Those Girls (6 page)

T
he day after Veronica’s party, I woke up on the couch in my basement at five
AM
with no recollection of how I’d gotten there. Eyes stinging and head pounding. I barely even remembered the goddamn party.

We met at Eddie’s Diner to recap the evening like we usually did. Whether it was noon on a Sunday or four
AM
on a Tuesday, there were always people at Eddie’s, and the menu was always the same. Typical diner, with white linoleum counters and red vinyl booths, covered in a light film, and reeking of fried trash—the crust on the ketchup squeeze bottles had likely been congealing since the early seventies. Alex picked me up and on the way she assured me that no one, including her, had witnessed the scene I’d made and that Veronica had been drunker than I was, which was a relief, but not altogether soothing.

We sat at our usual booth in the corner. I refrained from offering any information first, as at that point who said what to whom when and in what humor was slightly questionable. I remembered saying some shit to V in regard to the Sam thing, but I didn’t remember exactly what I said, nor did I remember
if I’d said these things in a jovial manner or if we’d actually had some sort of altercation that I’d need to apologize for. V arrived late, and seemingly not totally pissed at me, so clearly she’d accepted my drunken venom as a joke, which was a relief. Alex complained about her hangover. Everything appeared to be business as usual.

“So what happened to you?” Veronica asked. “When did you leave?”

“Josh said you passed out in the car when he drove you home. He had to carry you inside,” Alex said.

So that’s how I’d ended up on the couch.…

“I’m such a fucking mess,” I said.

“Please!” Veronica exclaimed, still staring intently at the massive menu. “Don’t even talk to me. I’m pretty sure everyone in the greater Philadelphia area now has pictures of my naked breasts.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that was photographed last night that the greater Philadelphia area and most of Europe hasn’t seen before.” Alex snickered.

“P.S.”—Veronica coughed—“I’m sorry if I had a hand in your fight with Sam.” She looked down at her lap. “I was really drunk.”

“Yeah, we all were,” I added, deciding that I needed to stop talking about this fucking party or I was going to become madder than I felt well enough to deal with.

“You and Sam will work it out,” Alex said. “You always do.”

“Yeah, I’m not that worried. Sam’s an asshole. Veronica’s a slut. Same old shit.”

“Ha. Ha. Screw you, guys,” Veronica said, still looking at her lap and rolling her eyes.

I sometimes wondered how she was able to brush off the jabs we all made at her. I guess it was because we never accused her of anything that wasn’t true: we never called her anything she didn’t seem to go out of her way to be called.

In sixth grade, some eighth graders on the field hockey team told me that my voice was so low, I sounded like a man, and they started calling me Manly Finn—I pretended I didn’t care, that I thought it was funny.

One day, one of the girls told me to call the coach and pretend to be her dad to get her out of practice. She had me repeat things after her. Everyone cackled away, and I giggled along like I wasn’t totally embarrassed that my natural, god-given, eleven-year-old voice happened to sound like Kermit the Frog after smoking six packs of Newports.

And then one day out of the blue, mid-“Manly, say…” bash session, Veronica, right to the eighth graders, no fear, no remorse, no sense of the backlash she’d receive, said, “I think her voice is sexy and you guys are just jealous.” Just like that. Right to their faces. They were so awestruck that from then on they left me alone and started calling her Ballsy Collins, and no one ever called me Manly again.

The waitress brought our food, which distracted us for a few minutes. She glared at us through teal eyeliner and told us to enjoy. Veronica asked for a side of bacon. Alex asked for more soda. I wondered exactly how much this poor woman hated her life.

“Can we talk about Alex and the cute Spaniard in the band?” V asked, alarmingly spritely for being as hungover as she claimed she should be. She’d showered and was in some sparkly, off-the-shoulder monstrosity. She’d even put fucking earrings on. Fucking Veronica, god forbid she leave the house without fucking earrings.

“No, we can’t,” snapped Alex over her omelet.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I forgot to ask.” I’d barely even asked Alex about anything band-related since she’d joined. I kept forgetting to take it seriously in the hopes that she’d realize she’d been joking all along.

“It’s not a big deal.”

“So, did you hook up with Fernando?” V asked.

“No!”

