Pucked Romance

ONE “I could have been married by now,” I say. “I would have been married by now. Isn’t that crazy, completely out of this world?” Sophie sits across from me at our scarred kitchen table. Our condo’s too warm—just the way I like it—my slippered feet propped up on the chair so I can hug my knees to my chest. “I think it’s time to stop drinking, yeah?” Sophie says, making a grab for the wine bottle. I don’t even like wine, but sometimes I get in a mood, and I want to feel warm inside, warmer, like it can make me forget the cold disappointment that’s behind my heart. “Get out of here and let me have some fun.” Sophie scoffs, sighing, slumping in her seat and now I feel bad. Sophie shakes her head, her white-blonde hair sitting precariously on top of her head, a bunch of pencils stuck in there, keeping it there as if by some kind of magic. She taps her nails (painted icy purple today) on the table, an impatient gesture that has me grabbing my wine glass and draining it in two big gulps. “It’s not fun if you’re upset.” “Then let me be upset. I’m allowed to be upset, okay? I’m allowed. Everything went to hell, and I’m allowed to be upset about it.” I put my wine glass back on top of the table, and run my hands through my hair, pushing it off my face. The wine’s starting to hit me, and it’s starting to hit me hard. “I just wish…I just wish I didn’t care. It’s been so freaking long already. I just wish I didn’t think about it so much, you know?” Sophie slumps forward onto the table, pillowing her head with her arms. It’s unfair to have a roommate that’s so incredibly cool—she’s got tattoos all over her body, piercings in her nose and eyebrow, in a row on both of her ears, and other body piercings that I’ve been too afraid to ask about, like getting piercings is contagious. Sophie has got her life together—she works at the tattoo shop deeper in the heart of the city, and is constantly working on her art, teaching herself new styles, going to conventions, meeting new people. She’s just everything I’m…not. “I think you’re allowed to grieve for what you lost.” I snort. “You’re making it sound like I care about him. I don’t, you know I don’t. My family, though, I didn’t think I would lose them when I broke off the engagement. Jesus Christ, the only person who talks to me now is Katie. I’ve been shunned. It’s been almost two years, when am I going to be forgiven, huh? What kind of stupid s**t is that?” I swipe at my cheeks where the tears have started to fall. I’m so sick and tired of crying over this, so, so tired. “I don’t know. Parents are weird. A lot of them shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. It was just the norm when they were younger to have kids and not stop and really think about it first,” Sophie says, leaning up to pour me another glass of wine. “If you’re getting drunk, I’m getting drunk, too, and I’ll just suck up the hangover tomorrow. It’s fine, totally good.” She pours herself a giant glass of wine when she comes back from the cupboards in the kitchen, clinking our glasses together and taking big gulps like she’s trying to catch up. “Nope, still don’t like dry red wine, I don’t give a s**t if that makes me look like a kid. Ugh, I need sugar. Where’s the sugar, Elena?” Sophie’s face is screwed up in disgust, and she’s smacking her lips and shuddering like she’s gone and eaten something rotten instead of fermented grape juice. “Ugh, that’s awful. I don’t even know how you’re drinking this.” I shrug, smirking a little at her antics, which I know she’s putting on for my benefit. “Thanks.” Sophie raises her pierced eyebrow. “For what?” She’s still pulling a face, but she swipes her hand against her mouth, smearing her lip gloss and groaning when she realizes it. “Ah, man. There it goes.” Sophie raps her tattooed knuckles against the table. “For what, DiNovro? Is it because I let you dabble in my huge makeup collection?” I shake my head, even if that is true. I’m just not adventurous enough to try the explosions of colors that make up Sophie’s eyeshadow palettes on my eyes just yet. It feels like all of my life I’ve been trying to fade into the background, to stay as far as possible out of any kind of spotlight, living in the shadows. The only time I ever did strike out and stand under that harsh light was when I told my parents I didn’t want to marry Frankie, that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him, like, ever. And I’ve been paying for it ever since. I’m still deciding if it was worth it. Frankie was a d**k, is still a d**k, but my parents saw me breaking off the engagement as breaking a promise, as me reneging on my word, which to them cannot be forgiven, even if I would have been miserable sharing a life with that asshole. But sometimes, more than sometimes, I think about the alternative, a future that could have been if I decided to keep quiet about the emotional blackmail and the eventual cheating. I think about having Frankie as a husband at twenty-five years old, but I would have kept the ties with my family. I probably would still be living at home rent-free (no Italian parents worth their salt are gonna make their kid pay rent), still working as a teacher, but I could hang out with my parents, be in the old neighborhood in the East and hang out with old friends and cousins. At least my nonnos and nonnas are all dead, so they didn’t have to witness my supposed disgrace. “Hey, get out of your head, right now.” Sophie raps her knuckles against the table again, like someone knocking hard on our front door, and it rattles me enough that start to focus on the present. I blink at my best friend, my roommate, suddenly feeling all mushy and thankful. “Thank you for letting me live with you, even if you didn’t know me.” Sophie shrugs, clearly uncomfortable. “I’ve had roommates before, the good and the bad. