Never be my Always

If there were a World Record for crying at the club, I think Jenna must have shattered it. She’s sobbed in every bar, karaoke room, and mosh pit in West Los Angeles, which would be impressive if it weren't so sad. What is impressive is Marie’s seemingly unending patience. Mine has long since run out.

Jenna stares at her phone in anguish, the text message glares at her from behind her hopelessly cracked screen. I can't keep track of which man in Jenna’s revolving door of boyfriends and situationships has dumped her this time, but Marie is dutifully dabbing at her ruined mascara and rubbing soothing circles on Jenna's back. Like always.

“I don’t understand why this keeps happening,” Jenna wails, throwing herself into Marie’s arms. She continues her ministrations, shushing her as if she could be heard above the pulsing baseline that threatened to break down the bathroom door.

The purple neon lights make the already tiny room feel even smaller— I am pressed up against the toilet already in an attempt to give Marie the space to work her crazy magic. She should be a certified crisis responder at this point since she’s always talking Jenna off a ledge.

“Oh honey, he doesn't know what he's missing!” Marie looks at me and I nod emphatically to show support even though I told her that we shouldn't have invited Jenna in the first place. Because I knew this would happen. But she and Jenna have been best friends since birth or so I’m told, and I’m just some friend Marie made in college who is as disposable as the men in Jenna’s life. They are a duo and I am just their temporary third wheel.

“Stephen just dumped me, over text! Like it all meant nothing!”

Oh, that’s right. Stephen.

“He’s an asshole, Jen, forget him,” I say, trying to move things along. She is in the feeling stage and not the rebounding stage of her post-breakup grief. The quicker she moves on, the quicker we’ll get back out there. God— I want to be out there dancing. Tipping back shots and dancing with anyone interesting, falling into the sea of drunken bliss and just letting myself drown… It all sounds better than watching Marie scrape Jenna’s soggy cardboard self off of the bathroom floor.

Jenna’s mascara streaks down her cheeks and her smokey eye is an expressionist painting that frames her puffy, red eyes. Behind her, Marie’s rhinestones are still holding strong to the corners of her eyes, looking perfect. Like always.

Some girls pound on the door, yelling something indecipherable. Marie takes that as her cue to wrap things up.

“Yeah, honey, forget him. Stephen’s a jerk anyway! You just need to get back out there and show him what he’s missing, girl.”

Jenna nods as if Marie has just invented the concept of a rebound. She untangles herself from Marie’s arms, still sniffling, still letting those fat hot tears roll down her cheeks. She brushes her bangs out of her face and clutches the sink like it’s a lifeline. She stares at herself in the mirror.

“God— I’m a mess, huh?” She chokes out something between a laugh and a sob.

“No, girl!” “Jen, of course not”

Our protests flow out simultaneously, almost instinctively, because even as much as I hate Jenna’s antics, I could never let her think she’s ugly.

Jenna vainly dabs at her eyeshadow and tries to get it back into shape.

“Here,” Marie says, “let me.” She makes a makeup wipe and her trusty pocket pallet of eyeshadow appear from her bedazzled clutch as if by magic. I guess she suspected we’d have another Jenna incident on our hands, too. Jenna perches herself up on the counter. Marie leans in close, pressing Jenna’s back into the mirror.

I blink and look away. Suddenly the graffiti on the bathroom wall is the most interesting thing in the world. With the precision of a drunk surgeon, she fixes the smokey eye and reverts Jenna back to her former clubbing glory. The only evidence of the breakup is the fading redness in her eyes and the memory of the text that was probably branded on her frontal lobe.

“There you go, honey,” Marie says, standing back to behold her handiwork. “You look perfect.”

The drunk girls hammer at the door furiously almost perfectly in time with the base. Marie sprays a cloud of perfume over the three of us that might as well have been mustard gas. We cough and sputter out of the tiny bathroom like it's a clown car, going straight past an angry line of girls and to the bar.

It’s the busiest time of the night. The bar is packed with the same crowd of bottle blondes and aspiring actors that are typical of L.A. The bartenders are swamped but Marie knows the shift manager well enough to get us served first, but not free drinks much to Jenna's dismay.

-

“You should fuck him, Marie, then that man would set us up!” Jenna had said one night when we were all perched on the couch, halfway through our second bottle of store brand wine. Marie laughed in the way that she does when she doesn't quite know what to say or think.

“I'd rather just pay for my drinks, honey, I don't want to ruin something good. Besides, he’s not really my type.”

“What do you mean! He's literally always looking at you, right?” Jenna topped off my glass with another generous pour.

“Yeah Marie, he's always giving you the hubba hubba eyes.”

“The what?”

“Better known as ‘fuck me eyes.’ I'm sure you're familiar.”

She lobbed a decorative pillow at my head and I laughed even though it hit me. She swirled her wine, victoriously.

“If anyone knows ‘fuck me eyes,’ it's Jenna.” Marie said.

“Hey now, don't bring me into this!”

Marie rolled her eyes. “I'll leave you out of this if you can assure me that you wouldn't screw that man for free drinks.”

