CHAPTER 1
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
The Blue Room was teeming with amateur influencers. The clubs in Studio City weren’t known for a cozy local vibe on the best of nights, but it was especially bad tonight. I sidestepped some guy trying to vlog in the middle of the dance floor—I mean, really?—and shouldered my way to the bar. The flash from a nearby iPhone mingled with the strobe lights.
I didn’t want to be here.
“Excuse me,” I said to a group crowding the bar to take artsy pictures of their espresso martinis, but my voice was swallowed up by the music—at the moment, a remix of a Dua Lipa song with enough bass to trigger the Big One. I waved my orange wristband at the bartender. “Buttery nipple shot,” I shouted over the music, and several people turned to stare. I scowled. How many complimentary shots would it take to forget why we were here tonight? I was determined to find out.
By the second shot, I’d managed to secure a coveted spot at the counter, and by the third, I watched as the employees swapped shifts to finish out the night, the old bartender tapping in a younger guy with a manicured mustache and really tight pants. The newcomer acted like he couldn’t hear me on my first couple attempts at ordering a buttery nipple shot; he bowed his head toward mine, his comb-over silhouetted by the Edison bulbs and the blue-and-purple lights gleaming off the subway tile backsplash. I leaned closer to speak into his ear—aaannndd now he was getting an eyeful of my boobs.
While he bent to grab the butterscotch schnapps from the bottom shelf, I hooked my thumbs under the straps of my corset top and hiked it up for more coverage. I’d dressed for pictures, but already I was regretting it, because I’d sincerely rather there was no evidence of me being here tonight. And preferably no memory, while we were at it. The bartender was sliding me my fourth shot and I was debating ordering something stronger when a delicate hand with immaculate red nails darted in front of me. Jo stamped my buttery nipple shot on the counter before tossing it back, then pretended to retch. “Ugh, that tastes like something my grandma would order.”
I shook my head, folding my arms against the counter. The whole bar top was made of scuffed-up resin with vintage L.A. Times newspapers sealed inside, headlines about Clark Gable and the moon landing and the 1994 Northridge quake. “If I knew you were going to steal it, I would have ordered a tequila shot.”
Jo’s red lips parted in a winning smile. That was her signature color: that classic Bordeaux red. “I’m pretty sure my maid of honor is contractually obligated to do a tequila shot with me anyway.”
I was inclined to agree, but not because I had anything to celebrate.
I hated weddings. By extension, bridal parties ranked pretty high on my list of things that were best left to corny romantic comedies and trashy reality TV like Say Yes to the Dress. Mercifully, it wasn’t my engagement we were supposed to be toasting to. But it was my best friend’s engagement, and she’d asked me to be the maid of honor. Which meant I was pretty central to any and all wedding activities—including tonight’s little announcement. I couldn’t have been persuaded to grin and bear it for anyone else, but Jo was a special case.
“Two shots of Cazadores,” I told the bartender when he finally decided to acknowledge my cleavage again. “With lime. And do you have any saltshakers around here?” He tore his eyes from my boobs and gave me a blank look. “Or margarita salt? I’m not picky.”
“What does this look like, a sorority party?” he deadpanned.
“I’m gonna be honest here, not really in the mood to be negged by a guy with Buddy Holly glasses and a handlebar mustache.”
“Real original. Haven’t heard that one before.”
Either the flashing blue-and-purple lights were causing me to hallucinate or there were cartoon mustaches printed all over his shirt—a short-sleeved button-down that, up to this point, I had assumed was covered in black blobs and that maybe he was channeling his inner Cruella de Vil. But no, those were definitely mustaches, and they definitely looked like the one that was already on his face. “Can you actually remember the last time you listened to music that wasn’t Tame Impala?”
He pointed at the overhead speakers. “Right now. There is literally music playing right now.”
As though to drive the point home, the song changed to “Gasolina” by Daddy Yankee.
“Just pour the drinks and I’ll leave a good tip,” I said, trying not to sound too exasperated as I held out my wristband for the fifth time in a row. “There should be a comped tab under Anderson.”
With an eye roll that looked almost painful, he turned his back on us and grabbed a bottle from the middle shelf. A part of me couldn’t fault him for his irritation. It had to be annoying, people waltzing into your work every week, brandishing orange VIP bands and demanding everything for free. These clubs were always hosting some promotional event or another, Emo Night or Nineties Throwbacks or whatever else they could come up with to draw tourists and locals alike. Tonight, aspiring actors and musicians and every other brand of L.A. hopeful were packed into The Blue Room, all under the guise of “Influencer Friday.”
But whatever the bartender’s distaste for influencers, I wanted to get drunk. I would’ve happily paid for faster service, but I wasn’t sure it would make a difference. It seemed he was determined to give us bad service on principle, so I might as well cash in on the perks of showing up tonight.
Jo scrutinized the way his cuffed chinos hugged his ass, not so much checking him out as making a professional assessment. “I can’t tell if you hate him or want to go home with him.”
