Night Shift

In the parking lot, it is the summer of 2019 and Anna is offering me a drag off a cigarette she bummed from Louis the short-order cook. Classic Anna.

Anna had never bought a pack of cigarettes in her life. She would bum them off strangers standing outside at bars. She’d take one when offered by a friend at a party and she’d always whine at Louis at the end of a shift. Louis was a sucker for Anna’s groveling. He’d pop up around any corner with his hand outstretched in service, casually rapping the pack against his palm. Without fail, she would greedily suck back the nicotine until the embers burned her fingertips.

In the summer of 2016, we would sit with our backs against Anna’s car, our legs warm on the concrete. She would pass the cigarette to me, touching her fingertips to mine, before it was my turn to lift it to my lips. Easy. Effortless. As if it was nothing. She would say there was something different about my mouth. I would say that the shape of her laugh was my favorite shape and that would make her just laugh harder.

Like many girls of a certain age, we couldn’t afford to live on our own. Even in a city this soundless, splitting rent is the standard. It was an easy decision. Just for the summer, we said. After summer’s end, we’d get real jobs, stop bumming cigarettes and really grow up. Become real girls. Go back to college.

In our apartment, it is not the summer of 2019. It’s the winter of 2023 which means the hotel restaurant where we work is running three shifts again, which means Anna and I are no longer speaking.

There are 99 days left on our lease.

Now, Anna and I are just two passing shadows in the dusky sun of the hallway. She heads to bed and I head out the door.

On the night shift, I can almost avoid Anna completely. I can let her sink into the whole of her bedroom door. I can’t see her go soft into a faceless bed, head under the covers, a tangle of shapeless limbs hanging over the sides. I can’t hear her giggle just beyond the door.

Night shift in the hotel is soft. Quiet. The lights flicker. I fish things out of the pool with a little blue net. I only have to look out of my peripheral vision, nothing ever has to be in focus. It makes the space Anna and I share in the world less noticeable. It makes the time slip faster.

I scoop a shoe out of the fake blue-green water. Utter silence. In the blur I can picture Anna limping away from me toward my room, one heeled, Halloween 2019. I hear an echoing laugh in my brain. Piling through the door dressed as witches. Twin flames. Cigarette breathe.

Sharp focus. Laughter replaced with the dripping sound of stale pool water. It’s still 2023 and I’m standing near the pool’s edge. Shoe pinched between my fingertips, waterlogged and soon to be stationary in the hotel lost and found. There’s no place like home, I think, and tip it into the cardboard box.

Water darkens the sleeve of my jacket. Anna and I used to laugh about it. Tucked in tuxedo shirt with red velvet lapels. So stupid.

She’d claimed I was leaving her behind with my black bowtie, turning into a real girl, no longer slinging dishes in the restaurant kitchen where she rolled the silverware. Elbow to the ribs. We’d cut through the back hallway to the parking lot, heading home together after our shift ended, feeling autumnal, returning to college nowhere in sight. 

Now, I walk home alone and pray that the wintry dawn might swallow me whole.

If I’m swallowed whole, I can’t run my hands through my hair in the mirror of our shared bathroom. I can’t pick a long dark hair off the porcelain and pinch it between my fingertips, weave it into my own blonde hair. I can’t stare at the blue smear of toothpaste on the rim wishing I could be the thing so close to Anna’s teeth.

You can sense the place in our apartment where the rift occurred. Right outside the bathroom door. A floorboard all warped and worn. I step over it, can’t bear the sound of the squeak, can’t stand the way it turns my shoelaces to gummy worms and gives me a sticking feeling in my soles, makes the walk to my bedroom door like swimming through all hell.

At first, in the following weeks after the rift, we tried to be sympathetic towards each other. Talk it out with a lot of feeling statements. No big deal, right? Friends forever. Never lovers. We shook hands.

I could tell by the subtle muscle strain in Anna’s face that it made her uncomfortable. The way she’d softly ask if her new boyfriend could come over and I’d smile with my differently shaped mouth and then too many teeth and tell her of course. Tell her that nothing would make me happier than seeing her happy. She can sense it’s a lie. I can tell she can tell by the wrinkle in her forehead and I feel her mark another mental tally against me.

I didn’t know that this was how best friends were allowed to act. Petty. That my feelings might feel like such a steep transgression. That a bathroom door could be slammed so hard. That I could miss something so much. Even if it was something I never had. I can’t take back what’s been said.

Most days, I bite my tongue and bide my time. But sometimes, on the walk into work, I think back to that break room flyer. Cork board, blue push-pin. Roommate wanted with the tear-away tabs. Neon pink with black ink and the spread of hope across Anna’s lips as she watched me pull the tab. Before knowing me felt like such a sin.