Dear Little Jo,
You would think I’d have learned from Uncle Viktor that drinking doesn’t make anything better. You’d think that particular lesson would be deep in my bones by now, or at least scarred into my skin. Just because you’re wasted enough to forget what’s wrong doesn’t make you any less upset.
We were half in the bag last night, Bron and me, by the time Shayna showed up. I mean we’d been drinking since way before the party started, and it was now, what—10 p.m.? 11?—when she came stomping into the house shouting for Bron.
“You bitch. You bitch,” she kept saying. Yelling over the music. “I can’t believe you’d actually tell Lyle, you stupid bitch!” Shayna was slurring—pretty drunk herself, probably. She wore a lacy top that left her stomach bare and a pair of those super-short cutoffs, the kind where the front-pocket linings actually stick out lower than the fringe. Thick black eyeliner. Huge silver hoops in her ears.
And Bron was trying to act all reasonable and calm. You know how she puts on that whole I’m-the-bigger-person-here act. “I did it for you, Shay. It was an intervention. You’ll thank me, I promise.” Et cetera. Which just made Shayna crazier.
The angry base of disjointed friendship is what Walt calls it somewhere. I had no idea what they were arguing about. To tell you the truth I didn’t much care. I just sat back on the sofa. I lifted my half-empty beer bottle and looked at the two of them through the glass. It was one of those expensive beers the Otulah-Tierneys drink, a green bottle with the brand name etched on the glass instead of a label. I watched their fight through the glass. Bron and Shayna were stretched and blurry and smaller than in real life.
I guess I must have been pretty drunk because I thought their voices were quieter too, through the glass. I kept experimenting—holding the bottle up to my face, to one side and then the other, to see whether the volume changed along with the image.
So I more or less missed the entire argument, but Shayna started getting more and more upset. Whatever anger she’d started with sort of cartwheeled right over into sadness. She started sobbing, and soon she couldn’t get any more words through the tears. Bron tried to hug her but Shayna shoved her away.
“You’re not my friend. You’re not my friend,” she kept saying, gasping and stuttering through all the crying.
Other people at the party started to notice and hang around and ask if everything was okay. Finally Bron punched me and told me to please get off my ass and take Shayna upstairs, to see if I could calm her down.
I had to pretty much carry Shayna upstairs. She wasn’t fighting me so much as just crying so hard she couldn’t move. Some freshmen were making out in Bron’s bed. They threw their clothes on when I came swaying in with Shayna, saying, “Sorry, man, sorry, it’s all yours.” It was the kind of thing Shayna would normally find hilarious, but I don’t think she even noticed them.
She did calm down though. She lay on Bron’s bed taking long, shuddery breaths. Hiccuping. I lay there beside her and stroked her hair off her face, which was soaking wet with greasy black tears and probably snot. I just kept petting her hair like she was a cat.
I was drifting in and out a bit. Once I looked at her and my hand was just lying there heavy on her ear. Her eyes were open, bloodshot and miserable in their black raccoon-circles, staring at me. The next time I woke up, both my hands were squashed under my cheek, and Shayna’s eyes were closed.
And the next time I woke up she was on top of me. Kissing me. Half her clothes off, then all of them. Then my shirt.
Why didn’t I stop her? Why didn’t I stop myself? I don’t know. I wish I could say I was too drunk. That I didn’t know what was going on. But the truth is, I knew. I knew. So why didn’t I stop?
She unzipped my jeans or I did it myself. Pushed them down. There was a condom, and I rolled it on.
I don’t know. Maybe I thought it would be easier this way. That everything would be easier.
She sat up on me and slid down and up again. Rocked forward and back. I don’t know why I didn’t stop it. But I have to say that it was easy. It was easy and fast.
Just like this, I was thinking, the whole time. Easy. Everything will be so much easier this way.
Sincerely,
AK