I have no idea what to say to that.
“You never thought I’d be someone into slumming it, did you?” She says this almost proudly, like she took me here, in some twisted way, to impress me. “Did you see his arms?” She laughs. “I’m totally just using him for his body. It’s an incredible body.”
But then something shifts. She looks out the window, and I get the impression that she’s trying to hide her face. “He’s good to me,” she says. “He treats me like a queen.” She’s silent for a few blocks, then turns back to me and says, “Ash is such hard work. Everything in my life is such hard work.” She says this as she’s drinking expensive bourbon out of a silver flask in the back of a hired car, after swallowing a two-hundred-dollar pill that’s supposed to make her forget all her worries. “Sometimes I feel like I’m not good enough for him. Can you believe that? Me? Not good enough?”
I don’t say, “What if that means you’re not supposed to be together? What if that means you don’t fit?” Admitting that would be a failure somehow. And Tami is someone who refuses to fail.
“I can relax when I’m with Vaughn,” she says. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to never be able to relax? To always have to be in control?”
“But no one’s making you,” I say.
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Yes you do,” I say. “You can choose anything you want.” What about Raine and Vaughn? What about their choices?
But Tami just laughs. “I don’t have time for that shit. You slow down for one minute in this world, you stop for just a second to have a feeling or wonder what it all means, that’s how you end up a failure. That’s what makes you weak. I’m not ever going to end up like that. My mom has never cracked. Not once.”
Yes, but where is she?
And what is the alternative to cracking? What if there are things that build and build until there’s so much pressure they need to be let out?
What if there are things that need to be let in?
“You want to know a secret about desperate people?” Tami says. “They fuck like their life depends on it.”
Tami laughs and laughs, and I don’t know if the pill already kicked in, if it’s the booze, if it’s some kind of nervous response to everything she just told me, or if it’s the high of doing and saying whatever she wants and knowing she can get away with it.
For a moment, I hate her. I think, This will be the last time I hang out with Tami Butler. I will go home early and call Lily and confess my temporary lapse in judgment and everything will go back to normal.
But then we enter a new section of the walled part of the city, and the glittering lights of the exclusive clubs lining the street pulse against Tami’s flawless skin. Her face throbs in and out of shadow, split-second snapshots of a glamorous girl in profile, and then I see something shift in the frame-by-frame of her, something drain out, like the shadows are lapping up the light.
I don’t think the pill has kicked in yet. As she stares out the window I am struck with the knowing that I have never met anyone so utterly alone in my life.
Maybe Tami and I do have something in common after all.
8
I’ve never been to Tami’s family’s condo in the city, but it looks exactly as I’d imagine it—same sparse, modern furnishings as her house, near the top of a high-rise, with a wall of windows looking west.
“There’s my house,” she says, pointing toward the northern tip of Commodore Island. “Do you see it?”
“Yes,” I say, though all I see are a line of indistinguishable, identical lights on the shore reflecting back at themselves.
Vaughn comes up and puts his arms around her waist and kisses her on the neck.
“Why don’t we ever go out?” he says. “I want to go out.”
“You know I can’t be seen in public with you.”
“I should go,” I say, and turn around. It is the right thing to say, but I don’t know if I mean it.
“Nonsense,” Tami says. “Vaughn’s friends will be here soon. He has a friend I want you to meet.”
I have only been tipsy a handful of times in my life and never really understood the appeal, but the few sips I’ve had from Tami’s flask have seemed to turn on a switch inside that I don’t remember ever feeling. A yearning for more. A spark of something new and wild and reckless.
I think maybe I will get drunk tonight.
They arrive in a pack, Vaughn’s friends. He introduces them to me one by one while Tami stands looking out the window, her back to us all.
They are too excited to meet me. I almost feel sorry for them, for their misunderstanding. They think I am another girl like Tami.
Kayla and Amir are both low-level coders at A-Corp. Esteban is a bartender at a nice restaurant downtown, and his girlfriend, Tracy, is in community college and is a server at the same restaurant. Jordan is training to become a junior real estate agent, the only one without a partner, no doubt the one intended for me. They are all friends from high school, which they graduated from two years ago.
“Do you want a drink?” Jordan asks me. There’s something vague about his face. He looks like the image that would come up if you searched “average white young man.”
“Sure,” I say. He has a face that is meant to be forgotten. I understand why Tami thought we’d be a good match.
Tami and Vaughn disappear into one of the bedrooms down the hall, and I am left with strangers to sit around a glass coffee table that looks sharp enough to cut someone. I try to follow the conversation but it’s all gossip about people I don’t know. I look out the window and count the few stars strong enough to shine through the light of the city. I let Jordan make me another drink.
There is a brief moment, after the second drink, when I think I finally understand the appeal of alcohol. I am in a miserable situation but somehow not miserable. I am not on this hard couch listening to a conversation into which I have no entry; I am floating out of this building altogether, over Seattle and the Puget Sound, over the hills in the middle of the island, back to my home and maybe snuggled on the couch in between my dads, or in my bed, where I will call Lily and be comforted by her tough love as I tell her all the strange things I’ve been up to. But first, I have to pee.
As I walk back to the living room from the bathroom, I hear someone say, “Ivy Avila,” and stop in my tracks. I lean against the wall and listen.
“I read that she was down to like ninety pounds and her hair was falling out,” says Kayla.
“No,” says Tracy. “It was drugs. She had a thousand-dollar-a-day coke habit.”