Chapter 2 #7
“Well? I needed cash, and I didn’t think she’d notice. She keeps all these balled-up twenties in her drawer.”
“But why did you blame it on me?”
“Because I have to be her sister for the rest of my life,” Ramona says. “And, I mean, no offense, but who knows how long you and I will be doing whatever it is we’re doing?”
“Okay,” Susan says. “I gotta go.” She hangs up the phone. Around her, people are working, reading their screens and making phone calls, oblivious to Susan’s drama.
She’s furious and hurt. She waits for Ramona to call back or at least text, but she doesn’t.
Her feelings aside, without being able to stay at Ramona’s, Susan needs a new plan for where to spend the night.
She could crash at Jonny’s, but she’s been doing that so much lately that she’s starting to feel guilty.
Katie’s is technically an option, but her couch is so small that Susan has never managed to actually fall asleep on it. She probably needs to get more friends.
Susan could go home to Long Island and take a 6 AM train back to the city, but that would mean waking up at 5 AM.
Or she could even skip the train and drive directly to the office from her parents’ house in the morning, but traffic is always a risk and so is parking.
Ultimately, though, the biggest issue is that she’s just so tired.
The commute is catching up with her. She simply doesn’t have it in her for one more back and forth on not enough sleep.
And so Susan does the thing she promised herself she’d never, ever do: She waits for everyone to leave and then, when it’s late enough that she can be sure no one is coming back, she locks the door, closes the blinds, turns the lights off, and sets up for the night on the disgusting office sofa where Ben so often sleeps.
A small part of her can’t believe it’s come to this, but a larger part always knew she’d end up here, so devoted to the idea of this job and the music industry clout it represents that she doesn’t even leave at the end of the day.
She curls up on the couch and tries hard to get comfortable. Sleep doesn’t come, though. She’s too mad, too cold without a blanket. It’s spooky in the office with the overheads off, the little blinking lights from all the desktop computers like a thousand sinister eyeballs watching her in the dark.
She texts Katie: “Do you think it’s deranged that I’m sleeping at my office?”
Katie writes back: “yes baby”
Susan writes: “k”
She tosses and turns on the couch for a while, pretending not to notice that the cushions smell of Ben and cigarettes and spilled coffee.
In a moment of weakness, she texts Ramona: “Goodnight”
Ramona doesn’t write back.
At some point, she dozes off. She dreams of following Ramona’s hair through a crowd of people, never quite catching up with her. When she tries to call Ramona’s name, nothing comes out of her mouth.
Susan’s alarm goes off at 7 AM. Groggy, she reaches for her phone to turn off the hellacious buzzing. Ramona still hasn’t responded. Susan’s whole body hurts from the couch.
She makes a pot of coffee in the darkness.
While it’s brewing, she goes to the small office bathroom and brushes her teeth, washes her face with hand soap, runs her fingers through her hair.
She looks like she crawled out of the sink drain, but she at least has a change of clothes, deodorant. The basics.
She opens the blinds and drinks her coffee at her desk. The sky is so bright it feels like an insult.
She calls Jonny. She knows he’ll be up.
“I think I need to move out of my parents’ house,” she says.
“As the prophecy foretold,” he replies.
“And you’ll never believe the shit Ramona pulled.”
He laughs. “Try me.”
As she tells him what went down the night before, she can hear him sighing.
“Oh, Susan,” he says. “You know you don’t have to put up with being treated like that, right?”
“I don’t know,” Susan says. “I can’t tell what’s normal and what’s not.”
“It’s not normal,” he says.
“Okay,” she says, but mostly she doesn’t want to face the truth of it. She’ll give Ramona one more chance, she thinks. Maybe things can still turn around.
Jonny takes a breath and then says, “Intimacy brings out the worst in people. Welcome to how adults behave under the guise of dating. You’ll get used to being treated like dog shit, but you never have to put up with it.”
She doesn’t really hear him.
After she hangs up, before she deals with the tasks of the day ahead of her, she texts Ramona again. “Are you alive?” Maybe something bad happened to her, and that’s why she didn’t write back. Maybe while Susan was feeling mad, Ramona was in a ditch somewhere, fighting for her life.
She waits a few moments. There’s no response.
