The Prince of Chicago

Isabelle Smoke filled the air. Darkness engulfed me, and it was so loud my ears were ringing. Lights flashed this way and that, colors dancing among moving bodies like a kaleidoscope, occasionally flicking into my eyes with a blinding intensity. Bass rattled the room, feeling like an aftershock from an earthquake beneath my feet. Why had I come here again? “HEY! ISABELLE!” I heard a familiar voice behind me call out. I turned around to find Marie, advancing toward me from the bar double fisting two drinks. “I got you your favorite!” she yelled over the music, handing me a vodka soda with two limes. She knew me so well. “Thanks!” I shouted back. That was really the only way to communicate in this place. Marie had convinced me to come out to the club that night, despite it not really being my scene. I preferred a more chill location if I was going to be drinking with friends; one where we could actually have a conversation and not lose our voices. But I had just moved to Chicago after graduating from my small college a few weeks before, and Marie insisted that we hit a club tonight in celebration of my big move. “I know all the best spots!” she had whined on the phone earlier that day. “Come on, you’re going to love it! The clubs here are actually fun, unlike those country bars you spent the last five years posting up at.” It was true, this place was a lot different from any bar I’d been to on my college campus in Iowa. Marie knew those country spots just as well as I did, though; she spent four years there with me. This big city schtick of hers only started eight months ago when she herself graduated and moved to Chicago to begin a brand manager job with a very popular clothing label. Her ‘dream job’ she liked to call it. Eight months in, and she was loving it even more than she could have imagined. I was happy for her, though that fifth year of school I did without her was a lot harder than I’d like to admit. I missed her a lot, and when she started incessantly pestering me about moving to the city with her, I knew that’s where I’d end up, although I still gave her quite a tease about whether I’d actually come. Marie and I both grew up in small towns in Iowa. While we didn’t know each other until we were randomly matched as dorm roommates freshman year, we had very similar upbringings. ‘When you’ve seen one small town in Iowa, you’ve seen them all’, Marie would say. We actually didn’t get along well at first; she was the kind of person that would get up at 6am to start her day, while I liked to sleep in. She could be pretty messy, while I liked things very tidy. She also had a bad habit of acting as though the snacks I bought for myself were communal, which really rubbed me the wrong way, and I know she hated how I was always vacuuming and dusting. You did that just last week, she’d say. But when I had to leave school halfway through freshman year to cope with the sudden loss of my mother, she was by my side the whole way, even making the three hour trip out to my hometown on many weekends to make sure I was doing ok. She helped me sort through my mom’s estate, find and execute her will, and got me into therapy to process the loss. Being the only child of a single mother, I didn’t have anyone to turn to. Marie was my rock through the whole thing, and after that, we became the best of friends. Without her pushing, I don’t even know if I would have gone back to school to finish my business degree. And even though it took me an extra year after all the time I took off, here I was with Marie, a new resident of Chicago, degree in hand. To say I was proud of myself would be an understatement. “Come on! Let’s dance!” Marie shouted, pulling me back into the present moment. I shrugged, and before I knew it I was being pulled by the arm onto the dance floor, the whirring kaleidoscope I had been observing moments before. This was definitely out of my comfort zone, but hey, this was a new city after all, maybe it would be the start of a whole new Isabelle too.