Chapter One #2
She knocks back the rest of her drink and sets it down where Maggie’s glass sat a second before. Bubbles appear like magic. Aubrey flashes a smile she hopes comes off as empathetic to the bartender, who doesn’t meet her eye.
Maggie says, “You’re drinking on me tonight,” and pulls out a comically large coil of blue tickets, sliding two of them across the bar.
All Aubrey finds to say in return is, “Okay.” She takes a sip, heavy and sharp on her tongue.
Fizzy alcohol tastes more or less the same to her, but she decides she likes this one.
She wonders if the people around her would agree, people who not so long ago couldn’t care less how the booze they drank tasted so long as it got them wasted.
Someone calls for Maggie, whose eyes double in size.
It’s too quick for Aubrey to decide whether Maggie’s reaction is good or bad. “Who is it?” she asks through closed teeth, but the answer comes as a squeal, high and crisp above the chatter.
“You bitch!”
Promising enough. Aubrey risks turning around.
A sea of auburn hair engulfs the both of them along with the powdery, floral smell of hairspray. “Oh, my god, hi! You’re here!” Gold hoops and a wide smile, long arms that hold them in for a three-way hug. “I wasn’t sure you were coming!”
“Maggie talked me into it,” Aubrey says pitifully. The hug lasts half a second too long and then they part. It’s almost painful how good Ivory looks. Aubrey jokes, “I’m starting to wonder why I even bothered showing up.”
“Oh, stop!” Ivory’s nickname was Vivian for a long time when they were in school together.
Mostly because of her resemblance to Pretty Woman’s leading lady, and also because the boys in their class loved how angry their teachers got at the reference, at their insolence to compare a teenage girl to such a character.
But Ivory loved it. She’d dressed up in different Julia Roberts looks for Halloween for as long as Aubrey could remember. “You’re stunning!”
Ivory motions at Aubrey as though she’s really something to behold, eyebrows too high on her forehead, mouth agape. Then she clasps her hands together and says matter-of-factly, “It should be illegal we haven’t seen each other in so long.” It’s the sort of thing they say now, as adult women.
“I know, yeah!” The words sound so dreadfully rehearsed. Ivory’s hand moves to Aubrey’s arm and gives a long squeeze
“Must be a bit weird being back here,” Ivory says, almost too quietly in the crowd.
Aubrey decides she doesn’t know what that means. She insists on smiling. “Must be weird for everyone.”
Ivory nods. Her gaze travels to the faces around them. “No, I know,” she says, “but I mean, you know. With people being so awful to you.” Next to Aubrey, Maggie is focused on anything but the two of them.
Ivory’s always been like this, a bit grave, heavy-handed with the cryptic statements, as if she’s trying to get you to admit something she knows you won’t admit to yourself.
It used to have more of an effect on Aubrey, but she’s older now.
She’s had too much time on her own to think things over, to ask herself questions she used to dread hearing from other people.
“We were kids,” Aubrey says, and she relaxes in the comfort of these words.
She’s mulled this over a lot in the last few years.
She’s learned to remove her present self from the guilt of things she handled differently, maybe poorly, when she was younger.
So long as she doesn’t think about it too long.
“You think I’m the only one walking around here tonight with shitty memories? ”
“Ah, no, I know you’re right.” It’s hard not to like Ivory, not to warm to the softness of her smile and the hold of her gaze. It’s back on Aubrey now, heavy like it’s searching for something. “I just wanted to make sure you’re good.”
“You’re sweet. It’s Maggie you should worry about. She’s already run into Victor.”
Ivory’s “No” comes out as a gasp.
“Still insultingly fit and everything, so I hear.”
At the mention of Victor’s name, Maggie’s attention snaps back to them. “What’s that?”
“How’ve you been, hon?” Ivory asks, moving her perfectly manicured nails from Aubrey to Maggie.
“Oh, you know. Grand.” Maggie’s voice cracks on the last syllable—it’s clear and impossible to miss, even through the noise.
The music starts then, a slow, classical string melody that rises above the crowd and unfolds across the room from speakers hidden in the ceiling.
“Ah, good. They’ve figured that out.” Maggie smiles, but the crack is still there.
“Oh, love. Alright, come on.” Ivory grabs Maggie’s wrist to pull her away from the crowd and further down the hall.
