Next, Julia tried punching a hole in the wall. The first attempt went horribly and sent a wave of pain through her knuckles, which coincided with a fit of laughter at how satisfying it was to drunkenly punch a wall in anger. She did it a second time, too in love with the thought of it not to try again. The pain was too bad for a third attempt. She hurled a bowl of chip crumbles across the yard, and it soared like a broken Frisbee. She broke the chair Joey Planko had sat in against the lawn, leaving wooden splinters sticking out of the scorched grass at dangerous angles.
She pictured Dave—her Dave, the funniest guy she knew, her best friend, the only person she could even imagine spending her days with—side by side with cookie-cutter Gretchen and her perfect blond waves and Julia broke into laughter so uncontrollable she had to lie down and let it tear through her. She ripped out a patch of grass and ripped the blades to shreds, throwing them in the air like confetti. As the bits of green rained down on her, she thought about waking up the guy on the couch and kissing him as an act of revenge, but she settled on going to the kitchen and finding more beer. Whether to drink or throw she hadn’t yet decided.
Julia loved Dave. And she would tear her house apart to prove it.
o o o
Julia woke up to the sound of the garage door rumbling open. Sunlight streamed into her room. She’d forgotten to close the blinds last night, and she hadn’t bothered to change out of her clothes. She was on top of her bedding, sweating slightly from the heat, her head pounding, a pain in her hand. In the far corner of her room, her phone lay facedown on the carpet, she didn’t know why. It looked like it’d been thrown against the wall, but she couldn’t remember doing that. Ugh, alcohol.
The garage door rumbled shut, and she heard the muffled voices of her dads getting out of the car. Julia wondered if her dads would wait to ambush her downstairs or if they’d come barging in. Then, in a flash, she remembered the love seat that she’d drunkenly dragged into the bathroom. Looping this image into the memory of last night, she knew it had happened after Dave had left, though it felt like something they would have done together. She laughed into her pillow, as pieces of the night started coming back, knowing for a fact now that the dads would be running in at any moment. She was so hungover that laughing hurt; she felt like a desert floor with cracks running through it. Looking over at her empty nightstand, she wished her drunken self had been smart enough to get a glass of water for this exact moment.
The dads started stomping their way up the stairs. They knocked twice, loud and hard, like a couple of gunshots. Tom came in first, his face bright red, the way it looked when he had even a sip of wine. Ethan, in poorer shape, lagged behind, huffing from the hurried climb up the stairs.
“Julia,” Tom said, arms crossed in front of his chest, “care to explain why the hell my house looks the way that it does?”
Julia decided she was going to lie in bed and take the yelling barrage without comment for a while. She tried to remember getting into bed last night, but all that came to her was a fuzzy memory of a bonfire, which felt more like something out of a dream. Why did her hand hurt? And why hadn’t Dave slept over, sprawled out next to her bed in that musky sleeping bag like he usually did?