The streets were filled with teenagers and other sociopaths. I was staring out the window, astonished by this. The mall was boarded up. The movie theater was shut down. The bookstore and the record store were both gone, too. I had been back in Lockport for less than twenty-four hours, and I had begun to catalog the things I was seeing. Everything was exactly the same, only completely different.
“I used to have a girlfriend who pierced ears in that mall,” I said wistfully.
“What?” my brother asked.
“Where did everything go? What are you supposed to do if you live here?”
“There was never anything to do to begin with.”
“Yeah. But now it’s so much worse.”
My brother, Peter, and I were driving down Transit, having just picked up our tuxedos for Kerry’s wedding. We were on our way to Cullen’s house, so that I could get a haircut. Kerry had warned me to deal with this before I got there, and she was less than pleased to see that I hadn’t. But the haircut was nothing. The thing she was furious about was the fact that I’d had the audacity to show up in Lockport without my date. Kerry all but accused me of trying to sabotage the wedding.
Lauren was supposed to come with me, of course. This was never not the plan. I had wanted her to come; she was excited to be here. She bought a dress and a necklace and a plane ticket. And then, all at once, everything went to shit again. I don’t really know how this happens. I told her not to come, or she was refusing to go. It didn’t really matter. The story ends the same both ways.
Peter was dateless, too, of course, which wasn’t helping anyone. The seating arrangements were wrecked. The symmetry was gone. Two dateless brothers meant that everything was fucked. There was no arguing with Kerry on this point. There was no sense in explaining how two dateless brothers had its own kind of symmetry. Peter and I had agreed to be in the wedding months ago, though we were never really given a choice. Our new brother-in-law, Greg, didn’t have much say in the matter, either. This was about what Kerry wanted. This was about the pictures and the cake. This weekend was her weekend, and everyone knew better than to cross her.
* * *
“Where is Lauren?”
People had been asking me this question for days. The truth was I didn’t really know. Lauren and I had a fight. It was several fights, really. She got angry and left the apartment. It was only after that that she told me she wasn’t coming. Or maybe I had already told her I didn’t want her there. Who could remember if it happened one way and not the other? It was just one more fight.
“Where is Lauren?”
They all kept asking this. It was not a thing I cared to discuss with them, frankly. I had thought I was making myself reasonably clear on this, but they all kept asking anyway. So I started telling them things, making it up. Dissembling on Lauren’s behalf. I was amused to find myself presenting her to the world as some kind of do-gooder.
“She’s building relief housing,” I offered soberly.
“Relief housing for what?” they’d ask.
“The hurricane,” I’d say blankly.
“Oh, wow. In New Orleans. Wow.”
But I exploited other tragedies, as well. I was just as happy to mention the tsunami. Or the earthquake. Or the typhoon. I spoke vaguely of famines and droughts and civil wars. There was always something terrible happening somewhere. A whole wide world of generalized misery. People were left stranded, and abandoned, and in need of intervention, all across the globe. In my version it was Lauren who was there to help them. She was the one who comforted and protected all these good people. She was the person who was easing their pain. She was the only one.
This was hilarious to me, of course. But how could anyone here possibly get my joke? It didn’t matter anyway. I was sure that most of them weren’t even listening. Lauren’s was just another name—like Greg’s—that they’d memorized in preparation for this happy event. I could count on two hands the number of people, in any given room, who had actually met Lauren Pinkerton or had any idea what she looked like.
“Where is Lauren?” they all asked eagerly.
“She’s around here somewhere,” I told them with a smile.
“Oh, good. I feel like I’m the last one to meet her.”
* * *
I was sitting bare-chested, in a wooden kitchen chair at Cullen’s house, as he stood over me with his clippers. “Thanks for doing this,” I said.
“Of course,” he answered, as he tilted my head to the side. There was a lit cigarette dangling off his lip. “I barely even use these things anymore.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mostly basically use them for one thing.”
“Right,” I said.
“To get rid of excess hair.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, not flinching.
“To clean things up downstairs.”
I nodded.
“To shave my balls,” Cullen said, grinning flatly.
“Yeah, I know. I get it. Thanks, Cullen.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Cullen flicked the switch and the clippers went blurry in his hand. My head tingled as he touched the razor to my scalp and started carving out swaths. The hair came off in peels, fluttering down over my shoulders and onto the floor.
