U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  Bonnie shrugged, her lower body turned to mist and her face faded.

  “Wait!” I said. “Wait, wait. Six months?”

  Bonnie snapped back into focus. “Deal,” she said.

  It was a bad deal. Bonnie liked to eavesdrop when Ezra had girls home. When he fucked them in bed, she liked to hover above their bodies like an uninvited and unseen third party in the sexual encounter, then tell me or Nozlee that she’d done it. With Ezra’s recent breakup, there would be plenty of new encounters for her revel in; unlike her feelings towards Noz and me, Bonnie liked Ezra’s one-and-done girls, their absence after that one night made space for Bonnie’s fantasy relationship. It was creepy, and I felt a little sick that I knew it was happening and had never been able to tell Ezra about it—a medium problem I never envisioned while studying with Witch Colleen. I’d just bargained away Ezra’s privacy for a long time. Every time we were out to a bar and he left with someone new, I’d have to silently know that a thirsty spirit pervert was salivating over another hot conquest.

  “He texted for a little while after you left, he looked upset,” Bonnie said. Probably clashing again with Noz, worse than before, from exhaustion and intoxication. “He didn’t sleep, and at around six in the morning, he got up and left.”

  “Then what?”

  Bonnie dropped out of Ezra’s shirt, she looked see-through. She’d been semicorporeal for longer than ten minutes and after years of being weakened by constant exposure to Cascarilla, she didn’t have the strength to stay present for much longer. I wondered how strong she’d be after six months without it.

  “Then what?” I asked again.

  “Haven’t seen him since,” she said. “Can’t wait until he comes home.” She floated higher and her body started to disappear.

  “If that’s all you’ve got, the deal is off!” I shouted, and she smiled a big toothy smile and shook her head ‘no.’ Witch Colleen had warned us against going back on any deal we made with a ghost, which is why we weren’t supposed to make any deals with ghosts. But it couldn’t count this time, considering how little she’d given me.

  “Fuck you,” I said, as she disappeared. I’d give her maybe a month before putting down the Cascarilla again; that was all she deserved.

  I assessed the information she’d provided; it wasn’t much of a puzzle, really. After a late, coke-y night, manic and heartbroken, there’s only one place Ezra would go before 9:00 a.m. A dark dive bar: the Drawing Room.

  It might’ve been easier for me to slip out of Ezra’s apartment and get on with my search if some element of Bonnie’s presence had remained, a ghostly hand against the wall, an uneasy stillness, anything; because I knew even though I couldn’t feel her, she could still feel and hear me and terrify me by choosing to appear at any moment she wanted, and I’d just given her the power to do that unfettered for a while. Witch Colleen had told me too many stories about witches going back on their word to ghosts and suffering great consequences, up to and including their own death, so while I could fudge the agreement at the edges, I couldn’t consider fully going back on it. I felt the familiar unscratchable itch of rising anxiety, a twitching panic; I spotted a small pile of Cascarilla on the windowsill above Ezra’s bed.

  Without thinking about it, I plopped down on Ezra’s IKEA bed and pulled open one of the storage drawers in the base of the bed, the place where he kept notes on his ongoing books. There was also a bong we never used anymore, his old medical marijuana card (a piece of history), small cardboard boxes full of Ritalin and Klonopin we bought on a trip to Mexico, small baggies of cocaine dregs, and the broken iPad we do it off of. The iPad had been cleaned after last night’s use and put away in this drawer, but there were no little baggies or other signs of the cocaine we had left over; curious, but no problem, I wasn’t after uppers. I pulled out the iPad and an expired credit card he’d left lying at the bottom of the drawer; I held the iPad beneath the windowsill and swiped the Cascarilla off the ledge and onto its gleaming surface. Though Witch Colleen had preached over and over again about a witch’s responsibility to remain aware of the spiritual world around them, I’ve been lately creeping towards a forbidden road of avoidance and disassociation. I’ve been snorting Cascarilla every now and then, and though I don’t like to admit it, with increasing frequency. The whispers of the spirit world are getting too sharp, the presence of the ghosts too haunting, I don’t want to know the secrets they always want to whisper in my ears; only Miggy knows about my bad habit, and he only knows because sometimes it’s as long as ten hours before I answer a text from him, something that would only happen if I couldn’t see it.

