“It’s fine,” I said, meaning the glass.
“It’s not fucking fine,” he said, meaning who knows what.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Okay, so, why I didn’t tell you about Miggy. You didn’t really know I see ghosts. You told me you thought the ghost thing was, what did you say, more metaphorical than real?”
“That is such a bullshit excuse. After Miggy died, that changed everything, you should’ve made me understand.”
“And what would’ve happened then?” I asked. “Would you have made me text him every time you saw a meme that he’d laugh at?”
“Isn’t that what you were doing? As my best friend, you should’ve given me at least what little contact you had with him. How would you have felt if I’d kept him away from you?”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. If Ezra had done to me what I’d done to him, I’d have been mad enough to storm away from our friendship, maybe end it forever. I didn’t want him to get that thought in his head, so I didn’t mention it. “I’m sorry,” I said instead, unqualified this time.
“You wanted to keep him for yourself,” Ezra said. “You would’ve been fine if you’d been my best friend, and Nozlee’s best friend, and Miggy’s best friend, and we never developed connections independent of you. That’s why I never got why you encouraged me to ask Nozlee out. It didn’t make sense, especially when—no, let me finish—you got predictably shitty about it when Noz and I really started dating and suddenly we had a relationship you weren’t invited to.”
“That’s not how I feel,” I said. “I loved hanging out as a group. I didn’t want to keep you from Miggy. It just seemed too hard to be the person to facilitate a connection between you two.”
“Why? Don’t we do hard shit for each other all the time?”
“Yes but—”
“But what?” he said.
“But I don’t fucking know why, okay? If I fucking knew why I was like this I would tell you, but I don’t know!” I was shouting now, even though my body wasn’t moving. Fighting is so strange, so in your head and out of your body, so fast and rushed and hot-blooded. No space for pauses. Even as I was thinking, I was shouting. “I felt so bad every day and the only way I could not feel bad was to just not think about anything! It barely crossed my mind to connect you and Miggy! I was just trying not to have thoughts!”
“Well when you turn your whole self off it has consequences!”
“It’s not on purpose!”
“It doesn’t fucking matter if it’s on purpose!” he shouted.
“What do you want me to do!?” I shouted back.
“Deal with yourself so you’re less of a shitty friend!”
Ezra got up and went into the kitchen zone, to be a little bit away from me. I thought about maybe looking at something other than the couch but found I didn’t have the emotional energy.
“Besides this one thing, I think I’ve been a good friend,” I said.
“This was a big thing,” Ezra said.
“All I’ve been thinking about for two days straight is you,” I said.
“That’s not good boundaries though. You were thinking about me in order to push this under the rug, but I can’t do that anymore.”
I finally tore my gaze away from the textured cream of the couch fabric. Ezra had his eyes on me unflinching and I bathed in the attention even though it wasn’t warm or sweet. I would take him mad over silent.
“I will try to be better. I will seriously work on it,” I said.
He came to sit with me again, as the energy in the room shifted from a boil to a simmer.
I leaned over to hug him and he hugged me back as tight as I liked it but said, “This doesn’t mean I forgive you, I just want to be able to forgive you.”
We unwrapped from each other and I wished badly for a drink that I could sip on to punctuate silences, to help transitions.
“You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to try. And when you get freaked out you have to manage it, instead of running off or doing stupid shit like locking my phone,” Ezra said.
“I was scared,” I said.
“The point is, you have to be less scared.”
“You should text Paris,” I said. “I posted something on Instagram and she reached out to me. She’s worried about you.”
“Shit,” Ezra said, fumbling for the phone in his pocket, sending off a quick text.
When he put his phone down, we gently told each other the stories of our weekends, all the little details we’d normally share with each other, but now we were tentative. All of the land mines we’d each been planting and stepping on as a surprise were suddenly dug up, so we were now obliged to walk around them carefully. I told Ezra about going into his house and reading the texts on Tommy’s phone, and I kept saying sorry sorry sorry, knowing that with every rendition of the word, I was diminishing its effect.
Ezra filled in the blanks of his story with his usual writerly flare: Friday morning was strange and too-bright, dizzying cocaine hangovers and no sleep and the cold water in the pool at the house Paris was selling. Kissing her had made him miss Nozlee (and feel guilty for kissing her), so he cracked and texted her Are you up, I still want you, where are you, can we talk? Nozlee had eventually texted him back; she was still going to Two Bunch since she couldn’t cancel the reservation and she still wanted to go to see the shaman here, and Ezra could come meet her later in the afternoon if he wanted, but he shouldn’t get his hopes up, her mind was made up, they could talk but they were done.
Ezra didn’t understand how set she was, Ezra didn’t take her words at face value, he considered this invitation a loosening. He planned to text me when he got to the desert, a fait accompli, because he felt that what he was doing was emotionally reckless and somewhat masochistic, and he wanted to hurt himself without his friend stopping him. But then he got to the desert and Nozlee told him about Miggy. At first he didn’t believe her and didn’t know what kind of strange games she was playing, but then Nozlee said all these things that only Migg would/could know. He thought about all the times when I was drunk and had said things like, The ghost at Little Cave won’t talk to me because I’m a dyke or The exorcism I did this morning was of a whole murdered family and it was really actually scary, they were all so mad. All my ghost talk. And he started to believe her. Then he started to get mad.
