set of keys, my hangover fairy godmother.
“You scared me last night,” she said. “Once I got you into bed, I went home to shower and stuff, but I thought I’d come by before I went to work. Want me to email your boss and say you’re taking a sick day?”
“That would be good. Thanks, Tessa. What happened last night?”
She sighed. “It’s pretty serious, Linds. Maybe we should wait and talk about it when you feel better.”
“No, no, no, I want to hear it now,” I said, because who hears that and thinks, Sure, let’s delay?
She chewed on her lip and stood up, crossing into the kitchen and returning with her phone. She sat on the bed next to me.
“So obviously you went out with…that guy,” she said, “who I didn’t know anything about. You ended up super drunk at a club and started sending me these really weird text messages that didn’t make any sense, like you were talking about go-go dancers and…and trying coke and that you were angry with this Josh guy and didn’t know how you’d get home.” She swallowed. “So I made you send me a screenshot of where you were—thank god you could still do that—and I took a cab there, even though it was like four in the morning.”
That uncomfortable hum all through my torso. “Thanks for that,” I murmured.
“Well, so I pulled up and got out and realized you were in this little crowd on the side of the street and…and you were yelling at this guy, I guess the one you were there with? And you were incoherent but just yelling and kind of pushing and everyone was trying to calm you down, and there was a truck coming and suddenly you…” She paused. “Well, I can show you.”
She held out her phone and it took a moment for me to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a shaky video of the dark scene, a group of us lit up by the sallow streetlights overhead; I made out the black woman and the tall Asian guy, plus Josh, his eyes wild. The one I barely recognized was me, definitely me, swaying and screaming and cracking both palms against Josh’s chest, over and over.
Then suddenly I’d stepped forward and pushed with both arms, and Josh tipped off the back of the curb, toppling down to the blare of a big rig’s horn as everyone in the circle screamed. The camera lens jerked around, then refocused on Josh lying flat on the ground, a pair of arms trying to help him up—Tessa’s arms, her face popped into view, so she hadn’t been the camerawoman, she hadn’t recorded this—and the bang of a heavy truck door and the sound of a gruff man cursing, but the camera swung back to me, my eyes unfocused, staring, expressionless, at Josh’s body at my feet.
The video ended and Tessa set the phone on her lap. “Is he okay?” I asked, tears streaming down my cheeks.
She nodded. “The truck stopped in time, thank god. He had the wind knocked out of him and he gashed his elbows, but he was otherwise okay. A woman—she was tall with tattoos? She was the one recording, and once she figured out I was your friend, she made me airdrop it onto my phone. She said…” She took a deep breath. “She said if you go anywhere near this guy Josh again, she’s going to post it and tag it with your name.”
I laid my head back and pulled the washcloth over my eyes. This isn’t happening.
“What was I so mad about?”
“I don’t know. No one told me.”
I flipped the rag over to its cooler side.
“Lindsay, this is really bad.”
Hot tears soaked into the washcloth.
“This is assault,” she went on. “I’m deleting this, but…but I wish I hadn’t seen it. That woman still has a copy. What is going on with you?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
“This is not you. You don’t assault people.”
“I don’t know, Tessa. I don’t know.”
She stayed silent long enough that I slid the cloth up to peek at her.
“So this isn’t the first time drinking made you violent,” she said quietly.
I nodded.
“I think you should tell me,” she said.
I pulled the fabric back over my eyes. Maybe like this, with the world blocked out and my forehead like an iron against the damp cloth, I could tell her about the Warsaw Incident.
“When I was twenty-three,” I began, my voice small, “Edie and I went