Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,66
I call each other brother and sister because it lets us pretend we have an excuse for still knowing each other. In anyone else’s life, Brian would be the college ex I never spoke to again, and I would be the crazy ex who’d once deliberately destroyed his brand-new guitar. But instead of being embarrassed by everything that’s happened between us, we’re both comforted by the fact that someone else has seen us at all of our possible worsts and hung around anyway.
There was a point, maybe even a year, where we were fucking each other for the conversation afterward. Not that the sex was bad, it just wasn’t the point anymore. We talked about our futures, the ones we never dared to imagine being full of anything but chaos. We toasted to the shortcomings of the various potential stepparents we’d grown up with: between the two of us, nineteen in total. When he was at his drunkest, he always told me the story about the time his mother passed him off as a neighbor she babysat, in order to date a banker who didn’t want kids, and when we were done laughing as though it were hysterical, him imitating the banker and his eight-year-old self, one of us would cry for real, and I would hold him and tell him I was sorry he was so fucked up, and he would tell me he was sorry I was fucked up enough to want him anyway.
“So, where’s this poor girl you’ve tricked into marrying you?” I ask. “Is she locked up somewhere so she doesn’t escape before the wedding?”
“Ha,” says Brian, but his smile feels forced. “She’s on her way. Alan and I came in the van with the equipment.”
The last time Brian got engaged, he would have cracked up at the joke. The last girl was an actress, someone he met at an Exxon convenience store on a road trip right after the play she was in had ended its run. They’d gotten engaged a month later, two weeks before she got called to New York for a better gig. Brian came to see me right after she left, and we’d spent the weekend in bed with each other, him talking about how wonderful she was, me reminding him of all the other women he’d said that about. I’d met Jay two weeks later. When Brian’s engagement inevitably fell through, we joked that if things had ended between them a few months sooner, he could have kept the wedding date and married me instead.
Brian and I almost did get married once, but not for real for real. We were in Vegas, which is a city I’ve always loved for its ability to be at once shameless about its fantasy self and honest about its real one, which is the only reason I’ve ever loved anything. A college friend with too much money had invited us out there for a birthday party, and we were champagne-drunk and tired of the Strip one night. I said I’d always wanted to get married in Vegas, because marriage was just a big flashy spectacle designed to cover up the tacky tragedy of human loneliness, and why would you get married anywhere you could forget that? Brian said he’d always wanted Elvis at his wedding, but only if it was fat Elvis, and anyway, us being us we might as well get our first divorces out of the way early. All of it was kind of a joke and kind of not, and I don’t remember why we didn’t do it, just that we ended up riding those gondola boats around the underground of The Venetian all night instead.
Brian bounces off to get me a vodka tonic, extra lime—he doesn’t have to ask what I’m drinking—and while I’m waiting for him to come back, or Chrissie to reappear from the ladies’ room, the fiancée walks in the front door. I haven’t seen her picture, but I know her right away. She’s wearing a vintage Wonder Woman T-shirt stretched tight across her chest, and Brian’s got a thing for both boobs and comic books. She’s cute. Platinum blond hair, layered and flipped up at the ends, a dab of frosted lip gloss. If her look was a smell, it would be grape bubble gum. Her name is Miranda. Brian met her at the go-kart track two years ago, but they’ve only been dating six months. She’s an elementary school teacher who moonlights as a semiprofessional