“Well, that was abrupt.”
She rolled her perpetually leaky eyes. “It’s embarrassing seeing you wash kale and floss your teeth every day. I don’t want to go back to that. If I don’t die now, I definitely will after another week of your natural deodorant and wholesome family entertainment.”
“I was watching porn this morning on my phone!” I scoffed.
She started making slashing motions across her throat.
“Fine. Do you want a hug or something before I go?”
Almost imperceptibly, Helen moved her head to the left. Not a nod, but not not a nod. I unlocked the carrier. She stepped dubiously onto the table, then climbed down into my lap. I hadn’t held her since she was a little baby. Every time I’ve moved to lay a hand on her in anything even resembling an affectionate way, I have been met with everything from mild resistance to misdemeanor assault. I felt her relax in my arms, her body warm and liquid, and I patted her head with the tip of my index finger. She closed her eyes and rested her head gently against my mangled and oozing arm. I tried to remember whether I had brought with me to Michigan the old bottle of amoxicillin from when I’d gotten my tooth pulled. I stroked Helen’s back and heard the faint rumble of a purr coming from her throat.
Our fever dream was broken by a knock at the door. The enthusiastic grim reaper popped his head in, asking, “We all good here?” Helen dug her rear claws into my thigh, and I would’ve body-slammed her to the ground if homeboy hadn’t been watching. Instead, I shoved her as nicely as possible onto the chair next to me and smiled while cursing that asshole back to hell, all the while reaching for the clipboard so I could give him permission to send her there. A technician came in with a portable credit card machine, and we all stood around as the chip reader took approximately forty-seven awkward minutes to process my payment. The tech left, and Helen Keller gave me a sour look. “Thank you for being my Annie Sullivan, I guess,” she said as I put my wallet back in my bag and shrugged into my coat.
I helped her back into her carrier and lingered near the door. She had sneezed a huge glob of mucus onto my pants.
“You want me to, uh, read a few stanzas of ‘The Rainbow Bridge’ off my phone or something?” I asked, one hand on the doorknob.
Again with the eye rolling. “Well, you’re the lesbian…”
I snatched the door open. “LOL BYE.”
I cried all the way to the twenty-four-hour grocery store and ate half a rotisserie chicken in the parking lot. It was the tribute she would have wanted.
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
It’s a sweaty, balmy night circa 2002, probably definitely around 1:00 a.m. It’s the witching hour, with fifty-nine minutes until the lights come on and you can realize that you’re just not into the person you’ve spent the whole night shout-talking to. I’m in the basement at Sinibar, lurking next to the bar, trying to order myself another Jameson, because that’s what I like. Or maybe that’s what I want people to think I like. I’m not even sure I had a personality back then; I just tried to haphazardly arrange other people’s projections and shit I thought was cool into something captivating. Meeting people in public with the idea that they might want to get my underpants off has always been difficult, because I’m fat and bars are too loud and crowded and dark for me to just pull out 250 out-of-context-pages of the YA novel I’ve been working on for years to try to impress some dude I wanna fuck. I’ve spent a lifetime glaring at dance floors full of people who didn’t splash on cologne and pay twenty dollars to get into the club to meet someone “interesting.”
Jameson in hand, I tip the bartender and am about to drink the whole thing on the spot (I HATE GETTING BUMPED INTO AT THE CLUB) when I feel someone sidle up next to me and put a hand on my drinking arm. “Oh, hey, it’s you,” I say to this stranger, which is one of many reasons that I would rather die than make a person’s actual acquaintance, this need to fuck every human interaction up with a jolt of disconcerting awkwardness. It catches him off guard, I can tell. He recovers quickly and asks what I am drinking. He chokes back a laugh when I tell him, because no one wants to make a nine-dollar investment in a weird idiot who oozes discomfort and wore her dad’s New Balances to a nightclub. My dude is already in too deep to turn back now, however, so he orders one for me and another for himself and I reconsider my decision to pass on the bread basket at dinner. I have approximately six sips until I become relatively incoherent, but the music is loud, so I can blame it on the DJ. Homeboy ushers me to a secluded corner of the room and toasts the drink in my left hand while I drink from the one in my right before launching into a soliloquy about all the cool shit he does that makes him sexy. I am right there with him, I am almost ready to take home a copy of his mixtape and listen to it for real, when he says, “You came in with the girl in the purple, right?” Right. “Yo, that girl is beautiful. Do you know if she’s into slam poetry?” And since the tiny lime-slicing knives behind the bar are too dull to effectively cut my wrists open along the vein, I choose to attempt suicide the old-fashioned way: listening to a hot dude who doesn’t want to fuck me ask a bunch of questions about the friend I came here with. I chug my whiskey in the hopes that my death from alcohol poisoning will be immediate and painless.