by Katie Heaney
After my shower I tried on eight hundred T-shirts before settling on a plain white one, and then I slicked my hair back with wax and put some black eyeliner inside my lower lid, hoping the overall effect was Kristen Stewart dirty and not just dirty dirty. I didn’t usually wear makeup, but Jamie had once called my eyes beautiful when I was wearing eyeliner, and I hoped Ruby would think the same. Downstairs I inhaled some reheated pizza and a Red Bull, and after yelling good night to my mom I rushed out. On the drive over I listened to my newest inspirational playlist, entitled You Can Do This. (It featured a lot of Taylor Swift.)
Jamie and I had made plans to meet at Triple Moon at eight-thirty that night, technically thirty minutes after the show began. There was an opening act, these kids who went to Torrey Pines and called themselves Pineapple Under the Sea, like from SpongeBob but ironic. Jamie said they were okay, which meant they were awful, so I proposed getting there a little late, hoping we’d miss at least half their set, and wanting to seem to Ruby like I had a life outside her.
I beamed when I pulled into the parking lot and found it mostly full for the first time in…maybe ever. People had come, just like I’d promised Dee and Gaby they would. And it was still early: despite my best efforts to wait, I arrived at 8:16. The sun had set by 7:00, taking all the day’s earlier heat with it. I wished I’d brought the jean jacket I’d eagerly dug out of my closet a week before school started. Though San Diego was still very warm throughout October, the nights could finally feel a little like fall.
When I pushed open the shop’s door I was met with velociraptor-esque shrieking and piercing guitar. It took everything I had not to clap my hands over my ears. Instead I made my way to the counter and took the stool that seemed farthest from the noise. Nobody else was seated at the bar; people were mostly huddled together close to the stage, incurring hearing damage. I counted thirty-five people in attendance, and every few minutes another pair or group came through the door and joined the herd. I hoped Jamie would arrive soon—I didn’t want to be seen sitting alone for too long. Not for the first time, I cursed Ronni and Alexis under my breath for having other plans: Ronni, visiting her brother at college, and Alexis, on a first date with some boy who went to her church. (She was texting our group thread updates so frequently she couldn’t possibly have any time left to talk to her date.)
I felt a jab in my shoulder and turned to find Dee, eyes wide in a mixture of alarm and possibly regret.
“What do you think?” I shouted. She held up rock hands and stuck out her tongue, and I laughed. It was too loud to have a proper conversation, or else I would have asked her for advice on what to do or say to Ruby after the show so she’d fall in love with me. For an older person, Dee was a stud, and I’d seen her charm a dozen or more twentysomething customers since I started coming here. They’d giggle, and sometimes leave her their numbers, and then they’d come back two days later, and again a few days after that, hoping to be asked out. Which Dee almost never did. Her favorite joke was that she’d rather get a root canal than go on a first date. Jamie liked to pretend Dee was still in love with Gaby, but I didn’t think that was it. Dee just liked dogs more than she liked people. She had three of her own, all of them rescues, plus a foster or two at all times. I’d once convinced her to get Instagram just for dog content alone, and now she posted like four dog pictures a day.
“Where’s Gaby?” I yelled.
“Hiding,” said Dee. I nodded. That meant Gaby was in the tiny office across from the bathroom down the hall. I crossed my fingers and wished for her to be happy with how the night went, and then I tacked on the same wish for Dee, and Ruby, and me.
