Fingerprints of You (18 page)

Emmy rolled over around two in the afternoon, checked the clock, and announced, “We are the laziest freaking vacationers
ever
,” before reaching for the glass of water on the nightstand. “Jesus, what happened? My breath tastes like shit.” She took a long gulp and flipped onto her back to look at the ceiling tiles shadowed with stains. “Seriously. It’s like a little man climbed into my mouth while I was sleeping and took a dump. God,” she said, “gross.”

“I met my dad,” I told her, “and you met a boy with a blue Vespa,” and she smiled at the thought of Aiden, which I didn’t blame her for. “But then you fell asleep, so I went to breakfast with the boy before I came to bed.”

“Big night,” she said, mulling it over. “No wonder we’re so tired.”

I’d been awake for an hour or so trying to decide how to tell Emmy I didn’t have a bus ticket back for Sunday like she did. It was time. It was past time, really, and I felt terrible about planning to stick her on a Greyhound by herself even though I knew she would have done the same to me if we’d been in opposite places, if it’d been the other way around. I knew Emmy would forgive me, but it didn’t make me feel any better when I imagined her in those crappy leather seats, using the liquid hand sanitizer, fending off the crazies on her own while she traveled back to West Virginia. But she would love me anyway, even after I told her I wasn’t going back when she was. It’s a wondrous and rare thing to have a friend who knows about the skeletons—the tattoo shops and the wreckage of your family—and who likes you anyway. Emmy was my first, and I was feeling pretty awful about lying to her for that long.

“I want to hear about Ryan, but I won’t be able to
concentrate until I feel less filthy,” she said, and then she was in the bathroom taking a shower.

Afterward, I threw on some jeans, and we left for a little café near Van Ness Avenue, where we stopped for breakfast.

“It’s New Year’s Eve, you know.” I smeared cream cheese across my everything bagel and watched a woman in a blue cocktail dress and sweatpants push a grocery cart down the sidewalk. It was drizzling again, and I wondered if she was cold in those high heels and silk spaghetti straps.

“New Year’s is overrated,” Emmy said irritably, which was true, but I could tell she was just pissed about missing breakfast with Aiden, and about being hungover.

“Whatever, Buzz Kill,” I said. “You know you’re excited to spend New Year’s in a city. A real city, Emmy. Come on, don’t be an ass.”

“It’s inevitably disappointing, and you know it.” She dunked her spoon into a cup of yogurt topped with perfect red strawberries. “New Year’s is never as good as you want it to be. Over. Rated.”

“Not necessarily, not always.” I was determined to be optimistic. I would pull her from her funk and refuse to let her waste a whole day sulking. “There’s a party if we want to go,” I told her when I squished the top and the bottom of the bagel together, the cream cheese oozing out the sides just how I liked it. “Aiden told me about a music thing, something at the Regency. He said it’s a pretty great event.”

But Emmy didn’t want to talk about Aiden anymore and changed the subject to Ryan, so I told her about the house and about Ryan thinking I wanted money, about Cassie walking me out and taking my phone number.

“It all happened really fast,” I said, leaving out the part about the sweating and the room spinning, about me crying on the couch. “We didn’t talk all that much. Mostly I just told him who I was, and then they argued for a while. I also told him about the baby, but I left after that.”

“Sounds like it could have been worse,” she said right before she asked if it was all right with me if we didn’t talk about our dads for the rest of the day, which I thought was fair enough.

So we acted like we hadn’t planned to go to Muir Woods that morning and spent the day window shopping in Union Square and walking around the city instead. We took a trolley ride downtown, then hiked up the hills of North Beach to see Coit Tower before we grabbed a bus out to Baker Beach to watch the sunset. Eventually we headed down to the water at Fisherman’s Wharf, where we ate sourdough bread bowls filled with clam chowder for dinner. But it was only when we made it back to our hotel in the Mission that we were allowed to talk about New Year’s again, because there under the door Aiden had left an envelope with two tickets to Anon Salon’s New Year’s festival.

The tickets read
A COSTUMED ART & MUSIC SPECTACLE
and listed three bands Emmy and I had never heard of. I rubbed my thumb over the silver letters, printed on the pink and aqua paisley design. We stood in the doorway of the room and read the note from Aiden: “Meet me at 11:00 in line.” A wave rolled from one side of my stomach to the other as I thought of seeing Aiden again.

And Emmy must have been feeling good by then too, because she shrugged and said, “I’m in if you’re in, boss.”

That night we scoured through our suitcases to see if we could find anything New Year’s Eve–worthy to wear.

“I miss being skinny,” I told Emmy while we tried on clothes in the hotel.

Everything felt small, my body shoved and squished into cotton that didn’t stretch enough. I missed being able to get away with not wearing a bra, and the perfect way my jeans had hugged my hipbones just months earlier. Emmy tried to talk me into wearing a silver sequined tube top she’d brought in case we went out to a club, but I was having a hard time imagining spending the night stuffed into the tiny piece of stretchy fabric.

“You look hot,” she said, and she moved behind my back and adjusted the back hem of the sequins before beginning to comb through the knots of my hair. “Your boobs look amazing.”

“I look bloated is what I look.” I eyed myself in the mirror in front of us, the silver fabric stretched tight over my curves. “Like a sausage in sequins,” I said.

