capturing the moment of heartbreak

"Are you happy?" she asked. It was the first time in a long time that someone had even thought to ask about my happiness. 'Yes' wasn't the right answer, and saying no wouldn't be entirely truthful, either. The reality was that I hadn't given my own happiness a moment of thought in years. A seemingly simple question had revealed that I'd been living a life where happiness was nothing more than an abstraction. She was still standing there after all my deep thought, waiting for me to say something. All I could do was smile--wryly, I hoped--and shrug.

***

"What did the doctor say?" he asked. The doctor had asked me about my diet--vegetarian? Vegan? No, and no. There were the beginnings of osteoporosis, she'd said, and a vitamin deficiency. So strange for one so young, with the balanced diet I claimed to eat. She'd asked about my drinking habits, and I'd told some socially acceptable lie--a glass of wine with dinner and a couple of cocktails on the weekends, something like that--and she'd just nodded, slowly, her head tilted slightly in an expression of pity. She'd prescribed a vitamin supplement and given me a sheet of phone numbers to call "in case I felt like I needed to."

I told him, "She gave me a clean bill of health," which I regretted immediately. But I could never take it back, and it felt easier not to want to. That's when I knew: I'd let myself down the way everybody else had let me down, and it was no use to try to make amends now.

***

As we loosened up on the starting blocks, the guy in the lane next to me said, "good luck," in this tone of voice that might have been sarcastic. I didn't reply, but at the gun, I shot out into the water and started channeling my response into an exhausting kick and fast, strong strokes. Muscles burning, heart pounding in my mouth, cheers of fans muffled to a wavering whimper: this was it. I owned the flip turn and practically shot myself into the middle of the pool with my legs. I focused on my rival to distract myself from the thought that this could very well be my last chance. I didn't see him, so he was either way out in front of me or way behind. I reached the end of the pool and surfaced, gasping to ease my oxygen debt. I'd beaten the guy next to me, but the scoreboard told no lies: my lapse in concentration made me miss my Olympic dream by three tenths of a second. "Better luck next time," he said, his tone sincere. I knew there couldn't be a next time for me, but I tried to say, "you too," like I meant it.

more letters = more majesty

people drive fast/people drink deep/people smoke weed/people skip sleep

"Pimpin'. Ain't. Easy," she said. "And neither is this." The wintry air was beginning to penetrate the layers of sweaters she'd told me to wear under my wool overcoat. She plastered a bright white smile onto her face and turned toward the cameras. How did she stand there for so long, just smiling in her thin sweater and puffer vest? It was a cheerful Hollywood knockoff of a winter ensemble, the kind that looks perfect but doesn't have the wherewithal to block out the cold. A sympathy shiver shuddered down my limbs as I thought about how many more takes they might need to do before they let her go inside.

A man wearing headphones as big as his head started waving his arms and cursing at the wind, which was whipping through the trees. "Take ten," the director said, his voice at once authoritative and defeated. "Let the wind die down." It took less than fifteen seconds to clear out the set as people bolted for the little cabin. Inside, craft services had laid out a few snacks and what seemed like one hot beverage urn per person.

"Is it always like this?" I asked her. She smiled again, handing me a styrofoam cup of steaming brown liquid. I wasn't sure whether it was coffee, tea, or cocoa, but at least it was hot.

"It's not always so cold," she said. "But I wouldn't trade it for any other job in the world." She smiled again, a couple of smiles in rapid succession. I think she was testing her face for thawing. After sipping in silence for a few minutes, I felt the hot drink start to work its magic, warming me from the inside. She looked at her watch and caught someone's eye across the room. Then she said, "Well, I guess I'd trade outdoor commercials in New York for outdoor commercials in California. But when I get out there again I'm going to look like I love it. All of it. And I won't even be acting."

I thought about her while I was driving back home later that night, the window rolled all the way down to accommodate my chainsmoking. The cold slapped my bare hand until it was numb, but it was easier to mark time in cigarettes when I drove long distances. I stubbornly squeezed each filter between my fingers until the smokeable part burned itself out. Three-pack trips always went faster with the window down and my foot pressed firmly to the floor.

