Chapter 5

5

An hour later, we’re shivering in front of the cottage, waiting for the shuttle to take us into town.

“Let’s just go back inside,” I say. “It’s taking forever.”

“I never used to get cold,” Naomi says, ignoring me. “I used to be out in the middle of winter in fishnets and a leather jacket and I was fine .”

“You weren’t fine. You were drunk.”

“Offensive,” she says.

“Where is this shuttle? They said five minutes, and it’s been twelve minutes. No. Thirteen minutes.”

“Impatient,” she says. “It’ll get here. And it’s such a beautiful night. Look at the lake! The moon!”

“I can’t feel my toes.”

“When they thaw, you’ll appreciate them like you never have before.”

“I appreciate my toes all the time.”

She’s skeptical. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed.

“What? I do,” I say, though I can’t remember the last time I thought about my toes. “I should’ve kept my car.”

“If you drove, you couldn’t drink. This is better. Ah! That’s it,” she says, pointing to a white van bumbling toward us.

“Or we’re about to get kidnapped.”

“Relax. There’s resort branding on it.”

“Maybe that’s part of the ruse.”

“It’d be a good ruse,” she says as the van pulls up. The door slides open, and the driver greets us. I’m relieved that he appears to be in his sixties and that the entire resort isn’t staffed by college kids.

“Hello! Good evening! Heading into town?”

“Yes, thank you, Todd,” Naomi says, climbing into the van. Either he was her driver earlier or she’s spotted a name tag that I can’t see. Or she’s intuited his name through psychic clues, mind reading. Or his name isn’t Todd, and she’s testing to see if he’ll correct her. Hard to say.

“Any destination in particular, or…?” He’s got a thick Midwestern accent and it endears him to me.

“Anywhere on Main Street,” I say, getting in and scooching onto the seat beside Naomi. I press my hands to the heating vent. The door closes automatically, making a horrible whirring sound.

“How’s your night so far?” Naomi asks him.

“It’s good, thank you. Would you like some music?” he asks.

“Yeah, okay,” I say. “Sure.”

He presses a button, and a second later, it’s “Everyday” by Buddy Holly.

“I was just thinking about Buddy Holly,” I say.

“No, you weren’t,” Naomi says. “You were thinking about death.”

My mouth falls open as I eject a strange noise.

“What?” Naomi asks. “Am I wrong?”

I always forget how well she knows me—better than I know myself. It’s saved me in the past, her intimate knowledge of my heart, my mind. I’ve used it for clarity, for comfort. But sometimes this knowledge feels invasive, unwelcome. Sometimes it terrifies me.

She makes eye contact with Todd in the rearview mirror. “We’re very pretty but very grim.”

“Hmm?” he says, as if he hasn’t been listening.

The drive to Main Street is short, only a few minutes. We pull up to the curb in front of one of the shops.

“This okay, girls?” Todd asks.

“Perfect,” Naomi says sunnily.

The door opens, and I’m about to step out when Todd says, “Now, you give me a call when you’re ready to go back, and I’ll pick you up. As long as it’s before one a.m. You have the number?”

“Think so,” I say.

“Good. Be smart, girls. Be safe.”

“We will. Thank you, Todd,” Naomi says, following me out of the van. The door shuts and he’s off down Main Street. She turns to me. “Why the face?”

“I don’t like ‘ma’am’ or ‘lady,’ but somehow ‘girl’ is worse.”

“What would you prefer, Goldilocks?” she asks, patting me on the head. “What would be juuusssst right?”

“I don’t know,” I say, shaking her off. “I don’t know.”

“God,” she says, looking around. “What a sweet little American town. Smells like apple pie and willful ignorance.”

She threads her arm through mine. “You hungry? You want to eat now, or you want to shop?”

“If by ‘shop’ you mean go into every store and not buy anything , then shop.”

“Done!” she says, pivoting on her heel and dragging me into a small store that sells artisan soaps shaped like mythical creatures—mermaids and unicorns and fairies. The prettiest of fictions.

