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“That’s the look I’m going for.”
“Well, you’re achieving it. But anyhow he’s really nice, Mason—”
“Mason? What kind of name is that?”
“You’re getting hung up on a name? You sound just like your mother.”
I resist the urge to stab her through the eye with a chopstick.
“Anyhow, who cares? Maybe his name is really Jason but he just wanted to call himself Mason,” Melanie continues. “Speaking of, no one calls me Melanie here. They call me Mel or Lainie.”
“Two names for the price of one.”
“It’s college, Allyson. No one knows who you were. There’s never a better time to reinvent yourself. You should try it.” She gives me a pointed look.
I want to tell her that I did. It just didn’t take.
Mason actually turns out to be not that bad. He’s smart and slightly nerdy, and from the South, which explains the name, I guess, and he speaks in a lilting accent, which he makes fun of. When we get to the party on a desolate stretch of windblown street, miles from the subway stop, he jokes that he’s from the hipster police and do I have enough tattoos to be in this part of town. At which point Trevor shows off his tribal armband and Melanie starts talking about the “tat” she’s thinking of getting on her ankle or butt or other places girls get them, and Mason looks at me and rolls his eyes a little.
At the party, an elevator opens up directly into a loft, which is both huge and decrepit, with giant canvases all over the walls and the smell of oil paint and turpentine. It smelled like this in the squat. Another land mine. I kick it away before it explodes.
Melanie and Trevor are going on and on about this kick-ass band, whose grainy video they show me on Melanie’s phone. They’re congratulating themselves on seeing them at a place like this, before the whole world discovers them. When the band fires up, Melanie—Mel, Lainie, whoever—and Trevor hop to the front and start dancing like crazy. Mason hangs back with me. It’s too loud to attempt conversation, which I’m glad about, but I’m also glad that someone stayed with me. I feel my tourist sign flashing, and I’m on native soil.
After what seems like forever, the band finally takes a break; the ringing in my ears is so loud it’s like they’re still playing.
“Care for a libation?” Mason asks me.
“Huh?” I’m still half deaf.
He mimes drinking something.
“Oh, no thanks.”
“I’ll. Be. Right. Back,” he says, exaggerating the words like we’re lip-reading.
Meanwhile, Melanie and Trevor are doing a kind of lip-reading of their own. They’re in a corner on a couch, making out. It’s like they don’t notice anyone else in the room. I don’t want to watch them, but I can’t seem to stop myself. Seeing them kiss makes me physically ill. It’s hard to push that memory down. The hardest. It’s why I keep it buried the deepest.
Mason comes back with a beer for himself and a water for me. He sees Melanie and Trevor. “It was bound to happen,” he tells me. “Those two have been circling each other for weeks like a pair of dogs in heat. I wondered what was going to trip the wire.”
“Alcohol and ‘kick-ass’ music,” I say, making air quotes.
“Vacations. Easier to start something up when you know you don’t have to see someone for a while. Takes the pressure off.” He glances at them. “I give them two weeks, tops.”
“Two weeks? That’s pretty generous. Some guys wouldn’t give it more than a night.” Even over the din, I can hear my bitterness. I can taste it in my mouth.
“I’d give you more than a night,” Mason says.
And, oh, it is so the right thing to say. And who knows? Maybe he’s even sincere, though by now I know that I cannot be trusted to discern sincerity from fakery.
But still, I want to be over this. I want all those memories to disappear or to be supplanted with something else, to stop haunting me. So when Mason leans in to kiss me, I close my eyes, and I let him. I try to lose myself in it, try not to worry if the bitterness in my mouth has actually given me bad breath. I try to be kissed by someone else, try to be someone else.
But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has since healed, and I pull away.
>At least when she hugs me, she still smells like Melanie: hair conditioner and baby powder. “God, you got skinny,” she says. “You’re supposed to gain your freshman fifteen, not lose it.”
“Have you had dining hall food?”
“Yeah. Hello, all-you-can-eat ice-cream bar. That alone makes the tuition worthwhile!”
