Chapter Three

three

“I swear on my life. U.S. History with Miss Carlisle.”

Ellie props up her elbows on the edge of the bar, chewing tiny zigzag patterns into the end of her cocktail straw. For efficiency’s sake, we traded our table to a couple of townies for a pair of seats at the bar. We’ve already doubled Ellie’s initial offer for just one more drink since then, and she’s spent the better part of an hour proving her memory of high school, specifically what classes we had together, is far superior to mine. So far, we’ve confirmed we had art and one semester of gym together. History, however, is currently up for debate.

“I know I had Miss Carlisle. She had the…” I draw invisible vertical lines on my forehead with four fingers.

“Stringy bangs,” Ellie translates, tucking her own hair behind one ear. A gold turtle-shaped stud sparkles back at me.

“Right. Who else was in that class? Mostly people in your grade, right?”

Ellie uses her fingers to count out our classmates, starting with her thumb, but each name is a complete blank for me. “Zack McMillan? C’mon, you remember Zack McMillan.”

I shake my head.

“Come. On. Zack McMillan, the football player? He just got married to that girl from the volleyball team.” She wiggles her phone out of the back pocket of her corduroys, blue fingernails flying across the screen until we’re both looking at a picture of a girl in a poofy white princess dress, standing next to a familiar-looking man who is presumably her husband. “You didn’t see this?”

“Wait, that’s Isha…something. It starts with a B ?” I snap my fingers over and over, trying to summon the name. “Her mom is a regular at Sip. Bowman?”

“Burman,” Ellie corrects me, pulling up Isha’s profile and swiping to her content. “Do you not follow her? She was in your grade.”

“I’m only really on social media for work,” I admit.

Ellie raises her eyebrows without taking her eyes off her phone. “Seriously?”

“I run the accounts for Sip. You know, the coffee shop? When half your job is creating content and responding to comments, it kind of takes the fun out of it.”

“Wow, they had a baby already!” She holds her phone out again, showing off the same vaguely familiar couple, each of them kissing the cheek of their new mini-me. “I didn’t even know Isha was pregnant.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I say with a shrug. “Isha’s mom never shut up about wanting to be a grandma.”

Ellie’s nose scrunches. “I didn’t realize you two were best friends.”

“Did you ever go to the original Sip?” I ask. “The seating area was really small. I have zero clue why people thought it was such a good place for private conversations. I could run a tabloid with all the gossip I’ve heard over the years.”

“Oh yeah?” Ellie ditches her phone on the bar top and leans in, intrigued. “How long have you worked there?”

“I started when I was sixteen,” I say. “So, what, five years?” Hearing myself say it out loud feels like a sucker punch. Five whole years perched just above minimum wage. At least taking on marketing has been a bit of an upgrade. “The renovations are really cool. You should come to the reopening this Friday.”

“Hmm, maybe.” Ellie taps one chipped blue fingernail against her lower lip and stares up at the ceiling. “Depends. Is the new space bigger? Or are you going to eavesdrop on all my conversations too?”

“It’s way more spaced out,” I promise. “So as long as you’re not publicly breaking up or making out with someone, you’ll be okay.”

Ellie smiles, but it’s a sadder, softer smile than I’ve seen from her so far. “I’m fresh off a breakup, actually.” She punctuates the news with a hefty gulp of her drink. “So I think we’re safe on both of those fronts.”

If I could swallow my tongue, I would. Way to bring the vibes down, Murph. I rack my brain for something witty or encouraging to say in response, but all that tumbles out is, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not as sorry as me.” Ellie dodges my gaze, a soft pink shading in the skin around her freckles. “Or my family. I think they were really counting on me marrying a business major.”

“Were you engaged?”

She shakes her head, gathers up all of her hair like she’s going to put it in a ponytail, then drops it again. It’s barely long enough to drape over her shoulders. “We weren’t, but maybe someday? Probably. Not anymore, obviously.”

Thus begins my campaign for Biggest Asshole of the Night. Poor Ellie tried to save my evening, and now I’m turning hers into a major downer. “Well, that’s the business major’s loss,” I say, lifting my cup in the air. “Because you’ve really glowed up since high school.”

Her laugh stays trapped behind closed lips, but those lips quirk back up to a smile, and I like knowing I’m responsible for it. “Is it bad if I say you look exactly the same?”