To their left, they find a door like the improvised cloakroom’s, but closed and much more imposing—dark wood and a freshly polished brass knob, which Ivory is quick to wiggle and nudge open.
“Wait,” Maggie argues, “I can’t go in there, there’s the speech coming—”
Ivory scoffs. “No one’s drunk enough for that yet.”
Aubrey stifles a laugh against the back of her hand. The room is eerily quiet, though the commotion of the evening still filters in. Moonlight floods the space through towering windows. The desks are still lined in perfect rows, like they’ve hardly moved over the past decade.
“Was this room always this big?” Aubrey asks no one in particular.
The ceiling is high. The wall to her right is still lined with a green chalkboard taking up the full width of the room.
There are posters on the walls of grammar rules and landscapes, shelves filled with textbooks, and a cupboard in the left corner of the room that Aubrey remembers but has never seen open.
“What’s going on, Mags?” Ivory is asking now, kneeling by Maggie’s side as she strokes her hair softly.
Ivory’s voice is gentle and poised, different from when they were kids, when she would gasp and press Maggie for details in an impatient, nasal tone.
She’s grown. She told them a few years back that her parents paid for her to go to therapy.
Aubrey knew their relationship as a trio had evolved when they’d stumbled into their twenties.
Once held together by similar taste in music, identical class schedules, and malleable identities, they’d branched off in the way teenage friendship often does, a Venn diagram of sorts with Maggie in the centre.
Watching the two of them like this, Aubrey wonders how much time they’ve been spending together lately, how often they’ve been hanging out.
She and Maggie never talk about Ivory together, which feels strange now.
“And work has just been insane, you know,” Maggie is saying now, her eyes raised to the ceiling, head tilted back to keep tears from flowing down her perfectly powdered face.
“And my mom’s been trying to match me up with her new trainer, and he’s gorgeous, I mean, ridiculous, but he’s messaged me a few times and then nothing. ”
In the background, voices grow closer until three heads poke through the door.
“Oh, my god, what’s going on in here?” Rachel Toro wiggles her way past Julie Cross and Marianne Henry, who’ve all hardly changed since Aubrey last saw them carefully adjusting their gowns and caps for a picture at graduation.
“Aubrey, hey,” one of them offers as they gather on the desks surrounding Maggie.
Aubrey smiles, quiet, in return. It’s always been a bit like this.
She’s never been one to talk much unless absolutely necessary, and in school there always seemed to be people around to fill in the silence anyway.
Things don’t feel too different now. Maybe a decade was too short a wait for a reunion—it feels like she saw all these people just yesterday, like there isn’t much she could tell them about herself now that they wouldn’t already know. It’s probably different for them.
“You’re kidding!” Marianne gasps at something Maggie just said.
They sit in a semicircle around her, like moths drawn to an entertaining, spluttering flame.
It brings a smile to Aubrey’s lips, just for a second, though she can’t quite decide if it’s happy or sad, or maybe something else.
She feels for her phone in her bag and pulls it out to read the notifications still waiting on the screen.
Just let me know by tomorrow morning at the latest, Louise’s oldest message reads. Then, timestamped a couple minutes later, This would do you some good.
A strong argument. Most things that aren’t spending another six months in her apartment, waiting for life to somehow take a miraculously fun turn, would probably do Aubrey some good.
It’s summer already. Half of the year has gone and she’s in the same spot she was when Louise made her offer six months earlier.
A fine spot. A spot where she hangs out with Maggie and no one else, a spot where she struggles to get enough hours selling scented candles to squinting, grimacing women who request coffee grounds to cleanse the fragrance from their noses, a spot where she rewatches the same few series on a loop and tries to make time to read but not really, a spot where she stares at dating profiles on her phone and fails to muster the strength to start another tepid conversation with a stranger.
A spot she knows other people must be in, yet when she glances around, it seems everyone else is moving just a little faster, with just a little more grace.
At least when they take a step back it’s because they’ve dared to move forward. Aubrey is just standing still.
“Honestly, I’m so embarrassed I ever let this man see me naked,” Julie is saying, watching the other girls’ reactions a little too closely.
A concert of “Oh, my god, don’t!” quickly follows.
Julie squeals, “I know, I know! But the post-relationship clarity is so shit, you guys. I mean he shaved his toes, for fuck’s sake.
And I called his mom to get him to talk to me! ”