I grabbed Laurel by the elbow. Her coat was nowhere to be found. It looked as though she’d wandered in to stay awhile with Fratty McFratterson. The hulking dude was wearing shorts with embroidered lobsters in the middle of December for chrissakes.
“Laurel, we’re going. Come on.” I didn’t realize how drunk Laurel was until I watched her stand up. She was wobblier than a baby giraffe finding its legs.
“I’m Broden.” Lobster Man extended his hand to me.
I sighed out a breath, because apparently I was about to exchange words with the man Laurel had targeted specifically to piss me off. “Broden. What an original name—”
“It’s a combination of Brayden and Brody,” he explained.
“Cool.” My smile was more a presentation of teeth than a display of genuine kindness. I gave him a once-over, checking for distinctive scars I could use to describe him in a future police report. Broden was doughy and bloated in a fairly unremarkable way, but he had the full, pouty lips of a man who would open a credit card in your name, which, apart from Petey, was exactly Laurel’s type. “Laur, shall we?”
She didn’t respond. All of her faculties were dedicated to removing the baseball cap from Broden’s head and putting it on her own, a drunk-girl pre-mating ritual I knew well. When she finally responded, the sentence flowed out in cursive, each letter curling right into the next. “Broden was telling me about his intramural Frisbee team.”
I boxed the guy out to face Laurel and Laurel alone. “Can you not do the thing youalwaysdo, for once in our lives, please?”
“What the hell does that mean?” She dropped her hand from his chest like I’d struck her.
My remorseful eyes shot up to the ceiling. “Sorry, it’s just…you said you’d leave, so let’s leave.”
She muttered something under her breath but still followed me out the door.
We piled into the back of the minivan, Ethan in the front seat flashing his hazards, the don’t-ask-for-permission-ask-for-forgiveness of parking maneuvers.
“Charley, stop,” she whined, fighting me off as I shoved her into the back seat. “I can’t find my phone, and I won’t leave without it.” She tapped her screen with one eye pinched shut. “I’ll call Broden so he can bring it out to me.”
“Your phone is in your hand, Lo,” Ethan said, checking his blind spot on his way out of the fire lane. “Whose hat is that? Brenden’s?”
“Broden’s,” Laurel and I said simultaneously, even though it filled me with an irrational fury that I knew the proper pronunciation of the name of a guy who was dressed like a Massachusetts Easter brunch.
“Where’s your coat?” he asked.
“She’s fine,” I answered for her. “She’s got her liquor jacket on.” I fastened her seat belt with a sharp click.
“Edith!” She shot up, meeting the resistance of the seat belt strap. “We have to go back! That coat was a perfect Goodwill find. Irreplaceable!”
I pressed her down by the shoulder, but she bounced right back up like a toddler on a trampoline. “Once we find my coat, we can stop by the other party,” she shouted through the van. Despite her valiant attempts at speaking at a reasonable volume, Laurel was drunkenly overshooting it.
“He’s not here this weekend,” Ethan cut in from the driver’s seat.
“Who’s not here?” she asked innocently, but, suddenly, the whole night—floating from sports bar to sports bar, pounding shots all the way to Greek Row, always scanning the room over my shoulder—was coming into perfect clarity.
“Pete’s been in Edmonton since Wednesday,” he told her, his voice sympathetic. “What happened with him, Lo? He wants to make it work.”
“Iwanted to make the best of the time we have left.He’sthe one who wanted to cut it off now.”
“Couldn’t you try long distance?” he asked her.
“He doesn’t actually want to be in a long-distance relationship with me. He just thinks he does.”
“You don’t know what he wants,” I argued, not because I felt defensive of Petey but because I was sick of Laurel blazing into my life and upending it like the Cat in the Hat with a bleached-blond shag (her current hairstyle of choice).
“So he can be handcuffed to his phone every second he’s not on the ice in case I’m available for mutually unsatisfying FaceTime sex? Or so I can feel trapped in my room in the apartment I share with three other broke teachers? And then he can grow to resent me for never having time off to travel to his games?”
Her voice was a hard, bitter thing, but the words kept tumbling out of her. Boulders down a hill.
“Then I’ll act out because I’ll know he’s unhappy. He won’t say it—he’ll never say it—but I’llfeelevery little moment when I disappoint him, and I’ll hurt him. Because that’s how I am, right?” She faced me, her eyes wild and frenzied.
“Stop it, Laurel,” I choked out. The tears burned behind my eyes. I hated watching her crumble like this.
