Chapter 2 #6
They always go back to Ramona’s apartment afterward. Susan is no closer to having a real orgasm with Ramona, but she’s getting better at faking it, becoming a little bit more convincing each time.
Ramona’s sister is often home, but with her bedroom door closed. The sister is an artist, like her. Not music, though. Sculpture.
A couple of times, Ramona has taken Susan to chic loft parties, where she introduces her to people as “This is Susan from my label,” or, with a wink, “This is Susan, she’s twenty-two.”
Susan feels unbelievably lucky to be Ramona’s young, trendy accessory. She likes being paraded around, that her day job is cool enough that a mention of it can be used for clout, that her age deserves a wink. She feels chosen.
“Not technically my girlfriend,” Susan says to Jonny, smiling. “But maybe soon.”
“You’ve come so far,” he says, throwing a french fry at her. She tries and fails to catch it in her mouth.
A couple of weeks later, after she and Ramona finish a round of drinks at Ramona’s local bar, Susan gets a text from Katie that says, “Party. My place. Come. Please?”
She shows Ramona her phone. “Do you want to meet my friends?”
“I guess,” Ramona says, and when Susan looks hurt, she quickly says, “Just kidding, babe. Yes, of course. Take me to them.”
They split a taxi to Katie’s building in the East Village. They always split things fifty-fifty, even when it’s nothing to Ramona and a strain on Susan, though she’d never say so.
“Wow, I can’t remember the last time I went to a college party,” Ramona says, as they walk up the stairs to Katie’s door.
“We’re not in college,” Susan says.
“I wasn’t saying it like it was a bad thing,” Ramona says, and pokes her in the ribs, just a little too hard.
Susan doesn’t get it. “We all graduated,” she insists.
Ramona rolls her eyes and doesn’t respond.
Katie’s living room is packed with people, and the air is humid, thick with their smells and their smoking. All the windows are open even though the AC is blasting, and Susan wonders how long it’ll be before a neighbor complains about the noise.
She tries to see the party through Ramona’s eyes and cringes as she imagines the judgments: everyone wearing too much denim, some Bruno Mars song playing from a single tinny speaker, the furniture all IKEA.
There are no famous people here, likely no one with more clout than the two of them.
This is not a hip party. It’s just a group of friends getting wasted together in a small apartment.
Jake and Katie materialize. “So this is her,” Katie says, and hugs Ramona. Ramona pats Katie’s back with one hand, limply.
“You’re exactly how I pictured you,” Katie says.
“You guys,” Susan says.
“So you’ve heard of me,” Ramona says, clearly pleased. “Hey, do either of you have any blow?”
“Yeah, no, it’s not really like that,” Jake says, eyes narrowing at her. “I’m sure someone has weed, though.”
Susan flinches but lets it go. Ramona can’t help that she’s from a different scene, where they do harder drugs, take partying more seriously.
Sometime later, Susan is sweating and smooshed between people on the small couch, taking drags from a damp joint that’s just been passed to her, when Ramona commandeers the iPod attached to the speaker.
One, two, three, four
I like you, but you like me more.
Susan feels her stomach curdle as the first few lines of the Monas single starts. She isn’t sure if anyone else notices what’s happening, until her eyes meet Katie’s. Katie raises an eyebrow. Susan looks away, pretending not to understand the silent question.
Susan passes the joint to the person sitting next to her, overly cautious to make sure the ash falls into the lumpy ceramic bowl Katie made in their high school art class and for some godforsaken reason still holds on to.
Ramona is now in a conversation with a small group of people on the other side of the room, laughing and gesticulating so wildly that she knocks the standing lamp over.
Susan jumps up and rushes over, picking the lamp back up and saying, “It’s fine, I got it!”
Ramona says, “Thanks, hall monitor,” and Susan feels her face grow hot. If Ramona notices how much this stung, she pretends not to.
Toward the end of the night, Katie pulls Susan into the bathroom and closes the door.
Katie is wearing a big NYU sweatshirt over jeans, socks with her Birkenstocks, auburn hair piled and twisted into a topknot, a digital camera sticking out of her back pocket.
College made Katie more basic and Susan more alternative, a change that still shocks Susan.
Katie five years ago would have balked to see herself dressed like this.
“Ramona,” Katie sings, the cheesy beginning of a Guster song they used to listen to in high school. She closes the toilet and sits on its lid while Susan perches on the rim of the tub.
