Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
We have to be the most-hated group of women in a one-hundred-mile radius at the moment. Thirteen of us, dressed in denim and cowboy boots, hair teased, makeup slathered, a picture of David Ortega’s face tattooed on our cheeks and shoulders and wrists.
I’ve owned a business for seven years now, but I’ve never had to be as authoritative as I was thirty minutes ago, corralling a dozen drunks onto this party wagon (which I reserved by calling 615-GIDDYUP several months back). The trailer is hitched to a cherry-red tractor with wheels so tall they reach my shoulders, driven by a man who announced himself as Farmer Bob and who was, frankly, a little too cavalier with the safety instructions.
I definitely prefer the morose disposition of our bartender, Wylie: a mid-thirties jock type with a muscle tee and a man bun. I know his name only due to the name tag, and not because he’s offered up a single word yet, despite taking our consistent drink orders from behind the small bar in the corner ever since we climbed aboard. Something tells me if a member of our bridal party is hanging by one boot over the side of the wagon at any point this afternoon, Wylie, and not Farmer Bob, will be the one to intervene.
“How do people hold a job in this town?” Giovanna asks, leaning both elbows on the wagon’s edge as she gazes out at Broadway. It’s four o’clock and lines are already forming outside the four-story bars down by the Cumberland River.
I point at the masses. “Bold of you to assume any of these people are going to be in Nashville come Monday.”
“Where do the locals go?”
“How should I know?” I take a sip of my seltzer. “I haven’t been local in ten years.”
“Is that a woman wearing a dinosaur costume?” Gio raises a cool eyebrow at a walking mascot missing her headpiece. “Carrying a bow and arrow ?”
“I’m sure it’s fake.”
(I’m not.)
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF NASHVILLE!” a dude in a University of Tennessee baseball cap shouts at us.
“Oh! There’s a local!” Gio exclaims, pointing at him like he’s a starfish and she’s a small child in an aquarium.
“Don’t be so sure. He’s got a guitar,” I note, “strapped to his back.”
“AUSTIN IS THE REAL UT!” Cami’s younger sister Patricia shouts at the guy from the other end of the wagon.
“Oh, that’s crossing a line!” he rallies back, cupping both hands around his mouth. “Can I get your number?”
We’re in such standstill traffic that Patricia nods, giggling, while the guy comes into the street and passes his phone up to her. Gio and I watch in rapt amusement as he stands below us, hands on his hips, and proceeds to flirt.
In the middle of the wagon, Cami is in a dance circle popping her booty while everyone gasses her up, screaming at the top of their lungs in unison with the blaring Fergie tracks. When she spots me watching her, she bursts through the circle and grabs me.
“Dance!” she commands.
I toss my drink into the garbage can. We hold hands and spin in a ridiculous circle, jumping and dancing, until I’m bodychecked by Mariana. Half her margarita seeps down the front of my overalls.
“Nobody will know!” she tells me seriously, cupping my cheek. “They’ll never know!”
“Mariana, I don’t think we’ll know.”
“Another!” she announces, cementing this fate. She links arms with me and steers us toward Wylie—who looks more and more horrified by the second.
Hours later, I’m wedged into the corner of a honky-tonk booth as every Sanchez sister belts Shania Twain to a roomful of strangers, most of whom have taken it upon themselves to roundly ignore the drunk women onstage.
“Let’s go, girls,” Camila repeats into the mic for maybe the fifth time, just before she accidentally drops it. Her sisters rush to pick it up, two of them bonking heads.
“Lights on, nobody’s home,” Gio says.
We call Ubers soon after, and the Sanchez women stumble offstage, piling into the rides with lyrics still humming between their lips.
“Are you even drunk?” Cami whines as I pull her up the stairs of our Airbnb. The two of us are sharing a room, which is already destroyed with clothes and makeup and jade rollers. Back when we lived together, we could hardly keep the place in order given how many belongings we each needed to function.
“Tomorrow,” I promise her.
“Can you tell Will Grant I said thank you again for getting us a reservation tomorrow night?” she mumbles. “Even if it is at Wagon Wheel. ”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I sing. “How much water have you had tonight?”
Cami laughs maniacally. I push her onto the bed and take off her shoes, then head to the bathroom and fill up a glass. When I come back, Cami is in tears, slumped on her stomach across the whole bed.
I’m not that alarmed—she’s a drunk crier—but still, I rush over and kneel in front of her, pushing the glass against her cheek.
“Hey, we’re going to bring the party to Wagon Wheel.”
“That’s not why I’m crying!” she wails, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara across both her face and the bedspread. Her forehead thunks down.
“Then why are you crying?”
Muffled, she says, “Josie. I have to tell you something.”
My stomach drops.
Here it comes. Part of me was expecting this.
I’m having second thoughts about the bridal party.
Actually, I want Patricia as my maid of honor.
David has never liked you.
Every villainous thing they say about you in the press is true.
But it’s none of those fears.
It’s worse.
“I’m leaving Revenant,” she says to the bedspread, and my heart cracks right in half.
