She shakes her head, gathers up all of her hair like she’s going to put it in a ponytail, then drops it again. It’s barely long enough to drape over her shoulders. “We weren’t, but maybe someday? Probably. Not anymore, obviously.”
Thus begins my campaign for Biggest Asshole of the Night. Poor Ellie tried to save my evening, and now I’m turning hers into a major downer. “Well, that’s the business major’s loss,” I say, lifting my cup in the air. “Because you’ve really glowed up since high school.”
Her laugh stays trapped behind closed lips, but those lips quirk back up to a smile, and I like knowing I’m responsible for it. “Is it bad if I say you look exactly the same?”
“Sort of. But I deserve it.” I let the ice hit my teeth as I down the last of my drink. She’s right. I dabbled in box dye a few times in middle school and cut my hair stereotypically short when I first came out, but once I grew out my side bangs and committed to an eyebrow shape, I was a fully evolved Murphy by age sixteen. I wave down the bartender, shaking my empty cup and holding two fingers in the air. He nods, and moments later, we have a fresh set of vodka sodas.
“Wait. I got it.” Ellie thumps her palm on the bar, spooking the couple next to her. Not that she realizes. “On Miss Carlisle’s desk. Do you remember if she usually had a Big Gulp?”
“You’re still on this?”
“Just try to remember,” she pleads. “Did she?”
I scrunch my eyes closed, catapulting myself back into what I thought was a dead conversation about a memory I smoked out. I try to place Ellie in that history classroom, picturing her face at one of the carefully arranged pods of desks. I remember the terrible blue carpet, permanently coated in eraser shavings. The big pull-down map. Miss Carlisle’s grating nasal voice and, as mentioned, her stringy bangs. And on her desk, next to a tall stack of ungraded papers…yup. A Big Gulp.
“I think so,” I finally say.
“If she did, you definitely had her sixth period with me,” Ellie says. “She’d always go to the 7-Eleven across the street during fifth-hour lunch.” She speaks so matter of factly, like she’s reading from the actual U.S. History textbook.
I open one eye, suspicious. “How do you remember that?”
“How do you forget?”
Before I can reply, a triple tap on my shoulder interrupts us. When I turn around, I’m nose to nose with one of the girls from the bathroom line, offering up her phone. “Would you mind taking a picture of us real quick?” she asks, gesturing behind her to her gaggle of gal pals.
“Yeah, no problem.” I take the phone, and she scampers back to the rest of her group, finding her place in a pose that looks too good not to have been rehearsed. One girl pinches her straw and sips her drink while another laughs out loud despite no one saying anything funny. I snap half a dozen pictures from slightly different angles before passing the phone back.
“Thanks so much,” the group’s representative says, then spots Ellie over my shoulder and wags a finger between her and me. “Do you want one of you two?”
“Sure,” Ellie says, thrusting her phone forward. “Why not?”
Our photographer steps back to set up her angles while I frantically try to remember if I’ve ever smiled for a picture without looking like a serial killer. Taking notes from the expert modeling work I just witnessed, I fake a laugh, and Ellie rests her head on my shoulder, her blonde hair falling into my face just enough to tickle my lips.
“So cute.” Our photographer returns Ellie’s phone with a smile. “Let me know if you want me to take more.”
“I’m sure these are perfect,” Ellie insists. “Thanks so much.”
As the amateur models turn their attention to another round of drinks, Ellie practically throws her phone at me. “Put your number in so I can send it to you.”
I do as I’m told, but when three new photo messages appear on my phone from an unknown number, I instantly regret agreeing to a picture in the first place. All three are nearly identical, and in all of them, I look absolutely unhinged, like I’m trying to bite off a lock of Ellie’s hair.
“We’re so cute,” she says, and suddenly I don’t care that I look like a hair-eating gremlin. Ellie thinks we’re cute. So cute, in fact, that she zooms in on the shot and sets it as my contact photo.
I cringe at the close-up. “Not my best look.”
“I like it,” Ellie says. “It’s proof that we had a fun night.”
“Did we?” I pause, weighing the events of the evening with my first and final attempt at a not-so-candid photo. “I guess we did.”
“And it’s not over,” she reminds me, double-checking thetime on her phone before pocketing it. “It’s not even eleven. Want to hit one more bar?”
There’s a moment between us, a split second of stillness in an otherwise noisy crowd. For a sliver of a fraction of a second, all that’s in this bar is the squint of her eyes and the curl of her lips, and me, drinking her in, deciphering the endless parade of signals she’s been sending. All I can see are hundreds of spinning green flags.
“Sure,” I say, “let’s do it.”
She slams her cup down on the bar top definitively. “Perfect. Just lemme grab my coat and say goodbye to the art kids.”
My mental color guard momentarily trades their green flags for yellow ones, signaling for the parade to slow down. I forgot she didn’t come here alone. “You sure it’s okay to ditch your friends?”
