The Swap

by Robyn Harding

  “I fired some of your pieces,” Freya said to me. “Come by the studio later and you can glaze them. I’d love to hear about your first week on the job.”

  After they left the store together, I returned to my dusting, picking up one of Freya’s bud vases. It was a simple design but deceivingly hard to produce. It had a narrow base, a tall sleek neck and a delicate opening like the petals of a flower. She’d used two glazes—one sage, one denim—to re-create the color of a stormy sea. It was exquisite. And then, somehow, it was on the floor, smashed into five clean pieces.

  Oops.

  13 jamie

  Freya and I liked the restaurant in the Blue Heron hotel. It offered harbor views and a good-size menu, though the food never quite lived up to the scenery. On weekends, the eatery was packed with tourists, but the midweek-lunch trade was sparse. Only three other tables were occupied; Freya and I easily got our favorite spot by the window.

  When we’d ordered salads and iced tea, I said, “I hope Low isn’t angry with me.”

  “It’s my fault,” Freya said. “We’ve spent so much time together over the last few months, that she thinks we’re BFFs. I enjoy her, but she’s just a kid.”

  “She’s barely said a word since she’s been working for me. I’m not sure how to make her feel more comfortable.”

  “She’ll open up,” Freya said as our drinks arrived. “But you can tell her anything. She’s a great listener.”

  Suddenly, there was a crash behind us, a plate and cutlery falling to the floor. I turned in my seat to see a child, about six months old, perched on its mother’s lap. The baby had a fuzzy blond head, a pale green onesie, and a wide toothless smile—evidence of its delight in the noise and mess it had created. The mother, in a loose-fitting dress and Birkenstocks, looked weary as the father, his long brown hair threaded with silver, bent to retrieve the carnage.

  “Why do people think it’s okay to bring babies into restaurants?” Freya sniped. “If you’re going to procreate, you have to stay home. There should be a law.”

  I turned back to her. “Cute kid, though.”

  Freya looked over at the child. “It looks like it needs a bath. And some vaccines.”

  To my embarrassment, my eyes moistened. I blinked frantically, but my companion noticed.

  “What’s wrong? Was it the vaccine comment? Did I cross the line?”

  I grabbed my napkin, dabbing at the tears that threatened to spill over. “It’s not that. I just… I just got my period.”

  “I used to get really bad PMS when I was younger,” Freya said. “Have you tried going on the pill? It can ease the symptoms.”

  “It’s not PMS.” I dropped the napkin from my face. “I was a bit late and I thought… I hoped…”

  Freya leaned forward. “Are you trying to get pregnant?”

  And then it all came out. The months of crushing disappointment, the costly and uncomfortable treatments, the humiliating and painful adoption scam. I knew everything about Freya’s fall from social media grace, the bullying and abuse, the trial and the civil lawsuit, but I hadn’t wanted our friendship to be tainted by my sad backstory. And yet, the words flowed out of me like a burst dam. Somewhere in the middle of my monologue, our salads arrived, but they sat untouched. Freya didn’t pick up her fork. She let me talk about my desperate, unfulfilled need for a child, our greens wilting before us.

  “Brian says we can be happy without a baby,” I finished. “I promised to try but… I just don’t know if I can be.” Tears leaked from my eyes.

  “I know. It’s hard.” Freya patted my hand. “Society expects women of a certain age to become mothers. If you’re not, everyone thinks there’s something wrong with you.”

  I nodded.

  “When people learn I don’t want kids, they think I have some mental or emotional defect. They feel sorry for Max. He doesn’t care if he has kids, but they just think the cold bitch he married won’t give him any. I’ve stopped talking to his mother. And I’ve had to drop all my friends who’ve become moms because they’re so annoying.”

  “People come right out and ask, don’t they?” I inserted. “Why don’t you have kids?”

  “Like it’s any of their fucking business.” Freya picked up her fork then. “I’m tired of being treated like I’m less of a woman because I’m not a mom.”

  I watched her stab a cherry tomato, pop it in her mouth, and chew aggressively. Freya understood. We had completely opposite desires—I yearned for a child, and she disdained the idea of having one—but we had one thing in common: we were both made to feel incomplete.

