“Zurich, I think.” She leaned closer to the pan, sniffing it. “With a layover in London. Or Milan.”
I took another sip of my drink. “So,” I said, after a few seconds of quiet, “I’m an angry, bitter bitch. Right?”
“Right,” she said, without turning around.
I nodded. Point proved. I supposed. I drew in the dampness left by my glass on the black countertop, stretching out the edges.
“And you bring this up,” Chloe said, turning around and leaning against the stove, “because . . .”
“Because,” I told her, “Chris suddenly believes in love and I don’t and therefore, I am a terrible person.”
She considered this. “Not altogether terrible,” she said. “You have some good points.”
I waited, raising my eyebrows.
“Such as,” she said, “you have really nice clothes.”
“Fuck you,” I told her, and she laughed, putting her hand over her mouth, so I laughed too. Really, I don’t know what I’d expected. I would have said the same thing to her.
She wouldn’t let me drive when I left. She moved my car around the corner—if it was parked out front her mom would be pissed—then drove me to Bendo, where I had to swear I would only have one more beer and then call Jess for a ride home. I promised. Then I went inside, had two beers, and decided not to bug Jess just yet. Instead I set myself up at the bar, with a decent view of the room, and decided to stew for a while.
I don’t know how long it was before I saw her. One minute I was arguing with the bartender, a tall, gangly guy named Nathan, about classic rock guitarists, and the next I turned my head and caught a glimpse of her in the mirror behind the bar. Her hair was flat, her face a little sweaty. She looked drunk, but I would have known her anywhere. It was everybody else who always liked to think she was gone for good.
I wiped off my face, ran my fingers through my hair, trying to give it some life. She stared back at me as I did this, knowing as well as I that these were just smoke and mirrors, little tricks. Behind her and me the crowd was thickening, and I could feel people pressing up against me, leaning forward for drinks. And the sick thing? In a way, I was almost happy to see her. The worst part of me, out in the flesh. Blinking back at me in the dim light, daring me to call her a name other than my own.
Truth be told, I used to be worse. Much worse.
I hardly ever drank much anymore. Or smoked pot. Or went off with guys I didn’t know that well into dark corners, or dark cars, or dark rooms. Weird how it never worked in the daylight, when you could actually see the topography of someone’s face, the lines and bumps, the scars. In the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal. It wasn’t the drinking or the smoking that was really the problem. It was the other thing, the one harder to admit out loud. Nice girls didn’t do what I did. Nice girls waited. But even before it happened, I’d never counted myself as a nice girl.
It was sophomore year, and Lissa’s next-door neighbor Albert, a senior, was having a party. Lissa’s parents were out of town, and we were all sleeping over, sneaking into their liquor cabinet and mixing anything we found together, then chasing it with Diet Coke: rum, vodka, peppermint schnapps. To this day I couldn’t stomach cherry brandy, not even in the torts my mother loved from Milton’s Market. The smell of it alone made me gag.
We never would have been invited to Albert’s, being sophomores, and weren’t bold enough to even consider crashing. But we did go out on Lissa’s back porch with our spiked Diet Cokes and sneaked cigarettes we’d stolen from Chloe’s grandmother, who smoked menthols. (Which also, to this day, made me gag.) Some guy, who was already drunk and slurring, waved us over. After a bit of whispered conferring, which consisted of Lissa saying we couldn’t and me and Chloe overruling her, we went.
That was the first night I ever got really drunk. It was a bad start with the cherry brandy, and an hour later I found myself making my way across Albert’s living room, clutching an easy chair for support. Everything was spinning, and I could see Lissa and Chloe and Jess sitting on a couch in the living room, where some girl was teaching them how to play quarters. The music was really loud, and someone had broken a vase in the foyer. It was blue, and the pieces were still scattered everywhere, strewn across the lime carpet. I remember thinking, in my blurry state, that it looked like sea glass.