My brother was sitting silently in the corner, petting a fuzzy orange calico. This was Cullen’s cat. We were in Cullen’s kitchen. Cullen owned this whole house, actually. A three-bedroom foursquare, down by Outwater Park. “Sixty-eight grand,” he told me proudly, as we took the tour of the stark and empty domicile. Cullen had been working for the last three years as a certified public accountant, making a decent amount of money, clearly. Dullsville, USA, Louis called it.
Louis had his own job working as a straight-up repo man. Collections, he insisted on calling it. I was tickled by the idea of Louis driving around the city, knocking on doors, repossessing property. Gas grills and Sub-Zero refrigerators and flat-screen TVs. Anything could be put up for collateral if both parties agreed on its value. Once a debtor went into default, it was Louis’s job to get their attention. After a period of civility, there was a period of threat. And then there’s just a knock at the door. By that time, your brand-new boat has been hitched to the back of a truck. True repossession comes without warning, in the end.
The whole thing fascinated me and I pressed Louis for details. I wanted him to tell me stories. I was looking for something I could write about, something I could steal. This was the stuff of fiction, I was sure of it. But Louis failed to see the beauty in how he spent his days. It was just a job to him. If you couldn’t pay for your shit, it had to be taken away. Besides, Cullen was the one who told me that Louis spent most days sitting at a desk, talking on a telephone. He wasn’t wrong about the absence of drama.
No one in Lockport, it seemed to me, had anything at all to say about the thing they did for a living. It was just work. It never really changed, because, how could it? I mean, can you actually imagine if Cullen went through the blow-by-blow of being a certified public accountant for you? Hour-by-tedious-hour. Day-by-drudging-day. Who could even tell the weeks apart after the first one? And why would you ever need to?
* * *
Peter and I went straight from Cullen’s house to the rehearsal dinner at the Lockport Town & Country Club. Someone handed me a drink and I found myself walking a gauntlet of aunts, and great-aunts, and second cousins. These plump and smiling women, with their tinted hair, and lipstick on their teeth. They beamed at me as they stood there and stirred their martinis with polished fingers.
“What about law school?” my aunt asked me, apropos of nothing.
“Excuse me?”
“Have you ever thought about going to law school?”
“Oh. Sure,” I lied.
“Good,” she said, seeming relieved.
“You’re next, then, right?” another one chimed in.
“Next what?”
“To marry!” she cried.
“I’m only twenty-five years old,” I said, stricken by the thought. They all laughed at this, as though I’d just told a joke.
I caught my reflection in the window, looking down over the eighteenth green. I was surprised to find myself looking like a stranger. I ran my hands over my shaved head, feeling it prickle. Why had I done this to myself? I wondered. It felt like it was supposed to matter, but it didn’t. Hardly anyone seemed to notice, as they repeated the mantra of the weekend.
“Where is Lauren?”
“She’s around here somewhere,” I kept on saying now.
“Oh, good,” they all said. “We can’t wait to meet her.”
But as the previous day’s stories of Lauren Pinkerton’s relief work—in New Orleans and around the globe—began to circulate, I found people grabbing on to my elbow to repeat them back to me in earnest. This little game of telephone had taken on a life of its own. They were suddenly asking me to account for Lauren’s work in places I’d never heard of. Disasters I hadn’t thought to invent.
“She must be helping children, then, right?”
“Sometimes, yes,” I said, as I took a carrot off a silver tray. “She mostly deals with lepers, though. That’s her specialty.”
I was not trying to be an asshole, I swear. This was an act of self-preservation for me. What other choice did I have? I didn’t know the answer to the question they were asking me. Where is Lauren Pinkerton? It simply was not possible for me to open up this vein on this weekend. What was to stop me from bleeding out all over the floor? I wouldn’t know how to stop talking if I let myself start now.
Not that anyone wanted to have that conversation with me anyway. This was a party, and we were here to celebrate. All they needed was a story. So I propped Lauren up for them. I made her go down easy with a spoonful of sugar. And then I changed the subject. No one was listening anyway, I thought. We were all just making conversation.
“Where is Lauren?” they asked again.
“She didn’t want to come,” I said finally.
“Oh,” they said, letting it hang there.
“Yeah.”
* * *
The mall and the movie theater were closed. The bookstore was boarded up. The record store was shut down. But the bowling alley was alive and well. Peter and I slipped out early to go meet Louis and Cullen there.