Dee pointed to the espresso machine by way of asking me if I wanted a drink, and I nodded, more because my mouth was dry than anything else. I’d have preferred a beer or a wine or anything even remotely alcoholic, but no matter how much Dee liked me, she wasn’t going to give me anything like that. When she set my coffee in front of me I swallowed half of it in one go, I guess so that instead of being slightly tired with a dry mouth, I’d be sweaty and insane. Immediately I wanted to text Ruby, again, but I’d promised myself I’d give her a break while she got ready for her show. This was turning out to be easier said than done: we had been texting more and more since our poster-making session, Ruby’s response times shortening from double-digit hours to single-digit to ten or twenty minutes. Which, don’t get me wrong, still felt like an eternity. But the point was, I told myself, she always responded. A few times she’d even been the one to text me first. As a result, I’d spent the better part of two weeks clutching my phone anytime I wasn’t in class or asleep. Though sometimes I also held it while I slept. Each interaction felt monumental, though whenever I scrolled up to reread them I found mostly trivia: Ruby’s favorite candy was blue Laffy Taffy, her favorite color was orange, her favorite band was…one I’d never heard of, and couldn’t actually recall the name of at the moment, but if I scrolled back far enough in our text history I would find it. She hated coffee and she still loved wine coolers, even though they were for freshmen. She slept with a small, worn stuffed elephant her grandma had given her when she was born, but she hid it under her bed every morning in case anyone came over unexpectedly. This last one, especially, felt significant: it told me that she trusted me.
I wanted to send her something now about the coffee, something to the effect that she was right and I’d rather be drinking a wine cooler, even if it wasn’t totally true. I got as far as opening our conversation on my phone. But I’d texted her good luck an hour earlier, and she hadn’t responded, so I replaced it, facedown, on the counter and took another big gulp of my sugary latte. And checked my phone one more time, very quickly, and put it back.
A particularly loud group of people pushed through the door, and I spotted Jamie at the back, seemingly arriving with them. Band kids, I realized, not without a little nausea. As first-chair clarinet, Jamie was the one who played the tuning note before the conductor waved his wand and the band started playing, and this made her some sort of god. For the most part, Jamie’s social interaction with the other band kids was limited to summer camp, and weekends when Ronni and I had soccer and Alexis was busy, so it was weird to see her with them now, here, when she’d implied she would be meeting me. Especially unsettling was the girl she walked in next to: Natalie Reid.
How to describe Natalie Reid? She was my nemesis, a wolf in first-chair flautist’s clothing, and number three on the Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t list. When Jamie and I were dating and Jamie had plans with band friends, I spent hours at home alone, worrying about Natalie Reid. I was always ten percent convinced Jamie was in love with her, and I was certain Natalie Reid was in love with Jamie, straight though she claimed to be. Natalie Reid was always touching Jamie on the arm, and flinging herself into Jamie’s side, and calling her “Jame.” Whenever I half teased, half prodded her about it, Jamie told me she found Natalie annoying more than anything else. Jamie told me she loved me and no one else. But still, I knew Natalie Reid was Jamie’s type, more than I would ever be: she was cute and vaguely emo and wore vintage sweaters and giant blue-framed glasses that suited her dark brown eyes perfectly, and, today, a neon orange beanie that should have looked hideous but didn’t. She matched every TV character Jamie had a crush on: a tiny, smart hipster who was pretty enough to be popular but somehow too cool to be. I’d hated her freaking guts ever since Jamie put her third on our list. I hadn’t thought of her once in the months since Jamie broke up with me, and now I wondered how I could have been so stupid.
I saw Jamie see me, and I waved. I watched her cup a hand to Natalie’s ear, and I held my breath, watching Natalie giggle. Then they separated, and I exhaled. Natalie led the rest of the band kids closer to the stage, and Jamie weaved through the crowd toward me. Even from across the room I recognized the glint of the earrings I’d given her for her seventeenth birthday. They spelled shut up in tiny gold script, one word p
er ear. She hadn’t worn them since we broke up, at least around me. I didn’t know how to interpret this, but I’d spent nearly fifty dollars of my own hoarded birthday money on them, so, in a purely financial sense, it was good to know she was still getting use out of them. When she appeared at the edge of the crowd as Pineapple Under the Sea wailed to a pained-sounding end, I gave her a one-armed hug, and she slid onto the stool next to mine. She looked pretty: she was wearing the faded-nearly-white overall shorts that I loved, and her cheeks were flushed, her eyelids sparkly. She leaned over to yell in my ear, and I smelled her cinnamon gum.
