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I’ve never felt as lost as I do now.
Because I don’tknowthat Lolly will remember me again. I just don’t know that. And even if it turns out she will, her forgetting me in the first place will never not hurt.
And my mind won’t shut the fuck up. It replays her words and the awful way she looked at me. It reminds me of all that has built up to this: the small details she used to mix up and the important details she started forgetting and the stroke she had when Pop died and the mood shifts and the false memories. Her calling me Lucas more than a few times, which didn’t seemtoobad because that was her brother’s name and it’s my middle name. Then her not calling me anything, except for the one time she said my name last week. How she sometimes looked like she just barely recognized my face—how I wondered other times if she evenbarelyrecognized it.
I can feel that she bruised my shoulder with the remote. And she threw Rae’s coaster; I didn’t check before I left, but I highly suspect it’s broken, which hurts me in a new way.
And on top of it all, work is even more awful than I expected.
The register that was broken yesterday has somehow spread its bullshit to another one, so half of our registers don’t work. I was supposed to work the morning shift with another bartender, but he was a no-call, no-show, and whenIcalled to see what was up, he quit on the spot. So I noted it for Bill and decided not to try to bring anyone else in early because maybe staying busy by myself would distract me from Lolly.
It worked for a little bit because we were just busy enough to test it. Then a crowd of people came in to celebrate being in town for a high school reunion. Since then, I’ve developed that headache, and one of the registers still in operation has run out of receipt paper—I can’t find a new roll, so that promises to end up being an issue.
By the four-hour mark, the headache is mean. Even with a few more employees around, the stress level has actuallyincreasedbecause the reunion people have invited everyone they know in the world to drink with them.
Why is this a problem? Well, in addition to being loud as hell, they’re rowdy and impatient. And not one, not two, butthreedifferent couples get caught trying to have sex in the bathrooms (and one of the girls very persistently hits onmeafter she parts ways with the other guy). I keep hearing glasses getting broken, bowls of pretzels keep ending up on the floor, and my coworkers and I have to stop girls from dancing on the bar on two separate occasions.
As time goes on, it just keeps getting worse.
A handful of the reunion-goers get sick at their tables because they don’t make it to the bathroom or even to a trashcan. Something stupid happens to one of our most popular beer taps, which causes grumbling from a lot of customers. My headache goes from mean to splitting and Tylenol isn’t helping worth a damn. A fist-fight breaks out between two older men who’ve been watching a sports game on one of the TVs, and I’m the only employee in fucking sight somehow, so I have to step in and, yep, I get punched in the jaw. We’ve been too busy for me to take my normal number of breaks, so I end up only getting thirty little minutes away from the chaos that is a typical Friday plus all this extra shit.
This is the worst day I’ve had in a very, very long time.
It’s so bad that when I’m finally off work and out of the bar, I’ve got a text to Liv typed up and sent in ten seconds flat:
Sorry to bother you, but something happened with Lolly and I’m a serious fucking mess. Can I talk to you about it? Please
Ihaveto talk to her. At least, I have to try, because I feel like I’m going crazy.
Besides, if ever there was a time to find out who she really is, it’s now. This is my last-ditch attempt to see if she’s worth being another thought in my mind.
Moment of truth, Liv,I think her way as I start my car.Are you the friend I thought you were?
After a minute, my phone alerts me to a new text. I check it as I stop at a red light.
LIV-ANDRIA:You can come over.
She doesn’t seem particularly warm, but she didn’t tell me no. That’s good enough for me, so I reply that I’m on my way.
As I wait on the light, I remember how she touched me at Abby’s party when I told her about Lolly’s condition. How, with one glide of her hand down my arm, I felt comforted. Settled. Like my distress about the whole thing might not have to be my burden alone.
I don’t dare to hope I’ll get anything like that from her tonight, but I do find myself hoping we can start to fix whatever happened at the ice cream place. That we can somehow get back to where we were.
Because her caring enough to talk with me about Lolly says that maybe shewasn’tsupposed to just walk in and out of my life.
It tells me for sure that her frostiness isn’t bone-deep, isn’t permanent—if it were, she would’ve pretended not to see my text, or would’ve just flat-out answered with a no. These last few days, I’ve learned that if she wants to cut someone off, she will. And she didn’t do it to me this time.
The traffic signal turns green, so I rush off toward the first speck of light I’ve seen since I left Lolly’s room this morning.
It’s a dust-sized speck, but hell, I’ll take it.
|| 7 || Liv-Andria
I blow out a breath as I stroke my hair back from my face with both hands.
I couldn’t do it: I just couldn’t ignore Landon’s text about Lolly.
I’ve done a good job of distancing Rae and myself from him these last few days. At first, I was pissed at myself for having slipped as far as I did in the first place, for evenneedingto force distance, but I can admit now that I just…got caught up in everything. In having to interact with him when he was choking, and in how distraught he was at the elevator that one day, and in how things unfolded at Abby’s party. He’s nice and generous and silly and he gets along well with Rae, so before I knew it, we were all spending time together on purpose.
