Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
A week later, on Thursday morning, Alice dresses more carefully than usual for work.
All of her clothes are relatively crappy; almost all bought from Goodwill, and her size has fluctuated over the years, so everything is either a little too loose or too tight.
Well, mostly too tight. She’s happiest in her oversize black turtleneck sweater and thick leggings, but she can’t exactly wear that to work.
Her coworker Delilah is one of those people who goes vintage shopping not because she has to but because she thinks it’s fun, and Alice is pretty sure she ends up paying more for her “great finds” than she would if she went to Target, but it means she always looks trendy and put together.
Tonight Alice is going to happy hour with Delilah and her friends, who Alice assumes are all equally as fashionable and pretty as Delilah, and Alice knows she won’t be able to measure up.
She knows it, but she stares into her closet with dismay anyway, wishing that somehow everything inside would have gotten a fairy godmother makeover while she slept.
“Knew I should have been nicer to that mouse family last year,” she mutters as she pushes aside lumpy sweater after frumpy shirt.
Maybe if she hadn’t put out traps, and instead had coaxed the family out and taught them how to sew, she wouldn’t be in this predicament right now. Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty.
She eventually settles on a black button-down shirt, black dress pants, and her least appalling shoes.
Maybe she can pretend she’s edgy. She puts on some eyeliner—three times because she messes it up twice—and makes sure to pack her deodorant in her purse because a long bus commute has never made anyone smell their best.
She wishes she weren’t so nervous. It’s just happy hour, drinks with people who, worst case, she’ll never see again.
Delilah has personally experienced Alice being a hot mess, and she invited her out anyway.
Alice knows she’s an uncool, dowdy disaster, so there’s nothing they could think about her that she doesn’t already think about herself.
Alice has nine regular hours to go before one becomes happy, but her heart is racing anyway, her palms sweaty.
Damn, she hasn’t left the apartment yet but she already needs another hit of that deodorant.
Trying to make friends shouldn’t be this scary—but Alice hasn’t tried to make friends in…
ever? No, that’s not true. She’s tried to make friends a lot, but it hasn’t quite worked.
When she was a kid she had Bella, and then after Bella moved away when they were eleven, Alice’s dad was already getting worse and worse.
Alice was never willing to have anyone over to her house for a playdate or sleepover, not wanting them to see the oxygen tanks or hear his wet, rattling coughs in the night.
He didn’t have the energy to drive her around much, so she wasn’t on any teams, and she never had the money to hang out at the mall or go to the movies like other kids did.
By high school she was lumped in with the burnouts, the kids who had already fried their brains on drugs, who didn’t give a shit, and she didn’t fit in with them at all.
She gave a shit! She gave so many shits, in fact, but it wasn’t like she had a quiet, stable place to do her homework, or like the biggest stress in her life was her chem final.
She was busy after school, working to supplement their paltry disability payments, taking her dad to medical appointments—guiding him on and off the bus, sometimes skipping school to make it to appointments with specialists—and by the end he was in and out of the hospital so much that sometimes she didn’t bother to go to school at all.
She didn’t get great grades and she wasn’t in any clubs, so she found herself alone at lunch and after school, isolated in her small apartment with her dad who, despite all of her best efforts, kept getting sicker and sicker.
Some weeks, the only people she spoke to were her customers at work, her dad, his doctors, and Lupe.
And then she graduated, and a few months later, he died.
She should have tried to make friends after that.
After she cleared out their small two-bedroom apartment and moved into her cramped studio on Division, she had so much time on her hands—no more Dad meant no more caretaking, no more waking up five times a night to check on him, which meant no more midday exhaustion naps.
She should have spent her twenties partying, meeting people, having a delayed adolescence, doing all the irresponsible shit she didn’t get to do in high school.
But instead she grieved. For him, for herself, for her mom. For her life. She spent her twenties grinding, feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. All she did was work, put her head down and try not to think about anything but making rent, paying down her dad’s medical bills, surviving.
She dated, sometimes, but it never went anywhere. A couple guys from work over the years, a girl in her building for a while, some meaningless hookups from apps that she’d hoped would take the edge off her loneliness, but never really did.
She’s never done happy hour with a group of friends.
Never sat around and ordered a pitcher without being on a mediocre date with some forgettable person and their equally forgettable friends.
Alice isn’t trying to date any of Delilah’s friends, she’s not looking for a hookup; she literally just wants a friend.
It shouldn’t be a big deal—Delilah certainly didn’t mean it to be anything but nice and low-key—but Alice is on the verge of hyperventilating for her entire bus ride to work.
—
After their shift is over, Alice follows Delilah for a couple of blocks like a pathetic little duckling.
They step inside a dark bar, and Delilah leads Alice to a table filled with some of the trendiest people Alice has seen in real life.
They’re all tall and thin and interesting-looking, although one has a truly horrible mustache and Alice wonders if anyone has ever told them it makes them look like a real creep.
They all seem kind of queer in the way so many Gen Z people do, the way that’s maybe just fashion Alice doesn’t understand but maybe is also a much more highly evolved sense of self and gender than she’s used to.
She likes them.
They don’t pressure her to talk much; not as if she isn’t there, but more like she’s not any different from them. Instead, they fold her into their conversation like she’s always been there, and even though she can’t follow some of it, it’s thrilling.
It’s like how Babs and Aunt Sheila and Marie brought her into their lives, but without all the lying and comatose people and sexy, confusing butches.
“So, Alice,” one of them says, a gender-ambiguous person with a mullet whose name is some nature word Alice was told and then immediately forgot.
Maybe Raisin? That can’t be right—who would be named Raisin?
—but it’s Portland, so. It could be Raisin.
