Back in her dorm, Mel picked up her phone and dialled her best friend. Emily picked up on the third ring, panting as though she had picked up her phone in the middle of an exercise..
“What? What? What?”
“Are you running?” Mel asked with a frown. “Why do you sound so breathless?”
“The – bus. Ugh, fuck, wait –”
There was a clatter as something dropped and Emily swore again. Mel waited patiently as she spoke to someone else on the other side of the line, followed by more rustling sounds and a definite thud.
“Sorry,” Emily apologized as she came back on the line. “I was running for the bus just now because I’m late for a meeting with my Renaissance Arts lecturer. But now I’m seated, so speak.”
Emily was an art major – the kind of absentminded person who constantly forgot things and events, and was always searching for something in her bag or house or car.
“What happened to your car?” Mel asked.
“I couldn’t find the keys. Anyway what’s up?”
“Nothing much,” Mel replied, hesitating. “What are you doing Friday night?”
“Friday night…hold on, I need to check…wait, are you asking me out on a date?”
“No, Em.”
“Cos, you know, I’m totally open minded when it comes to that kind of thing, but I just think it would make our relationship dynamics weird, actually –”
“Just tell me if you’re free,” Mel said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes.
“Alright, alright, Ms. Prissypants. I was just joking. Friday…I was supposed to buy art supplies, but I could always postpone that. I mean, how sad is that anyway, spending your Friday night deciding if a filbert or a mop is better for your crappy B-grade artwork?”
“Your work is not B-grade, it’s amazing,” Mel replied automatically.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m the next van Gogh, bleh, whatever. You’re just saying that because you’re my best friend.” Mel wasn’t, but even if she told her that, Emily wouldn’t believe her. After half a heartbeat, Emily added, “You do realise van Gogh cut off his own ear to gift to his sweetheart as a declaration of his love, right?”
“No, I didn’t know that. But now I do. So which of your ears are you planning to gift me?”
“Haha, very funny, Mel. Your sense of humour is just deafening. Get it? Deafening, because of –”
“Got it, Em. I got it.”
“Good. So what are we doing this Friday night? Or more importantly, who are we doing?” she crackled at her own joke. Mel groaned.
“Nothing. No one. It’s just…there’s a bar I wanted to check out. It’s called The Hodge. Have you been?”
“The one by the bay?” Mel could almost see Emily wrinkling her forehead in a frown as she thought about it.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there a few times with Kenny.” Kenny was Emily’s gay roommate. “Why the sudden interest in bars? Has the all-great, super resistant to the distractions and trappings of college life Melissa finally fallen prey to the desire to get pissed drunk and dry hump a chair?”
“I would never dry hump a chair,” Mel said in reply. She wouldn’t. She didn’t know where Emily got these ideas.
“That’s what she said. Until she did three shots of tequila for the first time and found herself rubbing up to a wooden armrest,” Emily said solemnly. “It was a life changing experience.”
Mel laughed then, because it sounded completely ridiculous yet it was something she could see Em doing.
“Right, so now I know what not to do then. So are we on for Friday night?”
“Oh baby, we’re so on that no one will be able to turn out the lights around the city because we destroyed all the off-switches with our on-ness.”
Mel hung up.
***
Friday was a rough affair. Mel had only one class on Friday, which was terrible because she needed something to get her mind off the boy and the bar and the terrible nails-on-a-chalkboard band. She spent her morning after class doing leftover assignments, and by mid-afternoon she was done with most of them. Emily was coming over at six to help her get ready, because according to Emily, Mel’s idea of dressing up was to look like a ‘librarian on tea break’. Emily’s words, not hers.