Jenna curled her legs up onto the couch and took a sip of her wine. “You don't get it, girl. I'd do it for free.”

-

Marie comes back with a tray topped with six tequila shots and a chaser of salt and lime slices— Jenna’s Breakup Cure. We each down two of them and I relish the burn of the alcohol in my throat and the salt on my tongue. This is what a night out is supposed to be.

I can't hear what Jenna and Marie are saying over the DJ’s EDM mix so I decide to go dance. The whole room is pulsing, pounding with the music as people press against one another on the dance floor. There is a fog machine somewhere that pumps the room with smoke so that the only indication that people are smoking is the occasional flicker of lighters randomly in the crowd.

I work my way into the dense, beating heart of the room. I’m feeling the shots now— the corners of the room are delightfully fuzzy and I don’t feel so mad at Jenna anymore. I’m in a sea of neon glitter and for once I feel comfortable in my skin even though the whole room is sticky and heavy.

A girl knocks into me, her drink nearly sloshing over the side of the cup. Maybe she yells out a “sorry” but it’s lost in the crowd. She looks drunk and like it isn’t her first time almost spilling her drink tonight. She offers me a sip as a nonverbal apology and I can’t even taste it when I try it.

I take her hand and we dance, closer than I’ve let myself in a while. Her silver crop top shines with the same bedazzled rhinestones as Marie’s magic clutch. I stop thinking and just let myself drink it all in.

A guy wearing a cowboy hat tries to get the girl to dance with him but she shoves him off and keeps dancing with me. It feels nice to not be second choice. For a moment the girl’s face breaks through the drink-induced fog and I see— shit.

She has hubba hubba eyes. For me.

Suddenly I become conscious of how close we are and how long it’s been since I’d seen Marie. I crane my neck to see but they aren’t by the bar anymore. I break away, and the girl looks disappointed but the night isn’t over and she’s gorgeous so I know she’ll find someone else.

My instinct is to check the bathroom in case Jenna’s broken down again, but I see her leaned up against the wall. She looks like a baby deer trying to walk for the first time, her legs locking up and going slack strangely as she tries to keep herself upright. They must have had more drinks since I’d left because damn, Jenna’s a wreck.

“Jen, where’s Marie.” It’s quieter here, away from the speakers, but she doesn’t seem to hear me. It’s worse than I thought. I try to sober up, realizing that I’ll probably need to be damage control soon.

I touch her arm, “Where’s Marie.”

“She’s, uh,” Jenna looks like she is learning to speak, “She’s looking for you.”

Oh God. I check my phone and see four missed calls and several texts with varying degrees of urgency. The most recent one was sent six minutes ago: Jenna’s fucked, WYA???

I try to return her call but it goes straight to voicemail. I take a deep breath, trying to clear my head. I bring fully-drunk Jenna a half-drunk cup of water that I found abandoned at a nearby table and tell her to drink it.

“Stay put, I’m going to find Marie.” I don’t know if Jenna hears me but I don’t think she could go anywhere if she tried.

“Wait, wait” she says, the words sound heavy, “wait.”

“What?”

"Don’t hate me,” Jenna slurs. I barely recognize them as words but unfortunately, I’m fluent in drunk Jen-ese. “It’s not my fault.”

“What isn’t?”

“Marie doesn’t like you.” I stare at her and try to pull her apart with my eyes. What’s she talking about? Marie is my friend, she wouldn’t keep inviting me out if she didn’t like me. Jenna seems to realize that it didn’t come out how it was supposed to.

“She doesn’t—” her mind is working overtime to piece a sentence together, she puts her hands in mine like it is easier to give me her meaning than say it aloud. “She doesn’t hubba hubba you.”

Oh. The room gets hotter as I realize what she is saying.

I never told her that I liked Marie. I never told anyone. Jenna was never supposed to know that I fell in love with Marie the moment I saw her sitting on the campus green with her hair in that funky blue bandana. She wasn’t supposed to know that I hung around her just to learn what books she liked, or what type of coffee, just so I could surprise her. Jenna wasn’t supposed to know that I can’t stop loathing her for being closer to Marie, or that every time they’re close I have to swallow my jealousy like a pill. Jenna wasn’t supposed to know. And neither was Marie.

“Don’t tell her,” I beg, not knowing what else to say. She nods her head reassuringly and relief washes over me like a cooling wave.

I know it’s not her fault that Marie is enamored with her instead of me. I know I can’t blame her, or Marie, or even myself, no matter how much I’d like to. No matter how painful it is to acknowledge that sometimes things just happen, and they suck, and it’s nobody’s fault at all.

“I don’t hate you, Jen.”

She puts her head on my shoulder and I rest my head on hers, too.

“There you are!” Marie bursts through from the dancefloor and immediately begins fussing over Jenna, checking her up and down and all over. Someone calls an Uber and when it finally comes, Marie and I take Jenna, arm in arm, and help her limp past the dancefloor, the bar, and the bathroom, out into the cool air of the night. We ride home, saying nothing, feeling everything, and wishing things were a little bit different. Like always.