I didn’t have the energy to illustrate how hard of a pass that was, but I shot her a look. I was taller than Jo on a normal day, but right now, wearing four-inch-heeled boots to her strappy gladiator sandals, there was almost a foot’s difference between us. “None of the above. I just want my drinks.”
“Speaking of people you hate,” Jo segued, “I’m sure you’ve already thought about this, but Peter is thinking of asking Declan to be the best man, and I wanted to run it by you to make sure …” On noticing my expression, she tapered off, but the damage was done. It probably looked like I’d sucked on a lemon, but the bartender hadn’t delivered our Cazadores with lime yet.
“You know, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable,” she finished lamely.
“It’s not that it would make me uncomfortable.” Contrary to her assumption, I hadn’t already thought about this because I’d always assumed Peter and Declan were one of those friendships that wouldn’t survive past high school. If there was one thing bound to make an unpleasant event that much more unbearable, it was having to spend it in the company of people I’d hoped to leave in the past. But they seemed to have a way of cropping back up as of late. “Anyway, what are you going to do, tell Peter that he can’t have his best friend at the wedding?”
Jo leaned her back against the bar top, facing the sweaty, undulating crowd. Her red lips curled in a frown. “I’ll talk to him, if it comes to that. But it has been like, eight years since you’ve seen each other, and he’s way different than you probably remember. He’s living in Pasadena now, and he’s got this great job at—”
It was hard enough to hear her over the music, and I didn’t care to strain my ears just to hear what Declan Walsh had gotten up to in recent years. I forced a smile and patted her arm in a way that I hoped was reassuring, though it felt more awkward than anything. “Stop worrying. I’m not going to go all Red Wedding on your best man.” When she didn’t look entirely convinced, I added, “Seriously. It’s fine. We’re all adults, and it’s supposed to be your day. And Peter’s. You guys should ask whoever you want.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, but I didn’t want Jo to stress over this. I might’ve hated weddings, but that didn’t mean I wanted to complicate hers any further. Marriage was bound to be complicated enough without my help.
“Two tequilas with lime,” the bartender announced, sliding a pair of shot glasses across the counter. They were each garnished with the largest wedge of lime I’d ever seen, tinged a muddled purple-gray color by the strobing lights. “Be sure to hashtag The Blue Room when you post a picture,” he added without enthusiasm.
He hadn’t bothered pointing us in the direction of the nearest saltshaker, but at this point, I didn’t care. “Bottoms up,” I said to Jo, balancing my phone in one hand to record a hasty clip of our glasses clinking together before we tossed them back. The tequila was a welcome burn in my throat, a promise of distraction—dancing, toasting, whatever it took to get my mind off the weeks looming before me. I stuffed the lime wedge into my mouth, and then I spat it right back out. I narrowed my eyes at the bartender. “Are you sure this is a lime?”
His smile was half-hidden behind his mustache. “Might be a grapefruit. Hard to tell in this lighting.”
“Let me guess. You ran out of salt, too.”
“Forget him,” Jo interrupted, steering me away from the bar before I could take out my bad mood on the bartender’s suspenders or hair. “The DJ’s doing our shoutout after the next song.”
Her shoutout. This was supposed to be a celebratory night, and I was doing my best to celebrate, but I wasn’t really up for all the gawking and unnecessary attention. Especially not after the controversial announcement we’d made on our livestream this afternoon. I wriggled free of her grasp on the outskirts of the dance floor. “I’ll be there in a minute. I need to get some air first.”
Without waiting for a reply, I slipped into the crowd and out the front door, flashing my wristband at the doorman. A queue had formed beneath the gangling palms lining Ventura Boulevard. “Just stepping outside for a moment.”
He gave me a curt nod. A few curious faces tracked my movements as my chunky-heeled boots pounded the pavement, putting some distance between me and the club. I came to rest against the stucco wall, well away from the yellow-gold glow of the nearest streetlight, and breathed in the warm, dry night air.
I extracted my phone from my pleather biker shorts. An uncomfortable clothing choice for Studio City in July, but nights like tonight, I needed to be photo ready. I had about a million Instagram notifications and thirty-six unread DMs, at least one of which was bound to be worth looking at, but I ignored all that in favor of posting a quick story of the tequila shots—#TheBlueRoom—before clicking over to the search bar. I typed in Declan Walsh and Instagram presented me with a smorgasbord of men, but none who looked anything like the Declan I’d known. I switched over to Twitter and found much the same: a deluge of notifications and a number of search results, but no sign of my high school nemesis.
Okay, perhaps I had grown a little dramatic over the years, always spinning my stories into something that would entertain the masses. Declan was never my nemesis. In truth, I wasn’t sure he’d ever cared much that I existed. I was fifteen years old, struggling to keep up with my classes and harboring lofty dreams of getting in to the music program at USC, when he’d transferred to Sierra Lakes from some science-y charter school. He was a pale, somewhat awkward kid with red hair and a smattering of freckles, and he managed to worm his way in with the popular kids almost immediately. Not because he played football or had super rich parents or knew where to get weed that was halfway decent. No, Declan was popular because he was funny.
