He smiles.
“And she has really great cheekbones, and a tiny scar by her eye from a circus accident.”
“A what?”
I laugh. I feel like he should already know everything; I forgot that he barely knows me.
So I tell him everything about her, which feels like telling him about myself, because when you think about something so intensely for so long, it kind of has a way of taking over everything else. I tell him about the circus and Mathilde, about the words Violet uses in the letters she writes. I tell him about a photograph I’ve stared at for hours, of her standing in front of a collapsing circus tent, with gold paint on her face and bangles on her wrist, her hand through her messy hair, the curve of her collarbone so gorgeous it hurts. I keep telling him about all of it even as we come to the end of the pier and the last traces of hope disappear.
I keep talking so that I won’t cry.
And then I’ve said all that I know about her.
We sit on a bench overlooking the sea lions sleeping in heaps, the bay to one side of us, the city with its empty, towering buildings to the other. All of the photos of her, all of the stories, all of the facts spin in a loop in my head, but I spare him a second round of the monologue. I look toward the bay, but all I’m seeing is that photograph of Violet. The tent is billowing in the wind, the fiercest red. She’s looking straight at me, wondering what I’ll do next.
Mark and I must have been destined for each other, because what two-hour-old friendship can endure such a deep silence? Eventually, his phone vibrates.
“Your mom again?” I ask.
He grimaces.
“We can go.”
“I’ll try to make the last train. You might still be able to find her.”
“No,” I say. “We should spare me from subsequent chances to let myself down.”
He nods, and then he leans forward and puts his head in his hands.
“I’m sure you aren’t in that much trouble,” I say.
“It isn’t that.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
“I keep seeing him with those guys. I keep wondering what he’s doing. Who he’s doing it with. And, as far as he knows, I should be home by now. I can’t believe he hasn’t even texted to see what kind of heinous punishment my mother is inflicting on me.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, Tattoo Boy has nothing on you. Pretty much every guy in that bar shared my opinion.”
“Unfortunately, there’s only one opinion I really care about at the moment.” He peers up at me. “Sorry,” he says.
“No, I get it,” I say. “And what will happen next? He’ll call you tomorrow and tell you all about it and you’ll have to act happy for him? Or will it be more like he calls you and talks about the weather and, like, his plans for the literary journal next year?”
“I don’t even know. This is uncharted territory for us.” He looks across the water, to the bridge looming above us. “But what if he does want to swap stories? What if he tells me all about his awesome night with the college guys and all the college hipster parties he went to after the bar, where they drank beers out of mason jars and spun records or something? Then he’ll ask me what I did and I’ll say that I ruined your night and made you drive me home and then got lectured by my mother before going to sleep.”
“That’s bleak,” I say.
I run through a similar scenario in my head. Lehna and June and Uma telling me all about how wild the party got, where they went afterwards.
There has been an undercurrent of trouble between Lehna and me for a while—the way I’ve been wondering about our friendship, the way small things that I do annoy her. But what just happened was entirely above the surface, and we’re not used to that. The number of real fights we’ve gotten into before this night is a perfect zero. I always took for granted that someday we’d be these bickering old ladies drinking iced tea on a porch somewhere, bragging about our grandkids. I’d think mine were cuter than hers and she’d still sound snarky every time she said my name.
What just happened between us was serious, and the fact that I left makes it so much worse. They count on me to be there. I’m never the difficult one who vetoes the restaurant choice or doesn’t want to go to the movie because I’ve seen it already. There is always something to like on a menu, some new meaning to glean in a film. Maybe the fact that I’m easy is the reason I’m their friend. Now that I’ve let them down, they’ll probably get a ride home with someone who will become Lehna’s new best friend. She’ll be this fearless girl whom Lehna will never have to lecture, who will never disappoint her.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s bleak and it’s unacceptable. We’re going home, but we’re also going to have the time of our lives.”
“How?”
“We’re going to make up an excellent story to tell in the morning.”
He laughs.
“What kind of story?”
“Well, we know what Shelbie’s party is like. And we have a pretty clear idea of what Ryan is up to. So we just have to top those. We can vouch for each other.”
He shoots me a skeptical glance, but I can see he’s considering it.
“All right,” he says. “Fuck it. At this point I’d do just about anything to avoid further humiliation.”
“We need to come up with a scenario that is basically their dream, and then fill in the details,” I say. “Like Lehna loves her San Francisco connections. She’s into the status of it, the fact that Shelbie lives in a Victorian near Dolores Park. That she goes to a private school and spends the summer in France. Like somehow Lehna is more sophisticated by association. So we should make it about something superclassy. Like a party in a mansion in Pacific Heights.”