isn’t here to play with me. I wonder how much space I have to give him, for how long. When will he get over this so we can go back to how it was two weeks ago, before all this amazingly great sex happened to us? And how exactly did I fuck up my closest friendship, my entire band, and what feels like my entire life in only two weeks?
That was some pretty powerful fucking, I guess.
I do realize that it’s under twenty-four hours since I told Travis he should date someone who’s not me, and only a few hours since I called and then called him an ex-boyfriend (oh my God) so, in terms of space, this really isn’t very much at all. But it’s still enough space to feel completely lost in.
At nine o’clock at night, Sonia comes in and plops herself down on the bed.
“What happened?” she asks. “And don’t say ‘nothing,’ because you’ve been playing that same riff for an hour. It’s not even that good.”
I put the guitar down in the stand and flop down on my bed, face-first. I pull the pillow over my head, trying to disappear. Sonia rubs my back and I curl up into a ball and take long, slow breaths into my comforter, trying to get a grip on myself before I sit up and face her.
“I told Travis we can’t be together and that he should go out with Millie.”
She looks some combination of sad and worried that I hate because I don’t know how to interpret it. Like, yeah, I’ve really done something fucked up, and this is as bad as I think it might be.
“Why?” she finally says.
“Because it’s going to fuck up the band,” I say.
“And you think that telling him this won’t fuck up the band?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“That’s what you’re afraid of, Emmy?” she asks, speaking like someone who’s never been in a band before. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” I say, speaking like someone who’s a fucking idiot, because I’m really afraid right now. Like, as afraid as I’ve ever felt of anything. I’m afraid that I’ve already lost him and fucked up the band, and that I can’t get things to go back to the way they were before. And nothing makes you dumber than fear.
“Come on,” she says. “We need to go drink.”
She pulls a black dress out of my closet—it’s a vintage mini shift that was my mother’s in high school—and convinces me to change and go out with her to the soccer party on Baldwin. This is the last thing I feel like doing tonight, but I go because everyone we know will be there, and part of me hopes that maybe, just maybe, Travis will end up there too. You never know.
We get there and they’re charging five dollars to get in. I take out my cash when a tall, adorable soccer player who lives there sees me and says, “That’s Emmylou from Stars on the Floor—let them in, no charge.”
“This is why I love going out with you,” Sonia says.
Being me doesn’t have a lot of perks, but this is one of them. This and getting rides from food-poisoned truckers at four a.m.
The soccer player’s name is Eli and he’s a forward, and I don’t know a thing about Rutgers soccer, but he’s really quite nice, so I pretend to be interested. He has perfect olive skin and thick, black hair and is very, very cute, but oh God he’s awkward. He’s an accounting major and Sonia has had a few classes with him. He tries to make conversation and asks me about my major and my family and things like that. He gets me and Sonia drinks and we get decently drunk watching the Holy Hobbies play. At around twelve thirty during Crown the Robin I’m dancing near the band like a fool with Eli and Sonia and maybe forty other people in this crowded living room, sloshing some college grain-alcohol-laced Kool-Aid, when I see Travis, Cole, Millie, Joe, and Bailey walk in the front door. I’m too drunk to pretend my heart doesn’t flip around in my chest like a mackerel on a fishing line when I see Travis with Millie trailing right behind him.
“You have to talk to him,” Sonia says, because she sees Millie put her arms around Travis’s neck and whisper something in his ear the same time I see it and I guess I look about ready to kill a very good friend of