Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

In the mass of people, she pressed her mouth close to my ear, and I could hear the laughter in her voice. “Oh my God, it’s you.”

When we pulled back, she looked over her shoulder again, and I asked, “Are you okay?”

She nodded in that familiar, easy way of hers, as if to say, Of course, I’m always okay, but she smiled tightly and said, “I need to leave.”

I picked up my purse and said, “Where to?”

“Anywhere but here,” she said, and it seemed so logical that I would take her back to my apartment – now in a nicer area, with a view – and we would sit on the floor and drink vodka.

“When did you get back?” I asked.

“Few years ago. I re-upped for another round after the first. I was living in D.C. after I got back, until a couple of months ago.” She was eating a loaf of my bread straight from the bag, and she noticed me watching. “I’m hungry all the time. But it’s like I can taste everything that went into this. Every container it’s been in, every hand that’s touched it, every machine and chemical.”

I frowned, tried to imagine stepping into a city after years of open air, open land. “Do you want to go back?”

“No, I don’t want to go back. I missed the death of my mother, and for what? I’m still trying to figure that out.”

I had thought she had been an idealist. We both were, in different ways. Me: the pursuit of truth, the naive belief that finding and reporting it could and would evoke real change. But hers ran deeper than her intentions. I supposed that was another reason I respected her. While the rest of us took internships to pad our résumés, and Paige went backpacking on her family’s dime, and Aaron did Habitat in the summers, Emmy dove full in. As she had done everything.

“My fiancé just found out I’m leaving,” she told me. I saw her eyes again. Pictured her pushing her way through the mass of people at the bar, looking over her shoulder. I poured her more vodka as she continued. “We moved up here a few months ago. A few months in a new place, and suddenly, you realize it’s never going to work.” She grimaced faintly, in a way that would be invisible to someone who didn’t know her the way I did. “Two years together, and I just now discovered the type of man he is.”

“Oh yeah? And what type is that?”

“The type who thought I would eventually become more like him. He was upset to discover I was exactly the same person I always was.”

“How upset are we talking?” I asked. The liquor was burning my throat at this point, my voice scratchy with what sounded like emotion.

She paused for a beat. “Upset enough that I’ll wait until he’s at work to go back for my things. If he hasn’t trashed them by then.”

She didn’t need to say anything more. This was the understanding we’d always had.

“Where are you going to go?” I asked.

She lifted her fingers as if to flick the imaginary dust from the air. Something more whimsical than a shrug. “Somewhere else. Away from all the people, all the noise. From people like him.” She drained her glass, held it out to me again, her wrist so thin, the veins visible. “Kind of ironic,” she said, “it seems like people who aren’t grounded give all this weight to stability and planning, and the people who work the steady, traditional nine-to-fives envy the wanderers. Guess it was inevitable we’d be drawn to each other. Him, in finance; me, bouncing around in nonprofit work. But then he gets a transfer and I up and move with him, no job or anything, and everything changes. I guess he thought I’d settle or something. Find a steady job. But I don’t have that type of background or résumé. I’m not that type of person. He’s not who I thought, either, I guess. So here I go again.”

The vodka sat empty between us, and I pulled out a bottle of wine from the fridge.

She kept talking, the alcohol coursing through her head, her tongue. “I think he was surprised I’d really up and leave him.”

I stared at her bare fingers. She curled them in, on her lap. “Sorry,” she said, raising her eyes to mine, smiling. “I don’t see you for eight years, and all I have is this sob story to vent. I’m fine. It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.”

But I didn’t want to talk about anything else. I was solidly drunk, infatuated with the person in front of me, with how she was so different from me and yet so familiar. “Emmy, what’s your last name?” I asked, and she laughed.

“You really don’t know?”

I shook my head. “I really don’t.”

“It’s Grey,” she said, still smiling, her eyes twinkling from the buzz.

“Emmy Grey,” I said, rolling her name around in my mouth. Yes, it suited her. “Emmy Grey, I need to leave the city,” I said, which felt like more of a confession than it was.

Everything was whimsical to Emmy, and so she probably thought I meant emotionally, spiritually, that I needed to seek out a new place for some personal growth. Not that I literally needed to leave this city before shit hit the proverbial fan.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, more serious now. Not talking about the wild egress of our thirties, as my friends called it – the mass exodus of thirtysomethings who get married and buy houses and commute in. But because I had to. There was nothing left for me here, not as Leah Stevens. Everything was a precipice.

Her eyes found mine over her glass, like she was reading something within me as well. “So come,” she said, as I knew she would.

She glanced once over her shoulder, to the clock, our bags dropped on the kitchen counter, the door. I saw her eyes again. Knew she didn’t want to go home until her fiancé was out of the apartment.

“You can stay here tonight,” I said.

In my memory, the rest of that night sounds like Emmy’s laughter and feels like a spell, dizzy and only half-real. I threw a dart at the map, she’d said, and all at once we were twenty-two again, in a bar, one eye closed, lining up to make that throw. How do you feel about western Pennsylvania?

I wondered if any of my other friends would do something like this, then I laughed to myself. Of course they wouldn’t. There was something so wild and free about Emmy. About the type of person who got kicked down and didn’t stay there. Who threw a dart at a map and thought, There, I’ll try again there .

How did I feel about western Pennsylvania? I felt good about it right then, with the words rolling off her tongue. It was familiar and yet new. It was close enough to come back, far enough to start fresh. I whispered it aloud, decided the name, the syllables stretching and slurring together, was bizarrely beautiful. I saw myself sitting on the front steps of a white porch. My hair down, coffee in hand. My laughter echoing in the open spaces. “Yes,” I said.

It was almost a joke. In the morning, I’d wake up, sober and with a headache behind my eyes, and I’d face the day.

But when I woke, Emmy was on my bed – how did she get there? The details were hazy. All I knew was she sat up and rubbed her eyes and said, “When do you want to go?”

We’d made the plan half-baked on hypotheticals, but there she was, and I stared at her, a mirror reflecting back. Wondering whether I could really upend my life, excise it from one place and set it in another; wondering whether such a thing was truly possible.

And then I stopped myself, sat at the computer, said, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Because thinking things through, which I’d done my entire life, carefully and deliberately, had gotten me absolutely nowhere but back to the start. A single misstep in an article, a calculated risk, and everything I’d accomplished, everything I’d become, had been wiped clean in an instant. There would be no do-over. There would be no coming back. Everything inside me vibrated with the word Go.