CHAPTER 1
“Snort the salt, slam the tequila, squeeze the lime in your eye!” screams Pia over the music.
“Snort! Snort!” Angie pounds the bar with her fist.
Two guys lean over, snort a line of salt through a straw, take a shot of Patrón, and—howling in pain—squeeze limes into their eyes.
“SUICIDE TEQUILA!” they yell in unison.
Pia and Angie fall against one another, laughing so hard they gasp for air. But I can’t bring myself to laugh with them.
I’m kind of stressed out.
I haven’t seen my boyfriend, Ethan, in ages, and I really wanted my friends to get to know him better tonight. Instead, I’m standing at the bar with two random dudes who haven’t said a word to me. Being the least hot girl in group sucks. Hard.
“That hurts so much! Let’s do it again!”
“Fuck yeah!”
Two random, stupid dudes.
We’re at a dark nightclub—well, the lobby of the Jane Hotel in the West Village, all velvet sofas and giant ferns, but at midnight on a Saturday, it’s throbbing chaotically with music and people and drinks. And that makes it a nightclub, right?
It’s certainly not like any club I’ve been to before. But I’m not exactly New York’s craziest party girl, so how would I know what’s normal? I still get nervous when I come to a place like this, as though someone’s going to look at me and tell me I don’t belong. And that makes me babble in my head—
“This is the shit, huh, Coco?” shouts Angie, breaking into my thoughts.
“It’s the poop, all right!”
“The poop. You’re adorable,” says Pia, pinching my cheek.
“We’re on a mission to get Coco to swear with confidence,” explains Pia to one of the dudes. I think his name is Nick. Or Patrick. “But she’s too much of a good girl.”
Nick/Patrick glances at me and nods briefly, then looks back at Pia. “I bet you do everything with confidence,” he says to her, winking. Pia’s eyes flicker to Angie’s. “Where are you from? Venezuela? I met a girl from Venezuela once. She was hot like you.”
Pia and Angie look at each other again, and crack up. Pia is half Indian and half Swiss, and beautiful, but people never know where she’s from. Angie has been her best friend since birth, and she’s equally stunning, albeit in a platinum punk princess kind of way. The two of them have a kind of friendship shorthand that means they’re always laughing at private jokes. It’s fun to be around, but inevitably, you can feel a little left out.
We all got here about two hours ago. By “we all” I mean Pia, Angie, me, my boyfriend, Ethan, and our other roommates: Madeleine and my older sister, Julia.
The evening started well. We all had a couple of drinks, and Ethan told everyone about his childhood summering in Oregon (“you use ‘summer’ as a verb?” asked Julia, before I gave her a look and she shut up). Then the club/lobby/whatever it is became really crowded, and Maddy disappeared and Jules went to find her, and then these guys started hitting on Angie and Pia. And now, somehow, I’ve lost Ethan.
I want to know where he is, but I stay put. I’m trying not to seem needy. Guys hate that, right?
Anyway, he’s probably just hanging out with my sister, right?
“Your turn!” Nick/Patrick holds the salt straw out for Angie.
“Oh, no.” Angie laughs. “Snorting salt is, like, totally dangerous.”
“Yeah,” Pia adds somberly. “Did you know that your nasal passages have a direct route to your brain?”
“Don’t you mean my dick?” says Nick/Patrick, suddenly serious.
Angie arches an eyebrow. “Your nasal passages have a direct route to your dick?”
“No. My dick has a direct route to my brain.”
Angie and Pia look at each other and dissolve into shrieks of laughter again.
“Oh, my God! My song! My song!” Pia and Angie are climbing up on the coffee table behind us. If there is anything that can be used as a platform for dancing, Angie and Pia will find it. In the past year I’ve seen them dance on dining tables, chairs, benches, stoops, and even Pia’s food truck, Toto.
“Coco!” Pia holds out a hand. “Get up here!”
I climb up obediently next to Pia. Dancing on tables isn’t really my thing. A few months ago, I was dancing on a chair and kind of fell off it and ended up in the hospital. Of course, that had less to do with the dancing and more to do with the cocktail of prescription meds and booze and hash I’d accidentally-sort-of-on-purpose-but-no-mostly-accidentally taken.
