CHAPTER 34 Vegas
March 18, 2011
I was on the verge of having a full-fledged panic attack inside the restroom of a packed nightclub in Las Vegas. I had no idea how long I’d kept myself locked up inside the stall, but the bathroom attendant knocking on my door and yelling, “Everything okay in there?” for the third time gave me an idea.
Too long.
It’d become tiring to smile, dance, and engage in small talk with Lily’s friends, most of whom I hadn’t met before, when a hot, guilt-infested, pressing weight had lodged itself inside my chest. So I fled from our table to the ladies’ room to gather myself with the intention of it being for only a few minutes.
I shouldn’t have agreed to come to Vegas on this date. It was the eve of the first anniversary of Caleb’s death and his birthday. I was well aware of it when Lily suggested this weekend as an option; the date was impossible for me to forget. She claimed it would be more convenient for me, being spring break for me at school, and she wasn’t wrong.
If I intended for my scholarship application to be considered by the committee for the fall semester, the least I could do was show up for class. It was important to demonstrate to them I was committed to my studies, so it made sense to do the bachelorette weekend in Vegas on this specific date because there wouldn’t be any more breaks or holidays before the semester ended.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Even Aaron made a pointed remark when I texted him the itinerary, but I stupidly thought to myself, “Caleb would want me to have fun and enjoy my life.” What a self-induced copout that was on my part.
The problem was that I wasn’t having fun and refused to enjoy life in this particular moment when I was so blatantly reminded he was gone because of me.
“Everything’s fine,” I rasped through a small door opening, feeling my phone vibrating inside my clutch. “I have a slightly upset stomach. I’ll be right out.”
The bathroom attendant scanned me from head to toe, probably wanting to detect the presence of any drugs. But she wouldn’t find any. Before I locked myself back inside the bathroom stall, I checked my phone to see a text from Aaron.
Aaron:Everything okay, Miss?
Me: Yes, Aaron.I’ll be out in a minute.
I took a deep breath and put my phone back inside my clutch.
“Billie?” Serena Delacroix, one of Lily’s friends, said when she spotted me before I could lock myself back inside. “Are you okay? You’ve been gone for a while. Lily was starting to get worried. And since your bodyguard is waiting outside the bathroom, I figured you were here.”
I met Serena this weekend—a model, too. She was very sweet but based in Los Angeles, so that’s why I’d never met her before. And the moment she approached me, I started to have trouble breathing. I placed my hands on the small of my back and bent slightly over, my lungs burning as I tried to get air into them.
“What’s wrong?” She stepped inside the stall and locked the door behind us. I could feel my heart beating loudly inside my ears, and the bathroom attendant banged on our door three seconds later.
“Miss, I need you to step out!” She yelled. “Only one at a time is allowed inside the stalls!”
“Seriously …” Serena cursed under her breath. She pulled out a ten-dollar bill from her purse and opened the door just enough for her two fingers to offer the woman a small bribe. “How much time does that buy us?”
“Five minutes,” the bathroom attendant replied in a snarky tone, plucking the ten-dollar bill from Serena’s fingers. The woman shut the door with a thud, and Serena locked it up.
The tequila flowing through my veins wasn’t doing me any favors. I tried to make the guilt of partying in a nightclub on this day go away by drinking a lot and drinking fast. All I wanted was to disappear from this place and teleport myself to my apartment.
Calling William wasn’t an option either. I knew I could talk things through with him. He was there that day. He had been shot because of me, too. If anyone alive besides Aaron could understand, it was him. But Aaron and I hadn’t been on the best terms ever since I invited Naomi to move in with him, and William was at a bachelor party with Joel and their friends at some bar or nightclub in New York. I couldn’t ruin Lily’s night either. I had to find a way to calm down and power through the night without her noticing.
Serena placed her hands on my shoulders and gave me a full body scan as if to see if she could somehow detect any apparent injuries on me. But there were none that she could see with her eyes.
“Breathe,” she said, realizing what my main problem was. “How can I help? What do you need?”
“Just …” I took a slow, jagged breath through my nose and let it out unhurriedly through my mouth. “Need … a minute.”
“Are you having an anxiety attack?” Serena asked. I nodded. Anxiety. Panic. Both. Who knew at this point?
Serena yanked down the toilet seat cover and made me sit. She grabbed my clutch and placed it next to her purse on the black granite shelf behind me.
“I’m no stranger to these. Just breathe, okay? Slowly.” She started counting from one to five, inhaling with me, then from five to one as we exhaled. “It’ll pass. It always does,” she said, softly caressing my back. “Remember that.”
Serena’s words were comforting.
It’ll pass. It always does.
My breaths were stabilizing, finding a steadier rhythm, just as the bathroom attendant paid us another visit. She pounded the door and yelled, “Time’s up, ladies!”
Serena pulled out another ten from her purse and offered it to the attendant. “Five more minutes?” The woman pursed her thick lips and took the money.
“Feeling better?” Serena asked after locking the door again.
