The yelling stopped when Cassie put her hand up, silencing Ryan with the gesture. She looked at me and said, “Are you okay?”
I guess she asked because of the sweating and the way I almost fainted, my skin flushed and hot as I sat on the couch and watched them argue. My hands rested on my stomach, the small bump that had recently budded from my body, and I didn’t realize it until she asked, but I was crying too, a subtle and quiet kind of moan children make when they’re scared or lost.
After that everything settled down. Cassie sat next to me on the couch and asked about the pregnancy, while Ryan relit the joint and watched us from the recliner, evaluating. I didn’t say much except that I should get going because my friend was probably worried that I wasn’t back yet. I stood up, and Cassie stood up, but Ryan stayed in the chair, looking down at the floor while I tightened the green scarf around my neck.
“I’m not here for money,” I said. “I just wanted to meet you, to see San Francisco.” I nosed the toe of my tennis shoe on the floor. “Stella doesn’t say much about living here, and I wanted to fill in some of the gaps before the baby came.” Which sounded pretty good to me, and I was glad I finally found something worthwhile to say before I left. Something he might think of after they closed the door behind me.
Ryan stared at his fingers, the fingers I studied as a kid, in the photo in the shoe, the same fingers from the picture of my father playing a drum, and I realized I was standing on the exact floor he’d sat on when someone snapped the shot. This had been his space with Stella, the home they made before she got pregnant and took off back east. Before Cassie, this house was my mother’s.
“Look, I’m sorry I flipped. I’m sorry I said that thing about the money, but it’s just a little crazy, man,” he said before he looked at me. “You showing up like this. It’s been a long time since me and Stella—” But he stopped and lost his words somewhere among the candles and the butt of the joint that sat dead in the bottom of the mug. “It’s just been a long time,” he said, and shook his head.
Cassie walked me out, and when we got to the bottom of the stairs she took a pen out of her back pocket and asked me where I was staying. She wrote down the address, the letters printed neatly in blue ink along the inside of her maple-syrup-colored wrist, and under it she wrote my cell number.
“Give us some time. Shit,” she said. “It’s been a long night.”
I agreed and opened the door, then made my way back down the front steps of the house. Across the street the boy with the bangs had been replaced by a woman with long red hair, and Emmy was nowhere to be found.
It was almost five in the morning by the time I got back to the hotel, and my eyes burned dry and aching when I put the key in the lock and opened the door, expecting to see Emmy splayed out on her bed, her shoes probably still on, and her scarf still slung around her neck as she slept. The room was empty, but next to the bed the window was open, and I could hear Emmy laughing outside, could smell her cigarette smoke seeping down into our room. I climbed up the grid of the fire-escape stairs and found her and the boy from the pizza shop sitting on the rooftop, a small square space littered with beer cans and cigarette butts.
Emmy told the story. “I swear I was waiting at the pizza place forever, but Aiden—this is Aiden, you remember,” she said, “Aiden finished his shift and asked if I needed a ride. He doesn’t have a car, though. He drives a blue Vespa. Blue, Lemon. Isn’t that some shit?” she smiled.
He’d told her it’d be safer to take a lift from him than to wander through the Mission.
“God, and have you seen this neighborhood at night? So yeah, I believed him. Jump on the back of that Vespa or wander home alone? No-brainer,” she said, and I realized her words were slurring together. “And check this out. We grabbed some beers and found these plastic chairs on the roof. Right here where we needed them to be so we could get some fresh air and have a quick smoke. And OhMyGod, look at this. Look—we smoked almost an entire pack of Marlboros,” she said, staring into the box of cigarettes. “Shit. Shit, are there stores open at this hour? What hour? What time is it, anyway? Jesus,” she said.
I eyed the empty beer cans at their feet and guessed Emmy had also swallowed a pill or two since her eyes were so glassy and red.
She waved her hand as if swatting a fly and added, “I told him about you being knocked up. I told him about your dad and stuff.”