We were friends from when I first knew she'd be an actress and she first knew I'd be a n'er-do-well, which was shortly after we entered the third grade. I spent a lot of that year indoors at recess, always writing about how I could work to be a better person until the teacher was satisfied that I'd "learned a valuable lesson about myself." She spent a lot of time indoors at recess too, acting like she had migraines or something so they wouldn't make her stand outside where the popular girls could taunt her.

"They're jealous of you," I'd said once. A kid who spends a lot of recesses forced to think about how to be a better person learns some interesting things about human nature, even though all I thought I'd learned was better penmanship.

"You're on crack," she'd said. That was a very popular thing to say at the time, despite the fact that most of those sheltered, suburban third-graders didn't actually know what crack was.

"No," I'd said. "You're cute, like a kid in a commercial. And you always seem to get what you want."

"I guess that's true," she'd said. "I'm inside, right? Maybe they are jealous." And that was how I found myself, 20 years later, speeding down I-95 once or twice a month and burning through gallons of gas and cartons of cigarettes like someone who could afford either luxury.

I knew that my roommate (another n'er-do-well) would be passed out on the couch when I got back. He'd have spent the evening smoking a bowl and eating ramen on Doritos, which is pretty much only appealing after smoking a bowl, at which point, it's the best food on earth. He went to med school but dropped out to be a full-time bartender--"The hours are about as grueling, but you get free booze and it's rare for anyone to die during your shift," he'd said--and just spent the rest of the time going to rock shows and playing video games. He paid the lion's share of the rent, though, which allowed me to use my meager freelancing income to drive back and forth to New York. So even though he was kind of an asshole, I never told him that to his face. It was a sweet situation, most things considered.

If I were to consider all things--like the fact that she isn't my girlfriend, and the fact that she will never be my girlfriend, and the fact that I couldn't hack it in New York as a writer, which is why I have to live in Richmond with my asshole roommate--the big picture would be a bit less sweet. Let's just say I try to think about this as little as possible.

Mackenzie The Writer

The barn door opened and my eyes flooded with burning, all-knowing light. It was rare for her to come in during the day, so rare, in fact, that it had been at least a week since I’d seen the sun. My eyes, unprepared for that particular assault, felt like she’d slammed them farther into my head. When the light calmed down, I was able to see it--the big, beautiful oak tree that stood majestically outside the barn. Sometimes, when she would forget to bring me a meal or two, I would think about what it must be like to be that tree. I wanted to suck water from the earth and grow lazy and fat on the rays of the sun. These were simple dreams, but at that time, I was a simple girl.

I didn’t see the entire oak tree, though. I saw only a halo of oak tree, fanning out around the shadowy figure of my mother.

“Do you want to go outside?” she asked. Her tone, as always, did not betray a single emotion.

“Yes,” I said, trying to suppress my elation. It was unusual for her to let me go outside during the day.

“Do you promise to act modestly?”

“I wouldn’t know how to act immodestly,” I said. She reached out and slapped my cheek. It was an admonition, rather than a punishment. For that, I was grateful.

“Don’t sass me, girl,” she said. “I’m doing you a favor.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Come on.”

I followed her out into the yard, eyes wide open, terrified and thrilled.

#

“There’s a man out here I want you to meet.”

I stopped, dead cold, with one foot still waiting to fall in front of the other. The idea that my mother would want me to meet a man was preposterous! As far as I could tell, my mother was keeping me in the barn precisely so that I wouldn’t meet any men at all. She’d kept me there since she noticed that I’d grown breasts even bigger than hers. I was too afraid to ask her why she hid me in there, but I allowed myself the flattery of believing that her reasoning was as I imagined.

There was a man standing by an unfamiliar car, which was parked next to my mother’s car. The car was a convertible, shiny and pale green, with the top down. The man looked to be about the same age as my mother, and he looked extremely rich. I’d only seen rich people a couple of times, back when Dad was alive and we’d go shopping in town for Christmas. Everything about the rich people I saw seemed perfect, down to their perfectly starched clothes and straight-toothed smiles. They would stop in front of shop windows, and buy whatever they (or their squeaky clean children) wanted. We had to walk past the nicest windows and go straight to the back of the store, where the clearance shelves stood, simultaneously picked over and neglected. This man looked like he could buy anything he wanted from the nicest window in town.

