I run through a similar scenario in my head. Lehna and June and Uma telling me all about how wild the party got, where they went afterwards.
There has been an undercurrent of trouble between Lehna and me for a while—the way I’ve been wondering about our friendship, the way small things that I do annoy her. But what just happened was entirely above the surface, and we’re not used to that. The number of real fights we’ve gotten into before this night is a perfect zero. I always took for granted that someday we’d be these bickering old ladies drinking iced tea on a porch somewhere, bragging about our grandkids. I’d think mine were cuter than hers and she’d still sound snarky every time she said my name.
What just happened between us was serious, and the fact that I left makes it so much worse. They count on me to be there. I’m never the difficult one who vetoes the restaurant choice or doesn’t want to go to the movie because I’ve seen it already. There is always something to like on a menu, some new meaning to glean in a film. Maybe the fact that I’m easy is the reason I’m their friend. Now that I’ve let them down, they’ll probably get a ride home with someone who will become Lehna’s new best friend. She’ll be this fearless girl whom Lehna will never have to lecture, who will never disappoint her.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s bleak and it’s unacceptable. We’re going home, but we’re also going to have the time of our lives.”
“How?”
“We’re going to make up an excellent story to tell in the morning.”
He laughs.
“What kind of story?”
“Well, we know what Shelbie’s party is like. And we have a pretty clear idea of what Ryan is up to. So we just have to top those. We can vouch for each other.”
He shoots me a skeptical glance, but I can see he’s considering it.
“All right,” he says. “Fuck it. At this point I’d do just about anything to avoid further humiliation.”
“We need to come up with a scenario that is basically their dream, and then fill in the details,” I say. “Like Lehna loves her San Francisco connections. She’s into the status of it, the fact that Shelbie lives in a Victorian near Dolores Park. That she goes to a private school and spends the summer in France. Like somehow Lehna is more sophisticated by association. So we should make it about something superclassy. Like a party in a mansion in Pacific Heights.”
“Wow.” Mark laughs. “We’re really going for this. Okay, let me think.”
We stand up and make our way past the dark touristy restaurants and the souvenir kiosks, their metal roller doors pulled down for the night.
“Ryan really likes art,” Mark says. And even though he should be pissed off, he sounds so earnest, like he’s just telling me about this boy he loves instead of planning a lie that will make him jealous. “I mean, The Arts. So if this party were to include, like, artists and writers and people like that, he’d probably feel like he missed out.”
“Perfect. So we went to a Pride party in a mansion owned by a couple of superrich, artistic guys. And they had a foyer full of sculptures that were so obscure they were almost impossible to look at. But then the sculptor himself was a guest at the party and he explained them all to us and now we understand everything there is to understand about art.”
In all the minutes we’ve been here, there hasn’t been a trace of any other person. I’m beginning to wonder if Violet even made it here. Maybe she got sidetracked by a better plan, or went to see the sea lions at a different pier even though this is the one famous for them.
And then Mark says, “Oh, fuck.”
“What?”
He’s stopped walking, is looking at something on a bench where the pier ends and the sidewalk begins.
It looks like a flower.
Slowly, we approach it, side by side.
A rose.
Of course.
Bright red. Like the circus tent in the photograph, like the lipstick I was told to reapply for her. I reach carefully and pick it up between two fingers. She removed all the thorns. I could hold it tight in my fist if I wanted to.
“What does it mean?” I whisper. “That she would leave it here? Was she throwing it away?”
“She might have been,” Mark whispers back. “But maybe not. Maybe it was an act of hope, like when you make a wish, send it out into the world.”
“You hope it finds its way back to you,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“If she wanted to throw it away, she would have put it in the trash or dropped it on the ground, not set it here where it wouldn’t get stepped on.”