We waited for fifteen minutes at the rental counter before wandering in and spotting them, at the scorer’s table, smoking cigarettes. Forget the fact that New York State had had a smoking ban in place for almost two and a half years. It simply was not enforced here. Worse than that, though, was the fact that my friends had brought their own balls and shoes. There was no punch line to all of this. Louis and Cullen were not being ironic. They were really here to bowl.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about any of this until Louis stepped up and rolled the first ball of the night. A dead-center smash. “Steeeeee-rike one!” Louis announced, with his arm cocked maniacally like a baseball umpire.
“Good, great, terrific,” Cullen said indifferently. And, all at once, I was happy I was here. Watching Louis and Cullen perform bowling-as-psychodrama was about as good as it got for a Friday night in Lockport. I knew enough to know that none of this was for my benefit, either. This was really just the way they acted.
Bowling itself had almost everything to do with drinking for me. I spent the first pitcher of beer just trying to work out the kinks. It was hard enough to find a ball where your fingers felt natural in the holes. Then there was the question of weight. Each next turn saw me picking out a new board on the floor to aim at. Every shot was its own surprise. The rhythm, however, was familiar. I was calling up ancient muscle memories of birthday parties, and Cub Scout meets, and snowbound Saturdays gone by. And, when all else failed, I was just whipping the damn thing as hard as I could.
Everyone’s game seemed to peak around the second pitcher of beer. This was the golden rule of bowling. The nerves had settled out and we were filled with the strange sensation that we knew what we were doing here. I forgot all about the mechanics and just started grooving the ball. When it was right, it was a thing you could feel in your fingertips. I knew each next strike the moment it left my hand. Crrrrrrrsssssshhh!
By the third game, Peter and I were done, though. We were useless. I was leaving pins all over the floor in inconceivable combinations. I would smile and slide the ball into the gutter, so that I could sit back down. “Mark it zero,” I’d announce blithely.
But Louis and Cullen were a different breed completely. Athletes. The alcohol didn’t seem to faze them. They were up there bending shots left and right, on command, well into their third pitcher of beer. I marveled, as the ball seemed to stop—spinning on its axis for a beat—before snapping forward into the pins like a rubber band. Bang! This was the stuff of magic tricks.
If anything, the beer just made them mouthier. Bowling was a game of intimidation the way that my friends played it. It was a head game; it was a war game. But there was a limit to how much they could actually talk about bowling. There was a threshold, even, in their energy for going after each other. And soon enough they started in on me. Or, more to the point, they wanted to talk about Kerry. They were baffled by the fact that they had not been invited to my sister’s wedding. They kept bringing it up throughout the night, playing scorned.
I just laughed and told them I had nothing to do with it. I told them I didn’t particularly want to go myself, but they didn’t care. Their feelings were hurt, they said. It didn’t matter that Kerry hated their guts, and had never liked them, going all the way back to grade school. Even now, as an adult, she seemed to go out of her way to be rude and unwelcoming toward them. They loved this about her, of course. Louis and Cullen felt like part of the family. They honestly thought that they deserved to be there.
But this was just another crude end-around for them to keep talking about Kerry. Objectifying my poor sister. They wanted to know why we had not thought to bring Kerry out with us on her “last night of freedom.” This is what they kept calling it.
Peter glowered as he split the uprights on his spare. My brother had lost all interest in keeping the company of Louis and Cullen, and his bowling was suffering.
“Skip the rest of my turns,” Peter said flatly, as he gathered up our pitchers and disappeared into the bar. Perfect, I thought, there goes my designated driver.
Cullen was in the middle of a confession now, anyway. This secret that he and Kerry had kept for the better part of a decade.
“Bullshit!” Louis said loudly.
“I swear to god,” Cullen answered. “When I was sixteen.”
“You fucked her?”
“I didn’t say I fucked her. I said she gave me a blow job.”
“Where?”
“On my dick.” Cullen gestured down to his crotch.
“Where on the earth, retard?”
“In the attic of Mikey’s house.” Cullen shrugged and took his turn.
“Bullshit,” Louis said again, though he was grinning wildly now. I was pretty sure that he was telling us the truth.
Cullen turned around to face me, looking suddenly concerned. “She’s not wearing white, is she?”
Louis practically fell off his chair, he was laughing so hard. “Fuck off,” I said, trying not to smile, as I sent another gutter ball hobbling off the dance floor.