—

After exploring every shop on Main Street, we get a tiny booth at the Pharmacy—the only bar in town. It’s eccentric but sophisticated. Exposed brick; built-in bookcases brimming with tchotchkes, like rusty funnels, apothecary bottles, antique syringes, crystal skulls, plaster molds of teeth, and fraying books. There’s a fireplace, inside it a neon sign made to look like a fire, glowing red and orange and yellow.

The ceiling is distressed tin. The lighting fixtures are all art deco with bulbs emitting a dim purple hue. The drinks are expensive, and the food is outrageous.

Naomi and I split some truffle fries as we sip our first cocktails of the evening. I ordered a Negroni; she got something called Soylent Green.

“What’s in that, again?” I ask, pointing to her glass.

“Very funny.”

“No, really. I’m asking.”

“Gin with cucumber, mint, and lime.” She slides the glass across the table. It’s a beaker, actually. They serve their drinks in beakers, shots in test tubes.

I take a little sip. “Mm, mm. People-y.”

She laughs, taking her drink back. She looks at me for a moment, and I can almost hear her wheels turning over the music in the bar, some mellow indie rock playlist. She’s analyzing me, and under her keen gaze I’m at once both desperate to know what she’s thinking and filled with such dread that I might prefer to stay ignorant.

She parts her glossy lips but, whatever she’s about to say, she’s interrupted by “Kitchen Floor,” Data Ave’s big hit.

Naomi downs her drink. “I can’t escape.”

She signals the waiter and orders two shots of vodka and a tonic with lime.

“I don’t do shots anymore,” I tell her.

“Good, ’cause they’re both for me. Don’t give me that look—you know I’m a lush.”

“I can ask them to change the song.”

“Fuck the song.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?” she asks, looking over her shoulder for the waiter. For her shots.

“Why don’t you tell me about Europe? Let me live vicariously through you. Please.”

“You should have come with me.”

“I have a job.”

“It’s remote.”

“I have a house. I have…It’s…” It’s too difficult to explain logistics to a free spirit. “Come on. Don’t make me beg.”

“That’s what he said.” She winks at me, and I roll my eyes.

Her shots arrive, she takes them in quick succession, and then she tells me her stories, slurring through tall tales of tour adventures. Outsmarting a pickpocket in Berlin. Befriending an Italian heiress in Rome, getting invited to her villa somewhere on the Amalfi Coast. Drinking the best wine she’s ever tasted with a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, passing around rare artifacts from the ruins of Pompeii stolen from an archaeological dig and kept in a private collection. Drinking gin and tonic out of cans in the shadow of the Tower of London, communing with the spirit of Anne Boleyn.

At some point, she goes up to the bar for another drink, leaving me alone at the table to pick at soggy calamari and the undesirable remains of charcuterie. Tiny sour pickles and colorful stinky cheese and mounds of congealed mustard. She was the one who ordered it, but she hasn’t eaten much; frankly, I don’t know how she’s still standing. Her tolerance to alcohol has always been much higher than mine; she’s a born party girl.

She’s made a friend. Some tall, strikingly handsome stranger with curly dark hair and tattoos, dressed like a hipster pirate. He appears somehow completely out of place but also like he’s part of the decor, like the bar is his home and he can never leave. There’s a weird aura about him.

Naomi’s into it.

I anticipate her returning to the table, but minutes pass. Half an hour. She hasn’t looked back once, hasn’t taken her eyes off the stranger. She’s had another shot and another drink, maybe a tonic. I’m keeping tally on a napkin. What else do I have to do?

Focusing on Naomi, I’ve lost count of my own drinks, which is unlike me. Is this my second or third? Maybe third?

It must be because I think I’m imagining things. Because I think someone’s staring at me. In the corner, a man whose face is half concealed in shadow, half washed out by a red neon sign. He leans back against the wall, but his shoulders hunch forward, his head angled down. His hair, almost as long as mine, hangs over his eyes. Something about him is familiar but I can’t place him. Maybe if he were closer…

There’s a prickly heat rising from somewhere inside me. Exhilarating. Uncomfortable. What if he comes over here?