“I think so, yeah.” I inhaled, and my lungs filled up with little to no effort, reducing the feeling of imminent dread in my body, but it wasn’t gone entirely.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t do this to Lily.
“I’m feeling better now,” I lied. If I started talking about this with anyone, it would only make me feel worse. I knew I could pull myself together. I’d done it a thousand times before. I could do it again for Lily. “I just need a minute to check myself in the mirror.”
“You sure?”
“I promise. I’ll meet you at the table in five minutes,” I assured her. “If Lily asks, please don’t tell her anything. Just say I had an upset stomach and that I’m feeling better.”
“Don’t worry.” She smiled. “I’ll see you in a bit.”
The water from the faucet was cold, and my swollen eyes and face appreciated it. I wiped the runny mascara from under my eyes and applied lipstick so I wouldn’t look like a rotten zombie. It was convenient that no paparazzi were allowed inside this venue, but you never knew what awaited us once we stepped outside.
I hated that I cared about such things now. That my appearance and my actions were scrutinized on a daily basis because of who I was dating. The outfits I wore to school were subjected to constant evaluation and, at times, appeared in various fashion magazines, including those targeted at teens. Naomi worked closely with the media to ensure none of this coverage became damaging to my image or to the relationship, for that matter. William’s public image was easier to manage since the world already loved and adored him.
And I was the “bitch who stole him away,” as a celebrity blogger once said in one of her entries. There were over five thousand comments on that post. But I refused to read them.
But all in all, I was being “accepted” when it came to the media that “mattered,” according to Naomi. And again, I hated that ever since I started to learn about all these things, they began to matter to me, weigh on me, and somehow get in the way of my natural flow of being. Like stopping to check myself in the mirror one last time before leaving my apartment. Applying a bit more blush than I usually did. Or retouching my lips before leaving my last class of the day, knowing there might be a hidden photographer somewhere outside of school.
I didn’t know how to not care about how I was being perceived. I wanted people to find me worthy of being with William, and that wasn’t who I used to be. That’s not how I used to think. And it all tangled into my subconscious and generated a layer of undetectable pressure to be better. Do better. Appear better.
Perfect, if possible.
I walked out of the bathroom, and Aaron was still there. Still waiting. Still as patient as ever.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his mouth pressing into a line. He knew what was afflicting me, and I never stopped to think about how he might be feeling on this day. He lost Caleb, too, and there he was, standing outside the bathroom of a noisy and crowded club in Vegas while dealing with his grief, waiting for me to be done dealing with mine.
I really messed up.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling my face scrunching up again. “I don’t know what I was thinking coming here today of all days. I’m sorry.”
Aaron pulled me into his arms, and the warm embrace of someone who understood exactly how I was feeling because they were feeling it, too, brought me a sense of peace and warmth to my broken heart.
“We promised we’d be strong for him, didn’t we?” He rested his chin on the top of my head and held the embrace for a while longer.
We had. We’d both had bad days in the last year, some of which we shared by talking about it in our own way. Short conversations that were highly packed with emotion. And it was in one of those days where we agreed to that. To stay strong and carry on in his honor.
We broke off the embrace, but Aaron rested his hands on my shoulders when I spoke, “I’m ready to go back out there.”
“Okay.” He didn’t seem convinced that I was, but I didn’t have a choice. And I wanted to be able to celebrate with Lily without my feelings getting in the way.
“And are you done being weird with me about Naomi moving in with you?” I asked, as we started walking back to Lily’s table.
“I’m not being weird.” He frowned.
“Okay.”
That’s how Aaron and I communicated. It was simple and complex at the same time. I knew he was being weird. He knew he was being weird. But by saying he wasn’t, I knew he meant: “I know. I’ll stop being weird.” And so that was that.
I was grateful to still have Aaron with me. My dad never got back to me after I begged him not to send Aaron away, so I assumed he was staying. Since that day, I’d been living with the fear that any day, I would get a call from Miss Patty to let me know I was on my own now. But the call never came. A perfect psychological torture technique if I ever saw one. He knew I’d always be worried about it if he never gave me a definitive answer. And I wasn’t going to ask Miss Patty about it and risk reminding my father how much I cared about this.
We spotted a man wearing sunglasses and pointing his cell phone at us. But he fled the moment he saw us and got lost in the sea of people before Aaron could go after him. Not that he could do much, anyway. We’d learned the hard way these people were complicated to deal with.
I had too much on my mind to care.
When I returned to the table, Lily approached me. “Are you feeling better? Serena told me you had an upset stomach.”
I placed a hand on my belly and rubbed it to look more convincing. “Oof, yeah! I think that burger we had at lunch didn’t agree with me!” I shouted over the loud music. “But I’m feeling better now!”
I opened my clutch and pulled out William’s credit card extension he gave me a few months ago. “William said I should pay today’s tab with his Amex!”
“What? No!” Lily shrieked. “Why would he do that?”
“Because he loves you! And I love you! And he has more money than I do!”
“You’re such an Aries!” Lily shook her head at me with an exasperated laugh.
“Tell me something new!”