I don’t bother answering Nick’s question about how the hell I know Tris. I’ve got to find Caroline.
I stand up on the barstool. That’s the only way I’ll find her with all these people and this loud music and this stink sweat and this beer energy and this never-ending day that feels like it’s only beginning in the middle of this night. I place my hand on Nick’s head to steady my balance as I scan the crowd, and my hand can’t help but rummage through his mess of hair, just a little.
There she is! I see Caroline huddling with Randy at a corner table by the brick wall just off the stage, to the right of Hunter from Hunter Does Hunter, who is now taking the mic. I don’t know what song his band had prepared but the lyrics Hunter sings are clearly being made up on the spot and have nothing to do with the fast and furious guitar chords: Dev, go home with me, Dev Dev Dev, I want you to f**k this man.
I jump down from the barstool and take off toward Caroline, but Nick’s hand clenches my wrist from behind me, pulling me back to him.
“Seriously,” Nick says, “how the hell do you know Tris?”
His grip pinches the watch on my wrist, and the ow of the pinch turns my eyes from looking for Caroline to looking straight at him. I notice how lost he looks, yet eager for me to stay with him, his eyes kind and angry at the same time, and the noticing makes me remember a lyric from some song he wrote for Tris that she passed around in Latin class because she thought it was so lame.
The way you’re singing in your sleep
The way you look before you leap
The strange illusions that you keep
You don’t know
But I’m noticing
Fuck Tris. I would give body parts to have a guy write something like that for me. My kidney? Oh, both of them? Here, Nick, they’re yours—just write more for me. I’ll give you a start: boy in punk club asks strange girl to be his girlfriend for five minutes, girl kisses boy, boy kisses back, boy then meets girl—what did you notice about this girl? Nick, let’s hear some lyrics. Please? Ready. Set. Go.
I want to stomp my foot in frustration—for him, and for me. Because I know that whatever Tris did or said to him, it’s what’s given him that haunted puppy-dog look of pathetic despair. She’s the reason he will probably become an embittered old f**k before he’s even of legal drinking age, distrusting women and writing rude songs about them, and basically from here into eternity thinking all chicks are lying cheating sluts because one of them broke his heart. He’s the type of guy that makes girls like me frigid. I’m the girl who knows he’s capable of poetry, because like I said, there are things I just know. I’m the one who could give him that old-fashioned song title of a thing called Devotion and True Love (However Complicated), if he ever gave a girl like me a second glance. I’m the less-than-five-minute girlfriend who for one too-brief kiss fantasized about ditching this joint with him, going all the way punk with him at a f**king jazz club in the Village or something. Maybe I would have treated him to borscht at Veselka at five in the morning, maybe I would have walked along Battery Park with him at sunrise, holding his hand, knowing I would become the one who would believe in him. I would tell him, I heard you play, I’ve read your poetry, not that crap your band just performed, but those love letters and songs you wrote to Tris. I know what you’re capable of and it’s certainly more than being a bassist in an average queercore band—you’re better than that; and dude, having a drummer, it’s like key, you f**king need one. I would be equipment bitch for him every night, no complaints. But no, he’s the type with a complex for the Tris type: the big tits, the dumb giggle, the blowhard. Literally.
You wanted easy—well, you got it, pal.
I extract my wrist from his grip. But for some reason, instead of walking away, I pause for a moment and return my hand to his face, caressing his cheek, drawing light circles on his jaw with my index finger.
I tell him, “You poor schmuck.”
3. NICK
When Tris passes by me, it’s like the world is no longer three-dimensional. The third dimension falls away, then the second, and all I’m left with is one dimension, and that dimension is her.
But of course there’s another dimension, too, and that dimension is time, and it keeps going and Tris keeps walking and all the other dimensions come back, and even though there are now more, it feels like a whole lot less.
And I’m left with this girl, this Siren of Mixed Signals, this Norah. She’s a f**k-good kisser, but clearly has some massive consistency issues. I ask her how the f**k she knows Tris, because that is leaving me completely confused, and at first she’s looking at me like I’m this guy she didn’t just start kissing out of nowhere, but then she’s got her hand on my arm in a way that makes me really notice I have an arm, and then she’s making to run away, and at the same time looking at me like I’m some cancer child. Then I take hold of her arm and she resists without really resisting. Finally she pulls away, only to touch my face in this way that reminds me exactly of her kiss.
Then she calls me “you poor schmuck.”
And like some poor schmuck, I’m like, “Why?”
I can tell she knows something, but she’s not saying. Instead she tells me, “I’ve got to get my friend.”
“I’ll come with,” I volunteer. I know Tris is somewhere behind me, maybe watching. And it’s not like I have anything better to do than follow a f**k-good kisser wherever she wants to go. Dev is climbing onto the stage now to be Hunter’s dancer, and Thom and Scot are nowhere in my line of vision.