Someone breaks a glass, the sound shattering the delusion I have about the man in the corner. He’s not looking at me. No one’s hit on me in a bar in years, and that’s not going to change tonight. I take another sip of my drink, finish it off. I pull out my phone and text Joel, wait for him to respond. Wait for Naomi to come back.

This whole thing isn’t a new experience. Naomi’s been abandoning me to flirt since we were fourteen. The night she and I solidified our relationship, went from classmates to actual friends, we were attending Meghan Fitzpatrick’s birthday party. We’d gone to the movies to see some forgettable rom-com and then migrated to the mall. Everyone split off into groups, and somehow Naomi and I ended up in the food court, just the two of us, licking cinnamon sugar from a shared Auntie Anne’s pretzel off our fingers.

“What kind of music do you listen to?” she asked me. I’m sure we’d spoken before then, at school or in dance class, or at some other mutual friend’s birthday party, but this is the first time I remember.

“Why?” I was being defensive—a strategic choice. She was the coolest girl in school; I was desperate to be her friend, but I didn’t want her to know that.

“Sorry, what?”

“Why do you want to know? So you can judge me?”

She started to laugh. She has the most delicious laugh; I had to bite my lip not to smile, to maintain my stone-cold fa?ade. “I mean, obviously.”

“What do you think I listen to?”

“I think you listen to Fiona Apple.”

She was right. I did. Still do. “Okay. What else?”

“The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.”

Right again. “Okay, and…?”

“The Strokes,” she said, and sipped her soda. “And then, like, Billie Holiday. On vinyl.”

“Okay, fine, you have me all figured out. Congratulations.”

She laughed again, snorting root beer through her nose. She wiped her face with a napkin, then started pressing those little buttons on the plastic lid of her cup, fidgeting with the straw. “So. Who’s judging who here?”

I looked at her, lowering my eyebrows, inquiring.

“You thought I was going to judge you, but you judge me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do! You’ve been judging me this whole time. You assumed I asked you about music so I could, like, figure out if you were cool. Like I’m some total uppity hipster bitch. But I was only asking because I already think you’re cool and was genuinely curious.”

I was taken aback. She was right again. And— and —she thought I was cool. Naomi Rowe thought I was cool. She wore Doc Martens to gym class and didn’t even get in trouble, because she was a track star and won a bunch of medals and could do whatever she wanted. She’d hang out with Coach Laura on the bleachers while the rest of us did jumping jacks. Everyone had a crush on her. She got straight As. Never had an awkward phase. Perfect teeth without orthodontic interference, flawless skin without ever agonizing over benzoyl peroxide or salicylic acid. She always showed up to school in some inspired mix of thrift-store finds and designer labels under her varsity jacket, inspiring trends throughout the halls.

“To be fair,” she said, filling the silence, “I can be a total uppity hipster bitch.”

“I guess me, too.”

“Want to go try on ugly dresses?”

“Yeah, okay.”

She took my hand and dragged me to JCPenney, where we picked out horrible mother-of-the-bride-type gowns for each other. We paraded in and out of the dressing rooms giggling like lunatics.

Afterward, we went back to the food court to meet up with the rest of the girls and wait for Meghan’s mom to pick us up. But the girls weren’t back yet, so it was still just us. That was when we discovered that we both have dream malls. We were describing our respective malls and splitting a milkshake when this boy approached us. Approached Naomi. Some cute skater kid who was old enough to drive. They flirted for a while; then he offered Naomi a ride, and I watched her toy with the idea of taking it. I think she would have had the other girls not shown up a few minutes later, Meghan in her garish pink birthday dress, her braces gleaming under ruthless fluorescent lights.

“Sorry,” Naomi told the boy. “Not tonight.”

She gave him her number, then took my hand again as all of us headed out to the parking lot to pile into Meghan’s mom’s minivan.

“It was a fake number,” she whispered in my ear as we sat smooshed in the back seat.

“Really? I thought it was true love.”

She laughed, squeezed my hand, and said, “I think this is. I think I love you .”

I dropped all my defenses, the fa?ade. “I think I love you, too.”