4
The first quarter hour was awkward.
The second uncomfortable.
The third exhausting.
The conversation flowed around me, zippy and fast, interlaced with inside jokes and the names of people I didn’t know. Whenever I tried to join in, everyone defaulted to the same sequence of questions and answers, like NPCs stuck on an infinite loop.
What are you studying? Business? Oh. That’s cool.
Where? Here? Remote learning? I couldn’t do that.
University life is so fun! I’m doing a bachelor’s, but I’m enjoying it so much, I might get my master’s once I’m done.
What about you? Oh. A certificate? That’s smart.
Way less expensive, I bet. And more practical!
You’ll get a job in no time. I love your Willy Wonka costume, by the way.
I did my best to stay on script, smiled when a camera roamed in my direction, and slurped down as much tea as my stomach could handle.
I’d been at it for just over an hour when I gave up.
I’d never been great when it came to other people. Talking to strangers felt a little like being an underqualified worker at a nuclear power plant—following checklists, monitoring reactions, hoping nothing was about to explode.
For some reason, the longer I was there, the more radioactive everything felt.
“Are you going?” Ginger asked when I started inching toward the door.
“Yeah. I . . . um . . . have to see my grandma. I promised I’d be back before sundown.”
She knew I was lying. I could tell by the unhappy way she sucked at her cheek. But, mercifully, she didn’t try to change my mind. “Do you want your drinks?” she whispered, eyes darting toward her mum. “I put them in the fridge, so they’ll still be cold.”
“No. Um. It’s OK.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said, already retreating away from her. “I’ll swing by tomorrow and pick them up.”
“OK. Um. See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”
It was a fine party, I told myself as I drove across town, sweating into my padded jacket, my car’s fan belt squealing the whole way. A totally normal party. Not at all weird. And, more importantly, I was not at all weird. It was fine. Really, truly, completely fine.
Even in my head, the words sounded like a lie. Despite that, I kept repeating them as I drove out of Ginger’s suburb, past the hospital and the grocery store, and through the underpass beneath the highway.
The sky was bruise purple when I got home, pulling into my usual spot.
My grandma’s house didn’t look like a five-year-old’s drawing. It looked like a carbon copy of every other house on the street. Prefab walls, corrugated tin roof, and the cheapest letter box money could buy.
It’s fine, I reminded myself as I yanked on the hand brake. Totally fine. No one thought you looked cheap, especially not Ginger. I’ll message her tomorrow and we’ll laugh-emoji about it. A great party. The best ever. I climbed out of the car.
The air was thick enough to drink. Hot, muggy, and filled with fat, whirring beetles that zigzagged drunkenly, the buzz of their wings overlapping with the rumble of trucks on the highway and the raw-throated screams of nearby cockatoos.
The neighbors were fighting again. The same fight they’d had last week.
“. . . think they’d have done a better job than me? They couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery!”
“It wasn’t a piss-up, it was Uncle Al’s funeral, and you forgot to buy a coffin!”
I could see, in the fading light, that there was an envelope sticky-taped to the front door.
I checked my phone. No messages, not that I’d expected there to be any. Grandma had a phone, but it lived uncharged in her bedroom drawer. “It’s too complicated,” she’d always say. “I’ll stick to the landline.” Except the landline had been disconnected two years ago.
I guessed when all else failed, there were always random, ominous notes. If it was good enough for Slenderman, it was good enough for me.
I shrugged off my jacket, locked the car, and walked the familiar route through the flowerpots up to the front door. The envelope had been stuck onto the door with a single bit of masking tape. The letter inside was written on the back of an old pizza receipt.
Hey Lulu Lemon!
Hope you had fun at your party. I’m going to be at Auntie Dawn’s for a couple of days. She’s going through a lot right now (I always knew Patrick was a pig, but to run off and leave her like that a week before her 70th? Don’t ever get married, Lulu. Men aren’t worth it).
Dinner’s in the fridge. Love you!
Grandma
A lump of emotion I couldn’t name clumped heavy and jagged in my throat.
