“Don’t suppose you want to grab something for lunch?” I asked hopefully. She looked up at me from her sun-dappled desk covered in books and cases, bags under her eyes.
“Can’t,” she said. “I’ve got an online study group starting at three.”
“You doing all right?” I asked her, stepping into the room as quietly as I could to not wake baby Esther.
“I’m doing,” she said, and that was that. Sarah was pragmatic by nature, had made me her friend in college when she’d noticed how good I was in our English classes.
“Symbolism,” she had told me wisely, “is bullshit. Most of these guys were drunk or high on opium or some shit when they wrote these books. They were probably seeing hallucinations on the wall. I refuse to engage.”
I’d liked that about her, and she wasn’t the judgmental type. We’d fallen into a best friendship the way desperate people fall into bed—an exhalation of finally after a grueling day to be around someone else who just couldn’t be fucked with at all.
I’d never been very good at friendship before Sarah. I’d spent so much of my teenage years seeing everyone around me as competition—for school rankings and scholarships and sports. It had been easy to let people in and then let them go. But I needed Sarah. I needed somewhere to land when reality hit.
Santa Monica was buzzing on Friday afternoon, people everywhere out walking, twentysomethings streaking by on electric scooters and bikes. On Santa Monica Boulevard, diners were sitting out on the patios, pints of beer, sparkling rosé and water and cider in glasses, shorts and tank tops and sunglasses, everything southern California was supposed to be in one shiny street.
I’d planned to go grab a salad somewhere, but I’d accidentally ended up inside a bar instead, the way I tended to do. I figured, worst came to worst, I’d eat whatever nachos they had thrown on their appetizer menu.
I scoffed at the menu when I looked down; the cocktails were obscenely overpriced, and my book sales certainly didn’t support this kind of lifestyle. Prices like this had driven me out of New York. I nodded the bartender over and ordered a Bud Light. She smirked as she popped the top off the bottle and handed it over to me, but that didn’t stop me. I drank almost half of it in the first gulp.
Calm, I had thought to myself then. You’re calm.
Two weeks ago, Priya had shown up at my apartment in Charleston to film my package for the show. They’d filmed me playing with Yank, my boxer mix, doing my daily Pilates, typing away at a computer (“just try to look like you do when you write books”) with my two book covers framed on the wall over my shoulder. Then Priya had slyly suggested we check out the brewery down the street, and they’d caught me sipping on a brew.
“I’m taking a break from writing to find love,” I said to the camera when prompted. Priya was eating it up. “I’m tired of writing other people’s love stories.” It was a good line. I dreaded becoming another in their long assembly line of “girls next door” and knew I’d have to do something to break out of that box.
At a stool in this overpriced, too trendy Santa Monica bar, I clicked my phone screen to life to see that my mother had already texted the family chat three times to ask if I had arrived safely, with the texts growing progressively more hysterical.
Did you land yet?
Jackie, it’s me, your mother!! Remember how you were supposed to check in?
I’m sure you’re not dead but I’m about 10 minutes from calling American Airlines to confirm.
I finally texted back, Here. Fine.
A text came through almost a minute later: Well, you’re there to try and find a husband on a reality TV show so are you technically “fine”?
Austin, my younger brother. When he’d found out I was going on the 1, he’d started laughing hysterically, and presumably had not stopped since.
Shut up, Eileen, Austin’s fiancée, texted back. Jac, you’re going to kill it! Good luck!
And then my dad randomly responded: I’m too drunk to taste this chicken, and I set the phone down.
I finished off the rest of my Bud Light and gestured toward it as the bartender went by. She went to the cooler obligingly and brought me a fresh one.
“Are you drinking shitty beer at Chalet?”
I looked in the direction of the voice, toward a guy sitting two seats down from me, alone. He had black hair, golden skin, ratty jeans, and a USC crewneck sweatshirt, and was sipping on a dark cocktail. Whiskey at 3 p.m., and he was judging me? I took another long pull, holding my beer by the neck. “Does that line usually work?” I asked when I finished, tilting my head to the side as I watched him.
He smiled without showing any teeth. “You tell me,” he answered.
I shrugged one shoulder. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m an easy target.”
A single dark eyebrow went up. “Don’t do that,” he said.
“What?”
“Sell yourself short.”
“Then why don’t you be nice?” I asked, shaking my just emptied bottle. He slid down a seat, taking the spot next to me.
“If I bought you another Bud Light here, that wouldn’t be nice. That would be cruel, even. This isn’t a place you drink Bud Light at.”
“But I’m a girl you drink Bud Light with,” I told him. “Not good enough for you?”
“No,” he answered, keeping up easily. “This bar isn’t good enough for Bud Light. I know a place that will treat you how you deserve to be treated.”
I laughed; it was so bad. “Enlighten me?”
“Come on,” he said, abandoning his drink and throwing a hundred on the bar, showing off. I didn’t mind so much. I shouldn’t do this, but I knew I would. I always did.
Together, we walked along the boardwalk to a dive bar in Venice Beach. It was the same kind of seedy I loved about Venice Beach, the mix of money and misery, the dirty and the beautiful, with pink sunsets behind the mountains every night. Knowingly, inside the dark bar with party lights strung up on the wall, he ordered a pitcher of beer and walked me out to a patio with the smell of the ocean in the distance, the homeless and tourists milling about the main road and golf blaring on the television.
He poured me a plastic cup of beer and then poured one of his own, sitting across from me at the picnic table on turf.
“A bar for a girl like me,” I said, people-watching the crowd headed to and from the beach.
“Look at me,” he said, and I did. He had dark brows and dark eyes. I learned later that his father was American and his mother was Malaysian and he’d grown up the most Californian you could, long sunny days and hot, happy nights, a boy who fit in instantly anywhere he went, whom people loved without question until he desperately wanted to crawl out of his skin.