“Mackenzie,” she said, in that tone of voice that said she meant business. “Mackenzie!” She’d been calling me for a minute, now, and I’d been so consumed by the rich man and the convertible and the outdoors and the sunlight that I hadn’t noticed. I walked over to where the man and my mother were standing, near the cars.

“Mackenzie, this is Mr. Richardson,” she said. Mr. Rich. “Mr. Richardson, this is Mackenzie.” Mr. Rich smiled coolly.

“Please, call me Steve,” he said. His voice even sounded rich, like smoke and velvet.

“All right,” I said.

“Mackenzie,” my mother said, gripping me by the shoulders. “You’re to go with Mr. Richardson and behave with him as if I were right there with you. You’re to do whatever he says.”

“All right,” I said again.

“She’ll be back…” she started, looking at Mr. Rich.

“As we agreed,” he said.

“Fine, fine,” she said. I thought I saw something strange happen to my mother’s eyes, then, but I wasn’t sure what. Without another word, she turned around and went into the house. I didn’t see her at the kitchen window, or at any other window.

“Are we going for a drive?” I asked, clearly giving the convertible a mental once-over.

“Yes,” he said. Mr. Rich was still smiling, and I immediately decided that something about all this was quite unnatural. I did not like him.

I reached into my mother’s car through the open window of the passenger’s side and clicked the latch on the glove compartment. Inside, my mother’s leather driving gloves were cool to the touch, in spite of the summery temperature. I took them out and put them on. In hindsight, they probably looked silly with my t-shirt and knee-length cutoffs, but I loved them. Those gloves, which she faithfully donned whenever she drove the car, were one of the few things I loved about my mother. I’m glad I took them with me.

#

Mr. Rich did not ask me about the gloves, even when we were a safe distance away from home. The convertible ran like a dream, and the pale green of the car seemed to happily coexist with all of nature’s greens. I squirmed against my seat belt, trying to count the number of shades between my pale knee and the creamy leather bucket seat.

“Do you know why your mother sent you to come with me?”

“No,” I said. I figured that I would let him do most of the talking, at least until I got to know him a bit better.

“Do you remember writing that story? The one for the class assignment?” It had been ages since the last time I even thought about school. I had been too busy trying to occupy my mind in that dark barn to think about days with routines.

“Sure,” I said. I had written lots of stories for school assignments. They always urged us to write creatively, even though there weren’t any jobs for creative writers, and we’d all be giving up the pursuit as soon as it was time to apply to college.

“Your teacher showed it to your mother,” he said. “And your mother showed it to me.”

“Great,” I mumbled, looking out over the edge of the convertible. The tall grasses and corn fields rolled by, one after the other. Mr. Rich watched the road and I watched everything else.

“You aren’t paying attention,” he said. “But I suppose that’s to be expected.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re thinking about things you’re seeing, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“Your mother is graciously allowing me to show you the world, so that you can become a better writer.”

I snorted. If my mother was ever planning on letting me live outside of that barn again, I imagined that she would want me to get a real job and make some money to support us. The needle of the gas gauge caught my eye.

“On a quarter tank of gas? Good luck,” I said.

“She keeps you in that barn, doesn’t she?” Mr. Rich said.

I found myself liking Mr. Rich less and less, but I still believed that if I misbehaved, she’d find out and punish me. So I pushed at the boundaries of good behavior. “So what if she does?”

“So that isn’t right,” he said. “And you won’t be going back there without me.”

“Are you my bodyguard, or something?” I asked.

“Or something,” he said. The county road had become a four-lane interstate highway while I wasn’t looking, and we were going faster, much faster than my mother ever drove. I crossed my arms in front of me, gripping my upper arms with my gloved hands, holding on to the one thing that I could trust to be still in my strange new world of motion.

Mr. Rich suddenly slowed the convertible and pulled off the interstate. We glid along a small suburban road until we found a gas station, and he pulled in. “Do you want anything from inside?” he asked. I never got to get anything from inside, so I barely even knew what sort of things they had.