“You’re the one who saved that guy, right? Delilah told us about it.”
Alice nods, taking a sip of her beer to hide her face. She ordered a Pbr because it’s cheap and some of the others ordered them too. It’s more like a beer-flavored LaCroix than a beer, but hey. If it means she fits in and can still pay her rent, all the better.
“And isn’t he, like, your boyfriend or something?”
Fucking Raisin. Alice was enjoying not lying for one stupid minute—was that too much to ask?
“Well, not exactly,” Alice says, slipping back into her mental gymnastics with a silent groan. She feels like a forty-year-old woman trying to put on her teenage leotard again, suiting up for a competition she’s long since gotten too old for. “And not…it’s over now.”
“Oh shit,” Raisin says. “I’m sorry.”
“That sucks,” the person next to Raisin says, who Alice is pretty sure is named Juniper. Or Maple? There are so many nice kinds of trees to name Portland children after! Alice isn’t immune; she doesn’t want kids anymore, but when she was younger she’d always wanted to name a kid Cedar.
Alice hums, and then realizes she’s kind of sounding like a closed-off bitch right now, and she’s trying to make a good impression, damn it. “He has amnesia,” she volunteers, and the table goes silent for a second.
“What?” That’s the third friend, Jessica, which feels like the weird name after Raisin and Maple.
“Amnesia?” Raisin says, their eyebrows so high it’s like they’ve melded with the mullet. “For real?”
“Yup,” Alice says, taking another sip of her watery beer. “Lost five years of his life, although it’s started slowly creeping back. He had no idea who I was.” That’s technically true; she’s careful to make that second sentence a separate one rather than a dependent clause.
The beauty of omission.
“You were pretty tight with his family, right?” Delilah says, her big eyes warm and sympathetic. “They came by the office.”
“Yeah. They’re…they’re great. Definitely the hardest part of the breakup.”
Delilah gives her a bit of a considering look, then seems like she’s steeling herself before she says, “His sister stopped by a lot.”
Alice blinks at her. The words are casual, but Delilah’s tone is making Alice nervous. She nods slowly, and Delilah keeps going.
“She’s hot.”
Alice almost spits out her beer. Instead she chokes it down, and creepy mustache dude slaps her on the back, trying to keep her alive.
“Um,” Alice wheezes. “Sorry, you surprised—” She finally swallows and takes in a few big breaths.
“Yeah,” she says, able to be honest now.
Hopefully none of them know Van—she knows queer communities can be small, but these people can’t be over twenty-five and Alice is going to hope that the Gen Z/Millennial social divide is working in her favor right now. “She’s very hot.”
“Did, um…” Delilah scrunches up a napkin in her hands and then looks sideways over at Alice. “Did anything happen? Between you and her?”
Alice looks around the table. Raisin, Maple, and Jessica are looking at her, eyes blown wide open, and mustache dude is muttering Oh shit, and fuck it but Delilah asked.
“It…did,” she says, and she’s pretty sure everyone at the table screams.
Alice drops her face into her hands, but Delilah and Raisin are quickly reaching out, pulling her arms down.
“Spill,” Raisin says, surprisingly invested for someone who has never met Van, Nolan, or even Alice before an hour ago.
Alice shrugs, like the memory of it isn’t setting her guts on fire. “We kissed,” she says.
“And?” Maple asks, breathless.
“Look at her,” Raisin says, grinning. “It was clearly life changing.”
“It…” Alice lets out a breath, and then she tells the truth. “It was.”
Jessica, Maple, and mustache dude scream again, and Delilah has her hands cupped over her mouth, either in excitement or horror.
“So what happened?”
Alice shrugs again. “I was supposed to be with her brother,” she says, trying to keep it simple. “And I couldn’t…I don’t know.” She twists her lips, trying to smile instead of cry. “I lost them both.”
“River!” Raisin yells, and Alice wonders if that’s a code word for something until the server comes hurrying over, and Alice realizes her name must be River. “We need heartbreak shots! Immediately!”
River brings over a tray of shot glasses filled with what Alice is sure is an incredibly cheap whiskey. Delilah distributes them, and Raisin says, “To gay awakenings!”
“Wait,” Alice says, and everyone pauses, their shot glasses held up to their lips but not tilted back yet. “I mean, sure, gay awakenings are great, but this wasn’t one. I’ve been bi forever.”
Raisin blinks at her, setting their shot down on the table. “Wait, for real?”
Alice nods slowly. Aren’t the kids all supposed to be somewhat gay these days? Why is this weird?
“Okay,” Raisin says slowly. “No offense, but if you’re a, like, relatively young, absolutely chaotic bisexual, why are you dressed like a middle-aged suburban housewife going back to work after catching her husband sleeping with the nanny?”
Jessica and mustache dude both do spit takes. Maple hits Raisin on the arm, and Delilah hisses, “Oh my god, you did not just say that!” but Alice laughs. They’re not wrong.
“Poor?” she offers, still laughing, and Raisin picks their shot glass back up.
“Okay,” Raisin says. “First, we get you drunk enough to forget about this hot-sister situation, and then next week I’m taking you shopping.
” They gesture at Alice, and Alice should be offended by how cheerfully critical this brand-new person is, but she’s not.
“I think you’re probably hot under there, so poor or not, I can fix this. ”
Three hours and one long bus ride later, Alice is still smiling.
She did it. She made a friend. A very weird, aggressive friend whose name she honestly doesn’t know, but, whatever.
She has Delilah, and the-person-who-is-possibly-named-Raisin, and Isabella and Henry and the kids and the mushrooms, so even without Marie and Babs and Van, she’s going to be okay. Maybe.