But let’s not talk about that right now.
Angie leans over to shout in my ear. “You okay, sugarnuts?”
“I’m fine. Totally awesome.”
“Good girl!”
From up here, I can finally see my boyfriend. That’s Ethan, with his downy pale brown hair that he seems determined to brush up rather than brush down …
Wait.
Ethan isn’t talking to Julia or Madeleine. He’s with some girl I don’t know. She’s short and thin and pretty and smiling at him in the way that I smile at him and flicking her hair and—
OhmyGod.
I feel my heart miss a beat as I see my boyfriend, my boyfriend, lean in to her, grinning, trace his finger slowly down her cheek, and—
Oh, my gosh, he’s kissing her. Ethan is kissing her, not me. HER.
My stomach flips over so fast that I lose my balance, falling face-first to the floor.
Please tell me I didn’t just fall off a coffee table in a crowded nightclub. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease …
I just want to hide right here and not get up, ever. Maybe I could roll under the coffee table and live there. It would be so nice and quiet.
But before I can settle in for life, Angie and Pia pull me up.
Pia is laughing. “Coco! Killer moves.”
I scan the crowd, trying to see Ethan, but the place is too busy.
“Are you on something again?” Angie peers into my pupils.
“No! No, no, no,” I say quickly. “I’d never—I mean, not again, you know, I wouldn’t—”
Pia narrows her eyes at me. “Are you sure?”
“Totally sure.” I smile as brightly as I can. “I just lost my balance. Um, and I have to pee.”
“Do you want us to come with you, ladybitch?” asks Angie.
“No, no. I know how to pee. I’ve been doing it for, like, years …
I feel sick.
The bathroom is full of girls, all gossiping and preening and laughing. I push my way in to the only empty stall, locking the door behind me, and sit down on the toilet, my breath coming in stops and starts.
I lean on my knees, staring at my feet, trying to calm down. I hate these shoes. They’re my work shoes. I only wore them because I hate all my other shoes more.
My boyfriend is cheating on me.
My chest hurts. I can’t breathe.
How do I deal with this? What do I do now? Like, seriously, what am I supposed to do? One of the other assistants at the preschool where I work introduced us a few months ago. And Ethan seemed, you know, really great.
I didn’t, like, fall for him immediately or anything. But he has a good job and he seemed nice and all that. And he asked me out. Me. And my family—I mean, Julia and my father—said he sounded great.
So I went out with him.
But then I started caring about him, because that’s the kind of person I am.
Plus, it’s way easier to be twenty-one and living in New York City if you have a boyfriend. I don’t know why, it just is. Ethan is someone I can hang out with when my friends are busy, you know? If I’m feeling lonely, I can text him. We go to the movies together. He just makes me feel secure.
Or he did.
Who the hell is that girl, anyway? How dare she kiss another girl’s boyfriend as though it’s a totally okay thing to do?
But maybe, oh, gosh, maybe he didn’t tell her he had a girlfriend. And it looked like he was kissing her first, not the other way around …
Breathe, Coco. Breathe.
The last time I felt like this was at prom. When I found out Eric—the guy I’d been crushing on, lusting after, pining for, seriously, just pick a verb, you know what I mean—had just slept with my (now former) best friend. I’d liked him for so long, it was like being punched. And then—no, actually, I can’t talk about Eric right now, I can’t even think about him. I’ll get even more upset.
And now Ethan is cheating on me. My first real boyfriend ever.
I’m such a loser.
If I was like Pia or Angie or any of the other girls, I would unlock the toilet door, walk back out there, right up to Ethan, and slap him, yelling, “How dare you cheat on me?” Or, “It’s over, motherfucker, yippee-kay-yay!”
But I can’t. I’m not like them. I’m too scared of doing something I can’t undo.
Anyway, all I really want to say is: “How can you treat me like this when I’m always so nice to you?”
No, really. Why couldn’t he just be nice to me? I’m so nice to him! I iron his shirts whenever he sleeps over, and I read the books he suggests. And when I make him dinner, I send the leftovers home with him in a Tupperware container for work the next day. Tonight I even got him to come out with my friends by offering to pay for everything, which was fine, really—
No, it’s not. It’s not fine.