“How about…some candy?” I ventured, hoping that I wasn’t making a fool of myself.

“What do you like?” he asked. Anything he liked from the shop window, from the gas station candy counter.

“Necco wafers,” I said. Mr. Rich nodded and pumped the gas while the soda machine and the machine that dispensed air into tires hummed innocuously next to the touchless car wash. I noticed then that the car looked very clean. I could imagine Mr. Rich polishing the chrome accents, but I couldn’t decide whether he hosed the car down himself, or if he had people who did that sort of thing for him. Cars like this one surely couldn’t go through such a vulgarity as the automated car wash I saw here. I loved it when my mother took the car through the wash, the way the water and soap pounded on the roof and chassis like a superpowered rain.

Mr. Rich surprised me by returning to the car. “They had chocolate ones,” he said. “I hope that’s all right.”

“Wow,” I said. “Sure.” I took the candy from him and busied myself unwrapping the waxed paper, the roll of candy unwieldy in my gloved fingers. I didn’t even know they sold the chocolate ones by themselves. They were my favorite anyway. The car was moving again, and the sugary wafers melted on my tongue. I suddenly felt as though we were gliding into my future.

#

“Do you think you’re up to meeting someone else?” Mr. Rich asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“She might be able to lend you some clothes,” he said. “You’re a little shorter, but you’ll fit them, for sure.” I looked down at my clothes and felt embarrassed, even though there was nothing inherently wrong with them. I picked a piece of straw off of my denim shorts and let it blow over the side of the car.

“What do I need different clothes for?” I asked.

“I need to take you shopping,” he said. “And you can’t go like that.” I pictured the children in their Christmas finery, perfectly bleached and starched. I wondered if he would make me wear petticoats.

As we drove on, I could feel things getting closer together, and the air developed a hard edge that made it more difficult to breathe. We were going to the city. The car handled just as smoothly on the uneven city streets as it did on country roads, and Mr. Rich darted us between other cars and around people like a pro. My mother was always a cautious driver, and very rarely drove in the city, if ever. The few times that we did, I recall, she would invariably end up holding up traffic, horns blaring at us from behind while she studied a street map. He pulled the car into an underground garage and parked it in a tiny space next to another luxurious convertible.

The elevator was fast and silent, and it opened on an expansive penthouse apartment with gorgeous high ceilings and windows everywhere. I’d heard about places like these: wide open spaces, gourmet kitchens, manufactured coziness radiating from the expensive furniture.

“I thought you would never come back,” said a husky female voice. The body belonging to the voice lazily loped into view. She looked exactly like a woman from a magazine, tall, thin, long-limbed, but still graceful. Her hair was loose, shiny, and voluminous. She brushed it out of her face with one hand and smoked a cigarette with the other. The woman was wearing what appeared to be one of Mr. Rich’s shirts and little else.

“I thought I told you not to do that inside,” Mr. Rich said. I caught a flash of her black panties when she reached over to put her cigarette out.

“Is this the girl?” she asked. Mr. Rich nodded.

“Can you loan her some clothes or something, and take her shopping?”

“Sure,” she said. “She needs a bath first, though. What was she, sleeping in a barn?” I felt a surge of something powerful and unidentifiable course through my veins. Who was she to judge me? But at the same time, she was exactly right. I had been sleeping in a barn. How did she know? “Can you bathe yourself?”

“Y-yes,” I stammered. How young must I have looked to her? If only I could have seen myself next to her at that moment, me in my cutoffs and driving gloves, and her in her nightshirt and stylish dark manicure. I looked like childhood, and she looked like sex. I wondered whether she, too, had been a girl that Mr. Rich had promised to show the world; I wondered if her present was my future.

“Bathroom’s that way. I’ll lay something out for you while you’re in there,” she said. “I’m Isabelle, by the by.”

“Mackenzie,” I said. I wandered into the bathroom and closed the door behind me.