Mel looked at the clock. Six o’clock was three hours away. She tried to revise last week’s lectures, but her mind had wandered too far away to ever return to a set on notes on the Principles of Communication, so she gave up and popped in a yoga dvd into her player. Mel was a yoga rookie – rookie being a generous description of her ability to contort herself into pretzels and doughnuts and other painful positions that were featured on the cover of the dvd, which had been a present from her mom. Back home in Long Island, Mel had intended to sign up for a yoga class for the longest time, but had never really gotten round to it so her mom had given her this home practice series. It took Mel about ten minutes of watching the instructor before she realised she was terrible at it. She could never get the position or the balance right, much less do it with grace. Her legs, which had always been skinny, stuck out awkwardly like a flamingo trying to do a head stand.
Still, Mel liked the idea of yoga and zen, so whenever she wanted to calm down, she would watch the yogo series and follow the really simple steps. Like the restorative position. All she had to do was to lie down on the floor. That’s it. Restorative. It had made Emily laugh, because according to Emily, the restorative position made Mel look like a really bored sex partner. (Emily wasn’t very big on zen; she believed that the universe only came about through chaotic and violent evolutions – the wiping out the weaker species, predator chomping on prey, etc.) And Mel had to admit, although it had helped during other times, yoga wasn’t much when you wanted to kill time. As she got into the restorative position, all Mel could think about was how blue his eyes were and the way he asked her out. We’re terrible…would you come see us?
By the time Emily came over (forty-five minutes late), Mel had showered, done her laundry, dusted and mopped her already clean room, and finished two episodes of Supernatural. It was amazing how efficient she could be when she didn’t put her heart into doing things. Half way through the third episode Emily had rushed in, a whirlwind of curls and floral perfume, complaining about the traffic and the terrible Mercedes driver who cut in front of her.
“Get dressed, get dressed, we’re behind schedule. I told Kenny we’d be there by seven thirty.”
“We’d be on time if someone hadn’t been late.”
Emily scowled and threw a black dress at her.
“Quiet, peasant! I’m not paying you to be a potty mouth!”
“You’re not paying me anything,” Mel replied lightly, but her voice was muffled by the dress she was slipping over her head. As soon as she put it on and looked in the mirror, she knew she couldn’t wear it.
“It’s too tight. And look at the neckline! Em, I can’t wear this!”
“Hush!” Emily threw a pair of sheer stockings at her, and pulled open her make up kit. Mel began to pull off her dress.
“No, no, keep it on! There’s no time!”
“But –”
“Mel, it’s just this once. Please.”
“No.”
“Remember that favour you owe me for helping you borrow the textbook from George Steiglman in tenth grade? Remember that?”
“Don’t do that Em,” Mel said even though she knew it was pointless. If Emily wanted someone into a black dress, she would get someone into a black dress.
“Well, I’m doing it. I’m calling on that favour right now. You have to wear the dress.”
“Em, I’m going to look at a prostitute.”
Emily paused in her track and frowned as she appraised Mel. “You really think that? You think it’s too hookerish?”
“Yes.”
“We can’t have that. I was going for more of a high-class-call-girl or a sexy masseuse that gives ‘extra perks’ kind of a look. Think Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Client List.”
“Emily!” Mel huffed in frustration.
“Kidding, Mel!” Emily laughed. “I’m not going make you look like a prostitute, I swear.”
She was right. In the end, she let Mel put on a soft cream blazer that was nice and thick enough to keep her warm, but still showed enough skin (‘to make em drool like you’re a corn dog’. Emily’s words.) and a pair of cream heels they bought together from Forever 21. By the time they left the house, they were extremely late and Mel prayed that the boy’s band would be on for a long, long time so that they would not missed it.
The drive to Brown Bay was not a particularly long one, just under forty minutes at Emily’s devil speed, but it felt much longer than that. On the way, Mel worried that her dress was too short, that he might think that she had especially made an effort for him (which she’d done, but she didn’t want seem overly enthusiastic about the prospect, even though again, she was enthusiastic about meeting him), and wondered if she should just scrape this meet up with pub-playing-band-member-guy and just spend her Friday night reading like she normally did. But she couldn’t because Emily was driving and Emily didn’t do things without questioning them because Emily was the kind of arts/sociology student Mel had been telling the boy about before.
