Xhenet Aliu - Brass

No. No, that is not going to happen. You rise to your feet and fling open the stall door without even stopping to look for the screw that drops from the handle. You check the mirror and smooth out the makeup that’s settled into creases you don’t even have, and you cup some water from the tap into your mouth. You give yourself the kind of pep talk that you imagine varsity wrestlers give themselves before meeting their middleweight nemeses: You can do this. You are stronger than them. You do not give a mighty fuck about how dumb you look for the next ten minutes.

You glance over at your table, where Teena is waving you back with a pleading look that means she’s ready to get out of there. Matt/Ahmet & Co., meanwhile, are avoiding all eye contact with both you and Teena, which is just as well. You wave back at Teena, though she doesn’t know it’s a wave goodbye. You have work to do now, lives to disrupt, starting with your own and radiating outward. You march straight over to the counter, where the lady from the bathroom is staring through drugstore readers at a scroll of receipts, and you tell her, “I’m ready for the check.”

The lady barely glances up, then throws her eyes over to your table. She says, “You don’t need to pay for this. Ahmet will pay for this.”

“No, I don’t want him to pay for it,” you say.

“He is going to pay. He’s an idiot, but he’s not a jerk.”

You’re glad that Matt/Ahmet is a gentleman idiot, but that’s not the point, so you pull your debit card from your wallet and place it on the counter. “No, really. Please. I need to pay.”

The woman sighs, pulls off her reading glasses, and finally looks at you, first with mild annoyance, and then—you think, though it’s possible that you’re imagining this part—with vague confusion, as if she’d met you before but can’t place exactly where. She takes your card from you, finally, but she runs it through the card reader without even a glance at it. The whole point was for her to glance at it, to see your name and then, maybe, to see you for what you are: one of them, part of an indefinable something you’ve always been chasing, whether or not you knew it.

But she doesn’t.

“At least let him apologize,” she says and waves Ahmet over.

“No, seriously, I don’t want—” you start, but it’s too late. Ahmet weaves his way to you with more finesse than you imagine he’d ever have steering his motorcycle through a parking lot of orange cones. He touches your elbow with the gentle consideration of a Boy Scout guiding an elderly woman through a busy intersection.

“Hey, are you okay? I’m so sorry, Lulu. Lulu, right? Your friend said.”

“It’s fine. It’s just water,” you answer.

“Lulu?” the woman at the counter asks.

“Yeah,” you say. And then, because she’s already handed your card back without seeing your name and all the things you suspect it might stand for, and because this is your last chance to ever make her see it, since you know you’ll never have the nerve to come back in here ever again, you add, “Well, no. Luljeta, actually. It’s actually Luljeta.”

Ahmet’s face instantly flushes with excitement, even more than when he’d first taken notice of your boobs. “You’re Albanian?” he asks. What a prize you are, suddenly, all things in one, an American girl that could make his parents happy, a halfsie who can pull off whorish American necklines but is probably still a nice Albanian virgin. The woman at the counter’s face, meanwhile, turns approximately the same color as the split pea soup on special that evening. She looks down at the receipt you’ve just signed. She pulls on her glasses and then flings them off again to get a good look at your face.

“Oh my god,” the woman says.

“So, like, do you have a boyfriend?” Ahmet asks.

Teena taps your shoulder. “Are you ready to go?” she asks.

You take it all in, this circus around you. Your heart is racing, your mouth is dry, and you instinctively unwrap the peppermint candy you’d been handed with your receipt and pop it into your mouth.

“I’m ready,” you say to all of them at once.

Greta wasn’t looking so hot. All the things in the world I should’ve been thinking about at that moment, like the tiny cluster of cells threatening to become human in my womb, and I kept coming back to that: someone’s got to do something for that girl. Greta was a trick, which was idiot-speak for trichotillomania, meaning when she was stressed out or sad or bored, when normal people bit their nails or puffed on cigarettes, she pulled out her hair one thin oily strand at a time. Who could blame her for wanting to dismantle herself: take a sixteen-year-old girl with a hairline like Willard Scott’s, no daddy, Carlo Rossi for a mother, a report card that had never seen anything less than an A, and a library card that got worn out every six months, and plop her in the halls of a high school in a place like Waterbury, where studying to be a nail art technician counted as postsecondary education. The girl was like chum in a tank of sharks. I wasn’t exactly vying for the homecoming court in high school, but at least I was unremarkable, just your standard minor slut who consistently failed to live up to her potential, a phrase so often used in my report cards that the teachers should’ve had a rubber stamp of it made to save themselves some work. Greta didn’t even get bullied anymore; she’d been picked clean, her predators had to move on to an obese girl with psoriasis just so they wouldn’t starve to death. She hadn’t come home crying in months, her face was now perfectly aloof, except for her eyes, which still always jumped around, looking for a place to run. But I’d lured her into the bathroom with me and there was nowhere for her to escape to, except for maybe the bathtub, which reeked of Jean Naté so strongly that it would have made her gag. I hadn’t had an actual friend since high school ended and my bestie-and-only ran off to marry and divorce the Marine recruiter who used to hang out in our cafeteria scouting for fresh blood, so my sister was the only person I could think of to wrangle into my mess. And now I’d managed to do what even her tormentors had given up on doing: I’d gotten her to cry.

“I want to hit you so bad,” she said. “I want to kill you.”

“You’re going to push a turd out if you keep rocking on the toilet seat like that,” I said.

“This isn’t funny. This is serious, Elsie. You’re going to wish it was a turd going down the toilet instead of your life.”

“It’s going to be fine,” I said, even with the pregnancy test in my hand telling me otherwise. The pregnancy test, in fact, was telling me to fuck off, one slim pink middle finger stuck straight up the center of that stick. I flipped it right back off but Greta didn’t see it, or she didn’t react if she did see it. She blew her nose on the neck of her T-shirt and groped for strands of hair that she’d already mostly gotten to.

“Hands off your head, Greta,” I said.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why don’t you even care what’s happening?”

It was a fair question. The E.P.T box was ripped apart on the counter, both of the tests undeniably positive, at least in one sense of the word. All the evidence was laid out in front of me: the two pink fingers, their tsk-tsks; the bile stain on the linoleum in front of the toilet after the latest round of sickness; a witness. When I blinked my eyes the facts went away for a second, but they kept coming back. Like cockroaches, they always came back.

“I do care,” I said. “It’s just, like, there’s no point in freaking out about it.”

“I’ve seen you freak out when your good pair of socks got a hole in them. This is your life, Elsie. And not just your life, another person’s life.”