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other, but Katie’s word has always been golden, so I knew you weren’t going to be a complete and total asshole.” She scratches at the back of her head, then tugs on her pierced earlobes. “It was a bonus that we got along so well, got to be closer as friends.” Sophie glances away, like she doesn’t want to confront the fact that she’s the best friend I ever had. “Well, thanks again, though, for taking the chance on me, for giving me your friendship.” My throat tightens up as all of the emotions well up inside me: the struggle of always keeping it together when it feels like my family shunning me left a hole in my chest, left me with this gaping wound while I try to patch it up with other things I care about, other people I care about. I’m still not over the betrayal of it, how they just tossed me aside like I wasn’t their daughter. Stupid, all of it is so stupid. But Sophie’s right. Some people aren’t meant to be parents, shouldn’t be parents, even if they can be. And kids like me fall into that portion of that Venn diagram. I’m not the only person, either, but it stills feels lonely. “Drink some more wine, you’re making me sad, and I don’t want to put this waterproof mascara to the test right now.” She points to my half-full glass of wine, but I’m stuffed with wine, and I don’t want any more. “I just think about it a lot. It sneaks up on me, and I look down at my left hand and really think about it.” “Marriage isn’t the end-all, be-all. You know that.” “I know, I know. I was just raised in that way, to look at it as important, to place it up on a pedestal like it’s some sort of achievement.” Sophie laughs. “Yeah, right. You just have to find another person who’s willing to be with you forever. You don’t need skills for that, that’s not an achievement. Come on. You think that’s why Katie’s been dodging Dean’s proposals all these years?” I shrug. “I don’t know. My cousin’s weird with all of that. It was treated like some sort of scandal in my family when her parents divorced. Like, we didn’t talk about it or acknowledge it at family gatherings, you know holidays and birthdays and stuff, and the poor guy my aunt brought with her was ignored. It was shitty, I’ll admit, really shitty.” I sigh. “I wonder if they talk about me at all. I wonder if I’ll be invited over for Christmas this year.” “What gets me is that you still care.” I nod, because she’s right. “I don’t know, man, maybe my heart’s broken, maybe it doesn’t work right. Maybe this is it, maybe it’s going to be like this forever.” “Would that be so bad?” “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it would be. I just get so pissed off, and then I don’t care. I try to convince myself that I don’t care about what happened. I focus on my job, on the kids.” Sophie smiles. I tell her stories from time to time, and she has her favorites. The kids would get a kick out of all of her tattoos, too, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll even do a show and tell where you bring in your best friend and tell the class all the awesome things about them. “I focus on making delicious food for dinner and cleaning the condo from top to bottom. I focus on the Habs and the games, and it helps get me out of my head. It helps a lot. But I can’t help but feel like time’s running away from me.” “Yeah, like it just keeps speeding up and up, right? We’re in October, Halloween is two weeks away, and then before we know it it’s going to be Christmas, and then we’re going to be ringing in the New Year, then the new decade, and what? I’ll be standing there, blinking, buffering while I try to make sense of it, you know?” Sophie rambles on, and I’m finding it hard to focus on her, everything going fuzzy around the edges, softly lit and warm. “I don’t think you should go and watch the game tonight,” Sophie says, and I nod slowly at her. “Yeah, I’m a little fuzzy. I’ll watch it here, if that’s okay.” Sophie laughs again. “As if I don’t own a laptop and can watch whatever the hell I want. As if I don’t have noise-cancelling headphones ’cause you tend to get really into it.” “Sorry,” I mumble, pushing my hair behind my ears. “I basically have nothing else to live for at this point. If they don’t win the Stanley Cup this year, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Sophie taps her fist against the table. “Keep talking like that and I’m going to tell your cousin.” I grin, the muscles in my face feeling odd. I tilt my head at her. “Do you ever think about it…? Getting married? Being with someone forever?” Sophie nods slowly. “Sure. Sure, I do. It’s with this faceless guy who adores me, and I adore him, and we get into fights and scraps, and he doesn’t care what I look like.” Huh. I wasn’t expecting that. I think Sophie’s beautiful; I do. And I know she’s had more casual encounters than I have because even after a bunch of disastrous first dates, I always felt smarmy for some reason or another. “I’m the have-a-good-time girl. That’s what I usually get in a guy’s first impression of me. Which is fine, I’ve had my fun, but it’s not what I’m looking for right now. And honestly, a guy is going to have to be super special to get me to consider even going on a date with him. Like levels of handsome that the world has never seen and the awesome personality to back it up.” “You’re looking for a unicorn, my friend.” I grin at her, but it feels all wobbly on my face. I gulp down the rest of my wine, vowing that this’ll be it and that I’ll feel better tomorrow, that I won’t be this sad person tomorrow, but for right now, I’m going to let myself think and dream about a future I can look forward to. “Yeah, I know,” she sighs, playing with her glass, swinging it around so that the liquid is in danger of sloshing all over our table. Sophie’s never been good