I looked out at the street when she said it, and I wished to be skinny and drunk and self-confident just as Emmy was in that moment, but then the air shifted and the feeling passed when I thought of her going back to West Virginia the next week, to a home she didn’t want anymore, to a family with a dad serving in Afghanistan.
Aiden said he was twenty-one and he wrote music reviews for SF Weekly but he didn’t get paid much so he worked four nights a week at the all-night pizza place.
“I also pick up extra cash managing my friend’s band,” he said. “They’re basically launching the jamtronica movement,” he told us, and Emmy and I nodded like we knew exactly what that meant.
He didn’t say anything about going to college or having any parents nearby, and I could tell he and Emmy had been trading stories for a while when she reached over and put her hand on his knee, laughing at a joke I didn’t catch. He looked at me when she did that and shifted his leg away. Eventually Emmy asked how things went with Ryan, but I didn’t feel like talking about it while she was so boozed and distracted, so I told them I was tired.
“I can’t even see straight,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
“Don’t do that,” Aiden said, and he stood up. He wasn’t tall or short, really, just in the middle, and I noticed the edge of a tattoo on his bicep when his T-shirt sleeve rode up as he brought his cigarette to his mouth. “I remember you from earlier,” he said. “Stay up. We’ll get breakfast.”
I was hungry, but my back hurt and my head was throbbing in pulses again, tiny thumps I couldn’t quiet down. I looked at Aiden, the smooth skin and the dark hair and the emerald eyes that I swore could look through me if they wanted to. He had the kind of eyes that made you want to believe everything he said. I ran my hand through my hair, straightened out the V-neck of my sweater, and grazed my finger over the stud of my nose ring. Aiden and I looked down at Emmy, who had her head resting on the back of her chair, her eyes tilting up to the sky, and then he looked at me.
“I think we’re about to lose her,” he said, and when I looked back down, she’d fallen asleep.
I shut my eyes and wished myself not-pregnant. I wished myself lighter, less tired. A seventeen-year-old girl wanting a boy who wanted her back. I imagined myself before the tattoo shop or the move to West Virginia, before the bus ride to California. I wanted pink Trident gum, perfect tiny bubbles flirting from my lips. I wanted to meet Molly-Warner at the park and worry whether or not anyone else at school knew about me losing my virginity to the pothead, the time when that was as complicated as it got. I wanted my old body back, and tank tops from the summertime, pants that fit on my hips, that didn’t feel so tight. I imagined that I was who I was before I thought that I was using Johnny Drinko and not the other way around. Before I thought he’d be a way to get back at my mother for all the things I’d never put into words. But when I opened my eyes and looked down, nothing had changed.
And then Aiden said, “I remember you from earlier” again, and, “We’ll get breakfast,” so we did.
We put Emmy to bed, and then he took me to a twenty-four-hour diner on Church Street near Market. And I knew it was stupid to leave the hotel with a stranger like that, but something made me trust him anyway, those green eyes or the sound of his voice, the way he touched my elbow when we turned the corner. Safe, that’s how Aiden made me feel, even on the first night. It’s just like that with some people—it had been with Emmy, too, that first day at school.
AIDEN AND I SAT ACROSS FROM EACH OTHER in a booth at the diner and ordered eggs over easy with bacon and sourdough, but he wouldn’t le
t me drink coffee.
“Even I know you’re not allowed caffeine.” He nodded toward my belly.
He didn’t ask about the father or about the due date, but as I smeared grape jelly across my toast I said, “I guess this week, if I could see the baby, he’d be making facial expressions,” remembering what I’d read in the pregnancy book that morning. “Frowning and squinting his eyes. Some babies start sucking their thumbs around this time,” I said.
“That’s so badass,” he said.
The diner was quiet except for the muffled sounds of the cooks in the back washing dishes and cutting food, getting ready for the morning rush as Aiden and I moved through conversations strangers typically have when they first meet. He talked about his job writing for the paper, and I told him I was worried about finding work to make money for when the baby came. I had never needed money like I needed it then.
