Let's Pretend This Never Happened (28 page)

We spent a lot of time learning how to swish the glass of wine. I’d always assumed people did that to seem snotty, but apparently the more oxygen you get in your wine, the better it tastes, so when you swish it, it spreads out all over the glass and gets more air. I felt sorry for the girl sitting on my right, because apparently I’m a bit of an overachiever when it comes to wine swishing, and so she was sloshed by me several times. Luckily she was nonchalant and simply licked the excess wine off her arm, a move that I considered both ecological and classy. Our teacher looked displeased, so to distract her I asked why people don’t just serve wine on large dinner plates with straws to suck it up, and she smiled at me stiltedly and told me she’d never been asked that before. I was pretty sure that was code for “I
am totally going to steal your brilliant idea.” I wrote my number down on a napkin and told her that if she started marketing wine plates I wanted a cut. She agreed but then left quickly. I’ll probably never see any of that money.

Five vans of chicks
took off to visit wineries for wine tasting.
Only four came back
.
¹

By my tenth glass of wine
I started to wonder whether there was something wrong with my palate. Everyone else was marking the wine list with notes like “Pleasant finish. Robust spices.” Meanwhile, I was doodling pictures of vampiric cougars. Then I noticed people staring at my doodles, and so I started writing notes next to the wine. Things like “Tastes of NyQuil, but in a good way,” and “This one will get you
all
the way fucked up.” “I can’t feel my feet anymore.” “Did I leave the garage door open? I wonder whether the cat is on fire. I should probably stop drinking now.” Everyone else there had a sophisticated palate. I had one that needed therapy, and possibly an intervention.

The last winery
looked totally haunted, and the ducks outside reminded me to be on the lookout for hungry-looking homeless people, but I was quickly distracted when the servers brought out cheese. I whispered to the girl next to me that I was very excited about having my first cheese tasting because I love cheese. Especially cheddar. I like
all
the flavors of cheddar. Sharp, very sharp, smoky sharp. I’m kind of a connoisseur. But then when the cheese came it was all unrecognizable and THERE WAS NO
CHEDDAR AT ALL. I was all, “WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING CHEESE PLATE IS THIS?” but I just said it in my mind (or possibly only with my indoor voice, because I was tipsy but still trying to be a professional). The servers explained that they were a bunch of “art cheeses” that had won contests, and truthfully they were pretty delish except for one of my pieces, which had a Band-Aid in it. So I said, “There is a Band-Aid on my cheese,” and the Asian girl I’d offended earlier bent forward and was all, “No. That’s bandage-wrapped blah-blah-French-something-blah,” and I thanked her, but I ate only the end farthest from the Band-Aid just in case she was still trying to get even with me for being unintentionally racist. An hour later, though, we bonded when we got lost in a labyrinth of wine casks in a desperate search for the bathroom, and she assured me that she was not trying to make me eat a Band-Aid. The desperate need to get rid of your urine is the great equalizer.

There was apparently
some sort of yellow-jacket infestation at one of the wineries, because they were everywhere. The guy who poured the booze joked that the color of that particular wine came from all of the ground-up yellow jackets that fell into the casks. I peered into my glass suspiciously, and he laughed and explained that he was just kidding, but that yellow jackets really do like the wine, so there might be some in there. I still drank it. “No biggie,” I said casually, “but I’m deathly allergic to yellow jackets, so I’m probably going to die here.” The rest of the table was all, “Really?” and I was like, “No, not really.
But wouldn’t that be a great way to die?
” Everyone at the table was silent, probably because they were busy thinking that yeah, that totally
would
be a great way to die.

Eight p.m.
I was supposed to be downstairs eating barbecue, but I was on the verge of an anxiety attack, so I bowed out, and everyone was very
sweet and understanding. That’s the great thing about hanging out with bloggers. They already know that you’re broken, and most of them are, too, so they just nod and make you go take Xanax and go to bed. They’re very supportive. Also they probably wanted me to leave so they could talk about me.

Laura dropped off a plate of barbecue and some water, and patted my head reassuringly when I told her how bad I felt that I wasn’t down there. “It’s fine, I promise. Everyone totally understands.” She walked out the door but then turned back quickly to say drily, “But you
are
getting kicked off cheer squad.”

I love my friends.

Four a.m.
I woke up and found that Laura was missing. I looked outside for her but I couldn’t see her. I vaguely wondered whether I might have accidentally murdered her in my drug-induced state.
“Probably not, though,”
I thought to myself.
“Not enough blood around. Unless the blood is in the bathroom.”
I decided to look later.

Eight a.m.
LAURA WAS NOT DEAD! She had fallen asleep somewhere else, and came back because she was worried that I’d think she’d gotten kidnapped.

ME
: No, I thought I’d murdered you and then blocked it out.

LAURA
: You thought you’d murdered me?

