by Laura Hankin
Ally went back to the letter.
Anyways, enough sappy stuff! (At least for the moment—who knows what might happen over the rest of this letter?) My favorite memory of you from this summer happened our first night here. We were talking in bed until way past both our bedtimes, and we started to fall asleep. You kept trying to fight the sleep, because there was more that we wanted to say (it’s amazing, the number of stories we had saved up for each other), and eventually you just hopped out of bed and did ten jumping jacks to wake yourself up. You, half-asleep, doing exercises at three in the morning just so we could talk more? One of the many reasons I love you.
And speaking of love, here’s my prediction/hope for you this year. I predict/hope that you will fall in love with a wonderful boy. It’s about freaking time. You deserve someone you’re 100% crazy about, not just someone who is 100% crazy about you.
Next summer (this summer? I’ve never figured out exactly how to qualify time for the BAAB), I hope you read this letter and think—no, not think, know—“Oh yeah, that’s (insert name here), my amazing boyfriend of whom Beth totally approves!”
But if not, that’s clearly okay too. It will happen sometime, and until then you can just be crazy about me!
Love,
Betharoo
“Wow,” Ally said when she finished reading. “Very prescient of you, Beth.”
Because that year she’d met Tom, and she had been crazy—one hundred percent, certifiably insane for him, all the way until he’d broken up with her.
That breakup had destroyed her. And Beth, who was currently pulling her hair back into a braid and avoiding Ally’s eyes, had never even asked about it.
• • •
ALLY was pulling her laundry out of the dryer when Tom texted to ask if he could come over. As she dragged her bag of clothes across three blocks and up four flights of stairs back to her apartment, she briefly considered putting on a fresh bra, or changing out of her sweatpants. But Tom always said that she turned him on just as much in her workout clothes as when she got all dressed up. And, she reasoned, one of the benefits of a long-term relationship was that you could be totally comfortable around the other person. She had yet to poop with the door open, but she sensed that day drawing near. Maybe when they moved in together. They’d started mentioning that possibility every so often. Only abstractly, of course, given that neither one of their leases would be up for months.
She folded her laundry and put it away as she waited for him. She’d done it all except for matching up the socks by the time he rang her buzzer. When he knocked on the door, she gave him a quick, distracted kiss.
“Hey you,” she said. “Let me just finish putting away my laundry.” She kept talking over her shoulder as he followed her into her bedroom. “So guess what?” She looked down at the single striped sock in her hand, trying to figure out if the dryer had somehow eaten the other one. “Gabby and Jeff hooked up again. This is, what, the third time since she said they were definitely done forever? I owe you five bucks. I’m gonna go broke soon.”
“You shouldn’t take my bets on this. They’re never going to stop until one of them actually starts dating someone else,” he said, but he didn’t say, “I knew it!” like he normally did whenever he was right about the ongoing Gabby-and-Jeff saga, and his voice seemed leached of its usual enthusiasm. She turned around and put her arms around him, twining his messy hair around her fingers.
“Hey, you okay? What’s wrong?”
He kissed her, squeezing her against him tightly, but not for long. Then he sat down on her bed and stared at her comforter. “I got a job offer in Portland, Oregon.”
“Wow!” she said, then, “Wait. What?” She went and sat down next to him. “I didn’t realize you were applying for jobs. You know, given that you already have one.”
“I’m not, really. I didn’t plan on it. I just saw the posting on the alumni list, and it sounded really cool, so I thought I’d apply as a shot in the dark. I didn’t think I’d get it. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want you to get upset over nothing.”
“Well,” she said slowly. “I guess it’s a good ego boost. It’s nice to be wanted.”
“Al,” he said. “You know I don’t like New York that much. I can’t get into the ‘New York is the center of the universe’ mind-set that you seem to need to have here. And at Atlas they barely give me anything to do—I just move data from one spreadsheet to another, and I’m so bored. This is a start-up, and it’s small, and I’d be really important there.”
“New York has start-ups. New York has everything.”
“I accepted the offer.”
She tried to say something, but she couldn’t find her voice. She was angry, angry with him for not consulting her, for unilaterally making this gigantic decision that affected them both. They were a disaster at long-distance—over the breaks at college when they’d been apart for longer than two weeks, she’d moped around in a swamp of despair. They’d eagerly scheduled Skype sessions, but the video always seemed to freeze, or somehow an awkwardness would spring up between them, lasting until they were able to see each other in person again.
“Okay,” she said finally. “So, Portland. I’ve always thought it could be a cool place to live.” She grabbed his hand. It felt a lot warmer than her own. Dimly, she registered that he wasn’t really holding hers back.
“Come on,” he said. “Don’t move to Portland for me. You love New York. You have all the inroads you’ve been making with your music career here.”
“What? Projected Trajectory? Please. I don’t care about them. It’s not like we’re going anywhere as a band. I could quit, easily.”
He pulled his hand away, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. Then he put his glasses back on and said quietly, “No. I don’t want you to move to Portland for me.”