I swallowed it down. It was fine. I was fine.
I was twenty. I didn’t need my grandma around all the time, especially not when everything was totally normal, totally fine.
Actually, it’d be good to have the house to myself for a bit.
A weekend without her music playing, her glasses misty from leaning over the stove, her hair tangled around her favorite leopard-print claw clip . . .
The lump rose up again.
It’s fine, I reminded myself as I fumbled with my keys. It’s fine and I’m fine because the party was fine. Totally, completely, extraordinarily fine. A couple of days alone will also be fine.
I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
Everything about my grandma’s house was familiar.
The squeaky floorboards, the stink of lavender, the stacks of stuff, tall enough to touch the ceiling in some places.
Boxes, cabinets, piles of clothes. A cross-stitch hung on a patch of exposed wallpaper, facing the door.
Our house is lived in, it’s not just for show.
If you don’t like it, you know where to go!
Below those words, stitched with loving care, was a fist with an extended middle finger.
Grandma had a talent for needlework.
“Cookie!” I called out as I hung my jacket up on the hatstand by the door. “Cookie, I’m home!”
Cookie heaved out a half-hearted bark from his spot on the sofa. He was a mastiff, big and droopy with wholemeal-colored fur that went black around his muzzle. Grandma reckoned he deterred thieves. I didn’t think he did much of anything.
I took my hat, bow tie, and boots off before weaving through the piles of stuff toward the sofa.
Cookie thumped his tail against the cushion as I sat beside him.
“Hey, buddy. I guess it’s just going to be you and me this weekend.”
He lifted a paw, presenting his belly. I rubbed it with one hand and reached for the TV remote with the other, my thumb going to the HDMI-input button automatically.
The menu of the last game I’d played appeared, the disc still in the tray.
A wall of flames. An angry, ominous choir. A glowering man who could’ve been the poster child for buccal-fat-removal surgery.
OG God of War.
Perfect.
I picked up the PS2 controller, loaded an old save, and started mashing buttons. On the screen, Kratos, the titular God of War (not that we’d gotten to that part yet), started smashing ceramics. A lot of ceramics. Really, a copious amount of ceramics.
The PlayStation had been a Christmas gift from Auntie Dawn.
I assumed she thought it was a new console, something high-tech that she’d somehow managed to get for cheap from eBay.
I didn’t tell her that the PS2 was as old as I was.
In all honesty, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I could afford anything better, and there was something comforting about countable polygons.
I kept mashing buttons. Kratos kept smashing ceramics. At my side, Cookie had given up on belly rubs and gone back to snoring, unbothered by the angry, epic music and exaggerated sound effects of the PS2.
I turned it up louder and kept playing.
Then I turned it up louder again.
Then louder.
It didn’t help.
I could still hear the neighbors fighting. I could still hear my own heart beating too loud in my ears. My leg was bouncing like the needle in a sewing machine. There was sweat between my shoulder blades. My jaw was clenched too tight, and my molars hurt down to their roots.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I hit pause, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and opened Instagram.
Back in high school, Ginger used to pepper Instagram with photos from all her parties.
St. Patrick’s Day at Ginger’s. A kaleidoscope of green.
1,141 likes. Frightful Fun at the Flower Festival by Ginger.
Daisy chains and black lipstick. 1,792 likes.
Ginger’s Pool Party. Watermelon slices, beach umbrellas, and heart-shaped sunglasses. 2,099 likes.
Sure enough, there was already a new post sitting in my feed, uploaded fourteen minutes ago. Ginger’s High Tea High School Reunion. My heart was in my throat as I started swiping through the pictures.
It looked even more magical online than it had in real life.
Smiling, sparkling, sepia. It was enough to make the most hardcore Pinterester weep.
I saw the girl who’d called her dress basic poking her tongue out at the camera, long dark hair hanging around a warm, freckled face.
I saw other girls, grinning and laughing.
Finally, in the last few photos of the series, I saw myself.
It was bad.
Really bad.
