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‘You have never come,’ she said, smiling.
That shocked me. I mean, I knew she meant that I had never come. When I had. I’d come!
‘Guys who come to my club know exactly how they come, why they come, you understand?’
I smoked. I looked at the exit sign. I wanted to be friends with this fucked-up Russian girl. I mean, she seemed radical, as if she knew all about men. This girl wouldn’t ever be scared of a man. This girl could tell me what I’d been doing with John.
The last time I’d been at Carousel’s Nadia had slipped me about five rum and Cokes and I got so drunk I gave some roadie a blow job in the toilet. I cringed at the thought of that. He was disgusting, disgusting.
Adi reached out and grabbed the hand I was smoking with.
‘Closer,’ she said.
It made me nervous. Heat from the cigarette moved toward my fingers. I shuffled in toward her.
‘You have good eyes.’
Then Adi let go of my wrist. Nadia started coughing hysterically, trying to get me back. I couldn’t stop staring at Adi, though, how light her eyes were with these star-shaped gold slits. The makeup made her look so dramatic, like a queen. For more than ten seconds we were eye into eye. My face froze. I felt pulled to a stop in the middle of running. How long can a girl keep looking at a girl?
Then the corners of Adi’s eyes twitched and she looked away. I think she was surprised that I didn’t stop staring at her first. She banged on the bar. She yelled at Nadia in Russian.
Nadia didn’t come. She was talking to another girl from our class where I had been with her at the opposite side of the bar. I hated that girl, who wore her hair in these toddler-style pigtails. We were nineteen! We were too old to wear our hair like that.
‘Immigrant!’ Adi screamed at Nadia.
I laughed in shock. Nadia was totally anxious and fired up as she came over to us. ‘If my father hadn’t plucked you out of the gutter you would still be there, okay?’ Nadia said to Adi.
‘Fatherfucker.’ Adi spit on the bar again. Her spit was a puddle of foam.
I stood at Adi’s side and I felt something for her. Or I felt so different all of a sudden with Adi, as if I were already on her side against Nadia. I felt totally grossed out about Nadia’s father. It was like some secret fucked-up childhood thing had just been exposed.
Nadia looked like she was about to cry. ‘Mira, come talk to me before you leave, okay?’
Adi let out a mean little laugh. ‘Don’t worry, Mira’s gonna come.’
I laughed at that too. Nadia pleaded at me with her eyes. What the fuck was Nadia so scared of? That her father was being outed as a prick?
‘I’ll call you later, okay?’ I said to Nadia.
Adi began to laugh hysterically at what was going on between me and Nadia. It was embarrassing, like she knew everything about our friendship, all its weak parts, its cracks.
Adi jumped off the bar stool and got her goat’s fur from the ground. ‘Tell your daddy all is good,’ she said to Nadia. ‘I don’t bug you people anymore.’
Adi’s body was so skinny but she had too-high tits and a bubble-type ass. I felt like a guy watching her. Adi twisted her shoulders into her coat and I was standing there like a fool, thinking: But I just got here, don’t go!
‘So, you coming or what, baby?’
Baby? Someone else calling me baby!
There was something about Adi’s neck. It kept tilting to one side. It was thin like a branch that would snap in the wind.
‘Okay, that’s it. She is coming. She likes us Russian girls. We are smart.’
Adi winked at Nadia. She rubbed two fingers together. Money.
I didn’t look back at Nadia and the pigtailed bitch at the bar. I felt like she hated me now. I went with Adi into the night. My chest felt empty. Nadia. Adi grabbed my wrist. Then my hand.
‘You make a name for yourself,’ Adi said, lighting a joint. ‘Not your true name.’