“I’ve never had a job,” I said, “not really.”
“Jobs are overrated,” he told me. “You’ll be fine, though. You’re a smart girl, smarter than lots of people I know with jobs. It’s amazing how many morons land nine-to-fives with decent pay.”
A man sat down in the booth across from ours and ordered a cup of coffee. He opened a copy of the New Yorker while he waited and eyed the curves of the waitress when she bent over to pour him his mug of caffeine.
“The trick is to find something you actually like to do. Find a place you like to hang out, a place with interesting people, and then work there,” Aiden said in a way that made it sound simple.
Afterward, Aiden walked me back to the hotel while I rambled about the Greyhound trip and about the couple staying in the room next to Emmy and me, about the endless sounds of sex drifting through the walls. I said I was planning on trying one of those bacon-wrapped hot dogs the next night even though I’d had some pretty bad luck with onions and mayonnaise since the pregnancy. I told him I’d read about the Palace of Fine Arts in our travel book and that I wanted to see those cracked columns, those ruins, while we were in town.
When we got to the skinny pink door of the hotel, he interrupted and said, “You’re adorable. You know that, right? The way you talk, the way you see things.”
I was quick to reply, the words streaming out of me as though I were a leak. “Actually, I’m not. I’m selfish and judgmental.” I looked at my feet, the tips of my Converses shuffling on the sidewalk. “I judge people all the time. I judged that homeless guy tonight at the pizza place.”
He nodded.
“And I judged you too,” I said.
“You’re honest,” he said. “That’s endearing.”
But I kept going because I’d evidently misplaced the brain-to-mouth filter in my exhaustedness or maybe just because it felt so good to talk to him, to talk to someone who didn’t know me yet. “I judged my father, too, before I even met him.”
“That’s not judging,” he said. “That’s just imagining, I bet.”
“I’m judging him right now. For being so absent. For smoking pot. For never coming for me, for never looking.”
Next to us a taxi sped by, the light on top turned off.
“As I’m standing here with you, I’m deciding things about him. It’s disgusting, really. The opposite of adorable,” I said.
“Shh,” he said. “Stop.” And then he kissed me on the forehead before I went inside.
Emmy was knocked out cold when I got in, so I ran a bath and climbed into the tub, soaking for what felt like hours and studying the body that had become mine through pregnancy. My skin was tight and stretched smooth over the small mound of my belly, and I ran my hands over the new curve of my abdomen and up across my nipples, now tender and hard. I leaned my head back against the rim of the tub and breathed, relaxed. And I thought again of Aiden before lowering my fingers to the V between my thighs. Afterward, I dried off and slid into sweatpants and a T-shirt before getting into bed.
Emmy rolled over around two in the afternoon, checked the clock, and announced, “We are the laziest freaking vacationers ever,” before reaching for the glass of water on the nightstand. “Jesus, what happened? My breath tastes like shit.” She took a long gulp and flipped onto her back to look at the ceiling tiles shadowed with stains. “Seriously. It’s like a little man climbed into my mouth while I was sleeping and took a dump. God,” she said, “gross.”
“I met my dad,” I told her, “and you met a boy with a blue Vespa,” and she smiled at the thought of Aiden, which I didn’t blame her for. “But then you fell asleep, so I went to breakfast with the boy before I came to bed.”
“Big night,” she said, mulling it over. “No wonder we’re so tired.”
I’d been awake for an hour or so trying to decide how to tell Emmy I didn’t have a bus ticket back for Sunday like she did. It was time. It was past time, really, and I felt terrible about planning to stick her on a Greyhound by herself even though I knew she would have done the same to me if we’d been in opposite places, if it’d been the other way around. I knew Emmy would forgive me, but it didn’t make me feel any better when I imagined her in those crappy leather seats, using the liquid hand sanitizer, fending off the crazies on her own while she traveled back to West Virginia. But she would love me anyway, even after I told her I wasn’t going back when she was. It’s a wondrous and rare thing to have a friend who knows about the skeletons—the tattoo shops and the wreckage of your family—and who likes you anyway. Emmy was my first, and I was feeling pretty awful about lying to her for that long.