My black hair looked frayed and tangled, my skin red and splotchy without any makeup, and my clothes bulky, badly made, and out of place.
In the first photo I was standing awkwardly apart from the group.
In the second, I was in the background talking to Ginger’s mum, caught mid-gesture, mouth half open, hands splayed out. The third photo was just of me.
I was leaning back in one of the chairs, feet propped up, top hat pulled low, and teacup sitting empty in my lap.
In the caption: I didn’t tell her to dress up like that !!!! Love the creativity @LucyMMcQuinn !!!!
In the comments:
OMG WTF
Who’s he?
WHERE THE OOMPA LOOMPAS AT?!?!?!?!?!
Hello Lucy . . . . . It’s your Auntie Dawn here . . . . . . I’m glad you’re having fun . . . . . Love that you don’t care what people think of you . . . . . . Be well . . . . .
OMFG!!!! THIS IS TOO FUNNY!!!
@LucyMMcQuinn Are you drunk?
lololololololololololol
I noticed several of the others who were tagged in the post were laugh-reacting to the comments. I wondered what they’d said about me after I left the party. I wondered why Ginger had invited me in the first place. Was it just to make fun of me?
The God of War soundtrack filled the air, all thumping drums and blaring brass.
It wasn’t that bad. I knew it wasn’t. I should’ve just untagged myself from the photos.
Or, actually, I should’ve laughed along.
That way everyone would’ve known it was a joke, and I was in on it.
Sure, I looked tacky and cheap and geeky and queer .
. . but that didn’t mean I was. It was just a funny costume.
That was all. It was fine. Totally fine.
Except it wasn’t. Not really.
It was my graduation day, my grandma was probably hours away by now, and I’d blown off cheap Thai food with my best friend to be the butt of the joke in Ginger Béliveau’s latest aesthetic Instagram post.
Another comment popped up.
It was from Krissy.
Wow.
That lump of emotion I’d swallowed down earlier came back, sharper and more jagged than before.
I wanted to block Ginger. I wanted to listen to loud, crashing music and have a really, really long shower.
I wanted to call the woman with the freckles who’d called her fifty-dollar dress basic a rich bitch, even though that’d be really fucking hypocritical, because the materials of my cosplay had cost me several hundred dollars.
Grandma had helped me with the sewing, and I’d spent hours supergluing all the details onto it. It was my first cosplay.
And, yes, it wasn’t really that great. I only got second in the regional novice division, and it wasn’t exactly a big convention, but I’d liked it. I’d liked it so much that I’d wanted to wear it again.
I’d thought it fit the theme.
Cookie whined and dropped his massive head onto my lap.
I took a long, shaky breath and scratched him behind his big, floppy ears.
I was overreacting. I knew I was. It wasn’t even that bad.
I couldn’t tell from the flat black text on the screen if Ginger was being sincere or shitty, and as for the rest?
Normal comments. The sorts of comments every post probably got.
I wasn’t used to it, because I only had fifty-one followers on Instagram.
But knowing that didn’t stop the sting.
I felt small. I felt humiliated. I felt . . . tacky.
Just like my certificate and its off-center logo.
Cookie huffed unhappily.
“It’s OK,” I said, as much to myself as to him. “It’s OK. I’m OK.”
Except I wasn’t. I needed to talk to someone. Someone who’d get it. Someone who wouldn’t judge me if I wanted to use mean words. Someone who would snort and roll her eyes at all the right times. Someone who wouldn’t sound like an NPC stuck on a loop.
Krissy.
I needed to talk to Krissy.
I needed to explain to her.
I needed . . . her.
A friend.
I closed Instagram and opened my recent-calls list. Krissy’s number was at the top.
I’ve analyzed every particle of this memory, right down to the atomic level, to the subatomic.
I’ve spent days, weeks, months, years trying to wring some meaning out of it, some understanding.
More than anything else, I’ve tried to identify where exactly I went wrong.
What I could’ve done differently. What it would’ve taken to make the dominoes fall in another direction.
But the more I think about it, the more arbitrary and stupid it seems.
I called Krissy . . .