* * *
Cullen had recently begun to let go of some of these secrets. He had a lot of them, too. For years Cullen didn’t have to tell us anything. He didn’t need to brag or make things up. There was nothing to be gained in that—he was getting laid like crazy. Cullen knew better than anyone not to go around spoiling young girls’ reputations. All that could come of that was drama. Besides, it’s a lot harder to fuck two best friends, at the same time, if they find out you’ve been talking about it. Or sisters, even. Sisters don’t want to have sex with the same guy. Although some do, of course. And Cullen was just as happy to keep those secrets as well.
Sadly, the time in Cullen’s life for coyness had already passed. At twenty-five years old, he was entering, irrefutably, into a period of physical decline. Frankly, I found the whole thing startling. Cullen had always been our golden boy. At sixteen he was prettier than the girls. That’s what made it so strange to see his skin go sallow and his hair fall out. He was paunchy and blotchy in ways I’d never noticed before. Cullen’s youth and vitality were fleeing him now. Unfortunately, you don’t get to skate on your reputation as a high school lady-killer when it comes to adult fucking.
Ironically, it was Louis who seemed to be coming into his own at the exact same moment. He was having more sex now than he’d ever had in his entire life. It made him jubilant to find himself coming up at the very moment that Cullen was falling down.
“Shut up and bowl,” Cullen said, trying to head him off.
But Louis found it very hard to just shut up. Unlike Cullen, he was ready to talk about his exploits at the drop of a hat. He was telling us now about some girl who had given him mono.
“It’s because of the way she kisses,” Louis said.
“How does she kiss?” I asked innocently.
“Like a whore, I’m guessing,” Cullen said, losing patience.
“Well, I mean, she’s got this really long tongue, right?” Cullen made an audible sound of disgust. “And as soon as she sticks it in my mouth, it’s practically down my throat. It’s like she can’t even help herself.”
Louis leered at Cullen as he licked his lips and wiped the sweat off his brow, before finally taking his turn. Another dead-center strike.
Cullen stood up hastily and rushed his own shot. A terrible-looking ball that was lucky to clip two pins. He whipped back around on Louis. “That’s not how you get mono, either, you know. Kissing? That’s just an old wives’ tale.”
“It’s called the kissing disease, Cullen,” Louis said pedantically. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that.”
“You don’t have mono!”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re too old.”
“Says who?”
“Says facts. Mono is for fourteen-year-old girls.”
Louis smiled. “She might actually be a teenager, now that—”
“Be serious!”
“Adults get mono all the time. Tell him, Mike.” Louis turned to me, wanting me to settle this.
“I dunno. It would be sort of unusual, I think.”
“Great. So you’re both fucking doctors now.” Louis frowned. “Fantastic.”
“You’re just out of shape, dude,” Cullen said, patting him on the shoulder. “You’re lazy. You have poor moral character. You don’t need a doctor to tell you that.”
“Shut up and bowl,” Louis said.
Cullen smiled and cleaned up his spare, which had been sitting there yawning at us. He turned back around, slapping his hands clean. “Spic-and-span,” he said.
* * *
We were at the end of our final game now. Long after Peter had returned with the extra pitchers of Genny. Cullen had a comfortable lead, and he wanted Louis to appreciate this. Louis would need three strikes in the tenth frame to win.
“Uh-oh,” Cullen said, working through the math. “Looks like you need a clean sweep, little guy.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Louis said, as he stepped up and rolled the first one without hesitation. A stone-cold strike. Louis stood there with his hand dangling over the air dryer, as he stared at Cullen, waiting for his ball to pop back up. And Cullen stared right back. My two oldest friends; these grown men who hated each other’s guts. I hadn’t had this much fun in weeks.
Louis’s second strike was a real wobbler, which he seemed to topple over with a thrust of his hips alone. This lurid gesticulation that sent the pins scattering. Louis allowed himself a cackle then, but Cullen stayed stone-faced. Staring up at the scoreboard, and double-checking his math. Always the professional accountant.
“This is only going to make it that much better when you miss the next one, Repo Man.” Cullen smiled.
Louis said nothing as he tucked the ball into his chest and made the sign of the cross, a florid gesture that was for Cullen’s benefit alone. And, with that, Louis turned on his heel and crouched down into his approach. Rearing back and letting it rip. Before the ball was even halfway down the alley, Louis turned his back to the pins. He stared at us and raised his arms over his head in a vee. Waiting for the unmistakable sound of it: Crrrrrrrsssssshhh! A dead-center strike.