  “Let’s do something fun,” she said, “something only we unfruitful women can do.”

  I tucked into my salad. “Like what?”

  “Come over tonight, you and Brian. We’ll get drunk.” She lowered her voice. “We’ll take Molly.”

  “Molly?”

  “MDMA. The love drug. The four of us will have a blast on that shit.”

  “No,” I said, “no chemicals.” Coming from Vancouver, the fentanyl crisis was top of mind for me. Street drugs were being cut with the potent synthetic opioid, and people were dying. The lethal drug did not discern between addicts and dabblers.

  “ ’Shrooms, then. Completely natural.”

  “Where would you even get them?”

  “Low’s a teenager. She’ll know someone who can hook us up.”

  “I can’t buy magic mushrooms from my shop assistant!”

  “I’ll buy them. I won’t tell her you’re involved.”

  “I don’t know.…”

  “We’ll put on some music and dance and laugh.” She took a sip of iced tea. “It’ll be cool. It’ll be mind-expanding.”

  I wanted to be Freya’s fun, wild, adventurous friend, but I had a bad track record with the persona. In college, I’d tried ’shrooms, pot, even ecstasy once. My dabbling inevitably ended in paranoia, vomiting, and/or diarrhea. I might have had the will, but I didn’t have the constitution to be wild and adventurous. But for Freya… maybe I could try?

  “They’re perfectly safe,” she insisted. “Max and I have done them a few times.” She bit her lip coyly. “Have you ever had sex on psychedelics? It’s amazing.”

  I had not. But maybe drugs were the answer to the sexual lull my husband and I were in? Not on a regular basis, but perhaps a night on magic mushrooms would allow us to recapture the passion we’d once had for each other.

  “And it’ll make us appreciate our freedom,” Freya nudged. She lifted her chin toward the parents behind me. “Those two won’t be having any fun tonight. They’ll be hand-washing their kid’s shitty diapers.”

  I giggled a little. The baby was cute, but Freya had a point. “By the looks of them, they’ll be weaving the diapers themselves on their loom.”

  “From thread they spun themselves. From their pet lamb.”

  “The baby needs to be changed!” I joked. “Quick! Shear the sheep!”

  Freya chuckled. “See how lucky we are? You have to come over tonight.”

  “I’ll see if Brian’s into it.” He would be. His man-crush on Max aside, he was the fun-loving half of our partnership. While his asthma precluded him from smoking dope, he was always up for a beer and a laugh. A night on magic mushrooms would be up his alley.

  “Awesome,” Freya said, then she peered past me to the baby and its family. She pointed with her fork. “Look at that.”

  I turned to see a waitress making goo-goo eyes at the child while she wiped food from the table. Next to her, the middle-aged manager was cheerfully sweeping up the broken crockery.

  “If we yelled and threw food and broke dishes, we’d get kicked out,” Freya said. “People will forgive anything if you have a baby.”

  14 low

  I had finished my shift at the store in tense silence. After Jamie had hijacked my lunch date with Freya, I was not in the mood for chitchat. Given my taciturn nature, she may not have noticed that I was giving her the cold shoulder, but I was. When I
left at five thirty, she called after me, “Have a nice night, Low.”

  “Yep,” I muttered, adding, “You too,” as the door closed behind me. I couldn’t lose this job, but I was pissed at my boss. She was so desperate for a friend that she’d pulled rank on me, jumped at the chance to share a meal with Freya. It was pathetic. I had just reached my truck when Freya’s text came in.

  Are you coming to the studio?

  As usual, Freya’s message lifted my spirits. When she had gone for lunch with Jamie instead of me, I’d felt angry and excluded. But her text validated that it had been me she’d wanted to eat with, me she had wanted to see.

  On my way, I responded.

  Her reply was instant.

  Can you get me some shrooms? Enough for four people. I’ll pay you when you get here.

