Chapter 12 #3
Hours passed. Hannah fell off the mechanical bull three times.
Baker managed to stay on for forty-five seconds while Hannah screamed to anyone who would listen that her fiancée was the sexiest woman on earth.
I took two turns of my own, falling off within five seconds the first time, then fifteen seconds the next.
My knee bled from where I scraped it on the bouncy tarp, but when Brian rushed to help me up, I laughed uncontrollably and assured him I was fine.
And then we danced. Song after song after song, disco lights reflecting on the walls, glitter blooming in the air like stardust. People I didn’t know wrapped feather boas around my neck and shimmied me into their open arms. Edge appeared out of nowhere and did a passable impression of the robot.
Brooke hoisted Maria Paula onto her shoulders and tried to chicken fight another lesbian couple until Hannah, drunk as a skunk, yelled at them to quit.
I sneaked off to the bar for another lemon drop shot, and then another, until Midas had had enough and refused to serve me anything but Coke.
And everywhere I looked were beautiful people.
College girls who held my gaze and smiled soft, beckoning smiles that urged me closer.
Women in the prime of their lives who shook their long locks and their ample thighs.
Older women in orthopedic sneakers who were completely out of fucks to give but still brimming with swagger and lust. Femmes and butches and sporty gays and fuckbois, trans guys in muscle tanks who proudly showed their scars, bears and gym bros and skinny dancers and choirboys, enbys with gauges and cowboy boots and tattoos and tutus.
And when Ralph-the-bull-guy’s daughter showed up—reportedly because her dad had texted her “Come 2 Bama u can’t miss this”—she literally took people’s breath away in a sequined floor-length dress that shimmered like fish scales from the old children’s classic The Rainbow Fish.
As I passed by her on my way to the bathroom, another trans woman was asking her to autograph her arm “because I need some of your magic for my own.”
By two thirty A.M., Hatch had had enough.
The crowd had started thinning out but the remaining partiers showed no signs of stopping.
We announced last call and played “Sweet Home Alabama” three times in a row until people got the message and finally spilled outside the doors.
And then it was the usual suspects: Edge and Otis and a gaggle of the old guard, hanging around with the last trickles of their drinks, shouting about how Uber was taking too long and the Cricket ought to buy its own bus.
“That’s it, I’m tired, get your asses in my car,” Hatch grumbled, shoving them out the door. “Penny, don’t you dare bring that Mule along. Edge—no, Edge, put RuPaw down!”
“Do we have to clean up now?” I asked after Hatch had taken his delinquents home.
“Hell no,” said Midas. He was dazed and exhausted, but his face was bright from having scored Brian’s phone number.
“We’ll clean up tum-morrow,” Hannah said, bleary-eyed and slurring.
“Come on, Lou,” Baker said, looping an arm around my shoulders. “I’m driving you home. And we’re getting McDonald’s.”
I grinned and followed Baker and Hannah out to the car while Midas locked up behind us. The air was still warm and heavy and the stars were sparkling in the black sky. I opened my arms wide and took a deep breath, like I wanted to soak everything up, like I wanted every night to be like this one.
Hannah stumbled into the passenger seat, giggling.
I flopped into the back seat and slumped against the headrest. Baker drove, steady and relaxed, taking the back roads like she had all the time in the world.
Hannah lowered everyone’s windows and dialed up the music, and Baker gave her an amused smile like she’d been waiting for her to do that.
Hannah screeched song lyrics in an off-key, raspy voice, and then she changed the words of every song to be about RuPaw.
When Tracy Chapman began to play, Hannah yelled, “You’ve got a fast claw,” and burst into another giggling fit, and Baker’s shoulders shook with laughter as she gave Hannah that secret smile that she saved only for her.
The McDonald’s drive-through was five cars deep.
The glaring lights had me rubbing my eyes, drunk and sleepy and hungry and exhilarated.
Hannah was still singing terribly. Baker propped her left leg up to rest her knee against the sideboard, and I laughed without meaning to, remembering that internet joke about how queer people were incapable of sitting properly.
We inched forward in the line, and I had no idea whether we’d been sitting there for one minute or ten. It didn’t matter.
We got Happy Meals, all three of us, with cheeseburgers and fries and Coca-Cola.
The toy puppy that came in my box was apparently from a kid’s show, and I ripped off the plastic and danced the pup across my knees, not caring that it was childish, already promising myself that I’d keep this memento forever.
It wasn’t until we’d finished eating that Hannah began to cry. I wasn’t sure if I was hearing right at first, but her singing had definitely stopped and she was sniffling like someone with a sinus infection.
“Baby, what?” Baker asked softly. She gripped Hannah’s hand and smoothed her thumb over Hannah’s palm.
“Sorry. It’s the song. I miss George.”
This made no sense to me, because the song that was playing was Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” upbeat and dancy and loaded with innuendo.
“I should have gotten him those tickets to see her,” Hannah sniffed. “Last fall, on her tour. He would have loved it.”
“Honey, you didn’t know,” Baker cooed.
The beat continued to thump. Hannah cried harder. In the slivers of moonlight coming through the windshield, I could see Baker’s aching expression.
“I just wish we’d had more time,” Hannah sobbed. “I wish the diagnosis hadn’t knocked us sideways. I would have asked him so many more things.”
“I know, honey. I know.”
“He was supposed to marry us.”
“I know.”
“I’m so mad at him. I’m so mad.”
Hannah’s sobs were so devastating that I started crying, too.
I cried because she was hurting, and because Baker was hurting, and because they had known my uncle better than I had.
How strange, I thought through my tears, to be jealous of another person’s grief.
To yearn for the pain that was proportional to the love.
I understood intuitively why Uncle George was on Hannah’s mind.
Tonight had been one of the best nights of my life, and the only reason I had lived it was because of him.
Because of what he’d built, what he’d given, what he’d left behind.
The searing joy of tonight was inexplicably twined with the senseless grief of losing the man who had cultivated it.
His legacy was stamped onto every person who had walked through the Frisky Cricket’s doors.
I thought of Hatch, of the picture of Uncle George he kept hidden in his desk, and I cried harder.
Baker missed the turn for my street, and I opened my mouth to protest before I realized what she was doing.
She turned left, and left, and left again, and I understood she was looping us in a circle until Hannah and I could finish crying.
Even after the song changed to something I didn’t know, Baker continued to drive with her hands steady on the wheel, giving us space in this long, necessary moment.
It was a gift I didn’t know how to say thank you for.
When our cries finally died down, Baker made a gentle turn onto my street. She lowered the music and pulled quietly into my driveway. Then she handed me a fast-food napkin to wipe my face.
“Get some sleep, okay?”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. Hannah couldn’t, either. She leaned forward with her head in her hands as I climbed out of the car. I snapped the door closed and ambled to my dad’s front door, exhausted in every way. The Subaru lingered in my driveway until I had safely gotten inside.