I was in tears, I was laughing so hard. But Cullen was pissed off. Only then did Louis allow himself the hint of a smile. He wanted to shake hands, of course, but Cullen was already walking away. I stood up and shook Louis’s hand instead.
“Bad teams lose these games,” he said with a shrug.
* * *
It was only as we got away from the clatter of pins that I recognized the music coming from the back. Not live music, exactly, but something else. Something damaged and in-between-sounding. As we got closer I realized that the bowling alley bar had transformed itself into an after-hours karaoke club. The stage was hung with paper lanterns now. A mirror ball floated across the ceiling.
My brother took me by the elbow as I began to walk into the room. It was obvious enough that we were too drunk to drive the car home. I told him not to worry about that; I told him I would figure something out. Peter nodded dimly and disappeared.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the stage. There was a tremendously fat young woman, in a billowing polka-dot dress, singing “November Rain” with the voice of an angel. I was not expecting this at all. We stood there at the back of the room, feeling helpless. Completely transfixed by this zaftig blonde and her beautiful singing voice.
Louis leaned in and whispered, almost reverently, “God’s a real sonovabitch for giving fat girls such beautiful voices.” I turned to him with a smile and saw that he was serious. Shaking his head in astonishment. “It must be like a goddamn concert hall inside that body.”
As the song ended, Louis left us and approached the stage.
“A hundred bucks says he tells that little fatty that she’s right up his alley,” Cullen said with a sneer. And as we watched the girl lean down, we could practically read Louis’s lips. “Ugh, what an idiot,” Cullen said, leaving me there at the back of the bar.
I watched him walk past the tables strewn with blue plastic binders, to the DJ booth, where he wrote down a call number on a slip of paper, from memory. There was something perfect about this image of Cullen singing the same song, week after week. What choice did I have now but to stick around and find out what it was?
And, all at once, I was happy I was here. It felt good to be out with my friends again, my real friends. No matter how much energy I spent fighting it, I knew we were the same. And besides, I was starting to have fun here. Fuck it, I thought. There’d be plenty of time to sober up before the wedding. The only thing in the world I wanted right then was to sing a song in this ugly little room.
But before I could get my hands on the songbook, a girl reached out and grabbed my wrist. This pretty face that I was sure I’d never seen before in my life.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” I answered, cluelessly.
“I’m about to sing ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ for you.”
“For me?” I asked, almost laughing. The absurdity of this pickup line had me swooning. She must say this every single week.
The girl nodded, smiling right back like she got the joke. So, okay, sure, let’s go with this. We were two drunk strangers, encountering each other beyond the point of inhibition. It was all pretty simple, really. Clearly we were biding our time before we slipped into a back booth, or a bathroom stall, and started making out sloppily.
“That’s so funny,” I said, grinning stupidly. “Because I was just about to go sing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ for you.”
“Oh, wow,” she said, laughing. “What a coincidence.” And for the first time all week I didn’t miss Lauren Pinkerton at all. I was glad she hadn’t come with me.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Anything,” she answered.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“What’s going on tomorrow?”
“I need a date for a wedding.”
“Oh, yeah?” she smirked. “Who’s getting married? You and me?”
“No. My sister,” I said simply.
“Oh, good. I was hoping I would get to meet your family soon.”
“Perfect, then. It’s settled.” We were both laughing now, having fun with this game. We wanted to see who would blink first.
“There’s one condition, though.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“You have to pretend that your name is Lauren.”
“My name is Lauren? At the wedding?”
“Yes. Tomorrow your name is Lauren Pinkerton.”
“Okay.” She nodded, taking it all in stride. This girl didn’t seem to know how to flinch. And for the first time since I met her five minutes before, I understood that she was really going to come with me to my sister’s wedding.
“But you can’t break character.”
“I’m Lauren Pinkerton,” she said, seeming to enjoy the name.
“Not under any circumstances,” I said, trying to convey my seriousness.
“Right,” she answered, and I could tell that she was serious, too. She was calling my bluff now. This was a bet we were making, and it was clear that she intended to win.
“It’s really important, Lauren.”
“I understand completely.”