She snaps her phone shut and leaves for the coffee shop, where she has to pick up the order she placed last night: two dozen doughnuts, a couple of boxes of coffee, cream.
She knows that no one will eat the doughnuts and counts on having one or two of them for lunch, though they’ll probably be stale by then.
Around 8 AM, the office fills up, everyone looking a little pissed off and tired to be there so bright and early for the big advertiser meeting.
“Assistant, why do you look like you slept here?” Ben barks, but he’s joking; no one actually thinks Susan of all people would have slept in the office.
Nor would they care. Still, she doesn’t want her coworkers to think she’s the kind of person who would crash on the couch.
She’d like to be thought of as more responsible than that.
A few hours later, Ramona texts her back. “Hi I’m alive,” she says. “But I think we should just be friends. Cool?”
“You never even made me come,” Susan types, her thumbs pummeling the keys. Her lack of sleep has robbed her of her usual cautious filter. After she hits send, she almost can’t believe her own assertiveness. It’s terrifying, being so frank.
She doesn’t expect a reply this time, which is good because she doesn’t get one.
Before she can think about it any further, Susan is handed a stack of new magazines and told to look for artist mentions, and Ben starts yelling across the room about the list for tonight’s show, and Heather needs her to order bagels for another meeting, and Drew needs her to transcribe an interview for the blog.
Katie texts her about several other, more pressing things, like plans for that night and a link to a couch she wants to buy and if she can go with Susan back to Long Island to see her parents next weekend, and then Jonny sends her links to cheap, small rooms for rent in Brooklyn.
By the end of the day, the Ramona situation doesn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore.
Early one morning on the subway a few weeks later, as the heavy heat of New York summer begins to fold crisply into fall, something odd happens.
The train car is nearly empty but for a small handful of ambitious yupsters going to work and bleary-eyed partiers dragging themselves home from the club when a girl with long, ratty purple hair and a torn flannel shirt holds eye contact with Susan just a beat too long.
They’re sitting across from each other, just close enough for Susan to see the girl’s shredded cuticles and dark under-eye circles and hollow cheekbones in the abrasive yellow light.
The girl tilts her head to the side. “Susan?”
There’s something familiar about her that Susan can’t place.
Someone from one of her lecture halls, maybe.
The girl starts to laugh, noticing Susan’s confusion.
Then her hair falls across her face and all at once Susan is brought back in time: It’s five years ago, and she’s sitting in her Volvo on a dark residential street with a girl she desperately wants to kiss.
“Oh my god.” Susan gasps. “Eliza?”
It is Eliza, somehow. She’s translucent, a ghost, even the purple in her hair fading to gray in some places. Her eyes are rimmed in red.
Susan can feel each individual blood cell crashing through her veins. As thrilled as she is to see Eliza, something is very off about her appearance. She looks like she needs some serious help. Susan wants to leap across the train and pull Eliza into her lap, pet her wan face, feed her a sandwich.
“Hey,” Eliza says. “Look at you.”
“Look at you,” she says. It’s not what she meant to say, but the words have left her lips already. She hopes Eliza doesn’t take them the wrong way.
How embarrassing to be faced with the reality of someone you’ve turned into a fantasy.
Out with Katie, Susan often thought she saw Eliza, particularly at the frat parties and underage clubs.
There were so many girls who could have been her, with their bad fake tans and straightened blond hair.
But they never were, always made a face when they caught Susan staring.
Susan had eventually given up on ever seeing Eliza again.
Now here Eliza is. On the subway, of all places. Looking completely different. If Susan had seen this person at a frat party, she would not have thought she was Eliza at all.
“It’s nice to see you,” Eliza says.
It feels like an invitation. Susan starts to stand then, wanting to go sit next to Eliza and ask her a million questions, but right as she does, the train pulls into the Bedford Avenue station and the doors open and the subway car promptly fills up with people.
The distance between them grows greater and greater as more people pour into the space, and then all Susan can see is the purple top of Eliza’s head.
It’s Susan’s stop. She needs to get off. She stands up, trying to meet Eliza’s eyes, but there are too many people standing in front of her. It’s like the train has swallowed Eliza whole.
Susan squeezes through the doors just as they close.
After the train pulls away she stands on the platform for a long time, bereft and haunted. She wishes she had said something more, something else. It’s always too late to say what she wants to Eliza.