It wasn’t even really my style, but I never took it off because I loved her, and the locket was all of her that was left. He opened it and pretended to read. “Once there was a girl named Sasha who was the greeeatest in all the land,” he said. Our faces were so close I could feel his warm breath on my lips. He stayed there, holding the necklace, then looked up at me. He mumbled something and I had to ask him to repeat himself. “I love you so much,” is what he said.
We said that sometimes as friends, so it’s not like that was particularly weird or anything. But there was something about the way he was staring at me that was not the usual way at all. It made me feel so good, it wasn’t even safe. Feeling that good could kill a person.
He let go of the necklace, then reached up like he was going to touch my face. I had wanted this for a very long time at that point. I had wanted it for so long and so badly that for just a second I let myself imagine it was actually happening in the real and normal way. But his eyes were all wrong, and I noticed then the prescription bottle on the windowsill. The top was off.
“I think you should get some rest,” I said. He nodded and lay down. I flapped his blankets out over him, then sat on the floor next to his bed. I poked him every couple minutes to make sure he was only sleeping and not unconscious.
Those fucking pills.
Xavier’s parents were good people, but they were also very serious and uncomfortable with emotions and had no clue what to do when Xavier’s girlfriend dumped him and he basically stopped leaving his room. So they sent him to their regular family doctor, who whipped out a prescription pad.
“I know brain drugs can help people, and that’s great. But maybe you should see an actual shrink or something, too,” is what I said when he first told me about the doctor. “Like a person who will, y’know, discuss some stuff ?”
“Nope, don’t need to,” he’d said. “These will fix me right up.” He shook his pill bottles like maracas.
There were two kinds of pills: pink sticks to take “as needed” that made Xavier loopy and forgetful, and little white oval sleeping pills.
I’d put my hand on his shoulder, then made my voice all dramatic, like I was in a cheesy TV movie. “There’s not a pill for a broken heart, Xavier,” I’d said. Because sometimes pretending you’re making a joke is the only way to say the thing you actually mean.
“Ah,” said Xavier. He had half-smiled, which was the most he smiled back then. “But apparently there is.”
I sat with him, waking him up every few minutes, thinking about how if he’d meant that I-love-you in the way it had sounded, it would change everything. How I wanted it to change everything.
But in the morning, Xavier had had no memory of the night before. The pills plus alcohol had switched his brain right off. He asked me what had happened. I told him he’d just seemed drunk, so I tucked him in and that was it.
Xavier hadn’t been convinced. He asked me again and again, “Are you sure I didn’t do anything terrible? Are you positive?”
“Well, if you really want to know, you can look at the video I put up on YouTube,” I’d said finally. “We’re getting soooooo many hits.” And only then did he drop it.
After that he decided to stop taking the pills, to drink less. He started getting out of bed more. He went running once even. It was a turning point and he moved past it. I was happy for him. Relieved, obviously.
But still I couldn’t stop thinking about that night. I wanted desperately to believe it had meant more than I knew it did. I googled “blackouts,” looking for evidence that in a blacked-out state people reveal only the true truth of themselves. But I knew I wouldn’t find any.
And I didn’t.
The train sped on. We passed the bottle back and forth. By the time we got to our stop, it was half empty.
“Now be a normal person for a while,” I said, playing our game.
“Don’t ask me to do the impossible,” said Xavier. He took my hand as we got off the train.
And I gave myself an instruction then, too: Tell him by the end of the night. Tell him no matter what.
I closed my eyes and breathed in, breathed out, and looked up at the moon. His hand was warm in mine, and the alcohol was warm in my belly.
I knew that night was going to change everything.
And it did, is the thing. It did.
Just not in ways I ever could have imagined.
We walked toward the back of Sloe Joe’s Tavern. Technically you were supposed to be twenty-one to go there at all, but nobody ever checked or cared.
It was hot and crowded and loud, like usual, with dim lights and red walls and a huge falling-apart crystal chandelier hanging over the dance floor. There was a rumor the chandelier was left over from when Sloe Joe’s had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. There was another rumor that if you sat on the couch by the door, you’d catch crabs.
I loved everything about the place, especially the way all that sound drowned out all the thoughts in my head, rattled them around until I couldn’t even think them, and then there was nothing but the heat and the stench of sweat and the feeling of music thumping inside me, beating in my chest like a heart.
It felt good to be back there with Xavier. This place used to be ours. Back when we first became friends, we’d come here most weekends, back when weekends were ours, too.
Then he started dating Ivy and that changed. But I kept coming by myself after that. I liked going places alone. (Xavier was maybe the first and only person whose company I preferred to no one’s.) I liked to be anonymous and watch people. I liked that when you were surrounded by people you didn’t know, you could do and say whatever you wanted, and nothing counted.
I had a game, and the game was called Kiss a Stranger. The way you play is you look at a stranger and try to imagine what kissing them might be like.
And then you go and find out if you’re right.
I liked the feeling of a mouth on my mouth. I liked that you could have an intense time with someone, crushed together in the dark, then let them go and never think about them again. Xavier said he was both baffled by and jealous of my ability to do that, because he was completely the opposite. “There are rocks inside the middle of you,” he’d told me. He meant it as a compliment.
But in that moment with Xavier, I wasn’t thinking about all of that. I was trying not to think of anything at all. There was a band onstage, a dozen people playing every instrument at once. And it was time to dance.
“Dance like no one’s watching!!” I shouted at him, which was a joke we had about that corny saying you find on inspirational-quotes websites, superimposed over a picture of the ocean or whatever. Our joke was that it really meant dance while also picking people’s pockets, because when no one is watching is the best time to be a thief. The game always progressed from there. Dance like everyone’s asleep! Dance like this room is full of ghosts! Dance like you just landed on Earth from space and what the hell is gravity even??!!
But the thing was people always watched Xavier when he danced. It was something about the tallness, the broad shoulders, the sheer size of him, combined with the way he moved, rhythmic and graceful and lost in the moment entirely. In regular life he tried to make himself smaller, to take up less space, uncomfortable being a sweet introvert in the body of a big manly jock. But when he danced he seemed more sure of himself than he ever did in any other context. He seemed free.
Xavier bumped up against me and grinned that grin that he did when he was just a little bit drunk. The lights flashed. Xavier took the whisky from his bag.
Was it time to tell him? Even through all that alcohol