I loved Alex’s fake shock and awe, like the fact that she could have made out with someone was such a preposterous notion. Even though it kind of was, but that was no one’s fault but hers.

“You say no like you weren’t cooing and giggling together all night,” said Veronica.

“We’re just friends. Some of us don’t have to make out with every able-bodied guy in the tristate area.”

V rolled her eyes. “Well, you guys looked cute together.”

“Yeah, right.” Alex’s eyes stayed focused on her limp eggs. She jabbed the corner of her buttered toast into the side of her thin mouth and said, “Let’s talk about how Veronica made out with Drew.”

I gasped.

“Are you serious?” I directed my question to Alex, not Veronica.

“I am,” she replied, with wide-enough eyes to let me know that despite whatever words she was about to spew, she was not happy.

Veronica, however, was smiling again, happy to have all the attention shining back on her. “He’s, like, the sweetest guy. We talked a lot at the party. It wasn’t really a
make-out
, just kind of a peck as I was going upstairs to get something. It was sweet.”

I looked at Alex, confused. She clicked her tongue and nodded.

“So are you guys going to be, like, a thing?” I asked.

Alex stared painstakingly at the eggs and twirled her dark, unwashed hair.

“I don’t know!” Veronica replied. “He said he’d call me, that we should do something this week. So I don’t know. Just something new and fun and exciting, I guess!”

Was this yet another matter of importance in Alex’s life that she hadn’t discussed with me? If she hadn’t, it was possibly because she knew my position on the Alex-and-Drew-ongoing-saga-of-self-indulgent-ridiculousness. It was obvious how she felt, obvious that Veronica was way out of his league—she just needed to nut up and tell him she wanted to date, because in the end, they weren’t dating, so when he wanted to go make out with Veronica, she had no right to care, because she could have told him how she felt and given herself that right, but she didn’t. Unlike me, who actually has the actual right to be
actually pissed off when my actual boyfriend feels up my fucking gutter slut of a friend.

“Lex, did he say anything to you when he drove you home?” V asked.

“No, we didn’t talk about it. I didn’t ask and didn’t want to make it seem like you ran right over to me and told me about it after it happened. I’ll let you guys be adults and handle your own relationship.”

“You’re the best,” Veronica replied, and returned to chomping contentedly on her bacon.

Alex reverted to her signature mess-making napkin tearing, and we all focused on our food. I had asked for no cheese in my omelet, but of course no one at Eddie’s speaks English and I was lucky I even got an egg-based dish at all. I tried to pick out the vegetables and just eat those, because Sam never treated me this way when I was thinner.

“So did you and Sam make up?” Alex asked after a soothing period of silence.

“I haven’t called him back yet.” Which reminded me to look at my phone and see if he’d called. He hadn’t.

Veronica coughed. “Oh god, I hope I’m not coming down with something,” she said.

I snorted and said, “Guess it’d be a tall order to track down who you caught it from.”

We all laughed. Everyone loves a slutty Veronica joke.

ALEX WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET
on our ride home. She was fixated on the windshield, sucking back Marlboro Lights
and flicking them into oncoming traffic. She wasn’t even fussing with the radio. And though those hazel eyes that turned yellow when she was hungover or crying or really tired appeared focused, I knew there was a shitstorm brewing behind them. Her anxiety was palpable, and I wanted to be in on her plan, as I was sure she must have one. As I would if my Drew was banging Veronica. And my own anxiety about what exactly had gone down the night before was becoming unbearable. Sam still hadn’t called.

“So.” I had to break her focused silence. I was about to have a heart attack. “Tell me how you really feel about Drew and Veronica.”

She paused, took a long breath, and shrugged.

“It’s pretty annoying.” She sighed.

“Why don’t you just tell her that you’re not okay with it? She’s such a fucking whore, it’s getting pathetic. You know that Drew’s just going to use her up and throw her out like the tampon she is.”

“Because”—she shrugged again—“I am. It’s fine. I have no claim to Drew.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said as I plucked a cigarette from her center console. “You and Drew have a thing. Whatever that thing is, it’s still your thing, and Veronica should check her ho card at the door for one goddamn minute. She’s supposed to be your friend.”

“Maybe I should just tell everyone that she’s got herpes, like you did freshman year so Sam wouldn’t date her.”

