Intoxicating
Fuck. Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck. FUCK!! Who the fuck was that?!
There is no word to describe the speed with which I launched myself down the stairs in front of the brownstone.
80th, so, what, Upper West? Do I even know anyone who lives around here? What the fuck?
My hands were shaking, and my left shoe still wasn’t on right. I felt like death. My head pounded, and if I didn’t have an eggs benedict and a mimosa in about four minutes I was going to succumb to the nausea.
I turned down Broadway and walked as fast as I could without running, each step threatened to eject the toxic reaction brewing in my stomach. The sun was a weapon trained on my face, but if it got even a degree colder, I was going to fucking punch someone. I reached the stoplight on 82nd.
82nd!? Fuck! I went the wrong fucking way. Goddammit if I need to get to Brooklyn from up here I need to take the… the 1, the A? the …Uber, bitch you need an Uber.
Don’t let it be dead. Don’t let it be dead. Don’t let it be dead. Please God please.
“YES! HAHA twenty-four fucking percent BITCH!!”
Yeah, if I didn’t already look like a psychopath, I’m sure I did now. The woman next to me reached down to cover her kid’s ears and gave me that rich lady disapproving stare. I gave her the finger; she can suck my dick. I fixed my shoe and caught my reflection in the window of a Barnes & Noble. Nothing looked right.
I fucking hate the way I look.
In the reflection I caught some rando beelining across the street, gawking at me all the way. His eye caught my eye in the reflection and he took that as his cue to speak.
“Hi! Sorry, I just, I saw you from across the street and I wanted to tell you that you are just so beautiful. Could I have your instagram?”
Bitch, what? The street is like four fucking lanes with a goddamn garden in the middle.
The toothpick-lookin’ motherfucker already had his damn phone open to the app and was shoving it into my face. Can you not see that I am FUCKING BUSY??
“Hahaha, OMG thaaanksss. Yea here…” Please go the fuck away.
“Thank you. When I saw you, I just…I knew I had to meet you.” He paused, not to let me talk, but to observe me.
“Nice to meet you… Rita.” I hated the way he read my name off my Instagram, as if he had just won something. He turned and walked back across the street without so much as introducing himself.
Where the fuck is this Uber? Two minutes away.
Sabrina, Sab, Sabby…Ragdaddy Ann… The Facetime call rang twice.
“OMG, hey bitch!We missed you!” It was Sabrina, she was holding a mimosa.
“We’re getting mimosas! Where’d she go?” Veronica’s voice came in slightly muffled.
“Veronica wants to know where you went,” Sabrina repeated.
“I can hear her. Listen I’m up in like Upper West, I’m getting an Uber, where are you guys at?”
“Upper west? How’d she end up there?” Veronica asked Sabrina. Sabrina looked toward her and shrugged.
“How’d you end up there?” Sabrina asked. I hate them.
“I don’t know, I’m getting an Uber, where are you guys at?” My initial panic and fear began to shift into irritability.
“She must’ve hooked up, isn’t Upper West like an hour from here? Tell her we’re about to leave.”
“We’re gonna leave soon Ri, it’s like 11:30.”
“I have lunch with my fiancé.”
“Veronica has lunch with her fiancé,” the waiter crossed behind Sabrina with another mimosa.
“I can hear her Sab, where are you going after?” The Uber pulled up and I got in, slipping my wireless headphones from my bag as I did.
“Girl, I don’t know, I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Sab, where are you gonna be?”
“Ri, I told you I don’t… O M G heyyyyy!” Sabrina’s voice contorted upward into the register she reserved for strangers, guys, and basically anyone else that wasn’t me or a close blood relative.
Sabrina knocked the table as she stood and her phone fell, so I couldn’t tell who it was she was talking too, but based on the space between her ‘O’, ‘M’, and ‘G’ and the long string of y’s after ‘hey’ they were either extremely hot or entirely loathsome.
I fixed my headphones into my ear while the muffled conversation continued over the black screen, enthusiastic mpfmhs from an unidentified male voice interspersed with shrieks and guffaws from both Sabrina and Veronica. Potentially hot, certainly loathsome. The Uber crossed 73rd Street; it was still a long fucking way to Brooklyn.
The driver had hushed the radio when I stepped into the car out of deference to my phone call, but now with the muffled volume I could hear the soft excited cadence of a Spanish soccer broadcast leaking out over the airwaves, wrapping the driver in a quiet intensity.
“Ri-ri, you still there?’
I was caught off guard by sudden change in the volume in my ear, and my panic from earlier rushed back into me, “Y-yea, yea, where are you guys?”
“Ri, I’m gonna call you back later, Justin is here, we’re headed to brunch.”
Now she’s going to brunch too?
“No Sab, please, I…” Before I could finish Veronica yanked the phone out of Sabrina’s hand. She held the phone up like she was taking a selfie. I could see all of them—Justin, Veronica, Sabby, Pete (who I guess came with Justin), and some rando I’d never seen before— standing there looking perfect without me.
“Ri-ri, love you biitttccchh, kisses, we miss you!!!”
I just put my phone back at bit so they could see me smile and wave. I didn’t dare expose even a single tooth, not only would that make the quiver in my lip obvious, but it would also almost certainly cause me to cry in this Spanish man’s car. Please don’t let me cry in this Spanish man’s car.
Veronica hung up. I was alone.
Once we hit the Brooklyn Bridge, the team that my dear English-challenged chauffeur was rooting for had scored two times, but I still wasn’t sure who was playing in the game. I tried to ask him because the loneliness was making me want to die and the wanting to die was making me want to cry, but it was clear he didn’t understand a word I was saying.
“Who is playing?”
“Sorry?”
“Who is playing? In the game.”
“Yes! Ok! Si!” He made an okay sign with his hand.
Each time that they scored he made a little fist bump against the steering wheel. I refreshed my snapchat constantly, praying for a message from The Scone Hoe a.k.a Sabrina, while I blasted the cathartic sounds of the Indomitable Mr. West directly into my eardrums. If this fucking nurse doesn’t let him give these goddamn flowers to his grandma…
A snap. Fuck! FINALLY. Sabrina, please tell me you skipped out on that goddamn sham of a brun…. who the fuck is Victer the Voice? Is Victor spelled with a fucking ‘e’?
I opened it. Please don’t be a di…Are those my fucking EARRINGS?
“Hey beautiful, if you wanted to see me again you only had to ask ;)”
Yep, that’s the big one. I’m gonna puke.
I took a top left forehead selfie then deleted it.
I chatted him, sidestepping his dumbass line, “What are you talking about?”
A photo response, this time with half his face. Bold.
“I mean you didn’t need to leave your earrings here to have an excuse to come back. You could have just asked. ;)”
I know you absolute moron, “Oh, haha, I actually live kinda far if you could just mail those to me that would be perfect!”
A little bit more of the face wiggled its way into lens view this time, “It’s no problem I can drop them off, where do you live? I can pick you up and then you can wear them to dinner.”
Excuse me?
“Haha, no thanks that’s ok, you can just send them to me.”
“I can’t even take you out to dinner?”
Even?
“I didn’t do anything when you were at my house, and you were drunk.
I’m a good guy, I could have done stuff, but we didn’t even kiss, I let you sleep in my bed. Let me take you out to dinner.”
“I’m sorry you want a fucking prize for not RAPING ME? What because you didn’t fucking touch me when I couldn’t defend myself now I owe you something? Here’s your I-met-the-absolute-bare-fucking-minimum award. FUCK YOU!!”
I cried in the Spanish man’s car. He didn’t say a goddamn thing, but I know he missed the end of his game.