“Oh.” Understanding flickered through her body. This wasn’t a problem-solving session. This was a breakup. “Why not?”
“It’s just . . . so big, you moving across the country for me. I’m not ready. I love you, but it just feels too soon to tie our lives together like that.”
“Too soon in our relationship? We’ve been together almost two years.”
“Too soon in my life.”
He looked so unhappy as he said this, and she knew her face mirrored his in a mask of misery. She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. She was about to cry, but she tried to hold off for as long as possible. She looked straight ahead at her white wall, with its posters and pictures she’d never bothered to frame, stuck up with Scotch tape. Eventually, her phone started ringing, across the room, on top of her dresser. Silently, she and Tom waited for it to stop. But as soon as it did, it began again, that stupid strumming guitar sound filling the room. Finally, the third time it happened, she got off the bed and strode over to her phone, wanting to throw it out the window or smash it on the ground and jump on it until it broke into pieces smaller than dust. But as she picked it up and saw a blocked, unknown number on the screen, the absurd thought flashed through her mind: Maybe it’s someone calling about my music career. So reflexively, she answered it.
“Hello?” As soon as she answered the phone, she knew it was a mistake. She should’ve just turned it off. Tom looked at her in disbelief.
“Allygator?” The voice on the other line barely sounded like Beth’s—the connection must have been bad—but no one besides Beth had ever called her that silly childhood nickname. She hesitated, considering just hanging up and pretending later that she’d lost the signal. The last thing she wanted to do right now was have a long catch-up session.
“Beth? What’s up?” she said.
“Oh, Ally. I really need to talk to you—”
“Look, love, I’m so sorry, but this isn’t a good time. I kinda have to go.”
Beth started speaking again, saying something, but A
lly didn’t even hear it. She took the phone away from her ear because Tom was talking to her too and she was looking at him, at how handsome he was, thinking about how impossible it seemed that she wouldn’t get to kiss him every day.
“Tell her to call you back later,” Tom said, urgently, frustrated, and she couldn’t believe she still had the phone in her hand. She pressed it back to her ear.
“I’m gonna go, but call me back tomorrow, maybe,” she said, and hung up. She turned her phone off, opened the door, and threw it out into the hallway. Then she burst into tears. She crawled back onto the bed and curled up against Tom. He put his arms around her, and they spooned there together. He cried too (she’d only ever seen him cry one other time, when his grandfather died the year before), and when she felt his tears on the back of her neck, she said, “You don’t have to do this. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” he said, muffled, into her hair.
What felt like hours later, he finally withdrew his arms from around her body. “I should go,” he said.
“Wait.” She pulled him back down to the bed and kissed him, then tugged off her sweatpants.
In the past when she’d had breakup sex, it had been hot, filled with a last-chance passion. But with Tom, it just made her sad, like every movement he made inside her was tearing her heart even further. She turned her head so that he wouldn’t see her start to cry again. But it didn’t work.
“Shit, Ally, I’m so sorry.” He pulled out and drew away from her quickly, like he was scared of her sadness. From his position half off the bed, his nakedness suddenly seemed foreign.
“Just go,” she said, and turned her back to him, drawing herself up into the fetal position. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I don’t want to leave you like this . . .”
“Just go!” She heard him hesitate, and then eventually, the door to her room opened and closed. As soon as she heard her front door shut too, she wished she hadn’t told him to leave. She should have fought harder for their relationship and then, if that had failed, she should’ve at least kept him with her as long as he’d been willing to stay.
She lay there in bed awhile longer, nearly comatose, unable to believe that he’d never again lie there with her. And then, as her body ran out of tears, she needed to tell someone. Gabby would probably be home soon, but she didn’t really want Gabby. The first person she wanted to talk to, the first person she needed to talk to, was Beth.
• • •
ALLY breathed out quickly in the hot attic air. “I’m still really sad about him,” she said to Beth, inwardly chanting ask me about it, ask me about it, ask me about it.
“Oh yeah?” Beth replied, uncovering a pile of old magazines. Ally decided that was good enough.
“Yeah. It’s like we’re broken up, but not fully because he still texts me sometimes, and wants to be friendly, and sometimes I’m like, well, maybe the only reason we’re not together is because he had to move away, and other times I’m like, no, idiot, he just didn’t love you enough.” She stared at Beth as she talked, gratified when she moved away from the magazines and sat down. She took a deep breath. She was ready to give Beth another chance to be the friend that she’d needed her to be. “And now . . . he’s coming back to New York soon for a job interview, and he wants to hang out. I’m worried that seeing him again is just going to throw me into an emotional tailspin.”
“He’s coming back? Maybe you shouldn’t see him. Make some excuse. Or tell him the truth, that you need a little break from communication.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
Beth sighed. “It just seems like you do the work of trying to get over him, and then he undoes all that hard work every time he contacts you. I think you need to stop talking to him for a bit.”