“You don’t have to worry, though. It’s just a bunch of aunts and uncles who are going to be asking for you. I already know for a fact that they’re going to love you. And besides, they’re all going to be drunk tomorrow anyway.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m going to be drunk, too.”
“Honestly, you can say whatever you want. Tell them stories. Make things up. Just make sure that you’re charming.”
“I can do that,” she said.
“You have to be sweet to my grandmother, though. That’s the second rule.”
“Oh, yeah? Grandma’s gonna be there?”
“Yeah, but it’s no joke. You have to be nice to her. You have to make her love you.”
“I understand completely,” Lauren said, clearly understanding nothing.
“She’s eighty-five years old. She’s not gonna get many more of these things. Okay? You can’t fuck this up for her.”
“I love old people,” Lauren said, laughing blithely.
“If you do anything to upset her I’ll have to kill you,” I said, laughing without her.
“What?” she asked, not sure that she’d heard me.
“I said, if you upset my grandmother at the wedding I’ll have to murder you.” I was leaning in to be heard over the din of the karaoke. “Just so you know. It’s that important to me.”
I watched her face go slack. I could practically hear the record skipping in her brain. I knew I’d gone and spoiled the whole thing.
“What did you just say?” she asked unkindly.
“Which part?” I said stupidly. I was holding on to my smile. I’d meant it all as a joke, of course. Or did I? As I watched her face darken now, I wondered where I’d ended up. I wasn’t really going to take this stranger to my sister’s wedding. Or, at least, I didn’t think I was. This girl was a sure thing. I just wanted us to sing our songs and go back home to her place.
“I just called Mom,” my brother said, appearing at my side.
“Okay,” I answered, not understanding this.
“She’s on her way,” he said blankly. “She’s coming to pick us up.”
I turned to Lauren as I answered him. “I don’t think I’m coming home.”
“Yes, you are,” she said with a scowl. And with that she walked away, leaving Peter and me standing in the dark. My brother didn’t say a word, staring down at the thin red carpet. There was a kindness in his silence now, I knew. I could hear Louis’s voice coming through the speakers as he took the microphone off the stand. And, all at once, I knew that it was time for me to go. There was no sense in even saying goodbye.
* * *
As we left the bowling alley I chastised Peter for waking up our mother. “Why would you do that?”
“She told me to. She doesn’t want us driving drunk.”
“Nobody’s drunk,” I said, stumbling through the doors and out into the parking lot. We sat down on a warped metal bike rack and waited in silence. We stopped speaking entirely then, as we stared out into the distance. I knew that Peter was not going to mention the ugly incident with the girl inside the bar, and I loved him for that.
We eased ourselves up off the rack as my mother’s minivan came into view. But, as it pulled into the parking lot, it was Kerry who was sitting there behind the wheel. We stood on the sidewalk, frozen, as she circled the island of parked cars to pick us up.
“I thought you said you called Mom,” I whispered harshly.
“I did.”
“Jesus. Fine. Just try not to sound drunk.”
“I’m not even going to speak,” he said solemnly.
I nodded as the minivan slowed to a stop in front of us. Peter slid into the backseat silently, leaving me to sit up front with Kerry.
“Hey,” I said, cautiously.
“Hey,” she answered.
“Sorry to make you pick us up.”
“It’s fine. I wanted to come,” Kerry said. “I had to get out of the house anyway. Mom won’t stop circling me. She keeps thinking of one more thing we need to do.”
I nodded. Even Kerry, it seemed, had a threshold for the ritual of marriage. All these ancient sacraments, passed down through the glossy pages of bridal magazines. In the end, she found herself locked up in my parents’ house on the night before her wedding, like some strange courtesan.
“I’m just ready to be done with it now, you know? I’m just ready to be married and living in my own house with Greg.”
“Right,” I said.
Kerry looked at me with a sideways glance that was impossible to read. I had been watching these gears turn my entire life. Kerry’s gaze had always possessed the uncanny combination of the mean and the well-meaning, and I braced myself for impact.
“It’s not really what I had in mind, you know. Your hair,” she said, smirking.
“Right,” I said, touching my head reflexively. I’d almost forgotten I’d done this.
“This is because of Lauren, isn’t it?”
“What?” I said, taken aback.
“This dramatic gesture,” she said, smiling. “All I ever asked was that you cut the hair out of your eyes. You didn’t have to go all Full Metal Jacket on us.”
“I didn’t,” I said defiantly.
