One
The skin on my heels is coming off in chunks, and I probably shouldn’t have sex tonight, right?
These are the types of things Adelaide shouts across her flat, prompting the kinds of conversations with which Madison, her roommate, quickly had to become comfortable. They’d been loose acquaintances at Boston University—members of the same sorority—but never really spent time together outside of chapter meetings and other mandatory events. Different majors and friend groups and all that. One afternoon, a few years after graduation, Facebook informed Adelaide that Madison would also be heading to the U.K. for grad school, and, Well, she’d thought, I could really use a pal over there. She dropped her a note and, somehow, convinced Madison to forgo student accommodations and search for a home with her in north London.
Five days before landing at Heathrow, they’d signed a virtual lease for a gorgeous Victorian flat in Highgate—all beveled glass and chipped paint and worn-down, antique furniture—which they quickly decorated with framed posters from flea markets and an abundance of fairy lights. The cupboards were stocked with chocolate biscuits and ground coffee, the windowpanes lined with empty wine bottles stuffed with candlesticks. Polaroids of the two girls in sparkly dresses, winged eyeliner, and cheap faux fur coats covered the various dings and stains on their refrigerator—an appliance that made an unusual whistling sound and might, they feared, give out any day now.
On their first night in the neighborhood, the new roommates had gotten drunk at a local pub populated by dusty leather chairs and old men, eating veggie burgers and giggling from a corner table. The conversation flipped from politically charged ideological discussions to Remember that girl who got carted out of a frat party on a gurney senior year? That was me! and Which Spice Girl was your favorite growing up? They bonded quickly and easily and thank goodness.
During the first week of classes, Madison attended a yoga session for new students, and—in a twist of fate for which Adelaide would forever be grateful—laid her mat down next to a girl with a faint New England accent and a Boston College T-shirt. The girl’s name was Celeste, Madison texted. She was a few years their senior, but had just moved to London for graduate school as well (same uni as Madison, slightly different program), and Would you want to grab a drink with us later? Adelaide did, indeed.
Just as she’d convinced Madison to move in with her, and just as she’d convinced Madison and Celeste to spend countless evenings at the pub (To study! she’d say, grinning), Adelaide had also tricked her roommate into doing a very intense foot mask earlier in the week—something she’d found on a Korean cosmetics site that smelled, alarmingly, of bleach. Now, their feet were essentially molting. At a glance, it looked like Adelaide’s legs were attached to two very wide, very pale snakes in ecdysis.
My heels are the same, it’s terrifying, Madison said, glancing at the bottoms of her feet and handing Adelaide a mug of red wine (the glasses were dirty, per usual). You know you don’t have to have sex with every guy you go out with, though, right?
Adelaide laughed. After nearly half a decade of celibacy, she had thrown herself into the worlds of dating apps and one-night stands with force and fervor when she was twenty-two—charming strangers in text conversations and sweaty dance halls on a weekly basis. First in New York, now in London.
Tonight’s date would be no different from the rest, she thought. She’d meet this boy and melt at the sound of his accent (Adelaide had been living in London for seven months now, but the novelty had yet to wear off). He’d mock American politics and ask if life in New York was anything like an episode of Friends. She’d laugh at his jokes; he’d excuse her clumsiness when she knocked a drink over. At some point, they’d stumble back to one of their homes, have sloppy, mediocre sex, and their fling would be over before the sun was up. It had become a pattern.
The week before, Adelaide had three one-night stands over a six-day stretch. A month or so before that, she made out with two guys in the same evening at a grimy bar in Shoreditch. It had little to do with low self-esteem and everything to do with control. There were few things more intoxicating to Adelaide than locking eyes with a stranger, running her tongue along his bottom lip, and abruptly leaving the bar, or his flat, or wherever when she decided she was ready to go. Adelaide had found agency in her twenties that she’d lacked in her teens (that had been stolen in her teens, really), and she enjoyed using it.
I don’t have to sleep with everyone, you say? She took a swig of wine and winked at Madison’s reflection in the mirror, then turned her attention to swiping black eyeliner above her lashes. News to me!
Madison sat on the bathtub as Adelaide started to iron her hair into long, dark blond, pin-straight sections, chuckling as she watched her struggle to tame her grown-out fringe. They talked about term papers, sailing trips in France this coming summer, and Oh my gosh, did you see that Marissa and Josh got engaged in Miami? I still remember holding her hair back at Sigma Tau the night that they met. Eventually, Adelaide poured the rest of her wine into a plastic bottle, ran her tongue across her teeth—Good? she grinned at Madison; Good, Madison nodded—and tucked her flaky little feet into a pair of floral flats, praying this boy didn’t notice their appearance.
The boy’s name was Rory Hughes, and Adelaide hadn’t yet decided whether or not he was her type. They’d met on a dating app and his photos were mostly out-of-focus group shots (as many men inexplicably featured on their profiles), so she couldn’t quite discern what he looked like. Not really. But he’d left little “hearts” on her profile, and he liked the Spice Girls, and the bits of banter they’d exchanged over text had put a smile on Adelaide’s face. If nothing else, she was hopeful she’d get a drink and some pleasant conversation out of the evening. And besides, it was best not to sleep with him, anyway—she had papers to finish and exams for which she should be studying. The date would be quick, she told Madison, throwing on a leather jacket.
I’ll be home before ten, she said.
(She would not, in fact, be home before ten.)
* * *
If one were to cleave Adelaide’s adult life in two—like a melon, split clean down the middle—those halves would likely be Before Rory Hughes and After, a different version of her sitting on either side.
On the Tube en route to their first date, drinking dregs of wine and playing Ginuwine’s “Pony” on a loop, she had no idea that this was it. That these were her final moments in this particular body, in this identity. Maybe she would have done something differently if she’d known; maybe not. (Probably not.)
Copyright © 2023 by Genevieve Wheeler