“Please. It’s just a little belly pooch. If I didn’t know what you normally looked like, I wouldn’t even notice.” She tugged the hairbrush gently. “You look hot,” she repeated, and she parted my hair down the middle before twisting each half into a tight little bun at the base of my neck. “The only place you’re showing is your boobs and that teeny tiny belly bump. It’s beautiful, really,” she said, and our eyes met in the reflection. She smiled. “I like running away with you, Lemon Raine. You know that?” but then the phone rang, and the moment was lost as I thought of Emmy’s dad, instantly thought of bad news, of her mom calling to tell us something loud and crashing.

And I guessed Emmy was thinking the same thing, because she dropped the hairbrush on the floor and scrambled to find the phone.

She sighed and said, “Thank God, it’s Dylan,” when she grabbed it from under the bed and flipped open the cell. She sank to the floor, smiling when she heard his voice on the other end. “Happy New Year’s, baby,” she said as she pulled her legs in crisscrossed. She began twirling her hair with her fingers, as if he could see her in her underwear and tank top all the way from West Virginia.

I looked at the clock and realized it was after midnight where Dylan was. It was New Year’s for Stella and Simon three time zones ahead, too. I slipped into the bathroom to do my makeup and found Emmy’s gold eye shadow in her toiletry bag. I carefully swept it across my lids and decided to be brave and wear the tube top and black mini stretch skirt. I told myself she was right, that I looked good with flushed cheeks and dewy skin, with full perky breasts I never had before the pregnancy. It wasn’t so bad once I had on some makeup and black knee-high boots. I checked my nose ring, put matching silver studs into my ears, and vowed to learn from Emmy, to practice her self-confidence and steal from her the traits I wanted for myself.

From the other room I heard Emmy whispering before she broke into laughter, and I felt good about being in California and about meeting Aiden later at the concert. Last year’s New Year’s was a disaster, an evening that ended with Stella on her knees puking in the hall bathroom, the splash of liquid on liquid as I held her hair back and looked away.

Molly-Warner had watched us from the doorway, said, “Smells like pineapple,” and rolled her eyes.

But I knew it was pomegranate martinis, Stella’s drink of choice that winter, and I also knew the man in the living room in the sports coat was an insurance salesman my mother met when he went to J.C. Penney to buy a pair of earrings for his wife for Christmas. Stella helped him pick them out during her shift: white-gold dangles that shimmered from Stella’s ears when her head jerked forward as she vomited again.

“I’m sorry,” Stella mumbled between heaves. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, and I realized she’d begun to cry.

I’d never seen her that drunk before, and I’d wondered if she’d remember it in the morning, or if all that booze flooding her body would wash out her memories during the night and she’d wake up guilt free. I wondered if she’d be embarrassed or if the hours of sleep would rinse away the humility.

“How can a woman that small be filled with so much stuff?” Molly-Warner said and headed for the kitchen as I used my fingers to pull Stella’s hair tighter.

I could tell she was sleeping then by the weight of her head, the final spew having kicked her out of consciousness. It was the month of Pine-Needle Green, and she was spilling out of a jade-colored minidress that hugged her curves, while Molly-Warner stood at the counter eating chips and salsa, and the married man sat on the couch in the living room looking nervous. I caught him watching me.

“Go,” I mouthed, and he did, shutting the door carefully behind him.

And then I plucked the earring from Stella’s left earlobe and watched it hit the water, bobbing in the filmy bile before I moved her to the floor and left her slumped and sleeping against the bathroom wall. I flushed.

As I looked at myself in the mirror in San Francisco, a
million miles from Stella, I knew this New Year’s would be nothing like last year’s.

The Regency Center, a massive rectangular building set on the corner of Van Ness and Sutter, was lit up and glowing when we parked in front in the taxi and dug in our coat pockets to pay the driver. The first floor was made of oatmeal-colored stone, and we looked up at the rows of huge arched windows and white crown molding, all bright and shining gold. The eaves atop the building were intricately sculpted into complicated shapes and designs.

“This is amazing,” I said as we got out of the taxi and joined the line of people stretched around the corner and down the street.

Most of the crowd was masked or winged or adorned with sequined pants, furry leg warmers, feathered headbands, or intricate jewelry. People poured out of cabs, and we found ourselves in line behind a tall woman in white leather pants and a blue tank leotard. A sparkly scene of jellyfish and seaweed had been stenciled on her arms and chest, and small plastic octopuses and glittering sea creatures were scattered throughout her hair, a teased nest of long blond curls. I heard her say she was freezing, and the man standing next to her offered the feather boa wrapped around his neck.

“Now,
she’s
got great boobs,” Emmy whispered, and she slid her hand into mine and squeezed, sensing my insecurity, maybe, sensing my hesitation.

One girl had tied red balloons to the ends of her pigtails, the helium pulling her hair into the air as if her head might float away. Another dressed as a flamingo in a bright cotton-candy-colored miniskirt with black fishnet tights underneath. Her hair was dreadlocked into short tubes and spray painted
Pepto-Bismol pink with black stripes, her stomach bare and muscular and camouflaged under paint designed to look like feathers. Men wore dresses or cowboy chaps and leather boots, furry vests and sunglasses in the shapes of fish, belts that worked as bottle openers and bright blue sweatbands around their heads. Camera flashes sparked and people yelled, and I smelled pot and booze and cherry-flavored lip gloss, sweat and cigarettes and spray paint. I couldn’t imagine how Stella had left this city behind.