Backseat Driving

She let her dance on the table, wantonly swiveling her hips and posing, salmon sequined dress sparkling under the ornate chandeliers that hung from the ceiling of the brilliantly lit VIP section. It was their night off. Lily wasn’t babysitting table dancing, Dom Perignon bottle-smashing Ronnie, and Ronnie wasn’t having her alcohol rationed.

Lily watched instead from behind her straight cut auburn bangs, honey toned arms crossed. She’d done good job with Ronnie. She remembered finding her stumbling in some strappy silver heels and a black mini dress that was bunched around her thighs. She was crawling around on the plush front yard of a friend’s villa, surrounded by a group of giggling, glitzy drunk girls that had to have been her friends. She eventually toppled over after trying to lean on a nearby friend for support, flashing both a movie star grin and her vagina as she tried to get back up.

And that was only three months ago. Lily had a habit of working fast. In just three short months, she’d ridden Ronnie’s life of many of the toxic characters she’d allowed into it. She’d banned friends that encouraged her to drink at three in the morning and drunk dial her exes, and guys that only had to say three words to get nudes out of her. Ronnie hadn’t complained once, though she was concerned about what her friends would say.

“You sure this is a good idea?” she’d whimpered in the passenger seat of Lily’s Mercedes, carefully turning her iPhone over in her hands. “I don’t want them all to hate me.”

After a couple of weeks, she’d successfully phased them out, slowly not responding to texts and calls and declining party invites before eventually sending a mass text telling them she didn’t need them in her life. She’d admitted to loving having Lily around.

“No one’s really ever looked out for me the way you do, Lils,” she’d smiled at her over lunch at Providence on Melrose. In just three months, she was making (mostly) her own decisions, and they turned out to be (mostly) good ones. The girl wasn’t stupid, Lily had concluded. She was just around people that encouraged her to be.

 Lily had seen drunk girls before. She’d even been one a couple times, but high school was four years ago. She’d seen girls that had been where she had been; drinking and screwing off because they were practically American royalty and life had little consequences. But after the very sobering experience of losing a friend to a car crash at the age of nineteen, she’d changed her ways. But what made Ronnie any different despite that?

 Maybe it was the way Ronnie’s chocolate tresses bounced that night as if she were in a Pantene commercial despite desperately clasping her clutch with one hand as she struggled to prop herself up on the other to gain her footing. Maybe it was how she hopelessly, helplessly slumped into a heap of sunkissed peach limbs on the grass, her toned legs folded oddly underneath her. Lily’s heart went out to her. Something about her said, “help.” So, Lily taking charge as she always did, she marched over. She hoisted the beautiful mess up, turned to her friends and declared, “I got this.” Expertly swinging an arm around Ronnie and locking a leg around one of hers to help her stay up and walk, she power-hobbled her around to the nearly empty guest room near the pool behind the villa and stayed with her, sending someone to bring her plenty bottles of Fiji and plenty of towels.

When Ronnie came to with a pounding headache, Lily looked her dead in her dark eyes and spoke loudly, clearly.

“Aren’t you tired of people laughing at you?”

So yes, she was destroying four hundred dollar bottles of alcohol and trying to twerk on top of a table, but at least she was wearing panties.