“Oh my god, I told
one
person she
may
have had a questionable cold sore….”

“On her vagina…” Alex laughed. It felt really good to make Alex laugh. Sometimes I felt like she didn’t think I was as funny as she used to.

“Anyway,” she said between chuckles and Marlboro puffs, “I really don’t care. It’s just annoying that Veronica has to molest every guy in town. Can’t she just hang out with guys? Is she capable of having, like, a male friend? It’s not that I’m jealous. It’s more like…”

“That you’re totally jealous! Because how can Drew be your pretend boyfriend if he’s Veronica’s real one?”

She tensed up in the driver’s seat and turned up the radio. Some rapper’s voice I didn’t recognize that sounded tinny and far away through her tape deck from the nineties. I turned it back down.

“What about this band guy?” I asked, trying to change the subject, trying to make her realize that she was a hot commodity and could use that to her advantage.

“Fernando?”

“Oh my god, his name is really Fernando?” I regretted it as soon as I said it. I’d forgotten I was trying to be supportive.

She rolled her eyes. “He’s cute. He’s flirtatious, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a cultural thing. Latin American guys are just like that.”

“Oh, really? And how many Latin American guys do you know in Greencliff? Have you been engaging in romantic trysts with José the gardener that I don’t know about?”

She laughed again. “You’re such a bitch.”

“It’s why you love me.”

We pulled into my driveway, and Alex shifted her car into park. I sat there, glaring at the ivy slowly swallowing my big white house, dreading having to deal with Sam. Deal with my parents. Deal.

“Wanna hang out and watch something terrible on TV?”

“I can’t,” she replied, shaking her head, green and yellow still bubbling in her eyes, which were still fixed on something past the windshield. “I have band practice.”

I laughed. “Christ.”

“I’ll call you after,” she said as I got out of the car.

“Yes, please do. And go for it with this Fernando! What do you have to lose?”

“My pride.”

“Overrated.”

She pulled away, and as I walked toward my front door, I decided that I couldn’t handle seeing or talking to my parents, so I walked around the back to get in through the basement. I swung open the wooden gate, then walked across the patio and down the brick steps to the pool.

Josh must have carried me all this way last night.

He probably had to open the gate with one hand, haul me down the steps, slide the glass doors open, and lay me on the couch. I wondered how he carried me and how heavy I must have been. Over his shoulder? Or over both arms, like a fireman? God, and I hadn’t even called him yet to say thank you. He could have just left me in a pile on the front lawn. That’s probably what Sam would have done, if he’d cared enough to bring me home at all.

I wondered why Josh didn’t call Alex and tell her to deal with me, but I’m sure he didn’t hate the idea of having a moment alone with me while I was vulnerable and unconscious. After a wave of flattery, I had a sudden wave of creeped out, thinking about what could have potentially happened between a catatonic me and a kid who kept pictures of me in his drawer. I was fully dressed when I woke up on the couch. There was no way. It was Josh Holbrook—only creepos like Sam and the twisted bitches who date them have these kinds of thoughts.

As I walked toward the basement, I saw Sam standing there, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and his clothes from the night before.

“What are you doing here?” My heart throbbed and my headache returned. I hadn’t even settled on how I was going to handle a phone call; I was by no means prepared for the in-person ambush.

“I wanted to make sure you got home.”

I stood about a foot from him. I wouldn’t go any closer until I figured out who was really at fault for the debacle of the night before.

“Come here,” he said. “Give me a hug, you crazy drunken psycho.”

I approached him and let him hug me but left my arms limp. He smelled of stale beer and cigarettes and outside and something else. I was still confused. Still angry. And now sad for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Thoughts, memories, and feelings were all crossing wires. I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. With Sam.

“What the fuck happened?” I said as I pulled out of his grip. “Josh Holbrook drove me home? You just let some kid take me home while you stayed at the party?”

“Babe, you were screaming like a crazy person! I didn’t know what to do with you. Josh offered to take you home. You seemed okay with going with him. Are you telling me you’re mad at me for this? I called to see that you were okay. You didn’t pick up. I figured you were passed out, so I stayed at the party and had a few more drinks with the guys. You are not allowed to be mad at me when you’re the one who went psycho.”