#

I used the soap that was in the shower, and it made the whole room smell like lavender, like the hand soap in my mother’s bathroom at home. It wasn’t homesickness that I felt, rather, it was nostalgia for the time when the scent of my mother’s lavender soap meant that my father would soon be coming home from work to love us both. Lavender had smelled empty ever since I realized that he would not ever be coming home. Now, it was just another sensation to be processed and absorbed. It had been a while since I’d had a proper shower.
Isabelle came in while I was bathing, to lay out the clothes like she’d said. I was even more afraid of her than I was of Mr. Rich. But I asked, “Isabelle? Can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“How do you know Mr. Richardson?” I could hear her stop moving for a moment, and I worried that I’d asked something socially inappropriate.

“He’s my lover,” she said, carefully. “Do you know what that means?”

I debated with myself for a moment: if I said yes, I might get in trouble. If I said no, she might try to explain it. I wasn’t sure which was worse. “Yes,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“No,” Isabelle said, still choosing her words thoughtfully. “I’m a model.” So she was a woman in a magazine after all. How would a simple girl like me fit into a model’s clothes? I found out, after I’d dried off. The sleeves of the lightweight black turtleneck were a bit too long, and the short flowered skirt Isabelle lent me was almost tea length on me. I pulled my driving gloves back on to complete the outfit.

“What size shoe do you wear?” Isabelle asked. “Are you dressed?” She was in the room already, clearly not caring whether I was dressed or not.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “The last shoes I had were eights.”

“Hold on, I think I might have some eights somewhere.” Isabelle ducked back into the bedroom, probably into a walk-in closet bigger than my barn. “I had a friend who wore eights, she was always giving me her shoes even though I wear tens. Oh, here.” Isabelle came back into the bathroom. “Try these.” She handed me a pair of brown leather mary-jane heels, quite a few inches taller than anything I’d ever been allowed to try on, let alone wear. They matched my gloves, I noticed, as I fastened the buckles.

“There,” she said. Isabelle approached me with a comb, a brush, and a hair dryer. “Now hold still.” This suited me fine, as I was uncertain about walking in my borrowed shoes.
I hadn’t figured Isabelle as the motherly type, but there she was, getting wet while she stood with me in that lavender-scented bathroom, detangling and heat-styling my hair. She walked around to my front and started pulling sections of my hair up, away from my scalp, heating them with the blow dryer.

“You have great hair,” she said loudly, competing with the deafening whir of the dryer.

“Thank you,” I said, pushing on each word with my diaphragm in order to be heard.

“Now you look proper,” she said. “Give me fifteen minutes, and we can go.”

“Okay,” I said. I took a tentative step. I took another step and nearly broke my ankle falling off of my heel.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, picking me up from the floor. “We’ll buy you some flats. Heel, toe. Heel, toe. Come on, walk like this.” Isabelle taught me how to get by in my heels, and I walked cautiously back to the living room.

Mr. Rich was there, reading The New York Times. He offered me a section, and I took it. My eyes rushed over the words for a few minutes and nothing really stuck. “Why are you helping me?” I asked.

“I owe your father a great debt,” he said. I wanted to know more, but I felt odd asking. I didn’t even know that my father knew any rich people.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “After I have some clothes, I mean.”

“We’re going to begin your education,” he said. “Tonight, we’re going to hear some music.” I nodded. My gloved hands twitched and the paper rustled.

“Will Isabelle come?” I asked.

“You’ll see a lot of Isabelle,” he said. “I hope you like her as much as I do.” Nothing about Mr. Rich seemed malicious at the time, and indeed, he was quite earnest in his intentions.

Sometimes I think back upon this moment, this beginning of my new life, with joy in my heart and overflowing gratitude. But at other times, I realize that my mysterious benefactor had absolutely no idea what he was doing. The moment he decided to repay my father by educating his daughter, Mr. Rich started to create something that he did not know how to control. He and Isabelle could clothe me, educate me, and teach me to drink in jazz clubs. They could and did introduce me to influential writers who taught me and improved my writing. They could disguise me, but they could not hide the frightened little girl whose widowed mother would never get her driving gloves back. They could not stop me from feeling like a manufactured woman, a counterfeit of a fraud.

“I am looking forward to that,” I said. Isabelle emerged from the bedroom then, smelling of the same lavender.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said. “We’ll be back later.”

