have trouble picturing Ethan anywhere but in his hideouts. He’s more like me, I think: burdened with the realization that what goes on in his mind is somehow different from what goes on in everyone else’s. Even those closest to us.
And how you can’t think about that for too long, because that thought—the truth of our own isolation—is too much to bear.
—
I’m drunk, and the warm beer sloshes sour in my stomach. Scar and Adam are in the laundry room, door closed, and it occurs to me, based on the sounds emitting from that general vicinity, that they are likely having sex, and probably not for the first time. Maybe she has told Deena all the details, and her new best friend was able to give her lots of tips, the pertinent information that seems incredibly complicated in the little Internet porn I’ve seen. Not just the condom-on-the-banana talk we got in sex ed, but the hows and the whys and the what-feels-goods that I don’t yet know. Perhaps this is why Scarlett no longer wants to be my friend, because I can’t provide that kind of useful counsel. And because I use expressions like “useful counsel” when I’m drunk.
Come to think of it, I don’t want to be my friend either.
Deena and Toby are kissing in the corner, in the L part of the Schwartzes’ couch, the exact location I fantasized about just a week ago, when moving back and sleeping down here seemed like the answer to all of my problems. Joe, who since I’ve left has had a tattoo of headphones inked around his neck, the stupidest tattoo ever, since technology will progress and pretty soon that will be the equivalent of getting a tat of a rotary phone, keeps trying to talk to me, inching closer with each question. Of course, he asks dumb ones like Have you seen Brad and Angelina? And can you sit on the letters of the Hollywood sign? I guess he assumes that we should get together by process of elimination, that I pick who I make out with via an uncomplicated algorithm of who happens to be left in a room.
I take out my phone, and I can’t help it. I message SN.
Me: You awake?
SN: I’m always at your service. how’s Chicago?
Me: Honestly? Effed up.
SN: ?
Me: I just. First of all, I’m drunk, and there’s this stupid guy who won’t leave me alone.
SN: for real? are you okay? should I call the police?
Me: NO! I didn’t mean. No. He’s fine, just annoying. And Scar is mad at me, but I don’t know why. Deena is her new best friend or something. And I just feel so—
SN: alone.
Me: Alone.
SN: I’m here.
Me: But you’re not. Not really.
SN: I am.
Me: You’re not even there when I’m there.
SN: do you always get so existential when you’re drunk?
Me: You didn’t even want to have coffee with me. It was just coffee.
I am crying now, and it’s this—my tears, not my IM’ing, or my pushing his hand off my leg, that finally gets Joe to give up and move away. Second choice to hooking up with me is, apparently, playing games on his phone. I hear intermittent beeps. At least my tears are quiet. Everyone else is way too busy to notice.
SN: what are you talking about?
Me: YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
SN: I really don’t.
Me: STOP PRETENDING I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
SN: wait, Jessie, for real, I’m confused. you know who I am? I mean, I thought maybe you did the other day, but then I thought no way. and I was going to tell you, but—
Me: It was only coffee. Am I that, I don’t know, horrible, that…Never mind.
SN: I don’t know what you’re talking about. seriously. should we wait till you’re sober to have this conversation? this is not going the way I wanted it to—
Me: Yeah. Me neither.
I turn off my phone. Run up the stairs to the small bathroom. Throw up my DeLucci’s pizza and six cans of beer and don’t even feel the tiniest bit of nostalgic relief when I see Scar’s map of the world shower curtain or even the Cat in the Hat soap dispenser that has been there for as long as I can remember. I sit on her old fluffy blue bath mat and try to hold still as the world continues to spin.
CHAPTER 28
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Scar says. I open one eye. She’s wearing flannel pajamas, her hair is back in a mini ponytail,