“Why not confront me then, yell at me or whatever. Have this conversation? Why mute me and run away from me?” I asked.
Ezra rubbed the tiny hairs on his head. I wished I could touch them, they looked so soft.
He said, “This is what I’m like when I get mad. I ice out people. I’ve just never been mad at you.”
Lydia had said as much, but I hadn’t believed her.
“I have my own things to work on,” he said.
“Let’s thaw stuff out, then,” I said. “Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
“I think I just need space right now, from both of you. You and Nozlee, I mean,” he said. “I’m just really fucking hurt by both of you right now.”
We were silent for a really long time; I felt a little bit like I’d been doing wind sprints.
“Were you out here to get back together with her?” I asked. “Because, I was the one who asked her not to tell you about Miguel’s ghost. You shouldn’t punish her for that.”
“I came out here to talk to her, yeah,” Ezra said. “But then, you know, we really talked and were totally honest with each other, maybe for the first time. We wanted to be that honest, that’s how Miggy came up in the first place.”
“Miguel’s ghost,” I insisted. “You have to think of it as the ghost of him, not him. That’s what our witch-teacher taught us, to protect ourselves from getting too attached to a monstrous thing.”
“Do you think of him like that, as a ghost of himself?” Ezra asked.
“No,” I said.
Ezra drew in a breath loudly, “Look, there are other reasons Noz and I definitely aren’t going to get back together, it’s not just the Miguel thing.”
“What are they?” I asked.
Ezra shook his head. “You can ask her,” he said. “Maybe she’ll tell you.”
“Okay.” I said. I brushed that away for now. “I need to say, ghosts are mostly the person they were when they were alive, but all ghosts are thirsty, and they become monstrous and awful sometimes. I’ll admit, I was selfish and I kept Miguel for myself—and yes, okay, I wanted to keep Miguel for myself. But also, if you’re not used to ghosts, I thought it might really hurt you to see an altered version of him, a scary thing, a monster. I’m used to ghosts and it wouldn’t bother me to see him all freaked out, but it could’ve hurt you.”
“I’m a fucking adult and you’re not my mom,” Ezra said.
“Yes, but, haven’t you ever tried to protect someone you loved from something bad?” I asked.
Ezra put his forearms on his knees and dropped his head; his shoulder blades rose up from his back under that nice shirt. I reached out to scrub my fingerpads against his scalp, the way I always used to even when there was hair in the way. I was worried, but he didn’t flinch or push me off; he leaned into my hand. I moved my hand across his scalp, I rubbed every inch of it, I know it felt good for him, it felt good for me to touch him. We stayed that way for a few minutes.
Ezra sat up, he grabbed my hand before I could pull it away and kissed my knuckles. He’d never been this tender, this semi-sexual, with me while mostly sober. All of our previous heated embraces had occurred on Molly, or at sunrise at the tail end of an all-night coke bender, or as spitty cheek and ear kisses while absolutely sloshed and sun-drunk at a daytime barbeque party.
“I’ve tried to think about what it would be like to have sex with you,” Ezra said. “But I never got very far. I think I want to be you more than I want to fuck you.”
“I want us to be the same person, sometimes, too,” I said. “That’s why I always took those pictures of our hair. Because we looked alike.”
Ezra smiled brightly, for me, finally. He let go of my hand so he could touch his own head.
“It’ll grow back,” he said.
Saturday, 8:20 p.m.
Fifteen minutes later, Nozlee still wasn’t back. Ezra was antsy, and I didn’t want to tarnish our moments of deep understanding by lingering too long in each other’s presence. He was still mad at me and would need to take time to get over how bad I’d betrayed him; I needed to learn how to be a good friend to him. To start, we needed to give each other space, we needed to create a jump cut like in a movie, so the scene didn’t stretch out too long.
I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet for a while after I’d finished peeing. I had so many notifications on my phone I didn’t want to check. I opened Instagram, it reloaded, and Georgie’s newest picture appeared on the top of my feed. It was from earlier, at The Grind. Most of the frame was full of sweating women mid-dance, but in the lower corner Bea was kissing Georgie’s cheek and Georgie’s eyes were closed and she looked happy.
Georgie
Today 1:09 AM
Where are you?
Today 8:25 PM
i have to mute you on Insta for a just little while
until im over it
im gonna get over it
and learn to be a good friend.
I went back to Instagram and muted Georgie. I unfollowed and blocked Bea. A new message popped up.
Georgie
im gonna get over it
and learn to be a good friend.
I understand
I’m glad you’re working on your shit.
