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“So, don’t tell me,” Brandon said. “You were the man,” he said, pointing at Jane, “and you had to be the…”
“Tambourine,” I concluded with a groan.
He chuckled. “How do you even dress up as a tambourine?”
“Oh, it wasn’t actually that hard,” Jane told him, standing up to pantomime the costume with both hands. “I’d been planning it for weeks, you see, and I had the costume ready to go. I cut out two five-foot circles out of cardboard boxes and painted them white. Then we grabbed the spare cymbals I had from my old drum kit in storage.” She stopped, to inform Brandon quickly: “I tried to be in a band once. It didn’t really take.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said with a nod. “Then what?”
I grinned in spite of myself. Now that the ice had been broken and Jane had stopped heckling him, Brandon was playing the new boyfriend really well. He was attentive and patient with my friend, asking the right questions at the right times. Maybe it was just the beer, but I didn’t think he was so nervous anymore.
“It wasn’t really that hard from there,” Jane said. “Chopsticks and duct tape pretty much took care of the basic engineering. Sky actually followed through on the bet, even though she complained literally the entire time.”
“Um, you weren’t the one who had to wear it,” I put in. “I couldn’t wear anything besides spandex underneath so I could fit in between the pieces. It had a diameter of five feet. I could barely walk.”
Brandon chuckled at the image, looking back and forth between us in amusement.
“It wasn’t that bad, you big baby,” Jane said, sitting down again. “The hardest part was getting you through the doorways. You did get stuck a few times.”
Brandon snorted. “Really?”
“I also had to hold my pee the entire night because I couldn’t use the bathroom,” I added.
“And had to turn your entire body around to talk to people,” said Jane. “You knocked a lot of things over.”
“And got whacked in the belly every time someone wanted to ‘play’ me. One guy actually tried to grab my tits that way.”
“Oh, plus you got knocked over four times!” Jane crowed. “Every time you crashed, the cymbals just made the loudest, most god-awful sound, and everyone would stop and stare. The first time someone even turned off the music because everyone thought you were trying to do some kind of performance art.”
By this point, Brandon was laughing so hard he was practically wheezing, and tears were starting to shine in the corner of his eyes.
“Shit!” he cried, holding his stomach. “I can’t take it.”
But every time he caught his breath, he looked at me and started shaking all over again as he imagined me in my tambourine costume.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, get it out,” I said. I couldn’t be mad, though. I was thrilled my best friend and my boyfriend were getting along so well.
“But in the end, as mad as she was, we were friends forever after,” Jane said. She slung a thin arm over my shoulders. “There’s a certain loyalty that arises when you have to help your roommate peel off beer-soaked cardboard and then shield her with it so she can pee in a bush in the middle of Harvard Yard because she can’t hold it until you get her home.”
I laid my head on Jane’s shoulder. “There certainly is.”
Brandon sipped his beer as he surveyed us with a reflective smile. I thought I saw a flash of envy there, but mostly he just chuckled.
“And on that note,” I said as I pushed myself up from the table. “The ladies’ room calls, no Jane required. Back in a moment.”
After I made my way to the other side of the bar, I glanced back. Jane and Brandon were leaning over the small round table, her dark head bent towards his cap in deep conversation. I smiled. The night couldn’t be going better if I’d scripted it myself.
* * *
“So, Jane’s…a character.”
After a few more drinks, Jane had begged off to make herself available at the bar. She wasn’t shy about how sexually open she was, and I could tell that Brandon was entertained, if slightly shocked, by her candor. We had watched with some amusement while she hit on several members of the Harvard crew team before Brandon had whispered a few things in my ear that suddenly made me equally ready to escape.
Now on our way back to the apartment, we were forced to behave in the presence of David, though it was hard not to encourage the hand currently massaging my leg a bit higher than was completely decent.
I flipped my gaze toward Brandon, trying to ignore the fingers on my inner thigh. “What’d she say?”
He grinned. “Nothing much. Only that she’d castrate me and make kimchi out of my balls if I hurt you.”