Great, now I’m hearing things. Maybe I really am crazy.
No you’re not. You’re perfect. And you’re better than this.
My eyes narrow as a tiny fire sparks deep inside me.
I am better than this. I don’t deserve this—this kind of bullshit.
I’m going to kick his ass.
But as I walk out of the toilet cubicle ready to get back out there and confront Ethan, Madeleine bursts into the bathroom. She’s half carrying, half dragging my big sister, Julia, who has puke running down the side of her face. She’s hammered.
With a high-pitched chorus of “ewwwwws,” the other girls in the bathroom part, scattering like a lip-glossed red sea.
“Coco!” says Madeleine, her long hair swishing behind her. “Thank God. Jules just barfed on a sofa.”
“I am allergic to vodka and cranberry juice,” Julia enunciates slowly.
“Everyone is allergic to vodka and cranberry juice if they drink nine of them.” Madeleine splashes water on Julia’s face. “Coco, paper towels?”
This is unusual. Julia is probably the most sensible one at Rookhaven. She’s not the one who gets out-of-control drunk. She just works long hours in her entry-level position in an investment bank and saves twenty-five percent of her salary (seriously, who does that?) and talks about “M&As” and “AUMs” and “DDMs” and other confusing aconyms. That’s it.
Madeleine is the quiet, skinny accountant, Chinese American, obsessive about two things: working out and Spektor, the band she sings with.
Angie is naughty and sarcastic, always. She works in fashion.
Pia is a party-hard drama queen. She runs a small food truck empire.
Me? I’m … I don’t know.
I work as an assistant in a Brooklyn preschool. I like to read and bake.
The good one. I’m the good one.
“Coco,” Maddy snaps. “Towels.”
I grab a huge fistful of paper towels from the dispenser just as Jules flops forward and starts vomiting in the sink. Ugh. I don’t think it’s actually the vodka and cranberry that’s the problem, it’s the predinner wine and flask of schnapps that Angie passed around on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but whatever.
“That is, like, totally gross,” says one of the glossy-lipped girls, looking at Julia’s shiny brown ponytail flopping over the sink.
“Shut up,” I snap. “You don’t like it, find another damn bathroom.”
Madeleine glances at me in surprise.
Julia squints at her vomit. “Carrots!” she exclaims. “Always carrots. I’m going to stop eating carrots, you know, as an experiment, and next time I puke, we can—” She pauses to throw up again.
“Great idea,” says Madeleine. “Conduct a science experiment with your binge drinking.”
Angie and Pia burst in. “What is going on?”
Julia stands up. “I’m a lil’ drunk! Fivies!”
Pia and Angie automatically reach to high-five Julia. Somehow my sister manages to miss both of their hands.
“I’m taking her home.” Madeleine tucks her dark hair behind her ears. “Julia! Stand up!”
“I’ll come with you,” I say, putting Julia’s arm over my shoulders so I can help her walk.
“We’ll come too,” says Pia. “It’s not like we’re here to score anyway.”
Pia and Angie are both in long-distance relationships while Julia and Madeleine are single. And I have a boyfriend … who is cheating on me. And now we’ll break up and I’ll be single again, with no more texts and no more Saturday-night movie dates and no more … anything. I’ll be single again. No one will ever ask me out. And my life will be empty. I will be alone. Forever.
I can’t bear it.
I stare into space for a moment, holding up my swaying sister.
Maybe I can pretend it didn’t happen.
Should I find Ethan before we go? Tell him I’m leaving, at least? No. Staying with Julia is the right thing to do. She needs me. I’m good at looking after people, I always have been. Besides, that strange, fiery anger I felt is gone now.
I just want to go home with my friends. And for everything to go back to normal as soon as possible.
“Turn the radio up, Mr. Taxi Driver!” shouts Julia.
Maybe it didn’t happen.
Maybe I imagined it.
Maybe everything will be fine.
Or maybe it won’t.
Copyright © 2015 by Gemma Burgess