  I slung my purse from the floor nearby to the bed beside me, dug around for my phone, and pulled it out alongside my little pouch, which held my glass straw. I opened the phone first:

  Miggy

  Today 2:02 PM

  i’ve gotta put my phone away or i’m gonna hit her up again

  i have to take a lil hit off the ol’ cascarilla

  but im only going to do it when i have to hide from bonnie, from now on

  and I’m gonna tell you each time

  I felt bad lying to Miggy, but I wanted to give him a real and serious reason why I had to do it, not some intangible uneasiness that I didn’t know how to explain. I wanted to do something that would make him mad, but have him not be mad at me.

  Miggy

  why can’t you just lay down the powder like you’ve been doing?

  i had to make a deal with her

  to get her to help me figure out ezra’s whereabouts

  You made a deal with BONNIE?? She’s unSAFE what did you promise her?

  I’m like very anxious over here because I know you did this to, like, “find Ezra” but like, girl.

  He’ll text you back when he’s ready

  I bent over the iPad and snorted a line of eggshell white in two consecutive deep inhales. I glanced at my phone screen, and I couldn’t see Miggy’s text chain anymore, which meant the ghost blocker was working. I tapped out another line and inhaled it. Unlike cocaine, which has a sick smell, Cascarilla is scentless as you inhale it, so I could smell something underneath it, something familiar, something coming from the sheets: a sweat smell I recognized, a body I was familiar with, the smell of Nozlee still clinging to Ezra’s bed.

  From the car, back on the 2, going south, I called Georgie.

  “Baby, are you home?” I said.

  “Sure am.”

  Georgie had a smoky voice, and she was a softie, not a mean bone in her body. She never had enemies, even though she had plenty of opportunities to make them. When she had been femme presenting, guys used to come up to her in bars and uselessly try to talk her up, with an incredibly actually insulting opener, along the lines of, “So, where do your parents come from? You look like you’re from [name of South American or Middle Eastern country].” Now that she has a dykier presentation, she mostly gets those questions from women, during a hazy post-coital downward spiral. She leaves girls’ beds a lot.

  “I was going to dip into the Drawing Room for a second,” I said. “You wanna meet me for a quick one?”

  “Sure thing,” Georgie said, amicable as ever.

  “I’ll be there in like fifteen,” I said. “Have you heard from Ezra today?”

  “Nope. We texted a little yesterday, he said he was going to the desert with Noz.”

  I didn’t know whether or not to tell her about the breakup; Ezra wasn’t super close with Georgie, and I didn’t know how close to the vest Ezra wanted to play the split. It veered uncomfortably towards spreading a rumor. I decided to see how I felt inside the bar.

  The day was starting to get very hot and I spent the rest of the drive moving my thighs from side to side so that the gathering pools of sweat between my skin and the car seat wouldn’t condense into a smelly glue. I was unsuccessfu
l. Pulled into the parking lot and my car turned off, I still had to painfully peel my legs away from the seat.

  The Drawing Room was the only bar on the east side of Los Angeles that opened at 6:00 a.m., a dive bar that trafficked in real drunks. It had no windows, it was dark and cold. It was where Ezra would’ve gone.

  Inside, Georgie was already at the bar, drinking from a pint, thumbing through something on her phone. Instagram, maybe, from the style of her scroll, an upward push interrupted by tapping twice on the screen. She waved when she saw me, put down her phone. She stood up to hug me, gave me a good squeeze. She was wearing a dashing beige linen dykey coverall “flight suit” thing that I’d advised her to buy at what we thought was going to be a lowkey summer collection release party for a brand we liked called Everybody, but that turned into a very high stakes see-and-be-seen event for a group of the chicest eastside lesbians and a parade of all of our ex-girlfriends. The flight suit was devastatingly flattering on her, though, but had made me look like I was drowning inside clothes, and I was jealous because truly all the coolest dykes are out there have been wearing flight suits lately; they’re either femming it up with heels or keeping it strictly carpenter-tomboy with some Timberlands. I would’ve done something in the middle, of course; sneakers, chapstick.