  Of course I could get some ’shrooms. They grew wild in the island’s northern forests and several kids at school collected and sold them. But Freya’s request hurt. She was treating me like a drug dealer. And ’shrooms for four? If she’d said ’shrooms for three, or even five, I would have assumed she was inviting me to join in. Although I didn’t care for hallucinogens, I would have made an exception for Freya and Max. But she’d said four. Four. Who was she planning to trip with?

  It had to be Jamie and Brian. While my straitlaced employer did not seem the type, four months of careful observation over the course of my friendship with Freya had convinced me that she had no other friends. She was friendly with a few people, like the seniors who took her pottery classes, but they weren’t friends. Definitely not friends who did ’shrooms together. Max didn’t seem to have any pals, probably because he spent most of his time alone in a kayak, or on a motorcycle, or exercising.

  But disappointing Freya was not an option, so I drove to the taxi company where a former classmate worked in the office and sold drugs out the back door. I bought five grams of magic mushrooms for fifty bucks. Freya was thrilled when I delivered the packet to her.

  “You’re a doll,” she said, handing me a bill. And then: “Umm… Were you still planning to glaze your pieces tonight?”

  “I was.”

  “It’s just… Jamie doesn’t want you to know she’s doing ’shrooms.”

  So, it was Jamie. I liked that Freya was betraying her confidence for me. “Why would I care? I’ve done ’shrooms plenty of times.” This was an outright lie—I had done ’shrooms only once, and I’d thought my lamp was laughing at me—but I hoped it might prompt an invitation.

  “You know how Jamie is,” Freya said. “She’s kind of uptight.”

  Her disparaging comments about Jamie made me feel deliciously warm. “Just a bit,” I joked.

  “I don’t want her to be paranoid and have a bad trip. Come back tomorrow.”

  The glow of satisfaction evaporated. Freya was dismissing me, like a delivery person. Like a mule.

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks for being so cool,” she said. She stood on her tiptoes then and kissed my cheek. It was an odd thing to do, but she must have sensed my feelings of betrayal and rejection, must have thought she could assuage her guilt with this pathetic show of affection.

  “No big deal.”

  But it was. A big fucking deal.

  15 brian vincent

  I was supposed to be working on my novel, but at some point that afternoon, I’d fallen down a social media rabbit hole. When Jamie walked through the front door at six fifteen, I was startled to realize I’d squandered hours of writing time. Feeling guilty, I jumped out of my seat.

  “Hey, babe.” I hurried over and kissed her cheek. “You surprised me. I was in the zone.”

  “Were you?” She gave me a wry smile. “Or were you on Facebook?”

  “Twitter,” I admitted. “But there’s a plagiarism scandal going on with this huge YA author. Technically, it was research.”

  “Or schadenfreude.”

  I held up two fingers about an inch a part. A bit.

  We moved into the kitchen, where lunch dishes and coffee cups still littered the counters. I began stuffing them into the dishwasher, as I asked, “Are you hungry? I bought a piece of fish at the docks. I could make some risotto to go with it.”

  “Freya invited us over tonight.”

  “Oh.” I stopped. “For dinner?”

  “For magic mushrooms.”

  “Seriously?”

  Jamie went to the cupboard and pulled out a glass. “Apparently Low can hook her up.”

  “Are you into it?”

  Jamie and I had taken ’shrooms in college. I’d had a decent trip, though I’d spent most of the night rubbing her back while she vomited into a garbage can.

  “I don’t know.” Her pretty face looked troubled as she poured water from the Brita. “I had a hard day today.”

  “Did something happen at the store?”

  “No.” She turned away, grabbed a cloth, and busied herself wiping mustard from the counter. “I got my period, that’s all.”

  “Jamie”—my voice was gentle—“you can’t get sad every month.”

  “I know that,” she replied, still vigorously cleaning. “I wouldn’t have, but I was late. I got my hopes up a bit.”

  “How late?”

  She hesitated before answering. “Two days. But my period is like clockwork. I thought… maybe… I’ve got an assistant, my stress levels are down.…”

  I moved toward her, tried to draw her into a hug, but she pecked my cheek and stepped away.

  “I’m fine now. Really.” She rinsed the cloth under the faucet. “Freya and I had lunch. We talked about how society expects women to become moms. Everyone thinks I’m defective because I can’t have a baby. Freya doesn’t want kids and people think she’s a heartless monster.”

