Where I End and You Begin (5 page)

But he’s checking me out. “You’re looking good,” he says.

I don’t look good. He wants an easy lay.

“Thanks,” I tell him. “What’s up?”

“I was just about to go out with some friends to get an early start on Friday drinking. You want to come with?”

His eyes are eager, his thoughts soft and dirty, but his body is warm and I’m cold and he’s going to feed me alcohol until I don’t feel anything any more.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Let’s go.”

I
read a story about a ghost, once. Not a
ghost story
, but a little snippet about a ghost, a long time ago. I remember the picture that went with it, too. The story goes that at some castle in England there’s a female ghost who runs across the courtyard at the same time each day. She always moans in pain, her mouth open and gaping, blood gushing from it. Her tongue has been ripped out.

The illustration of her was awful. Blood running down her chin, her eyes wide and terrified. Her dress was crimson, too, and her hair flew across her face as she ran.

I remember thinking, and this was back when I was little and thought everything was possible—I remember thinking,
Just stop and breathe and write out what you need to say. Tell someone who did this to you.

Now that I have known terror, I know that it swallows you whole. Terror throws your soul out into the void, and it comes back as an animal. Everything is focused on the pain and fear. And what would a ghost write with, anyway?

They always want help, but they are trapped, locked into an inevitable fate, unable to arrest their fall long enough to scream.

T
equila burns down my throat, and a roar goes up from the table. I slam my shot glass down on the scarred wood and smirk at the guy sitting across from me. Not the guy I came here with. Whatshisname. The guy who challenged me to a drinking contest. I can’t remember how it came to that, or why I agreed. I’m an idiot.

But at least I’m a drunk idiot. At least I don’t care.

The dimness of the bar—McGruder’s, I think, the dingy dive just off campus that everyone goes to—crowds in. Hot bodies press against me on all sides. I don’t know any of them, but it doesn’t really matter. They are loud, they shine bright in the dimness. They keep me occupied.

When did I get here? I couldn’t say. I know I came with whatshisface, after stopping at the Taco Hut for some food. Must have been around six. Just before that I’d changed into a low-cut shirt and shiny black skin-tight pants and then done a bit of pregaming in my room with Tanya. We each had a glass of wine, though she was staying in and writing an essay tonight. And I am here. Wherever here is.

The table under my elbows is old and shiny, an ancient piece of bar furniture engraved with accidental scratches and deliberate messages from the past to the future.
Chris has a big cock. Call Sandy at blah blah. Janie loves Trevor.
The air around me is choke-thick with the haze of cigarettes, and the sour smell of spilled beer lurks beneath the smoke, a thin shard of dark yellow beneath the gray poison.

But none of that is very important. What is important is that the guy across from me is hot, or at least I think he’s hot. He looks hot. That might be the alcohol talking. I can’t find the guy I came with in the press of people, so he’s probably off making out with some other girl.

That’s fine. Boys always want to fuck someone. Always. Someone will fuck me. Someone will hold me. It doesn’t really matter who it is, in the end. I just need it, more than I need a drink, more than I need air.

“Again!” someone is shouting, and I find another shot in front of me. I have no idea what’s in it, but I pick it up. I manage to coax my eyes to go in the same direction at once and I look my challenger in the eye. His gaze is intense, shadowed by huge dark eyebrows, and his black hair is plastered to his forehead with a sheen of sweat. But he has a little smile on his face that promises me whoever loses this contest will still win. The air between us crackles.

He grabs his shot glass and we lift them to each other.

“Hook your arms!” someone else says. “Do it at the same time!”

Wobbling, I pull myself up over the table and he mirrors me. We lock our elbows around each other. His skin is hot and damp, his arm meaty. The realities of flesh. The crowd around us shouts in time: “One! Two! Three!”

We drink. It was vodka.

The bar spins around me. Even my thoughts are slurred.

“Ah, shit,” I say. “I gotta piss.”

“You piss, you lose!” A girl next to me is grinning, her sparkling top almost falling off. Her teeth are bright white, a slice of sharp ivory in the darkness, the grin of a shark moving in for the kill.

“Drink!” a guy says. He’s tall and gangly, his fingers long and thin as he presses another shot into my hand. He looms over me like a scarecrow, and I can’t see his face.