Mr. Rich just nodded and smiled, sipping at a glass of brown liquor. “The show is at ten,” he said.

“We’ll be back,” Isabelle said. She tossed her rich leather handbag over her shoulder and grabbed me by the hand. “Shoes first.” I stumbled along after her, feeling ready to be remade. How little I knew, then! How little I knew!

merry

As the world passes by in a blur of colors and waving parents who are too oblivious to realize that their children are going through life in circles, I realize that I don't just want to grab the brass ring. I want to grab the whole damned merry-go-round and let it spin in the palm of my hand. I want to hold all the colors and parents and nauseated children, and I want them to know that I am what makes the world spin, that my whim commands dizzying power. I want them to bow to me, to know my benevolence, and to praise it. That brass ring is just a proxy for all the power that could be, I think, as I see a kindergarten-age boy nearly fall off his up-and-down gelding to take hold of it. "I got it!" he shouts, his face lit up with glee. He can see his reflection in it, and the feedback loop of shining face and ormolu ring is almost too bright to watch. How easy this is going to be, I think, when they are so disoriented and so easy to appease.

sleeping giant

The white noise hums away as he sleeps, his even breaths belying the hailstorm of pain behind his closed eyes. This is his refuge, this dreamless slumber, and I intrude upon it, my feet heavy on the old wooden planks although I am doing my best to swan through his house like an uninvited ballerina. I will have broth ready for him when he awakes, I have decided, but I do not know where to find the pots in his kitchen, and I despair of ever unearthing a fresh vegetable or the remains of a chicken in the neglected cavern where he occasionally stores his leftover takeout meals.

Breakdown/Repair

After we had passed through the final police checkpoint, Mason and I ran up the stairs to the apartment that I shared with our coworker Rayjeanne. I grabbed two bottles of beer, the cheap-but-decent stuff, and ushered Mason into my bedroom. "Nobody's here yet," I said. "And Rayjeanne wanted me to stay out of the way if it was just her and Trick." Mason shrugged and took the beer I handed him, finding a seat on my neatly made bed. I sat down on the end of the bed and leaned against the wall. I had been looking forward to this for the entire month, this "bonding and brewskis happy hour" party that Rayjeanne had planned as a thinly-veiled attempt to get into Ricky T's pants. I could hear them in the living room. "Tri-ick," Rayjeanne drawled, purposely using the familiar nickname that Ricky had quickly earned around the office. "Can you open this beer for me, darlin'?" I pictured Trick popping the top on his belt buckle, on the heel of his boot, or with his teeth in some wild display of machismo that was certain to make Rayjeanne cream herself. "Much obliiiiged, Trick, darlin'," she crooned, her voice dripping with sex. I tried to smother a smile. If my poor roommate was anything, "subtle" was not it.

"What are you laughing at?" Mason asked me then, his steely eyes grabbing mine and refusing to let go until I answered.

"I'm trying not to laugh," I said, contorting my face into a parody of seriousness.

"You might as well be trying not to breathe," he said, grinning.

"I'm also trying not to breathe," I laughed, taking a deep breath and miserably failing to hold it in my puffed-out cheeks. He laughed too, tilting his head back to take a swig from his longneck. Although this party was ostensibly all about Rayjeanne's desire to make breakfast for Trick, I was secretly ecstatic about it for my own reason: Mason Wayland. Would there ever be a better opportunity to get this incredible specimen of a man into my bedroom, beer in hand? We were just talking, of course, my sense of subtlety being quite overdeveloped in comparison to Rayjeanne's. But there was time enough and beer enough for something else to happen, wasn't there? Sure, we all worked together, but those were the perks of having a dangerous job: everyone who wanted to eventually just fucked each other to relieve the tension, and nobody ever gave it a second thought.

When the waves of laughter were only lapping at our shores, he asked, "What do you think is up with Rayjeanne and Trick?"

"I know what she hopes is up," I smiled at my own double entendre, but my mirth faded when I saw Mason's expression, a bit forlorn with a hint of brow-furrowing that I hadn't anticipated. Someone else came through the front door then, calling out a hearty "hullo!" to Rayjeanne. It was Pete and Mielle.

