Last Night in the Before (Fiction)

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And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”  the lead singer chants again, and Angie flips her hair to the music. She’s hot and thirsty and her warm Modelo won’t help but she takes a slug anyway, leaving her breath yeasty and her mouth sticky. She grins at Sarah and Sarah grins back, hooks her slick elbow in Angie’s and spins her around like a square dance. This night is glorious, all these bodies dancing in the thick Puerto Rico air on the terrace of a bar that’s wallpapered inside with animal prints and gold. Christmas lights shine incongruous colors on the palm trees and the dance floor breathes the cumin scent of hippie sweat and the girls’ coconut sunscreen. 

Fuck Kathleen, Angie thinks. We’re having the best time without her. She chugs the rest of her Modelo and the DJ plays sixties surf-rock and she dances her angry glee loose. Fuck Kathleen for being a bitch, a sore loser, a drama queen, a spoiled brat, a shit-stirrer, a selfish, messy hotel roommate. “Spring break girls trip,” she’d had said. Not “get your two best friends to cover the check while you run off with a boy” trip. Not “throw a fit when no one wants to go to Macy’s San Juan with you” trip.

Sarah lets out a whoop. The music changes again—I can’t get no satisfaction—and Angie and Sarah shimmy into the bar for tequila shots, bumping their hips together to the beat. While Sarah orders, Angie feels someone’s hot breath like a whisper on her neck but when she whips around no one is there, and the no one is weirder than a someone. In this crowded space, there is a person-sized gap. Angie rubs her neck and scowls at the no-one space. She grabs her shot from Sarah. Cheers! And they make their way back to the terrace to dance. 

In the cab home, her consciousness on the fritz, Angie feels the no-one again, warm and pulsing in the middle seat between her and Sarah who’s already asleep against the window. Angie can’t deal with the no-one right now, her responsibility is to get them both back to the hotel. Stay awake, pay attention, pay the driver—probably too much. She reaches past the no-one to slap Sarah on the thigh, wake her up. In the air between them, her arm fizzes, the hair stands up. Angie retracts her arm, alarmed, rubbing away the feeling of static that engulfed it a moment ago.

When Sarah sees where they are, she swings her head around, hair swishing, and gives a whoop like she’s still on the dance floor. If she feels the strange patch of electricity as she slides across the seat, she doesn’t say, just hips the door closed and thanks the cabbie profusely with her strong Jersey accent.

Lobby, elevator, keycard. Angie kicks Kathleen’s clothes out of the way and climbs into the bed she’s been sharing with Sarah because Kathleen’s a light sleeper. Kathleen couldn’t possibly share a bed. But Kathleen didn’t think she should pay more for the hotel room.

Stopping only to take her shoes off. Sarah bops about, singing and the days go by, changing into her shirt and boxers, kicking more clothes into the corner, then brushing her teeth. Angie smells the cotton candy scent of Sarah’s night cream, registers the weight of Sarah’s body settling in next to her before she finally allows sleep to come.

Angie dreams of Kathleen. They are all at the bar together, on the rainbow terrace. Kathleen is dancing with a boy, she is pointing at Angie and Sarah, then whispering in the boy’s ear and giggling, raising her status by demeaning her friends, a move Angie has seen before. Instead of music, a drum solo that goes on and on. Instead of tequila, something sweet and sugary and pink. Angie tries to clink her shot glass to Kathleen’s but receives a lip snarl instead. Kathleen dances with the boy. Angie’s heart hurts with rejection. They’ve known each other their whole lives. The boy pulls Kathleen back into the bar, which is a fun house now, and Kathleen glances something inscrutable back at her friends as she’s dragged through the gaping, grinning mouth of a plaster clown. Angie shouts at her to come back, fear piercing, but by that time the clown has turned into a beach and Angie is swimming out to a floating dock where a big group of friends is waiting for her. Friends that she’s never seen before but are so happy she’s arrived. She keeps looking around the dock for something, but what? She feels like she should be scared, but everything seems fine, pleasant out here on the water.In the morning, the room is hot and strange, like the sticky breath of no one from last night and the bed Kathleen had commandeered for herself is still empty.

Georgia Lowe is a writer, a mother, a Brooklynite, a Midwest native, and an MFA student in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is working on her debut novel.