Ally bristled at the commonsense suggestion, one she’d heard so many times before. She herself had said it to friends going through bad breakups in the past, wondering why they couldn’t just do the obvious thing that would make them feel better. But she hadn’t understood then how even limited contact with Tom could lift her out of a week’s worth of feeling deadened and numb. She’d walk around at a remove from everyone and everything else, forgetting that she was fully alive, and then he’d send her a text and remind her.
“That’s easier said than done,” she said. “He’s still really important to me. And now that he might be moving back to New York, who knows? Maybe we will get back together. The whole situation is just really awful.”
“Okay,” Beth said, starting to stand back up. “That’s hard.”
“I mean,” Ally said, wanting to draw Beth back down to the floor with her, “I haven’t been able to hook up with someone since we broke up—at least not sober— and it’s been half a year.”
“Wait, how many people have you been hooking up with drunk?”
“I don’t know.” Ally cast her mind back. “Okay, so I kissed those two guys like a week after the breakup.”
“Two?”
“Yeah.” Ally laughed. “I got super drunk at this bar and made out with one guy for a while, and then wandered away when I got bored of him, and made out with another.”
“I’m impressed,” Beth said. “I’m no good at that, going up to a random guy and kissing him.”
“Oh, it’s not so hard. Over the course of my painstaking research the past six months, I’ve discovered that most straight single guys will hook up with you if you throw yourself at them.”
“Well, good for you, getting back out there. Were you interested in either of them?”
“Like for dating? God, no. They were cute enough, but I didn’t really want to know anything about them.”
“Ah. Okay,” Beth said carefully.
“Then at Gabby’s office holiday party a week or two later, I had sex with some guy in the janitor’s closet.”
“Whoa,” Beth said, blinking rapidly. “Um, in the janitor’s closet?”
“Yeah, it was nearby, and it had a lock.” They’d knocked over a mop and broken a carton of lightbulbs, although she’d barely noticed at the time. She’d been so wasted that everything happening had taken on the blurriness of an Impressionist painting.
“Weren’t you nervous that people would hear you?” Beth asked. “Or know what you were doing?”
“Well,” Ally retorted, “I wanted to have sex with him, but I didn’t want to go home with him because he could have been a murderer. So no, I was fine with the closet.”
“I just feel like that’s kind of risky,” Beth said. “On so many levels.”
“Oh, so you’d rather I go home with strangers? Well don’t worry, I did that once too, and it was an awful decision.”
“Ally.” Beth sat down close to her. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Ally hadn’t meant to bring this up. She didn’t want to talk about it. “Well, nothing, really.” Beth raised an eyebrow and didn’t look away. “I was just blackout drunk, and we had sex and I don’t remember it. It . . . it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m not happy I did.”
She’d woken up the next morning with her eye makeup smeared beneath her eyes, the unfamiliar sheets rough against her nakedness. She had no idea whether they’d used protection, and no memory at all of his name or why she’d been attracted to him. She’d hurled herself into her clothes, hoping he wouldn’t wake up, and left, calling Gabby on her way to the subway. Gabby had gone with her to the pharmacy to get Plan B. Gabby had exhaled with her in relief when all her STD tests came back negative. Beth hadn’t been responding to her e-mails at this point.
“Ally . . . that’s rape,” Beth said rape softly, nearly whispering it. She looked into Ally’s eyes with total concentration.
“No,” she said. “No. I mean, I was into it at the time. I remember being all excited leaving the bar with him. It was just the next morning I felt weird
about it.”
“But technically if you were really drunk you couldn’t consent—”
“I’m aware of that, Beth. I’ve read a fucking Jezebel article. But maybe he couldn’t tell I was as drunk as I was. I can appear pretty coherent when I’m wasted. So it happened, and now I just don’t go home with strangers from bars. Okay?”
“Okay,” Beth said. She reached her hand out and held Ally’s in silence for a minute. Then she said, “If you want to talk about it—”
“I don’t.”
“Okay.” Beth rubbed her thumb along Ally’s palm. Then she asked, “But the making out, and the anonymous sex in closets, you’re fine with?”
“Yeah, totally.” Ally said.
“Really?”
“What?”
“I just worry that if you can’t do something sober, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Or not so much, anyway.” Ally thought she saw a hint of Beth Superior lurking on Beth’s face.
“Oh, I’m happy when I do it. I have a fucking fantastic time.” She pulled her hand out of Beth’s grasp. “But thanks anyway for the thorough slut-shaming.” Ally felt the attic closing in on her. She needed to get away from Beth looking at her with mingled pity and judgment. She had no right to judge. If she’d bothered responding to Ally’s e-mails, Ally might not have felt the overwhelming need on that lost night, the total loneliness that made her keep pouring back tequila shots until she couldn’t remember anything.
“No, I didn’t mean to slut-shame you,” Beth said. “That’s not—”
Ally stood up. “I’ve got to take a break from this. I’m going to walk into town.” She walked toward the stairs as quickly as she could, stepping over the remains of Grandma Stella’s storage cartons. She’d thought that going through the BAAB would help things. But instead, it had given her discomfort a steroid shot.