Suddenly the music is too loud, the bar too hot, the people too sinister. I know, in the back of my wasted brain, that all this is just a product of the alcohol, but that doesn’t help me now. We’re all just chemicals knocking together inside a sack of skin. All emotions are chemicals. Hormones. Adrenaline. A bunch of neurotransmitters, amino acids, proteins. None of it is
real.

I still need to get out of the press of people.

“I have to go,” I mumble. Or shout. I can’t tell. My ears hurt, my head full of razors wrapped in gauze. Turn wrong, I’ll get cut, bleed out, die on the floor. I slide off the high bar chair I’ve been perching on. I know I’m bruising my ass, but I’m too drunk to feel it. The sticky tiles under me kiss the soles of my shoes, candy kisses, sugary sweet. I twist and turn, shoving through the stink of sweating bodies, staggering away from the table and into the relative coolness of the open bar.

There are so many people here. How can there be so many people on a Thursday night?

College town,
my head tells me. Everyone drinks all the time. Does the day end in ‘y’? Someone is drinking.

I have to find the restroom. I really do have to piss. Or pass out.

I feel my way in the dark, knocked between my fellow drunks like a pinball, heading for the back of the bar, where the restrooms always are. The bright neon lights tell me I’m getting
some
where, though I can hardly read them, I’m so drunk.

To my relief, the bathrooms are through a cramped little hallway. Women’s at the end. I push through the door and practically mince to the nearest stall. I grab the edge and sag against it, suddenly feeling far more drunk than I thought I was. With clumsy fingers, moving strangely through time, I unbutton my pants and shove them down before finally relieving myself. I lean against the side of the stall, thinking how comfortable it is here.

The sound of the door opening jolts me awake. I’m not sure if I was asleep, but I was drifting somewhere, afloat on a cloud of numbness. Shakily I stand up and pull myself together. As I wash my hands, I try not to look at myself in the mirror. I don’t want to know how terrible I look.

When I leave the restroom, my drinking contest opponent is there.

He smiles at me and grabs my hand before pulling me into the men’s room.

He’s still hot, I think, but now I don’t want to fuck him. I just want to sit down and go to sleep. It doesn’t matter where. I’m
tired.

But then he sequesters us in the handicap stall and his mouth meets mine, and for a moment I am warm all over, inside and out.

I’m too drunk. I fade in and out as he kisses me, his hands everywhere on my body, slipping under my shirt, moving over my waist and down to my ass, pulling me against him. I feel the hardness of his erection through his pants, and the familiar flood of desire and need sluices through me. I am lazy in his arms, leaning into him, and his hands come up to cup my breasts.

I fade out. I fade in.

His jeans are open. In my fingers he is hard and hot, and his hands are on my shoulders, pushing me down, down.

I shake my head.

I fade out. I fade in.

I’m looking straight at his cock. I’m on my knees. The tiles bite and hurt. He’s trying to guide himself inside my mouth, his hand fisted in my hair.

I push away. “No,” I say.

The cold of the tiles under me cuts through the drunken haze. I come to myself a bit, and I realize where I am.

A dirty bathroom in a shitty club, about to give a blowjob to a complete stranger.

With great effort I scramble to my feet.

“Come on, baby,” he’s crooning, but I shake my head and fumble with the lock. He mutters something, but then I am opening the stall and stumbling out of the bathroom, past two guys standing at the urinals. I duck my head and push back into the bar, feeling so sick with myself that I can hardly think.

Smoke stuffs my nose. I’m going to vomit, and it has nothing to do with alcohol. Shoving forward, I fight my way through the crush of people until I’m miraculously at the front of the bar. I fall against the door and spill out into the cold October night.

The chill air slaps me across the face and sobers me somewhat, and I realize that I don’t recognize where I am. I thought I was at McGruder’s, but I’m not. I crane my neck to look at the neon lettering over the door, but my eyes hurt, and I’m too drunk to read it. My vision is blurred, skating over the letters as though they were ice.

Closing my eyes I take a deep breath of cold air.

I need to get home somehow. I need to call someone. Someone who wouldn’t mind coming out at, oh
God,
one in the morning on a Friday. Fuck.
Fuck.
Someone who won’t judge me. Someone who won’t gossip.