It was mostly harmless: weird voices when popcorn-reading passages of The Catcher in the Rye and jokes in math class about sixty-nine and four-twenty that always had about a fifty-fifty chance of landing him in detention. For a senior prank, he’d wrapped the vice principal’s car in enough bubble wrap to pack up a two-bedroom house, which was terrible for the environment but it was admittedly hilarious watching Mr. Alvarez trying to tear it all off. Point being, Declan was funny in that immature way that only worked in high school, before everybody grew up.
Still, it was high school, so I hadn’t minded him for the first couple weeks—right up to the point when he stuffed my tuba with shaving cream and I spewed it all over the woodwind section while playing “The Final Countdown” for our homecoming pep rally. When, about a year later, he stopped me in the cafeteria to offer me a tapioca pudding cup that turned out to be filled with mayonnaise, it was the proverbial icing on the cake.
But I was an adult now. I’d long since moved past all my high school hang-ups. My dream of getting into Thornton had been squashed faster than I could say “music appreciation class,” but that was unrelated to the homecoming incident. I didn’t have the energy to uphold a decade-old grudge. Even if I did sort of blame him for the superlative I landed in our senior yearbook. A dark, vindictive corner of my brain found solace in imagining him as a class clown turned adult burnout, performing bad stand-up comedy or somewhere in Venice Beach doing bubble tricks for people on the boardwalk.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t confirm either of those theories, because Declan Walsh had no digital footprint.
“Go?”
I nearly leapt out of my skin, fumbling my phone so bad that it clattered on the sidewalk screen-first. I stooped to retrieve it. Black cutout heels were planted on the concrete in front of me, but I paid them no mind. I turned my phone over in my hand. A lightning-bolt crack split the screen. “Shit,” I muttered, typing in my passcode. It seemed to be functional, at least.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry!” the girl standing over me whined. “I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just, I’m a fan of the podcast and I saw on Twitter that you guys were going to be here tonight, and I was hoping to maybe get a selfie.”
I straightened up. She was about college aged, a few years younger than me, with dark barrel curls and cheeks carved out by heavy contour. A headhunter, probably. At least that was what I called them. Sometimes they were aspiring Instagram models and other times they were small-business owners, but whichever they were, they stalked social media to figure out where the more established influencers were going to be that night, all for the sake of snapping a few blurry club selfies that they would unironically caption like we were #besties.
I checked my own makeup using the front camera of my now-cracked phone. My foundation was a bit oily and my signature Phantom Green hair was washed out in the amber glow of the streetlight. But all in all, good enough. “Sure,” I said, locking my phone and stuffing it back into a sweaty pocket. I’d deal with the crack in the screen later. “But please don’t use any cringey filters or anything.”
Not needing to be told twice, the girl whipped out her phone and started testing out different angles. Clubgoers ogled us as they skirted around us on the sidewalk, probably trying to figure out who the hell I was and why this chick was taking a picture with me. A fair number of people had heard of the podcast, but the vast majority of them wouldn’t recognize my face.
Over by the front door, the bartender had stepped out on break, chain-smoking American Spirits while he chatted with the doorman.
The girl took a couple pictures and then checked the results. “So cute. Is Jo with you? I’d love to get a picture with her, too. I’ve always wondered if you guys are, like, friends in real life. Like I know you’re friends on the podcast and for social media and everything, but I’ve always wondered if it was all for show.”
The bartender stomped out the remains of his cigarette on the gum-riddled sidewalk, but this time he didn’t light another. He mumbled something to a pretty brunette with a pixie cut at the front of the line, who nodded in my direction. I prickled with discomfort. People talking about me online I could handle, but I was always a little uncomfortable when gossip managed to find its way into the real world. It blurred the lines. Made it harder to compartmentalize. “I hope not, considering she asked me to be her maid of honor,” I said, distracted.
“She … what?”
My attention snapped back to the girl in front of me. She was frowning, plainly confused. “I’m guessing you didn’t watch the livestream this afternoon.”
She took a minute to parse out what I was implying, and then her mouth dropped open. “No way. You’re pulling my leg.” Unfortunately, I was not. The DJ was probably giving a shoutout as we spoke. “Jo’s getting married?”
“Well, she’s too old for a quinceañera,” I said dryly. Though you better believe I was on the court of honor then, too. I’d had fewer qualms about that.
“Isn’t that against the whole thing, though? Hashtag Single Not Seeking.” She laughed uncertainly. “You can’t exactly go around hooking up with strangers when you’re married. Or, I mean, I guess you could, but that would be pretty messed up.”
I glanced over at the bartender, who had moved away from the front door and was hanging out near the base of a towering palm tree. Lurking. Maybe Jo had sent him to find me. “All the more reason to stay single, right?”
“Right,” the girl agreed, though she sounded a little put-out.
The bartender waited until she was gone and then sauntered over. I pushed myself off the wall, the lacy fabric of my corset clinging to the stucco like it didn’t want to go back inside, either. But I’d have to show face sooner or later. I was surprised Jo hadn’t come looking for me yet.
Copyright © 2023 by Kristyn J. Miller