Kerry sighed and shook her head. “Your problem is that you take it all so hard.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve always been this way. You’ve always been the girl in every relationship. Even when you were in high school. You can’t help it.”
I frowned and looked away. Kerry never knew when to shut up about anything. I didn’t know who she thought she was describing, but it wasn’t me. Or, at least, it didn’t sound like me. Then again, I could barely even recognize myself in a mirror.
“I like Lauren, you know. I’m just not sure that she’s right for you.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. I think that you’re wrong.”
“I know you do,” Kerry said sadly.
I was staring out the window, feeling trapped inside this conversation. I resented her imposition. Who the fuck asked Kerry anyway? Where did she always get the nerve? I wanted to turn on her now. I wanted to tell her all the disgusting things that Greg had said and done, among his frat-brother groomsmen. But Greg was every bit the choirboy that Kerry knew. He was peace-loving to a fault. And my sister already had his balls in a vise, besides.
“The two of you broke up?” she asked, continuing to press.
“We don’t believe in putting labels on it,” I offered snidely. Where did Kerry come up with this? Who had told her these things anyway? I was desperate just to slow her down now, to make her stop. But Kerry could go on this way forever.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly, disarming me again. I wanted to open the door and roll out into the street, or at least curl up on the floor. I’d been sitting on these feelings like land mines for weeks. And now was no time to abandon my post.
As we pulled into the driveway, Kerry reached out and touched my head. She pulled me close and kissed the soft bristles. Reaching into the backseat, she forced Peter to take her hand. And, for a moment, she was there: our older sister; our protector.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “Both of you. No one’s allowed to be hungover tomorrow.” And with that we opened our doors and fled the car in three different directions.
* * *
The next night I broke down and called Lauren’s phone. It was always me who blinked first. Pulling open my shirt and offering my chest to her bayonet. And it was Lauren who never failed to show mercy in these moments. I could hear it in her voice then. She was feeling every bit as ripped apart as I was.
We laughed at the way that these fights could pick us up and drop us down so far outside of our selves. It was hard to even know what had happened. There was no great flash point. It was not possible to say for certain who had decided that she was not coming with me. This was a gun we had been pointing at each other’s heads for weeks.
“It must be awful,” she said, sounding guilty.
“It’s not that bad,” I lied.
“I never should’ve left you all alone.”
It was strange. Now that I had her on the phone, I found I couldn’t speak. As I listened to her breathing I could feel her head pressed to mine for the first time in weeks. And yet, there was this static on the line between us that refused to lift. I didn’t want to feel this way anymore, and neither did Lauren. We had a hole in our guts that was the shape of the other person. It was hard for us to exist with the knowledge of that hole. We didn’t know how to live. We were reaching out to pull each other in. We were desperate just to crash back into each other and live off the heat from the wreckage. In endless reconciliation there is infinite hope.
“I’ve made a mistake,” she said finally.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I want to fix it, though.”
“What do you mean?” I could hear the urgency in her voice.
“I’m going to buy a plane ticket. I want to come to the wedding now. I can be there in the morning.”
“The wedding is over,” I said simply.
“What?”
“It was this afternoon.”
“Oh.” We both started to laugh. “How was it?” she asked.
“I dunno. It was fine. It was a wedding.”
“Right.”
“We got drunk. We danced. I got lonely. I called you.”
“Aw,” she said, and I could feel this little tremor through the line.
“Are you at home?” I asked her finally, knowing that she wasn’t.
“No. I’m in New York. I’m staying at Cokie’s.”
“Are you going to be at home when I get there?”
Lauren sighed and answered without malice, “I don’t know. I hope so.” It hung there between us like a death.
“I hope so, too,” I said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go home, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe we should find a new home.”
“Yes,” I said. “We need to get out of D.C.”
“It’s poisoned. It’s wrecked. We can’t just keep living there forever.”
“No, exactly. You’re right. We could go anywhere we wanted to.”
“You could come here to New York,” she said hopefully.
“Or we could just go west.”
“Mm,” she said quietly, saying everything she needed to say. “Let’s not talk about it tonight, maybe.”
“Right,” I said, stopping.
It was impossible not to search out a change we could make that could save us from our fate. But it just didn’t matter. The point was to keep breathing into the phone now. To listen and to laugh for each other. To make the other feel less alone.
“Are you still there?” I asked over the silent static.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Good.”