“I want to hear about Ryan, but I won’t be able to concentrate until I feel less filthy,” she said, and then she was in the bathroom taking a shower.
Afterward, I threw on some jeans, and we left for a little café near Van Ness Avenue, where we stopped for breakfast.
“It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.” I smeared cream cheese across my everything bagel and watched a woman in a blue cocktail dress and sweatpants push a grocery cart down the sidewalk. It was drizzling again, and I wondered if she was cold in those high heels and silk spaghetti straps.
“New Year’s is overrated,” Emmy said irritably, which was true, but I could tell she was just pissed about missing breakfast with Aiden, and about being hungover.
“Whatever, Buzz Kill,” I said. “You know you’re excited to spend New Year’s in a city. A real city, Emmy. Come on, don’t be an ass.”
“It’s inevitably disappointing, and you know it.” She dunked her spoon into a cup of yogurt topped with perfect red strawberries. “New Year’s is never as good as you want it to be. Over. Rated.”
“Not necessarily, not always.” I was determined to be optimistic. I would pull her from her funk and refuse to let her waste a whole day sulking. “There’s a party if we want to go,” I told her when I squished the top and the bottom of the bagel together, the cream cheese oozing out the sides just how I liked it. “Aiden told me about a music thing, something at the Regency. He said it’s a pretty great event.”
But Emmy didn’t want to talk about Aiden anymore and changed the subject to Ryan, so I told her about the house and about Ryan thinking I wanted money, about Cassie walking me out and taking my phone number.
“It all happened really fast,” I said, leaving out the part about the sweating and the room spinning, about me crying on the couch. “We didn’t talk all that much. Mostly I just told him who I was, and then they argued for a while. I also told him about the baby, but I left after that.”
“Sounds like it could have been worse,” she said right before she asked if it was all right with me if we didn’t talk about our dads for the rest of the day, which I thought was fair enough.
So we acted like we hadn’t planned to go to Muir Woods that morning and spent the day window shopping in Union Square and walking around the city instead. We took a trolley ride downtown, then hiked up the hills of North Beach to see Coit Tower before we grabbed a bus out to Baker Beach to watch the sunset. Eventually we headed down to the water at Fisherman’s Wharf, wh
ere we ate sourdough bread bowls filled with clam chowder for dinner. But it was only when we made it back to our hotel in the Mission that we were allowed to talk about New Year’s again, because there under the door Aiden had left an envelope with two tickets to Anon Salon’s New Year’s festival.
The tickets read A COSTUMED ART & MUSIC SPECTACLE and listed three bands Emmy and I had never heard of. I rubbed my thumb over the silver letters, printed on the pink and aqua paisley design. We stood in the doorway of the room and read the note from Aiden: “Meet me at 11:00 in line.” A wave rolled from one side of my stomach to the other as I thought of seeing Aiden again.
And Emmy must have been feeling good by then too, because she shrugged and said, “I’m in if you’re in, boss.”
That night we scoured through our suitcases to see if we could find anything New Year’s Eve–worthy to wear.
“I miss being skinny,” I told Emmy while we tried on clothes in the hotel.
Everything felt small, my body shoved and squished into cotton that didn’t stretch enough. I missed being able to get away with not wearing a bra, and the perfect way my jeans had hugged my hipbones just months earlier. Emmy tried to talk me into wearing a silver sequined tube top she’d brought in case we went out to a club, but I was having a hard time imagining spending the night stuffed into the tiny piece of stretchy fabric.
“You look hot,” she said, and she moved behind my back and adjusted the back hem of the sequins before beginning to comb through the knots of my hair. “Your boobs look amazing.”
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