I met Camila during freshman orientation.
My first impression of her was how short she was. Camila had a bob back then, dark hair that was almost black, messy curtain bangs. (These days, every time she gets stressed, she threatens to cut them again. Only it’s not the threat she thinks it is, because David and I have both agreed Cami looked great with bangs.) That day, she was wearing the coolest earrings I’d ever seen in my life. They were gold, Egyptian-looking, and they wrapped up and down her ears. Once we became friends, I borrowed them all the time.
Cami and I got paired up during a breakout discussion. I remember her telling me, completely unprompted, that she wanted to do marketing for a fashion brand when she graduated college. Maybe Anthro, maybe Reformation, or maybe a company that didn’t exist yet.
Here’s a truth I’ve never admitted, even to myself: part of the reason I had the balls to turn Revenant into what it is today is because I knew it fit into Camila Sanchez’s plan.
I was fragile my freshman year of college, and Cami, very quickly, figured that out. She didn’t know everything. Not at first. But she knew I didn’t have social media, and she knew I didn’t go to many parties. I think she was drawn to me because I made her feel like she wasn’t the only person missing out.
We became friends slowly. Migrating toward each other in lecture halls, eating together in the cafeteria. Neither of us was an open book at first, but that changed one afternoon in the library—when we accidentally spotted a couple going at it in the stacks. We ran away giggling loudly in tandem, and it was like the frost melted. We were in on a secret, together.
I don’t know that I ever thought of Cami as fragile, but she was cracking. As the year went on, it became more and more obvious. Her grandma was getting sicker. Her younger sisters had been reliant on Cami and her cousin Mariana for years by the time Cami went to college. She was struggling with a full course load, trying to balance it with her responsibilities as a caretaker. Her family lived forty-five minutes away. She spent a lot of time driving back and forth between campus and their place.
Sometimes, she’d come by my dorm room well after midnight when my roommate was out at a party. I could always tell she’d just gotten back to campus based on the weary look on her face. She would jump on my bed and watch me sew something or draw a design at my desk while New Girl played on my TV in the background, and we’d talk.
Am I a bad person, she asked me one night, because I’d rather be here, staying up too late and wasting time with you, than saving money and living at home?
I think you’re the least bad person I know, I told her. And also, what you want makes you exactly the same as every other freshman.
Another night, when we were practicing our speeches for Public Speaking 101, Cami asked me why I didn’t have social media.
I had an unhealthy relationship with it, I said. Completely honestly.
In what way? she asked.
I shrugged, marking a note in the margin of my printed speech, and mumbled out a response without looking her in the eye. Like, I was obsessed with posting pictures of my outfits. And I was obsessed with following fashion bloggers, but I couldn’t separate what was real from what was staged. It messed with my head. To be honest, I would have gone on letting it, but in April, pretty much my entire grade unfollowed me and some people were even trolling me a little bit and it hurt my feelings and I just decided a clean break from the whole thing was what I needed not to hate myself every morning when I woke up.
When I finally glanced up, Cami was watching me with a confused look, and I knew exactly what she saw.
A healthy, able-bodied, tall, blond-haired, hazel-eyed girl with smooth skin and just enough freckles to look airbrushed, and, of course, money. I knew when Cami looked at me, she saw money. Money in the handbags I had lined up on the top shelf of my closet, money in my skin care, money in the fabric, money in the sewing machine, money in the full cost of out-of-state tuition, because lord knows I didn’t study enough in high school to manage a scholarship.
What on earth, Cami asked me, her voice deadening, were you trolled for in high school that prompted you to delete all of your social media?
And I just—told her: I had a public make-out with my best friend’s twin brother in front of, like, fifty of our classmates, on a beach during senior spring break. People sort of slut-shamed me after that. Plus, it also hurt my best friend’s feelings because she thought I had been using her just to get close to her hot brother.
Cami considered my admission. Well, did you like him?
No? I said. Yes?
You aren’t sure? she asked.
I shook my head. We were warming up to each other. But still, it was a stupid, impulsive mistake, and it hurt Zoe’s feelings.
Chalk it up to a learning experience, Cami said. Nobody’s perfect. I’m not. Carry the lesson forward and move on.
You don’t think I’m a bad person? I asked.
If you were a bad person, Cami said, throwing me a look, you wouldn’t be feeling any remorse. But I can tell you’re swallowed by it, Josie, even though I’m not sure you should be. I get that Zoe was hurt, but you didn’t make out with her boyfriend. You kissed her brother. Do you think he feels as guilty as you do?
I have no idea, I admitted.
Cami crossed her arms over her chest, peering at me through her bangs. If you ever hurt my feelings, I’ll tell you, and we’ll have a conversation about it. Same goes for you if I hurt yours. And we do our best not to hurt each other in the first place. Deal?
She was so pragmatic. I’ve always loved that about Camila. Where I’m highly emotional, she’s logic and reason. Where I’m overly dramatic, she pulls me back to earth.
Deal, I said, and over the course of nine years, we always, always abided by it.