“Sort of. But I deserve it.” I let the ice hit my teeth as I down the last of my drink. She’s right. I dabbled in box dye a few times in middle school and cut my hair stereotypically short when I first came out, but once I grew out my side bangs and committed to an eyebrow shape, I was a fully evolved Murphy by age sixteen. I wave down the bartender, shaking my empty cup and holding two fingers in the air. He nods, and moments later, we have a fresh set of vodka sodas.

“Wait. I got it.” Ellie thumps her palm on the bar, spooking the couple next to her. Not that she realizes. “On Miss Carlisle’s desk. Do you remember if she usually had a Big Gulp?”

“You’re still on this?”

“Just try to remember,” she pleads. “Did she?”

I scrunch my eyes closed, catapulting myself back into what I thought was a dead conversation about a memory I smoked out. I try to place Ellie in that history classroom, picturing her face at one of the carefully arranged pods of desks. I remember the terrible blue carpet, permanently coated in eraser shavings. The big pull-down map. Miss Carlisle’s grating nasal voice and, as mentioned, her stringy bangs. And on her desk, next to a tall stack of ungraded papers…yup. A Big Gulp.

“I think so,” I finally say.

“If she did, you definitely had her sixth period with me,” Ellie says. “She’d always go to the 7-Eleven across the street during fifth-hour lunch.” She speaks so matter of factly, like she’s reading from the actual U.S. History textbook.

I open one eye, suspicious. “How do you remember that?”

“How do you forget?”

Before I can reply, a triple tap on my shoulder interrupts us. When I turn around, I’m nose to nose with one of the girls from the bathroom line, offering up her phone. “Would you mind taking a picture of us real quick?” she asks, gesturing behind her to her gaggle of gal pals.

“Yeah, no problem.” I take the phone, and she scampers back to the rest of her group, finding her place in a pose that looks too good not to have been rehearsed. One girl pinches her straw and sips her drink while another laughs out loud despite no one saying anything funny. I snap half a dozen pictures from slightly different angles before passing the phone back.

“Thanks so much,” the group’s representative says, then spots Ellie over my shoulder and wags a finger between her and me. “Do you want one of you two?”

“Sure,” Ellie says, thrusting her phone forward. “Why not?”

Our photographer steps back to set up her angles while I frantically try to remember if I’ve ever smiled for a picture without looking like a serial killer. Taking notes from the expert modeling work I just witnessed, I fake a laugh, and Ellie rests her head on my shoulder, her blonde hair falling into my face just enough to tickle my lips.

“So cute.” Our photographer returns Ellie’s phone with a smile. “Let me know if you want me to take more.”

“I’m sure these are perfect,” Ellie insists. “Thanks so much.”

As the amateur models turn their attention to another round of drinks, Ellie practically throws her phone at me. “Put your number in so I can send it to you.”

I do as I’m told, but when three new photo messages appear on my phone from an unknown number, I instantly regret agreeing to a picture in the first place. All three are nearly identical, and in all of them, I look absolutely unhinged, like I’m trying to bite off a lock of Ellie’s hair.

“We’re so cute,” she says, and suddenly I don’t care that I look like a hair-eating gremlin. Ellie thinks we’re cute. So cute, in fact, that she zooms in on the shot and sets it as my contact photo.

I cringe at the close-up. “Not my best look.”

“I like it,” Ellie says. “It’s proof that we had a fun night.”

“Did we?” I pause, weighing the events of the evening with my first and final attempt at a not-so-candid photo. “I guess we did.”

“And it’s not over,” she reminds me, double-checking the time on her phone before pocketing it. “It’s not even eleven. Want to hit one more bar?”

There’s a moment between us, a split second of stillness in an otherwise noisy crowd. For a sliver of a fraction of a second, all that’s in this bar is the squint of her eyes and the curl of her lips, and me, drinking her in, deciphering the endless parade of signals she’s been sending. All I can see are hundreds of spinning green flags.

“Sure,” I say, “let’s do it.”

She slams her cup down on the bar top definitively. “Perfect. Just lemme grab my coat and say goodbye to the art kids.”

My mental color guard momentarily trades their green flags for yellow ones, signaling for the parade to slow down. I forgot she didn’t come here alone. “You sure it’s okay to ditch your friends?”

