we both appear. That’s my boiled-down definition of best friend. You always know what the other is thinking.
Except for right now, when I have no idea what Esther is thinking.
I see her through the window of the shop before I go in, taking in her layered ginger hair, the alabaster skin. It’s evening, darker outside than it is on the inside, and so I can see right in, into the industrial designed space with its bold, unfinished look, the steel tables, the salvaged and recycled things that hang from the ceiling and walls. She sits, slouched on a bar stool at one of the wooden window counters, picking at the deckled edges of the coffee cup’s paper sleeve, staring out the window, waiting for me, and I think to myself: she’s got it all wrong. That’s not where Esther and I sit, but rather at one of the smaller, more intimate steel bistro tables near the back, beside a custom brick fireplace and the exposed brick walls. And we wait until we’ve both arrived and then we order together, the very same thing, some caffeinated concoction that we agree to while waiting in line for our turn. But this girl has gone up to the counter all on her own and ordered her drink without waiting to see what I’d have. She sat at the wrong table.
This girl is not a good match for Esther. Not at all. That’s what I decide.
I walk in and cross the room, traversing the patchy, polished concrete floors, staring down at them, in fact. I don’t look at the girl, not yet, not until I’m closer. It’s hard to look into the eyes of the person who plans to take over your life—knowingly or unknowingly. It isn’t her fault, I get that, and yet it doesn’t make me dislike her any less. I might just hate her.
I focus on my feet instead, on the rounded toes of a pair of leather boots, as I walk.
Her light eyes move from the window to mine, and it’s then that she smiles, a pleasant smile, yes, but also one with reserve. “You’re Esther?” she asks, extending her tiny hand, and I say that I am. I’m Esther, though of course I’m not. I’m Quinn, but right now, that’s neither here nor there. I’m Esther.
Her name, she tells me, is Megan, and then, as if she doesn’t even know her own name or hasn’t quite decided on who she is, she says, “Meg.” Her handshake is lethargic to say the least. Prissy. I’m not even sure that we touch.
I don’t bother to get a coffee, knowing this will be quick. I’m not even sure why it is that I agreed to meet, but for some reason I wanted to see her with my own two eyes. She strikes me as young and naive, the kind of girl who probably has no clue how to hail a cab. The kind of girl I used to be. I slide onto a bar stool beside her and say, “You’re interested in the apartment,” and she assures me she is. She’s a recent grad, or will be come December, and looking for a new place to live. Right now she lives with her single mom out in Portage Park, but is looking for something closer to the Loop, more trendy, a younger crowd. She has a job all lined up for after graduation in the west loop. She needs an apartment close to transportation. She tells me dramatically with a flip of the ginger hair, “The commute from Portage Park would take years.”
The thing that exasperates me the most is that she sounds a lot like me, or the me I was all those months ago when I saw Esther’s other ad in the Reader, her first roommate request. My lucky break, I’d thought at the time, but now I wasn’t so sure. Now I feel like some kind of mass-produced commodity rather than someone unique. My heart breaks a little with each of Meg’s words, when she tells me her gig is in graphic design, how—as an avid environmentalist—she plans to bike to work in the summer. How the hardest part of moving away from home will be leaving her cat behind. How she loves to cook, and is a self-professed neat freak. My heart breaks not because any of these things appeals to me but because I think Esther would like Meg. I think Esther would really, truly like Meg.
But the question is this: Would she like Meg more than me?
“You’re looking for a new roommate?” asks Meg, and I nod my head, staring out the window as a sea of people walk by, commuters just stepping off the 22 bus.
“My roommate,” I tell her sadly, “is about to move out.” And then I tell her how she sometimes has trouble paying her fair share of the rent. How sometimes she shorts me on her half of the utilities, or eats my food without asking first. And it’s true; I do each and every one of these things. But that doesn’t make me a bad roommate. Or does it?
What will I do, I wonder, if Esther makes me leave?
Where is Esther, I wonder, and why won’t she come home to me so we can figure this out?
Why won’t she talk to me?
Meg asks questions about the apartment, logical questions about first and last month’s rent payment, security deposits and whether or not there’s laundry in the building. Questions I never thought to ask. But when she asks if she can see it, the apartment, I say no. Not yet, is what I say. “I’m speaking to a few other applicants first,” I lie, though I wonder, over the course of the next few hours and days, how many calls Esther’s phone will receive. One call, ten calls, twenty calls? Twenty young people wanting to chase me from my home, to take my bed, my bedroom, my best friend?
“I’ll be in touch,” I tell her, but then mumble under my breath so that she can’t hear, as I walk quickly away, out of the coffee shop and onto the city street, But I just don’t think you’d be a right fit, Meg.
Though of course she could’ve been Jane Addams or Mother Teresa or Oprah Winfrey, and I still wouldn’t have thought she was good enough for Esther, whether or not Esther brought her here because she thought I wasn’t good enough for her.
Talk about ironic.
Alex
I wander the streets, searching for Pearl.