ME
: Just for a second, but there wasn’t enough blood. But the showerhead was askew, so I thought maybe I’d just washed off all the blood in the shower. But it didn’t seem like me. I’m
terrible
at cleaning up after myself.

LAURA
: Well, it’s nice to know that I’d be the first person you’d want to kill.

ME
: No way. I adore you. You’re the
last
person I’d want to kill. That’s why I figured I’d blocked it out. I figured I’d recover all those memories later with therapy, and then also I’d suddenly remember being abducted and probed by aliens. Which would suck. I’m glad you’re not dead, though, because I’m already fucked up enough without remembering an involuntary probing.

LAURA
: And I guess that whole “murdering your best friend” thing would be a downer too, I suppose.

ME
: That too. Mostly the probing, though.

Ten a.m.:
Yoga in the rain.

We were all doing the downward-dog position and all I could think was,
“For the love of Christ, just don’t let me fart.”
I’d begun to pray to the baby Jesus to deliver me from accidentally passing gas, and then someone else farted. It wasn’t me, but all I could think was that I felt total empathy for her, and also that I really wanted to say, “That was totally not me,” but it probably wouldn’t be appropriate, since we were all supposed to be meditating.

I worked up enough courage
to talk to Maggie and thanked her for inviting me, and then found myself telling her that I’d decided that if anyone there was a mass murderer it was she. She was silent, and I pointed out that I meant that in a good way, because she was the most organized. Then she asked the cook for a cleaver and I got a bit nervous, but turns out it was because she thought it was brilliant and wanted to act out a murder scene. And so we did. . . .

And it was awesome.

The final morning
we all sat around by the pool, wrapped in blankets with mussed hair and no makeup, and I listened to the conversations around me the same way I had in high school, but instead of trying to block them out or sneer at them internally, I smiled and nodded. I forced myself to join in and listen to all the conversations going on around me, rather than hide my head in a book to avoid rejection. And I realized just how awesome girl conversations could be. Random snippets of overheard conversations:

“I’ve never said this to anyone before, but sometimes I think my baby is a real asshole. Is that normal?”

   “Oh, yeah. My baby is a total dick sometimes.”

“You know when you’re in Nepal and there are all these Japanese people around and it’s two a.m. and you’re in a basement and you’re trying to find breakfast and suddenly a magician shows up?”

   “Oh, I know
exactly
what you’re talking about.”

“My dad had anger problems, so his doctor recommended he go to mime school to learn how to deal quietly with his emotions. It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized that everyone doesn’t have this memory of taking mime classes with their angry dad.”

   “I don’t like mimes. I don’t like the fact that they fake a disability.”

   “
Right?
Why stop at mimicking the mute? Where are the clowns pretending to have polio?”

“I once slept with this guy who had an ENORMOUS penis. Like, it was a problem. The condoms wouldn’t even fit. I was so overwhelmed that I accidentally laughed at it. Then it shrunk. He was not pleased.”

   “That should be a comic book.
Penis giganticus
is his superpower, and women laughing at it is his kryptonite.”

“Do you ever get on the subway and think, ‘
Who is that guy in the back? He looks familiar. Did I sleep with him?’
That happens to me all the time.”

   “No. That’s never happened to me.
Whore.
But it
has
happened to me on the bus a lot.”

The final hour:

As we all dragged our luggage out to the waiting vans, I looked with a surprising amount of affection on these women who only days ago I would have immediately dismissed as being snobby or mean, but who all turned out to have backstories and struggles just as damaged or bizarre as my own. Sure, I was the only person there with just one small carry-on and a single pair of shoes. But I was embarrassed to realize that those things that set me apart from other girls had turned from what I’d considered “self-proclaimed badges of honor” into defensive shields that I had used to keep
others out. I’d used those same shields to judge and dismiss people who I suspected had more than me, in the exact same way that
I’d
been judged for having less as a kid.

I tossed my small bag in the van and went back to help my newfound friends with their enormous luggage sets and hanging garment bags, and they smiled in appreciation, shocked that I’d managed to pack for such a long trip using only one small bag. I smiled back in silence and felt a little guilty at their praise. They may have all had suitcases three times as big as mine, but I realized that the emotional baggage I’d brought with me was big enough to put theirs to shame. It was a little lighter, though, now that I was leaving.

I was leaving behind my assumptions that only snobby, rich people liked wine, and that everyone would immediately break into cliques based on who had owned the right kind of underwear. And most important, I was leaving behind the idea I’d been carrying around for years that girls were not to be trusted. Yes, some girls could be complete douche-canoes, but so could some guys (and even some babies, apparently), and I was slowly losing a prejudice that I hadn’t even realized was holding me back. Girls were fine and (until proven to be assholes on an individual basis) were worthy of my trust. Women were great and relatively harmless.

It’s the four a.m. vampire cougars in the woods you really need to be worried about.