Susan sighs impatiently. “Well?” she says. “What do you think? Do you like her?”
The bathroom is small and crowded with Katie’s endless beauty products. Susan accidentally knocks some body exfoliator off the edge of the tub and lets it roll across the floor.
Katie looks like she’s thinking hard about what to say. “Yeah, I mean, sure,” she says. “And she’s definitely hot. But, like, is she really the kind of person you want to be in a relationship with?”
“What do you mean?” Susan says. “Ramona is great.”
“Is she, though? She seems kind of sketchy. It’s like, I can’t tell if she’s actually cool or if she just decided that she’s cool and acts accordingly.”
Susan shakes her head. She’s getting angry, but it comes out like a whine. “You didn’t even give her a chance.”
“I’m sorry if I’m being protective over you,” Katie says. “I just don’t think you need to date the first girl who shows interest in you.”
Now Susan is genuinely annoyed. “She’s not the first girl who has shown interest in me.”
“You know you’re beautiful, right?” Katie says, her voice softening. “Like, everyone thinks so. And everyone always has. Beautiful and fucking cool, Susan. That’s, like, your whole thing.”
“Me?” Susan says, aghast. “No. I’m so awkward.”
“I could kill you,” Katie says. “I know we don’t speak of him, but do you really think Kyle would have been into you if you weren’t hot? And Ramona, for that matter? You really think the girl out there is interested in what’s on the inside? Your dazzling inner beauty?”
Susan rolls her eyes. She doesn’t believe Katie at all. It’s not that she feels ugly; she feels plain. “You just love me.” What she doesn’t say: You’re the pretty one.
“I do love you,” Katie says. “But I’m also capable of being objective.”
Susan laughs and squeezes Katie’s hand, the anger lifting. “Can I go back to your party now? Or do you want to keep yelling at me?”
“Go.” Katie sighs. “But later you have to tell me what to name this Facebook album.” She whips the camera out and takes a photo of Susan sitting there on the edge of the bathtub, legs tightly crossed, hands over her face like a celebrity hiding from the paparazzi.
“You should call it ‘The Night I Met the Girl Susan Is Fucking and Decided She’s Not Good Enough.’”
“Ha ha,” Katie says, not laughing. “Maybe too literal, no?”
Once, when Susan was in college, she had to give a presentation as the final for some bullshit filler class she’d taken called the Performance of Poetry.
The assignment was simple: Find a poem and read it in front of the class.
They’d spent all semester studying the ways in which a poem can come to life.
Susan had chosen a short one, but still, when the time came for her to walk to the front and perform it, she found she was so nervous that her whole body was shaking.
She leaned against the podium for support, fairly certain that without it, she’d fall over.
She had not been able to look up from the page, to make eye contact with her bored audience, though she knew she was supposed to.
Instead, she blew through it as fast as possible.
When she was safely back in her seat, her professor resumed his place in the front and then launched into a lecture about how much body language communicates.
“Someone casually leaning against this podium,” he said, “for example, will appear as though she doesn’t care at all about this assignment.
Someone who won’t make eye contact with you seems to care even less.
Perhaps she thinks she’s too cool?” He even leaned against the podium and looked down, a crude impression of her, while her classmates snickered.
After the shame of this feedback settled, the truth of it hit her.
People were reading her abject terror as aloofness.
When she was dying of nervousness, she came off like she didn’t care at all.
What a strange thing, to have to think about what your body does in space so that people don’t assume the worst.
Beautiful and fucking cool, Katie had said. How funny, given that most of the time Susan feels like twelve chihuahuas in a trench coat pretending to be a human girl.
At work a few days after Katie’s party, Susan calls Ramona from her desk.
“Hey,” she says. “Can I stay over tonight? I have to be at work at like eight AM to set up for an advertiser meeting.” She has her overnight bag with her. She’d expected an easy yes—planned for it, even.
But to her surprise, there’s a long pause on the other end, and then Ramona says, “My sister doesn’t want you staying at our place anymore.”
“What? Why?”
“She, uh…” Ramona trails off, and Susan presses the phone harder to her ear, as though that’ll help her understand what’s happening. “She thinks you stole money from her.”
“What?” Susan looks around to see if anyone in the office is listening. They aren’t. “Why would she think that?”
Ramona sighs, loudly. “Well. Because I told her you did.”
“Um,” Susan says. She doesn’t get it. They’re quiet for a few moments, and then it dawns on her. “You stole from your sister and blamed it on me?”