at patient conversation, it’s only after she comes home from closing up the shop do I get to be with her like this, talk with her like this. She’s so loud in every other part of her personality, but not when it comes to talking about love. “You? Frankie’s long gone, out of the picture, or so I’ve heard from the grapevine.” The grapevine’s my cousin, Katie. She’s got her ear to the ground, and it’s the only way I know what’s going on with the DiNovro side of the family. My mom’s side is scattered across the country and we’re not close. “Do you see yourself with someone?” Sophie asks, a hesitant side to her I haven’t seen too often in our two years of living together. Everything about her demands attention—the way she looks, the way she laughs, loud and long, never covering it up with a hand like I always seem to do. “Do you see a future with someone like that?” “It would be nice to have that. I’m lonely, I can admit that.” That aching loneliness in the middle of my chest expands, pushes up my throat, and I hastily look away as my eyes get wet, as I try to choke back the tears. “It would be nice to have that, someone who cares about you like that. I miss kissing. I didn’t think I would. I miss being held, this whole skin hunger thing is no joke, shit.” I sigh again, wiping away the stray tears, sniff hard enough to hurt something in my skull. “I don’t know where I’m going to find him though. I’m exhausted from all the terrible dates I’ve been on, trying to figure out what the guy wants. Why can’t people just come and say what they want? Why is that so hard?” Sophie nods. “Yeah, I know, right? I don’t know, maybe it’s an immediate turn-off, even if you are looking for something casual. I guess it’s all perception. I don’t know if I’m the marrying type, though. Can you imagine me meeting my guy’s parents? I’d have to wear makeup all over my pale-a*s skin, and it’d feel so sticky and gross probably.” Sophie pulls another face, shuddering at the thought of body makeup. I mean, it does sound gross. “I don’t think that matters, though,” I say. Sophie shakes her head. “I’d like to think so, too, but people still get really…” She waves her hands around, nearly knocking the glass over. “Judgy about that kind of stuff, like putting art on my body actually says something about me instead of what I say and what I do. It’s so dumb.” “Dumb,” I murmur, nodding. “Maybe you just haven’t found the right guy, yeah?” Sophie raises that eyebrow at me, the jewelry catching the low-hanging light over our table. “I could say the same thing for you. Just because you have a broken heart doesn’t mean you can’t use it.” “I don’t know, I’m still stuck on the whole situation. I want to put it behind me, but I still think about it a lot.” “I don’t think it’s a matter of not being hurt by what happened ever again, though. I don’t think it’s about that at all. It’s just maybe not being destroyed by it all the time, every time it’s brought up, and I think you’ve achieved that.” Sophie frowns. “Unless you’re not telling me something, and then I will sic Katie on you. You know how she is.” “Yeah, she doesn’t take any s**t, ever. I wish I was more like her.” Sophie nods. “Yeah. It must be nice.” I stifle a yawn, the wine making me sleepy, the hour even more so, but I just don’t really feel like moving. I wonder how I’m going to get into bed. Screw brushing my teeth, I’m tired. “Thanks for listening to me, it means a lot. I don’t really have anyone else to talk to about this. Katie’s probably sleeping, and you just got home.” “Excuse me, are you saying I was the next best person to talk to? Elena! Come on.” I shrug again, shoulders hiking towards my ears. “I know you don’t like me talking about it.” Sophie thumps her fist against the table, once, twice. “Because I’m not good at dealing with people, in general, when they’re sad. I don’t know what to say or do,” she says, sounding panicked, and it makes me laugh, just a little. “I’m glad that you listen to me. Really glad.” “Okay, up, get up now, I’m going to strangle you in a hug.” “Put those biceps away,” I say when Sophie starts flexing, grinning at me. “No, no, it’s hug time. Up, up, up.” I scrape my chair back and get my feet on the floor, ignoring the pins and needles as the sensation gets back to my toes. I push myself upright, opening my arms wide for a hug. Sophie really does give the best kind of hugs, all tight around my shoulders, not one of those half-assed hugs that makes me think the person would rather be doing anything else. Sophie sighs when she lets me go and just stares at me. “It might be bullshit, but my mom always used to tell me that falling in love with the person I was gonna marry—because she’s old school, too, even if she doesn’t say it—that it would happen for me when I least expected it. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, since I wouldn’t like to be bonked upside the head with the conviction that I’m going to marry this random guy and spend the rest of my life with him, but whatever. “The sentiment’s cute, that you’d just be going about your day, hanging out with friends or whatever, and there he is. Like, it’s been years since I had a steady boyfriend, I don’t know, they’re going to have to be really, really special.” Sophie nods at me, and I find myself nodding back. “Yeah,” I say. “Special.” She squeezes my shoulders. “You’re not always going to feel like this. And I know you feel so much better already.” I nod. “Yeah. Yeah. Screw everybody and everything.” I hold a fist up. “Well, I wasn’t expecting you to go from zero to a hundred, but yeah, it still stands. Screw everybody and everything!” she crows, and I start laughing and laughing until I start crying, and Sophie’s right there, doing the best thing she can—hugging me close and telling me it’s going to be fine. It does feel like it will be.