  “And then you decided to get high on psychedelics?”

  “Basically, yeah.” She smiled as she wrung out the cloth. “She thought a night of friends and music and tripping would make us appreciate our childlessness. I’ll probably just have some wine, but the rest of you can take mushrooms, if you want.”

  “Sounds kind of fun.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see your boyfriend.”

  I rolled up a dish towel and whipped it at her butt as she laughingly skittered from the room.

  “My boyfriend,” I muttered to myself as I pulled the fish from the fridge. Of course there was nothing romantic about my feelings toward Max Beausoleil, but I liked the guy. He was a small-town boy who hadn’t let fame and fortune go to his head. Or, maybe it had gone to his head, but then the fallout from the illegal hit, the lawsuit, Ryan Klassen’s overdose, had brought him crashing back down to earth. Like everyone with a TV, I’d watched the replay of Klassen’s incendiary stick in the face, and Beausoleil’s retaliatory check. I saw the anger and aggression on Max’s face in slow motion. I also saw his tears as he apologized to the Klassen family in an emotional press conference outside the courthouse. It was hard to muster pity for the rich, handsome athlete with his sexy blond wife hanging off his arm. He’d pled guilty to assault to “spare them the ugliness of a trial,” but many thought it was a PR move, that he was crying crocodile tears. I’d been one of them.

  Growing up, I’d hated his type. The scene at my Seattle high school was straight out of The Breakfast Club: jocks, stoners, Goths, rich kids, nerds… I was firmly, and quite happily, entrenched in the nerd clique. In fact, I was a member of a nerd subset known as the creative nerds. We were the Dungeons & Dragons players, the Warhammer fans. My group was held in even lower esteem because of our lack of earning potential. The computer geeks and gamers would end up with lucrative careers as programmers and coders. We were destined to work in comic-book shops or toy stores.

  No one looked down on us more than the jocks. When we contributed to class discussions, they snickered, coughed into their hands and said, “Dork!” They pushed us into lockers and knocked us down in noncontact games of soccer and baseball. They even broke into the resource room we’d
commandeered for our lunchtime D&D sessions and messed with our laborious setup. My smaller friends bore the brunt of it. I was just under six feet tall, quick and agile, so less of a target. But I wasn’t big, strong, or competitive. And I was intelligent and inquisitive. To those sports-obsessed assholes, that made me a loser.

  When Jamie told me that her new friend was married to Maxime Beausoleil, I knew I’d hate the guy. He was a jock, a bully, a killer. Still, I was glad Jamie had found Freya. My wife was happier, lighter, laughing more. When she came in from a walk or a wine date with her friend, she looked placid and content. I hadn’t seen that look since before she realized that her life with me was incomplete. That she and I were not enough. I wouldn’t begrudge her that friendship, but I would steer clear. Jamie knew me well enough not to suggest we become “couple friends.” And then one day, I bumped into Freya at Hawking Mercantile.

  I was prepared to dislike the California blonde in her impeccable makeup and pricey yoga pants, but she won me over. In a brief, ten-minute introduction, she found a way to compliment my wife, her shop, me, my career, my past career (“teaching is the noblest profession”), and my marriage. I was powerless in the face of her beauty and charm. So when she said, “Why don’t you two come over for dinner? Max will love you.” I agreed.

  Max Beausoleil was nothing like I expected. Well, he was huge like I expected, but he was also soft-spoken, humble, and interested in me. He asked me about my books, said they sounded great and promised to buy them for his nephew (the sure-fire way to win over any writer). When I complimented their stunning home, he brushed it away, gave credit to the architect, the builder, and his wife. Our next get-together was at our house. Jamie was embarrassed by our humble abode, but Freya kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa. “I love this place. I feel so cozy and at home here.” Over the salmon steaks I’d barbecued, Max and I discovered that we both liked kayaking, canoeing, and fishing. I told him about two summers spent working on a commercial crabber, and he talked wistfully about fly-fishing as a kid in the North. The amount I liked the guy was in direct proportion to the amount I’d expected to dislike him.