“Olivia. Hi. Can you please explain what’s happening?”
“Juni drank a little too much and got sick, so I’m spending the night. We watched The Road to El Dorado, and Juni wants to do Finding Nemo next.”
I picture them curled up in the living room, on the plush rug in front of Juni’s TV. My frustration builds. “Why is she drinking?”
“I don’t know. She wanted to. Sorry about the late call. I know you have to get up early.”
“I mean, it’s fine.” I straighten up, resigning myself to the fact that I’m awake. “Just . . . I thought you two were supposed to be having a chill night in, and this is two weeks in a row she’s done the shitty-drunk thing. You think there’s something wrong?”
“She hasn’t mentioned anything,” Olivia says. “But . . . yeah, you’re right, she’s been weird. I was gonna ask, but I got distracted by the whole impossible-quantities-of-vomit thing.”
“Ew.”
“That’s better, though, right? Get it all out of her system or whatever.”
“Is that how that works?”
“I think so,” Olivia says. “Science!” The sound of a commercial blares through the phone. Her voice grows distant. “Juni, want to put Nemo on? I’m gonna get some blankets.”
“So. Did Dan text you again?” I ask. The second the question comes out, I wonder why I brought it up. Talking about boys with Olivia is never a good idea.
“No, thank God,” she says. “But Richard Brown got a hold of my number somehow, so now I have to deal with that. Even though I made it totally clear I wasn’t into him.”
“Someone’s popular,” I say.
“Not necessarily a good thing.”
I sigh. She always does this weird denial thing, as if guys being interested in her is bad.
“I’m serious,” she says. “What, you think I’m bragging?”
“I dunno,” I say, chewing harder on my thumbnail. From the perspective of someone totally unnoticed by the male population, it’s hard not to hear it as bragging.
“Getting hit on is one thing,” she says. “But when guys won’t leave me alone, even after I’ve made it apparent I’m not interested? That just means they’ve heard I’ll jump on anything that shows me attention. Not a compliment.”
“Okay,” I say, still not getting it. If she stopped sleeping around, guys wouldn’t expect anything from her anymore, right? Isn’t that the obvious fix?
“Anyway, it’s stressful,” she says. “Like, one time I said no to this guy, and he was all, ‘Fine, I’ll find someone better, skank bitch.’?”
Anger jolts me out of my confusion. I keep my voice from rising, but only because Grace is asleep in the next room. “I—what? Someone said that to you?”
“Eh, don’t worry about it. He was wasted, so—”
“Is this someone we know?”
“No, ’course not,” Olivia says. “I never know guys who act like that. My point is, you never know if you’re dealing with some guy who’s going to get scary-angry or just plain mean if you’re like, hey, sorry, not interested.”
“I . . . okay,” I say, starting to see it from her angle. I don’t know why I feel so reluctant to agree with her. It’s not like I want this stuff to be her fault. “I mean . . . yeah.”
I hear her fumble with what I assume are blankets. “Aight,” she says, “I should go care for our dear, drunken June bug.”
“Night, Liv.” I plug my phone back in to charge and set it on my bedside table, then roll over, burying the side of my face in a cool pillow.
My eyes won’t close. My hands wander to my mouth, and I catch myself about to start biting again. I form fists, protecting my nails.
Skank bitch. Olivia made it sound as if the insult meant nothing to her. How many times has she heard that? How many times has she put up with it and not told me or Juniper?
Or is it only you she’s never told, Claire? whispers that voice in my head.
Of everything, that’s the thought that sticks: that yet again, I’m being excluded. I squeeze my eyes shut, selfishly hating myself, as if it’s the time for that sort of thing.
IT STARTS RAINING AT 3:00 AM ON SUNDAY MORNING. The rain starts and stops outside the window over and over. Sleep, I tell myself, but it doesn’t come, not like the focus I can drive myself into onstage. Lying here, I can’t clear my mind, let alone get out of my head into some other safe haven.
I hate nighttime. In the chunks of night before I drift off, my brain bombards me with every thought I’ve been kicking back since morning. Tonight, the spinning wheel has stopped on the topic of sadness and how unoriginal it is. People have always been unhappy. It’s only in the last hundred years—or fewer, maybe—that people have started thinking that unhappiness is this abnormal thing, that we’re all entitled to happiness somehow. Such bullshit. That’s not how the world works. I bet in Grigory Veselovsky’s time in Russia, all the serfs or peasants or whatever were probably major-depressive by our standards.