  “Hi babe,” she said, “How was your day so far?”

  “Good,” I said. “Weird.” We settled onto our stools.

  Michael, the white-haired bartender who always pretended to have never seen me before glanced and then turned away; I was the only person in the bar without a drink, and he acted as if I wasn’t needing anything.

  “I’ve gotta pee,” Georgie said, and slid off her stool and slunk into the even darker back of the bar. I knew those bathrooms well. The toilet’s porcelain was degraded, the stall was narrow, but I didn’t mind that feeling of being locked in with my body, swaddling via bar bathrooms.

  Michael didn’t rush to me, he didn’t seem bothered to help me, as I eagerly anticipated my first drink of the day. I put both my forearms on the varnished wood and leaned forward. He asked me what I wanted with a gesture.

  “A boilermaker with a Bud please,” I said.

  He didn’t have to move far to grab a shot glass, fill it up, and get the beer open.

  I glanced at my phone.

  2:35 PM         Lydia

  i promise Mom.

  Do as mother says.

  yes mami

  Today 2:35 PM

  YOU PROMISED TO CALL ME BACK, BITCH

  I STILL WILL CALL U BACK, BITCH

  Nothing from Ezra.

  “Did you see Ezra earlier this morning?” I asked Michael.

  “No, I said,” Georgie said, returning to her seat.

  Michael delivered my drinks. “You know, the guy I’m always with?” I pressed him.

  “There are always guys,” Michael said. “That’s seven dollars.”

  “You can put it on my tab,” Georgie said.

  “Last name?”

  “Delvalle, one word,” Georgie said, with a tinge of vocal fry. Georgie was a Valley Girl, born and raised in the San Fernando.

  I clinked my shot glass gingerly against her pint, tapped the bottom of it on the bar, and took the shot. Georgie, always a little physically affectionate, rubbed the flat of her hand on my shoulder blade. I wanted her to wrap her whole arm around my shoulders and squeeze me a bit, but I didn’t know how to ask for that.

  Georgie and I had sex once, years ago, when she was femmeier. I’d driven to her house with a bottle of rosé and three pre-rolled joints; she’d ordered Los Burritos, nachos and enchiladas, and we’d watched her old DVD of Now and Then. Stoned and a little drunk, we’d cried when Gaby Hoffmann nearly drowned in a sewer while a young blonde Thora Birch scrabbled impotently at a heavy manhole cover, and rain like we’d never seen pummeled them both into oblivion; we had earthquakes and fires yes, but neither of us really understood how easy it was to be killed by rain.

  “Are you anxious about Sunday?” Georgie asked.

  My beer was disappearing fast; my throat was full and wet.

  “I feel like, anticipatory sadness. I want to really celebrate Miggy’s life, but I’m worried I’m going to wind up in a bathroom, sobbing my eyes out.”

  “If that happens I’ll get in the bathroom with you and we can cry and pee,” Georgie said. “I’ll bring you bathroom wine.”

  This was a good enough excuse to hug Georgie, so I did, and she squeezed me like I wanted.

  “Bea’s coming,” I said, “I can put our shit aside for the night. We were both so close with him.”

  Georgie nodded, sipped, wiped beer foam off her lip. She picked up her phone and pointed it at me, I twisted my beer so the label could be caught on her camera, then licked at my lip in a way I hoped was cat-like. Georgie laughed and took the picture. She turned around her phone to show it to me. I looked squinty and a little deranged, but sexy enough.

  “Post it,” I said, and she fiddled with her phone, getting the filters right.

  DONT TEXT BEA

  Maybe everything IS fine.

