Bobbi didn’t laugh. I dropped it. We hardly spoke on the bus, since I could see she wasn’t going to be interested in the effortless rapport I had established with Melissa’s trophy husband, and I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.
When I got back to my apartment I felt drunker than I had been at the house. Bobbi had gone home and I was on my own. I turned all the lights on before I went to bed. Sometimes that was something I did.
*
Bobbi’s parents were going through an acrimonious break-up that summer. Bobbi’s mother Eleanor had always been emotionally fragile and given to long periods of unspecified illness, which made her father Jerry the favoured parent in the split. Bobbi always called them by their first names. This had probably originated as an act of rebellion but now just seemed collegial, like their family was a small business they ran cooperatively. Bobbi’s sister Lydia was fourteen and didn’t seem to be handling the whole thing with Bobbi’s composure.
My parents had separated when I was twelve and my father had moved back to Ballina, where they’d met. I lived in Dublin with my mother until I finished school, and then she moved back to Ballina too. When college started I moved into an apartment in the Liberties belonging to my father’s brother. During term time, he let out the second bedroom to another student, and I had to keep quiet in the evenings and say hi politely when I saw my room-mate in the kitchen. But in the summer when the room-mate went home, I was allowed to live there all on my own and make coffee whenever I wanted and leave books splayed open on all the surfaces.
I had an internship in a literary agency at the time. There was one other intern, called Philip, who I knew from college. Our job was to read stacks of manuscripts and write one-page reports on their literary value. The value was almost always nil. Sometimes Philip would sardonically read bad sentences aloud to me, which made me laugh, but we didn’t do that in front of the adults who worked there. We worked three days a week and were both paid ‘a stipend’ which meant we basically weren’t paid at all. All I needed was food, and Philip lived at home, so it didn’t matter much to us.
This is how privilege gets perpetuated, Philip told me in the office one day. Rich assholes like us taking unpaid internships and getting jobs off the back of them.
Speak for yourself, I said. I’m never going to get a job.
3
Bobbi and I often performed at spoken word events and open mic nights that summer. When we were outside smoking and male performers tried to talk to us, Bobbi would always pointedly exhale and say nothing, so I had to act as our representative. This meant a lot of smiling and remembering details about their work. I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’, but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.
Melissa sent us the image files from the dinner party a few days later. I’d expected Bobbi to dominate the photo set, along with maybe one or two token photographs of me, blurry behind a lit candle, holding a forkful of spaghetti. In fact, for every picture of Bobbi, I appeared too, always lit perfectly, always beautifully framed. Nick was in the photographs also, which I hadn’t expected. He looked luminously attractive, even more so than he had in real life. I wondered if that was why he was a successful actor. It was difficult to look at the photo set and not feel that he was the primary presence in the room, which I definitely hadn’t felt at the time.
Melissa herself didn’t appear in any of the images. As a result, the dinner party depicted in the photographs bore only an oblique relationship to the one we had actually attended. In reality, all our conversation had orbited around Melissa. She had prompted our various expressions of uncertainty or admiration. She was the one whose jokes we were always laughing at. Without her in the images, the dinner seemed to take on a different character, to go spinning off in subtle and strange directions. The relationships of the people who appeared in the photographs, without Melissa, became unclear.
In my favourite picture, I was looking straight into the lens with a dreamy expression, and Nick was looking at me as if waiting for me to say something. His mouth was a little open. It looked like he hadn’t seen the camera. It was a good photograph, but of course I had really been looking up at Melissa at the time, and Nick simply hadn’t seen her come through the doorway. It captured something intimate that had never really happened, something elliptical and somehow fraught. I saved it to my Downloads folder to look at later on.
Bobbi messaged me about an hour after the photographs arrived.
Bobbi: how good do we look though?
Bobbi: i wonder if we can use these as facebook profilers.
me: no
Bobbi: she says the piece won’t be out till september apparently?
me: who says
Bobbi: melissa
Bobbi: do you want to hang out tonight?
Bobbi: and watch a film or something
Bobbi wanted me to know that she had been in touch with Melissa when I hadn’t. It did impress me, which she wanted it to, but I also felt bad. I knew Melissa liked Bobbi more than she liked me, and I didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention. I had wanted Melissa to take an interest in me, because we were both writers, but instead she didn’t seem to like me and I wasn’t even sure I liked her. I didn’t have the option not to take her seriously, because she had published a book, which proved that lots of other people took her seriously even if I didn’t. At twenty-one, I had no achievements or possessions that proved I was a serious person.
I’d told Nick that everyone preferred Bobbi to me, but that wasn’t really true. Bobbi could be abrasive and unrestrained in a way that made people uncomfortable, while I tended to be encouragingly polite. Mothers always liked me a lot, for example. And because Bobbi mostly treated men with amusement or contempt, men usually ended up liking me better too. Of course, Bobbi made fun of me about this. She once emailed me a picture of Angela Lansbury with the subject heading: your core demographic.
Bobbi did come over that night, though she didn’t mention Melissa at all. I knew that she was being strategic, and that she wanted me to ask, so I didn’t. This sounds more passive-aggressive than it really was. Actually we had a nice evening. We stayed up talking and Bobbi went to sleep on the mattress in my room.
*
That night I woke up sweating underneath the duvet. At first it felt like a dream or maybe a film. I found the orientation of my room confusing, as if I was further from the window and door than I should have been. I tried to sit up and then felt a strange, wrenching pain in my pelvis, which made me gasp out loud.