When Omar loses for the sixth (sixteenth?) time, he suggests we play kings, which I’ll later remember in flashes:
Jessa pulling nine, make a rhyme, surprising us all with a win by rhyming “telescope” with “artichoke.”
Chad insisting we girls stick to beer, but being a little too far gone himself to check our cups closely.
Mike drawing eight, invent a rule, after which Jeremy has to sip every time anyone shouts, “Douchebags drink!”
Chad, his comet-white teeth and his deep, rumbly voice.
Jessa linking her arm through the hot crook of my elbow, and me feeling so good that I let her.
Me, pulling the fourth and final king. Omar hands me the center cup, where a mixture of Sam Adams and Captain and Coke and at least a little tequila and who knows what else swirls in one dangerous mud-brown brew. “Guys, no way, no way,” Chad says, and tries to relieve me of the cup.
“Let her do it, Chad,” Jeremy says. “She needs a good time right now, you know?”
Chad asks us what he means.
“Because of—” Jeremy looks at Jessa, pale between us, and then at me. “Because of your dad being lost, right?”
I turn to the wavering faces around the circle. Mike and Omar are watching me like I’m a bucket of water about to tip. And Chad. Chad is the worst of all.
I cough the terrible mixture down, throw the cup back, then trip up the basement stairs, through the Prices’ perfect, shiny kitchen. Jessa’s slurred voice shouts my name from below, but through the spinning of the world on its strange new axis, I consider the time it will take her to stand, let alone crawl up the steps, and time is on my side. Pausing just long enough to make my unsteady hands, which no longer seem to belong to me, pick up my purse and coat, I spill out onto their lawn.
Even in winter and in the dark, their grass seems painfully green.
ELEVEN
At eleven a.m. on the fifth day after my dad goes missing, I sit down on a bench at the Boston MFA, trying not to throw up on my sneakers.
The squeak of winter boots on white tile floors, the echo of a man lecturing his wife on postmodern art, the bleats and barks of kids who’ve had culture forced upon them on their school vacation—all of it boils over in my brain. My stupid brain, which feels like a cracked egg. I drop my face into my hands and try to ignore the nausea I’ve been swimming in since I woke up this morning to the chiming of Jessa’s relentless texts, all of which I ignored, switching my phone to merciful silence. I was still in Jessa’s dress. My carefully braided hair was a ruinous heap, now scraped snarls-and-all into a bundle at the back of my throbbing head.
I’ve seen Dad hungover. I know some of the tricks. Like, there’s a sleeve of low-fat saltless Ritz in my bag, smuggled out of Lindy’s diet cabinet in the pantry. And I’ve been guzzling water since I woke up; I stuck my face in the fountain by the museum bathroom until a mom behind me tapped her foot on the floor and muttered, “Leave some for the fishes.”
Dad’s hangover ritual, other than flavorless carbs and sleeping till two under an Everest of blankets, is a single drink first thing in the morning. Once, he had this book party in Boston that he was contractually obligated to go to. This was just pre-Lindy, at the start of the last real bad time, and his agent had to put him in a two-hundred-and-something-dollars late-night cab ride home. Dad called me from the front steps so he could use me as a crutch to the sofa. The next morning, I watched him make a tall Bloody Mary, sweating and gray-faced. “Don’t breathe so loud, Immy,” he begged me. “I’m recovering.”
“From being drunk?” I stage-whispered.
“From waking up.”
Unfortunately, Lindy was still around when I dragged myself out of bed this morning, and it was all I could do to keep my game face on when we passed each other in the hallway. “It’s a beautiful morning,” she chirped, though it was a hollow, preoccupied kind of joy, like an underpaid Starbucks barista might offer. Still, she probably would’ve noticed me mainlining vodka and Tabasco.