  Today 2:41 PM

  georgie says hi, she’s excited to see you at miggy’s thing

  Bea’s response came superfast.

  DONT TEXT BEA

  Maybe everything IS fine.

  Today 2:41 PM

  georgie says hi, she’s excited to see you at miggy’s thing

  You’re with Georgie?

  You guys are talking about me?

  “What do you think?” Georgie said. I looked up from my phone, put it down, took hers. She’d filtered me graciously, and added the caption and tagged me: “cheers from your best american girl, @sleeve.” There were already three likes on it.

  I giggled, “I look like a sexy squinty drunk babe.”

  “Add it to your Tinder profile,” she said.

  “Oh god,” I said. “Is it time to go back on?”

  “Eventually you’re gonna run out of friends to rebound-fuck,” Georgie said.

  “Not yet though,” I said. “What are you up to tonight?”

  Georgie shrugged, “Going to Chelsea’s party, I suppose.” She drank. “What’s going on with Ezra?”

  I wanted to give Ezra the chance to tell the story in his own time and in his own way, but the riptide of two drinks on an empty stomach was too strong to swim against; so I recapped Ezra’s breakup, our late night together and his radio silence since, the unusual and extended gap in our conversation. I censored my own actions here and there, tried to seem calm about the whole thing, excluded my manic visit to Ezra’s empty apartment. But even so, Georgie saw through the gaps in my storytelling, to the anxious knot I was pulling at. She saw my unraveling.

  She didn’t want to scare me, so avoided hitting it head-on, “Did you guys talk about Miggy last night?”

  Georgie knew intimately about the frantic day, one year ago, that I’d spent trying to track down Miggy. Ezra was in New York for work and I hadn’t heard from Miggy all day, nothing from him on my phone, nothing at all, until I went on his computer and signed into his Find My Phone and followed the beacon it provided to a motel room in Palm Springs, and I banged on the door so long that the manager finally came. She wouldn’t let me go in until she got consent from her guest; she opened the door and went in herself, and so a stranger found his body instead of me. I lost some time then. Later, a police person or someone who worked for them told me they couldn’t let me drive home in the state I was in, and so I had to call someone, and I cried so hard into the phone to Georgie that I could barely get any words out at all. I can’t remember how I told her, I can’t remember how she knew to come get me, I can’t remember the hours between calling her and her car rocketing into the motel’s parking lot; she found me on the asphalt
behind the hotel, screaming for Miguel’s ghost to speak to me, my face sunburned and my lips chapped. I remember the slam of Georgie’s car door, two slams actually, Nozlee and Georgie loading me into Georgie’s car to take me home, and Nozlee whispering in my ear, “His ghost isn’t here, Eve.”

  Days later, Ezra was with me at the Drawing Room when my phone lit up with the first afterlife text I’d gotten from Mig:

  Miggy

  Sorry but it’s v chill that even in death I can text u

  I’d frantically destroyed that phone, flinging it into the dirty toilet in the narrow bathroom stall. I’d flushed over and over again, but my phone was too big to go down, lingering dead and waterlogged at the bottom of the basin. Ezra’d found me, my sobs were making me heave so hard he’d thought I was vomiting. I let Ezra take care of me; I left my phone to get shit on. I didn’t have a phone for two days.

  Georgie gently tapped on my upturned palm. “Are you worried about Ezra?” she pressed.

  “I can’t even think like that,” I said to Georgie. “Plus Ezra has never exhibited signs of suicidal ideation.”

  “He hasn’t. He might just be really sad this weekend. A lot of bad shit all at once. Maybe he put his phone on Do Not Disturb and he doesn’t even know how worried he’s making you.”

  “Probably,” I said, even though Ezra had never, to my knowledge, put his phone on Do Not Disturb and knew how bad this weekend was going to be for me, so why would he leave me to stand alone against the crush of my memories?

  “Did you text Noz?” Georgie asked.

  “Fuck her, how would she know where he is?”