I pull my phone out and scroll through the names, trying to find someone that I wouldn’t mind seeing right now, but there are none. I’m so tired, so embarrassed. I just don’t want to be like this right now, maybe never again.

A name slips by that makes me frown. And pause.

Daniel McGuire.

It takes me a minute to remember just who he is and why his name is in my phone. The handsome graduate student whose shoes I almost threw up on.

I chew my tongue.

He said to call him any time of the day or night and he would answer. He’s already seen me at my worst, or close to it. Of course he didn’t mean for my drunk ass to take that as an open invitation to use him as a shuttle service, but right now I need a friendly face, and his is the friendliest I’ve met since... well, ever.

Without really meaning to, I dial his number and hold it up to my ear.

The phone rings. I run a hand over my face.

Should I hang up? I should hang up before he answers.
But shit, he’ll know it was me, because he has my number too...

And then he answers.

“Hello?”

There is an echo. A strange, queer sound. As though I am hearing Daniel’s voice here with me outside the bar as well as over the line.

“Hello?” I say.

“Bianca?” he says. Again the echo. I pull the phone away from my ear and look hard at it, my distress pushed into the background by overwhelming confusion.

“Bianca?”

I blink. The voice didn’t come from the phone. Slowly I turn, teetering on my feet, to see Daniel McGuire lounging not twenty feet away against the brick facade of the bar. A cigarette dangles from his fingers, the cherry brilliant in the dark, his face a nightmare of clashing colors in the neon light. He’s staring at me with his mouth open, his phone pressed to his ear.

In a daze, I turn my phone off.

“I was just calling you,” I say.

A smile flits across his face as he lowers his own phone. “I know,” he says. “Any particular reason?”

I blink. My eyes feel hot, as though I were about to cry. But I never cry. I won’t cry.

“No,” I say. Then, “Yes.”

He pushes away from the brick wall, his tall, lean body all delicious, all restrained. He’s wearing fine slacks and a white button-up under a fitted sport coat. If we’d just met, I would have wanted to hook up with him.

But I can’t. I’m tired of fucking up my life.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and his face is again all concern, all gentle thoughtfulness. He’s not thinking of anything but helping me.

I want to fall into him, but I don’t.

“I don’t know where I am,” I say. “I’m drunk. I don’t know where my ride is. I have to get back to my dorm, but I don’t have any money, I can’t call a cab, and I know you said it was to talk, but I... I just don’t want to call anyone I know, I just want to go
home—
”

He holds his hands out, as though placating me. “It’s okay,” he says. “I told you to call me any time of day or night.” He smiles “I said I wanted to help you. I don’t get to pick how. Don’t worry. I’ll take you home. I hate this kind of place. I’m just the designated driver for my friends. I’ll give you a ride.”

I want to hit him. He’s too kind. Someone is going to hurt him some day.

He moves toward me and stops just a few feet away. He’s so
tall.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to call you, it was just a stupid thought, I don’t want to bother you if you’re out with friends...”

“Don’t worry,” he says again. “
They
can afford a cab. They’ll be fine.”

I try one last time. “I didn’t mean to call you for this...it’s stupid...”

But he’s shaking his head. “I’m here. You meant to call me, and here I am, right where you need me. Hey, pretty good timing on my part. We must have met for a reason, eh?”

I think about it.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, we did.”

T
here are reasons people meet. Of course there are. But the reasons aren’t because we are meant to do something, or learn something from another person; the reasons we meet are entirely disconnected from whatever happens between us in the future. All of that is up to chance.

European mythology holds that there are three women who control destiny. In Greek mythology, it is the third, the future—Atropos—whose name means
unturning. Inexorable. Inevitable.
But in Norse mythology it’s the first—Urd—whose name means
fate.
In Norse lore, the spinners of a person’s life, the Norns, are
disir,
which can mean Goddess, spirit, or ghost. Between the Greeks and the Norse, I think the Norse had it right.

The ghosts of the past determine our fate. Whatever happens, happens because of what has already gone before. A death, a disaster, a destined meeting—it doesn’t really matter what it
is
. All that matters is that it cannot be stopped.

It’s all been set in motion, sometimes long before we were even born.