I could’ve said “thanks” or “thank you for helping me figure out I have a lot of work to do in order to be good to people,” but Georgie didn’t need to hear it and I didn’t need to say it; I could just let our message chain ebb, I could let it fall to the bottom of the scroll until one day we were ready to forgive and ready to be better and she could jump to the top of my feed once again. I deleted my message chain with Bea; maybe she’d text me again, and I’d ignore it, but either way, I didn’t need to keep the whole record of our back and forth anymore.
I left the bathroom and Ezra was leaning against a wall across the room, looking at his phone. He’d turned off some of the lights, so the hotel suite had less of an interrogation room feel and more of the dim glow of a romantic night in the desert. In the lower light, his face was illuminated by his phone’s blue glow.
“The Saguaro has cheap rooms on HotelTonight,” Ezra said.
The Saguaro in Palm Springs was where we were meeting up on Sunday, to have Miggy’s vigil, because all our friends loved it there. Once, a huge swath of our group of friends had taken over about half the rooms at the hotel for a weekend and didn’t leave once in forty-eight hours. We ate bags and bags of salt & vinegar potato chips and drank our way through a hundred beers. The few hours we slept, Ezra, Miggy, and I shared a bed; we woke up smelling like sunscreen and each other’s underwear.
“You don’t have to go,” I said. “I can get a room.”
“I think I need to be alone tonight,” Ezra said. “I booked a room.”
“Do you want to wait for Noz? To say bye?”
Ezra shook his head. He pocketed his phone, and walked away, into the bedroom of the suite. I heard a bag unzip, I heard him shuffling around.
“I should get a room too!” I said. I pulled out my phone and tapped the HotelTonight app.
Ezra appeared in the doorway. “Wait before you book, okay? Can you do me a favor? Stay here until Noz gets back and update her and chat before you book a room and run off?”
“Yeah okay,” I said. “Is she okay?”
“Not really,” Ezra said.
Unsurprising; none of us were really okay, and it would be a while until we were.
With his bag slung over one shoulder, Ezra hugged me really hard and we stayed that way for a while, my chin over his shoulder and his chin over mine, my hand on his back and his hands in my hair.
“If you’re ever mad at me again, please don’t freeze me out.” I whispered in his ear. “Yell at me, make me cry, just don’t vanish. I was scared.”
“I promise,” he said, and kissed me on the ear, and let go of me, and left. I heard his car start and the tires crunch on that white rock road, and I was still just standing there in the middle of room. I didn’t know what to do while I waited, I got antsy almost immediately.
I scrounged around a little and found the little binder all hotels have, with a guide to all the amenities. I checked the menu for their restaurant, annoyingly named “Essence,” and ordered a totally ridiculous amount of mismatched food: gnocchi, a meze plate, grilled asparagus, crispy spiced cauliflower, seared scallops. Nozlee liked everything but it was hard to order for her because she ate based on her feelings on any given day rather than on a reliable list of preferences, and I couldn’t begin to guess what she was feeling and why it was taking her so long to go on an easy errand.
She came in a few minutes after I hung up the phone and explained, “I stopped at Tonga Hut just to be alone for a little while. I got a blue Hawaiian.” She stuck out her tongue and it was stained, faintly, from the blue curaçao.
“I ordered a bunch of stuff from room service,” I said.
“Oh thank god,” Noz said. She collapsed on the couch, dropping her bags of booze on the floor. “I haven’t eaten all day. Except crab rangoon with my blue Hawaiian.”
I wrinkled my nose. Noz could eat anything and in huge amounts, but I couldn’t really stomach all that fried bar food. I was better with liquids than solids. I found myself considering anew the familiar shape of her body, the way she always lounged in a sprawl instead of si
tting like a normal person, the hugeness of her eyes, the way she didn’t look at her phone when she was in the same room with you. I made myself useful gathering up the plastic bags of drinks and taking them to the kitchen area to sort them out.
“So he left?” Noz called from the couch.
“Maybe he’s napping in the bedroom,” I said, just to joke with her. I needed a little levity, I was starting to feel tired.
“His car’s gone,” Noz said.
“You’re a good detective,” I said. “He went to stay at the Saguaro, he needed space.”
“So I bought that beer for nothing!” Noz said, but she didn’t sound actually mad about it. She was talking just to talk, filling up the room, keeping me interested.
“Yeah,” I said. Then, I caught her up on our convo, like Ezra had asked me to, while I put the beer in the mini-fridge and opened the white wine and poured us each a glass. I walked back into the living room, she was in a slump on the couch; I handed her a glass and she de-slumped so she could sip on it.
“That’s the whole story?” she asked. “That’s all you guys talked about.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much everything,” I said. “Why, wasn’t it enough?”
She shrugged. I sat in the armchair. Someone knocked on the door. I stood up again and let in a man in a white, billowy uniform carrying a large tray, and Nozlee moved a few random objects—our wine glasses, decorative bowls—off the coffee table. The man put the tray down, lifted the cover, and said, “Enjoy.” All the plates of food were steaming and Nozlee looked blissful. The couches and armchairs were too plush and elephantine to give us easy access to the plates so we both, automatically, slid to the ground, scooted close to the coffee table, grabbed our forks and started pecking.
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