Alice drops her face into her hands, but Delilah and Raisin are quickly reaching out, pulling her arms down.
“Spill,” Raisin says, surprisingly invested for someone who has never met Van, Nolan, or even Alice before an hour ago.
Alice shrugs, like the memory of it isn’t setting her guts on fire. “We kissed,” she says.
“And?” Maple asks, breathless.
“Look at her,” Raisin says, grinning. “It was clearly life changing.”
“It…” Alice lets out a breath, and then she tells the truth. “It was.”
Jessica, Maple, and mustache dude scream again, and Delilah has her hands cupped over her mouth, either in excitement or horror.
“So what happened?”
Alice shrugs again. “I was supposed to be with her brother,” she says, trying to keep it simple. “And I couldn’t…I don’t know.” She twists her lips, trying to smile instead of cry. “I lost them both.”
“River!” Raisin yells, and Alice wonders if that’s a code word for something until the server comes hurrying over, and Alice realizes her name must be River. “We need heartbreak shots! Immediately!”
River brings over a tray of shot glasses filled with whatAlice is sure is an incredibly cheap whiskey. Delilah distributes them, and Raisin says, “To gay awakenings!”
“Wait,” Alice says, and everyone pauses, their shot glasses held up to their lips but not tilted back yet. “I mean, sure, gay awakenings are great, but this wasn’t one. I’ve been bi forever.”
Raisin blinks at her, setting their shot down on the table. “Wait, for real?”
Alice nods slowly. Aren’t the kids all supposed to be somewhat gay these days? Why is this weird?
“Okay,” Raisin says slowly. “No offense, but if you’re a, like, relatively young, absolutely chaotic bisexual, why are you dressed like a middle-aged suburban housewife going back to work after catching her husband sleeping with the nanny?”
Jessica and mustache dude both do spit takes. Maple hits Raisin on the arm, and Delilah hisses, “Oh my god, you did not just say that!” but Alice laughs. They’re not wrong.
“Poor?” she offers, still laughing, and Raisin picks their shot glass back up.
“Okay,” Raisin says. “First, we get you drunk enough to forget about this hot-sister situation, and then next week I’m taking you shopping.” They gesture at Alice, and Alice should be offended by how cheerfully critical this brand-new person is, but she’s not. “I think you’re probably hot under there, so poor or not, I can fix this.”
Three hours and one long bus ride later, Alice is still smiling. She did it. She made a friend. A very weird, aggressive friend whose name she honestly doesn’t know, but, whatever. She has Delilah, and the-person-who-is-possibly-named-Raisin, and Isabella and Henry and the kids and the mushrooms, so even without Marie and Babs and Van, she’s going to be okay. Maybe.
Twenty-Two
Almost a week later, on a frigid Wednesday, Alice puts herself to bed at the ripe hour of seven. The high from happy hour had buoyed Alice for a few days, but today sucked. There’s no other way for Alice to describe it. The streets had been slick and icy this morning, and Alice fell on her ass, hard, on her way to the bus stop. Then the bus was late and impossibly slow, so when she got to work at seven-twenty instead of sevena.m., her butt still smarting painfully, she wasn’t really in the mood to get reamed out by the ubiquitous Mr. Brown. But of course, that didn’t matter, and she had to stand there, shivering, her pants still wet from the ice, while he yelled at her for a good five minutes.
Babs called and Marie texted again, which made her feel so guilty and anxious that she cried in the bathroom for six of her ten allotted minutes of break. She forgot her lunch at home and it was too icy to walk down to the coffee shop, so she just starved and tried not to think about bao and mint tea and stolen kisses, and then her bus home slid down a hill and Alicefound herself honestly saying the rosary while the lady behind her screamed and the person across the aisle threw up all over himself.
And of course she fell again, twice, on her walk back to her apartment, and the chicken breast she’d splurged on last time she went grocery shopping had gone bad even though it was supposed to be fine until tomorrow. It was the kind of night where she wanted to give up, to order a pizza and climb into bed with her laptop and fuzzy socks and watchParks and Recagain from the beginning until she fell asleep to the soothing sounds of Leslie Knope, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t ask some poor kid working for a pizza place to risk their life to drive food to her, not now that it was dark—god, it gets dark so fucking early in the winter—so she found a depressing old can of chicken soup to heat up. Too messy to eat in bed, somehow both flavorless and too salty, andParks and Recis behind a new paywall, and her fuzzy socks are in the laundry.
So now Alice is in bed at seven, sans pizza or socks or Leslie Knope, and she’s doing what she’s not supposed to.
She’s put on her Altman Christmas pajamas and is scrolling through Marie’s social media. She knows she has absolutely no right to be doing this with all of Marie’s unanswered texts piling up, but hey. What’s a little self-inflicted torture when you’re already feeling like complete and utter shit?
She misses Marie with a deep throbbing ache, and it only gets worse with each picture and video she sees. Alice isn’t sure when the semester starts down in Corvallis, but Marie’s still posting a lot of the family. A picture of her and Frank makes Alice’s heart seize up, and she lets out a wet laugh that’s almost a sob at the video of Marie trying to teach Aunt Sheila some choreography. There’s a time lapse of them making a pie, andwhen Alice catches sight of someone wearing the pink “I Like Big Buns” apron, the tears start rolling down her face.
Great. Crying over a novelty apron. This isn’t a new low or anything.
Videos of Marie with Nolan hurt in a different way, and then there’s a whole series of Marie with other kids her age, probably her high school friends. They’re singing and dancing and joking around, and Alice watches them over and over and lets herself be miserable.
Alice has always thought of herself as a good person beset by bad circumstances. She would have been a good student if she hadn’t been so busy taking care of her dad. She would donate to charity if she had enough money, she’d return a wallet if she found one on the bus. She would be a generous partner if she met the right someone. But this whole thing with Nolan and Van—lying to the family, but especially lying to Nolan about himself—it’s making her wonder if she’s actually a bad person, a person who, at her core, is terribly selfish. A person her parents would be ashamed of.
She tried to steal a man’s life, to take his mom and aunt and little sister for her own. She fell for his other sister and kissed her before curling up under his Snuggie. She took advantage of the family’s care and hospitality, ate their food and wore their pajamas and soaked up their affection, gave nothing back but lies, and for what? A couple hugs and some Christmas cookies? A hot boyfriend and the love of a parent?