“Are they done?”
“I really hope so.”
Dee slid down the counter to greet Jamie and asked her what she wanted to drink.
“Wine?”
“How’s an iced tea?”
Jamie sighed. “Just water. Thank you.”
On closer inspection, Jamie’s flush extended down her neck, and her pupils were wide and glossy. “Are you drunk?” I asked.
Jamie, uncharacteristically, giggled.
“Did you pregame with your band friends?”
She rolled her eyes. “You can just call them my friends.”
“Since when?”
“It makes them sound less important to me.”
They are, I thought. Jamie herself had said as much. But defensive positivity was one of her many annoying qualities. She could say one of her friends was bugging her, but if I so much as suggested the same thing, she’d insist she’d never been annoyed at all, and in fact was the opposite, and nobody had ever been a better, more important friend to her than that person had. It was easier just to let her have it.
She was quiet for a moment, perhaps ruminating on her close and unfaltering friendships with the entire wind-instrument section. As soon as it became evident she wasn’t going to offer up any additional details voluntarily, I tried another approach.
“How are they?”
“Who?”
“Your friends.”
“Like, collectively?”
I could feel steam pressing against my skull, threatening to pour out my ears at any moment. I took a few relaxing breaths, as inconspicuous as possible: in through the nose, deep in my diaphragm, out through the mouth, the way my post-divorce therapist, Jennifer, had shown me when I was younger.
“Sure,” I said. “All of them.”
“They’re good.”
“And Natalie?”
I studied Jamie’s expression, but her eyes stayed fixed on the stage. Only her eyebrows rose a little: a facial shrug. “She’s good,” she said, sounding like someone who wanted to sound ambivalent.
My insides roiled, which made me furious. Why did my body have to take it so hard when my head and I both knew she hadn’t said anything meaningful? And even if she had, what then? We weren’t together. We had been broken up for two months. Nine months from now, we’d have been broken up for exactly as long as we were together. And then, for every day after that, we’d be exes for longer than we were ever girlfriends. It was weird the way that worked. Anyone who became your ex stayed your ex forever, no matter how long ago they broke your heart, or you broke theirs.
I knew I was straining hard against the point at which I could reasonably say that we’d “just” broken up. I knew it wasn’t my right, anymore, to feel betrayed by the prospect of another girl. Much earlier, it would have been too soon. But at some point very recently, what would once have been cruel had shifted imperceptibly to fair. Maybe it had happened that day at the beach, when I told Jamie that Ruby and I had come here, to our spot, without her.
Speaking of—when in the name of Xena, Warrior Princess, was Ruby going to come onstage? Never in my life had I been so eager to hear a high school band play. If anyone could drown me out, Sweets could. But Pineapple Under the Sea was still ambling around, picking things up and setting things down, and Dee had turned the lights back on so people could buy something to drink between bands. Or that was the idea, though not many people seemed all that eager to buy iced coffees at nine p.m. Looking around, I had a sudden suspicion as to why.
“Is everyone here drunk but me?” I asked Jamie.
Jamie laughed, a single honking ha! “Sucks to be you.”
She gave me a sidelong glance and, seeing my bewildered expression, burst into laughter. My shoulders dropped, releasing tension I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, and I laughed too.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie croaked. “That was beneath me.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say ‘sucks to be you’ since fourth grade.”
“I’m bringing it back.”
“Please don’t.”
She shrugged and took a big gulp of water, and for a minute we both scanned the room. Now that it was almost time for the lead act, Triple Moon was as packed as I’d seen it in months, if not years. I couldn’t wait to find out how much money Dee and Gaby had made, and to see how happy with me they were. Maybe they’d let us—well, them—have another show or three here. Maybe I could convince them to give me a dollar commission for every cover charge they collected. Or even fifty cents. It looked like there were probably sixty people here, which would translate to thirty dollars a show. Which wasn’t a lot, but after five shows, it would be enough for…one college textbook. Hm. Maybe we could compromise and do seventy-five cents a head.