"Hey kids!" Rayjeanne said, her voice bubbling with excitement. She liked being a gracious hostess almost as much as she liked getting laid.

"Sorry we're late," Mielle said. "But Pete wanted to find the closest approximation to his favorite beer, and we were at that place by the north border, where the guy lets you taste everything?"

"You're not late," Rayjeanne said. "I don't even know if Cat is home yet."

"We're in here," I shouted into the living room, almost reluctantly jumping up and pulling Mason into the fray.

"Jesus, Cat," Rayjeanne said. "How did you get in here without my noticing? Hello, Mason."

"I have a key, don't I?" I said, my voice betraying my annoyance. I realized that this sort of behavior was probably how I had gained my reputation for being the sullen one. That, my wardrobe, and the extensive collection of shoegazing indie rock that I shared on the office's iTunes.

"Hello, Rayjeanne," Mason said.

Sometimes I got the sense that Rayjeanne really only tolerated me, even though we did most of the things that friends were supposed to do. And I was suddenly curious about her relationship with Mason. Why had he had such a visceral reaction to my snarky remark about her and Trick? A timid knock was a welcome interruption to our strained greetings.

"That must be Kristi and her cubemates," Rayjeanne said, opening the door. "Have some beers, everyone! We have enough to last us through a siege!" The ever-effervescent Kristi and her cubemates tumbled through the door the way that cartoon snow falls into a house after a snow-in. The girls were just as glittery as snow, too, and the guys seemed all too happy to be accompanying them to a party. This was really the first time since our start date that our hiring class had gotten together as a group to do anything that wasn't work.

The only one left to show up was Andrew. He was the kind of guy who spiked his hair in the morning and wore a black hoodie everywhere. If it hadn't been against regulations, he probably would have pinned things to it, band logos screen printed on cloth scraps, like the punk kids who hung out near the border, just out of the grasp of the checkpoint police. Andrew and I often wore the same black Converse, which prompted everyone else to think that we should get together. But I didn't want a guy who was just like me. I wanted Mason, a guy who wouldn't have had any trouble fitting in with the popular crowd in my high school: smart, preppy, athletic, blond. Another weak knock interrupted my reverie. But that wasn't like Andrew at all. He had a firm handshake and a percussionist's knock.

"Who is it?" Rayjeanne asked before opening the door. The knock had aroused her suspicions as well. She peered through the eyehole.

"Andrew," came a gruff voice from the other side of the door.

"Oh my God, Andrew," she said, quickly undoing the lock and throwing open the door. "What happened?"

"The cops," he said into the doormat, bent double. "They hassled me at the checkpoint. I forgot my work ID card, and I guess they thought..." Andrew stumbled in, trying to straighten himself out. Rayjeanne closed the door behind him and ran to get some ice from the freezer.

"Are you ok?" I asked.

"I'm fine," he rumbled. "Just need to sit down." Mielle rushed to his side and helped him sit on the couch.

"Andrew, seriously," she said. "You look hurt." His cheek was red and puffy and we could see the dusty brown bootprints at the waist of his black hoodie, with a few on the chest.

"Just a couple of kicks," he said. "I've had worse."

"Maybe you should start combing your hair down," Pete suggested, trying to be helpful. Andrew cut him off with a piercing glare.

"Fuck you too," he snapped. "Isn't this supposed to be a beer party, Rayjeanne?" I had already gotten a beer for him, a twist-off that I opened right before handing over the bottle. "Oh, thanks, Cat." Rayjeanne came back with a plastic baggie full of ice, wrapped in a kitchen towel.

"Take about ten beers, put this ice on your face, and call me in the morning," she said, dabbing at his cheek with the icy kitchen towel. Andrew took the ice from her and held it to the lump on his cheek, which was purpling before our eyes. He thanked her and tried to smile, but the resultant one-sided effect looked more like a sneer. "Drink up, kid," she said, smiling at him. He took a swig. Rayjeanne nodded her approval and I realized that I had been compulsively sucking on my beer since Andrew came in, and it was empty. I went to the kitchen for another, Mason hot on my heels. The party noise was slowly creeping back into the party, now that it seemed that Andrew was not in any immediate danger.