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“Did he ever. I think I tried six or seven different drugs in those three months. I don’t think I slept even once at night. Getting up at two in the afternoon was standard. I puked in a gutter and passed out on a sidewalk. It was awful and it was very, very unhealthy, but somehow it was necessary. I’d never gotten to do any of that at sixteen, when everyone else gets it out of their system.”
“Aw.” Juliet put a hand on her heart. “The boy I met was so innocent.”
I shook my head. “Not as innocent as you think, but innocent enough. I’d never been able to screw up without people hounding me and taking pictures. Not being Finn Wiley anymore made me a human again.”
“Uh huh,” she said. “And there were women, I assume?”
I winced at the memory. “Only a few.”
She sat forward, putting down her glass, her eyes lighting up. “Come on, Finn, fess up. You slayed all those French women.”
“Juliet, no one slays French women, except for French men. And sometimes, not even them.”
She laughed, her face lighting with real humor. “Okay, I get that. But you tried.”
I shrugged, putting my empty glass down. “The point was to try everything at least once, so yeah, I tried. But hooking up with strangers wasn’t what it was about. It was about everything else.” I looked at her, remembering. “I did get dumped by a French woman, though. At a nightclub.”
“A nightclub?” She was into this, her smile genuine. I wanted to take a picture so I could see her like this whenever I wanted, but I had to settle for taking a mental picture instead. “What song was playing?”
“I’ll play it.” I took out my phone and swiped it on. Juliet cackled harder when I played “What Is Love” by Haddaway, a song so dumb it was immortalized by Saturday Night Live. “I’m not kidding,” I said to her as the song played. “I was dumped to this song. I think I win.”
“You haven’t heard my worst story yet.” Juliet stood and grabbed the wine bottle to refill us. “So you lived in Paris, ate cheese, got high, got laid, and got dumped to bad music,” she said. “Then what?”
I held out my glass to her. “Travis left to go back on the road. Eventually, I went home and drifted for a while, which is when I met Denver Gilchrist at a party. Then Dad got sick.”
She nodded. “The party was over.”
She said the words without pity, without awkwardness. She said them like someone who knows what bad things feel like, that once you’ve faced them and gone through them then they’re something that happened, something that made you who you are.
I thought of my father’s long, hard illness, of how I’d held his hand when he finally let go. I thought of what had happened in the year afterward. I wanted to tell Juliet about that, too. I wanted her to know everything, but I couldn’t find the words.
What happened that year was a bad dream that had seemed like it was almost worse than Dad dying. I could never quite decide.
Still, it had happened. All of it had changed me.
“Right,” I said to Juliet. “The party was over.” I looked up at her, where she stood to put away the empty bottle. “Until Alistair asked me to be his best man. Until I went to a Road Kings show, then took the gorgeous bass player out dancing all night.”
To my surprise, red bloomed on her cheekbones, vibrant against her pale skin. I had never seen Juliet blush before, had never thought she was capable of it. It was so beautiful it robbed me of speech.
She took only a beat to recover, and then she called up a sarcastic retort. “Lucky bitch,” she said.
I found my voice, though it was raspy. “Yeah. Lucky.”
FOURTEEN
Juliet
I could have said it was the wine, but it wasn’t the wine.
I excused myself to go to the bathroom, just for something to do. An excuse to catch my breath. The conversation, like every conversation with him, pulled me in directions I wasn’t used to. It confused me and illuminated everything at the same time.
No, my reaction wasn’t because of the wine. It was Finn.
I closed the door behind me and stood at the expansive bathroom counter, big enough for two sinks. I ran cold water and splashed it on my face. That smeared my mascara, so I yanked at a tissue and wiped my eyes. I was a mess.
My thoughts jumbled faster than I could sort them. I kept thinking about Finn, a few years older than when I met him, lying in a Parisian park, staring at the sky. Where was I while he was doing that? Maybe, at the exact moment that Finn was lying in a park, I was breaking up with my band, or meeting someone new, or collecting my shit from a guy’s apartment because I was never going to see him again. I was gritting my teeth to pursue a dream that was never going to happen. I was getting hurt and pretending not to show it. I was enduring stale phone calls with my mother, pretending that everything was her fault so that I could make myself feel better. I was worrying about how much I weighed.
And with a painful, twisting ache, I wished that I had made a different decision the night I met Finn. I could have told him how much I liked him on first sight. I could have told him I wanted to see him again. Maybe he would have said no, but I could have tried.