I looked for and found Natalie Reid, easy to spot in her stupid neon beanie. She appeared fully engaged in conversation with Justin (trombone) and Becca (flute—why did I know this?), and I breathed relief in and out. It truly hadn’t occurred to me that anyone from band would be here, least of all Natalie. I imagined her as more of a gentle indie girl. Songs with ukuleles, and people who murmured more than they sang, so you couldn’t really tell if they had good voices or not. Then again, I was here. There could be other motives for coming here. Mine was a girl. I hoped Natalie’s was anything else.
Natalie Reid aside, everyone else I could see was more or less whom I’d expected: the burnout boys, helmed by Sam Perpich and Nick Weiss; Lara Hammond and Kaela Brown, the otherwise straitlaced popular girls whose interest in MDMA necessitated their friendship with Sam and Nick; the nervous-looking sceney sophomore boys, wearing lots of hair product and cologne, and the goth-lite girls they were trying to impress; a cluster of freshman and sophomore girls who were one hundred percent going to cry the second Sweets took the stage. As if reading my mind, Dee leaned over the counter between Jamie’s shoulder and mine and muttered, “I’ve never seen so many heteros in here at once.”
“You don’t know they’re all straight,” Jamie scolded.
I looked at her in disbelief, but evidently she was too tipsy to notice her hypocrisy. Now that Natalie was here, we weren’t supposed to assume anything about anyone. How interesting.
Dee squinted. “Mmm. Yeah. I do.”
I tried to distract myself, watching as some skinny freshman who looked about twelve in his dad’s jean jacket bustled onto the stage from behind the drop cloth hanging from the rafters and began arranging the instruments. I wondered if Sweets paid him part of their earnings for his services. Or, I thought, maybe he was planning to put this on his college application as volunteer work. Assisted local artists in presenting their work to the community. Or, maybe more likely, he was in love with Ruby too.
“Is she still dating that guy?” I asked suddenly. I knew, of course, that Natalie Reid’s college boyfriend, Ian, had dumped her in our junior year, just as I knew Jamie knew I knew. Just as I knew she knew who exactly I meant. All the many associated implications hung between us like cobwebs, and as a favor to each other we tried our best to ignore them.
“Who?” said Jamie.
“Natalie Reid,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “No. They broke up last year.” A pause. She couldn’t help herself. “Remember?”
Jamie nodded, eyes firmly fixed to the stage. Again I tried to focus: the twelve-year-old, disappearing behind the curtain, the crowd perking up in response. You could feel it—the specific, restless energy of waiting for your favorite band to show themselves. One of Sam’s friends tried to start a slow clap, presumably ironically, but only a couple of others picked it up, and it died off, embarrassingly, within thirty seconds. Without the cue of dimming lights, it was hard to know when to start making noise. A girl shrieked, “WE LOVE YOU, DAVID,” and everyone else at her table immediately hunched over giggling. My heart thrummed with excitement. I was, quite literally, on the edge of my seat. I couldn’t wait to see Ruby. I couldn’t stop asking Jamie questions I didn’t want her to answer.
“Who’s she dating now?” I said, sounding as bored as I could manage.
“Natalie?”
I ground my teeth into dust so I wouldn’t scream. “Yeah.”
“She’s not,” said Jamie. I waited, and finally she glanced my way. “She was seeing this girl at camp, but they broke up.”
This is it, I thought. This is what dying feels like. I leaned an elbow onto the counter behind me to keep myself upright, but still the room tilted and swayed.
“What girl?” I asked.
“She goes to a different school,” said Jamie.
“Sounds made-up,” I said. I took a panicked slurp of my coffee, which was now mostly water, and raised my hand to my neck, surreptitiously feeling for my pulse.