If Mel asked her to drop her back home, Emily would demand an explanation and Mel would have to tell her about the boy. And how Mel was too shy to meet him. Emily, knowing her, would go on a long rant about how the demeaning of females and forcing them to believe themselves as the occupants of a lower social class for hundreds of years by the opposite sex have now created these modern problems, where women like Mel who are smart and beautiful and perfect just the way they are feel insecure in the presence of males. And then she would drag Mel back to the bar and tell her to have monkey sex with the boy because that’s just what Emily does. Mel wasn’t insecure about meeting boys; she just couldn’t connect with them the way she wanted to. They were like aliens or horses or latin books; intriguing and interesting but way out of her comfort zone.
Somewhere between worrying over her appearance and guessing how her suggestion that she skip this event would go down with Emily, Mel and Emily managed to arrive at The Hodge around eight-thirty. The Hodge just like any other pub; woodsy and smoky, with lots of people, dim booths, and waitresses with big boobs walking around. There was a stage which was currently empty and Mel began to wonder nervously if they had played already. She seldom visited pubs; for all she knew, bands play in the afternoon and then leave at night. Over their heads, some jazzy song was playing loudly and a few couples were dancing slowly on the dance floor in front of the stage. Mel and Emily headed over to where Kenny was already at the bar, perched on a tall stool, typing away furiously on his phone. He looked up as they neared, and burst into a full grin. If he wasn’t gay, Mel thought, he would be the prime boyfriend material for Emily. Handsome in that healthy country boy kind of way, patient, and with excellent skills in being on time and finding things.
“Hey, Mel!” he greeted as he enveloped her in a bear hug. “You finally came out!”
“Very funny, Kenny, very funny,” Mel replied as she slid into a booth on the other side. He laughed as he let her go.
“I know. I’ve been practising that all evening. It’s good see you out and about; if Emily hadn’t been talking to you over the phone, I would have thought you’d ran away to Moscow.”
“And why would I go there?”
“To be with a flaming hot Russian boy, of course!”
Mel laughed, and then took a quick glance at the stage. Emily, who was ordering about twenty different drinks, didn’t notice but Kenny did.
“The band just finished as I came in. No one new on stage since. Why? Got a number you wanted to listen to?”
“Oh,” Mel said, feeling like someone punched all the air out of her stomach. She had missed it. After all the efforts, she had missed his performance. “No, not at all. Just wondering why…they put up a stage when there was no band.”
Kenny shrugged. “Like I said, the band finished playing.”
“DRINKS, BITCHES!” Emily suddenly screamed as she slammed a tray between the two of them. Mel sniffed as Emily wriggled her brows. She can’t believed she missed him. She didn’t have his number, she didn’t even know his name, for god sake! What a terrible plan this was. Mel absentmindedly accepted a shot-glass filled with some clear liquid, and tried not to look too crestfallen.
“Alright, Mel, drink it up in one shot!” Emily ordered. “In three –”
Someone moved into the stool behind Mel, his shoulders almost bumping into hers, and she scooted closer to Emily to put more space between the two of them. . Next time, she promised herself, she was staying away from boys with charming personalities and pretty eyes.
“Two –”
Mel looked down at the glass in her hand. She had never done shots before, but there was always a first, wasn’t there? She raised the shot glass to her lips. What a fool she was being, anyway! Pining over some boy...
“One!”
“That doesn’t look much like cold earl grey with milk, does it?” a voice remarked wryly from behind.
Mel choked on the drink and it burned, much stronger and hotter than anything she’d ever tasted before, as it got caught at the back of her throat. Then, in a terrible, blindingly embarrassing second, her throat retched and she spat out Emily’s Flatline Shot straight at the boy’s surprised face.
Way to greet a person, she thought just as her eyes teared up and she began to cough violently.