“Generous of you to call them my friends,” she says, snorting a laugh. “We’ve barely spoken since graduation. I doubt they’ve even noticed I’ve been gone.”

“That can’t be true,” I say. Not that I have any evidence to back it up.

Ellie lets out an unimpressed puff of air. “You’d be surprised. But hey, I’ll be right back.”

We part ways momentarily, just long enough for her to find her coat and for me to close out our tab. She meets me back at the bar, dressed for the weather in a camel-colored knee-length coat and a gray Carhartt beanie that her bangs just barely poke out of.

“Ready?” I ask.

“Ready ready.” She takes a few initial steps into the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd before reaching back to grab my hand, towing me behind her as she motors through. Her head grooves to the beat of the bass as we bump and stumble past old classmates, but I’m stuck on the warmth of her palm pressed to mine. It’s easy and secure, and I almost regret how quickly we make it through the chaos. I wouldn’t mind a bar twice as crowded if it meant holding her hand twice as long.

Outside, the November air has dropped a few too many degrees. Chicagoland has officially crossed over into that chaotic time of year when any kind weather would be normal, but I would’ve preferred snow to this bitter cold. Nothing could stop the merrymaking, though, and a line has formed on the sidewalk, stretching from the front door of the bar to well past the old courthouse down the block. “Sheesh.” I crane my neck, trying to spot where the line falls off. “I’m glad I got here early.”

“So am I,” Ellie says with a wink. The second wink of the evening. One more and I might develop a complex. “Where to next?”

I scan my mental map of downtown Geneva. “Wanna check out the new wine bar on Third Street?”

“I didn’t know there was a new wine bar on Third Street,” she admits. “I’m following you.”

Past the line of shivering hopefuls, we turn down a quieter side street, where a few stragglers are tripping over drain covers while they wait for their price-surged Ubers. Compared to the madness of the bar, it feels borderline silent, and to my surprise, I don’t feel inclined to fill the quiet with small talk. When we turn onto Third Street, Ellie’s stride breaks, the tiniest gasp fogging the air around her lips. Geneva has put on its holiday best: white Christmas lights line each storefront, and a lush green wreath and glossy crimson bow hangs like a necklace around every other light post.

“I forgot how pretty Geneva is around the holidays.” Ellie tips her head back to admire the lights, which cast a twinkly glow over the apples of her cheeks. “It’s like a Christmas card or a picture book.”

“It’s definitely our best season,” I say, one of several canned responses I keep handy during holiday rushes at work.

“That’s not fair,” she pushes back. “What about fall, when they do the wine festival? Or summer? Geneva is so cute in the summer.”

I try not to visibly wince. With summer comes the swarms of middle schoolers flooding into Sip, ordering one iced vanilla latte to share and taking up an entire table for the better part of the day. “I think I’d like downtown Geneva better if I didn’t work here.”

Ellie stops for a moment, nodding as she considers me with thoughtful eyes, then makes up her mind. “ That’s your problem,” she says. “You haven’t learned the secret to loving your hometown.”

“Which is?”

“Leaving it.”

I huff a laugh. “I’m working on it.”

For the remainder of the walk, Ellie stays a few paces ahead of me, pointing out every tinsel wreath and light-up Santa in the store windows. Third Street really is enchanting; it’s just been so long since I’ve had a reason to slow down enough to notice. When we pass by Sip, Ellie smiles over her shoulder, and her eyes twinkle like Christmas lights.

“When did you say the big reopening was?”

“Friday.”

“Friday,” she repeats to herself, like she’s trying to stamp it into her memory. “I can’t wait. It’s so cool that you were a part of all this.”

Warmth flutters in my chest. I haven’t thought of my job as cool since I first got bumped from full-time barista to part-time marketing-manager-who-picks-up-barista-shifts-as-needed. When I’m not filming videos or coordinating events, I’m mostly trying to blend in with the espresso machine and avoid conversation with the new batch of sixteen-year-old baristas. But if Ellie says it’s cool, maybe it is.

“Can we look through the windows?” she asks, lacing her fingers together like she’s praying for a yes. “Is it cheating to sneak a peek before the opening?”

I shove a gloved hand into my pocket, fishing out my keys and mentally discarding my employee handbook. “Y’know, I think I can do you one better.”