I used to work with a stupid girl who would drunkenly throw herself at all the guys after work when we would all go to the bar. She didn’t care if we had a girlfriend, or wife, or were gay – which we all did or were except for the one ugly one and no one ever thought of him that way anyway.
She had spent the night buying all of us shots of well-whiskey and going on and on about how much she loved Cheap Trick and stuffing as many dollars that should have been tips into the jukebox to play “I Want You To Want Me” over and over and over again, knocking over barstools with her flopping arms and breath, screaming the lyrics like they weren’t what we already knew all about her, and were already tired of the first time we heard it.
By 2 AM everyone had pretty much cleared out but me and her and the ugly one who was talking an awful lot about something to do with Richard Pryor. She was playing with her hair in a way she thought was sexy but was just causing knots to form and frizz. The ugly one got up to go to the bathroom or to buy another round or something.
All I know is he got up leaving me alone with her.
“Wanna come up? I got some beer up there,” she said, kind of burp-puking out the last part of it.
I didn’t want to really go home, but I wasn’t 21 yet and the bar we were at was the only place that let me in that I knew, so I figured I could at least squeeze in two or more beers. And they were free.
“Sure. Let’s go.”
***
She lived right above the bar we were at, so it wasn’t like it was out of the way or anything. She fumbled for her keys on the way up the stairs, dropping them down a flight. I ran back down to get them and she swooned and called me her hero, dropping them again, this time on purpose.
No, she threw them.
We both stood there on the 9th or 10th stair before her apartment, staring at each other until I coughed and sighed and walked down to get them again.
Once inside, she went right to the fridge to get us something to stuff in our mouths, but I couldn’t wait that long: I had lit a cigarette the minute the door had shut.
“Oh, you can’t smoke in here. But we can go out on the fire escape.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, taking another drag.
“It’s okay. C’mon, let’s go out and have a cigarette!”
She tumbled over to the window, leaving two beers on the kitchen counter. She struggled with opening it, letting out a huge sigh and looking at me with a pout and what she probably thought were puppy dog eyes though they were more squinted, like mice mincing around some rotten cheese.
I opened the window with one arm, thinking that she’s really bad at faking it or she really needs to go to the gym more often. Or both.
Once outside, she leaned against the rail of the fire escape and I offered her a cigarette. I lit it for her and we stood there, taking our drags in what I thought was pretty uncomfortable silence.
“You know,” she started, “you’re like the nicest guy I know. Nobody else comes up when I ask if they want to.”
“That’s nice of you to say. But I really just came up because you said you had beer.”
“That’s okay,” she said, letting out a little breath. “You still came up.”
We stood out there for the rest of the night. She told me about her being an only child and growing up outside of town, but close enough to be able to come in when she wanted to. But her parents never wanted her to, so she’d have to sneak out on the Metra train, telling them that she was going to dance practice. It wasn’t until her parents read about a dance recital in the paper, and they showed up to place that had never heard of her, that they started keeping a closer eye on her. She told me that she could dance, so she never needed lessons, she could dance fine and sexy and guys loved watching her dance for them in the woods behind her high school. She told me about one time when she was doing a strip tease for one of the boys from her French class who had bad teeth but a nice smile, and how they went there to practice their "French" and how he ran away when they heard someone coming, leaving her there with her jeans and shirt and bra on a stump on top of some mushrooms.
And a look on her face like she was a looney.
She told me how she started drinking when she was 15 and her cousin brought over some bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill in her backpack and they got drunk in her room when her parents were out to dinner and how she liked it and just kept drinking more things, different things, and liked those things too. And that it wasn’t a problem because she liked it and she would probably stop once she stopped liking it so much.
But I like it so much, don't you? I mean, really?
She told me about the first time a guy ate her out and then told her that she tasted like his lunch and said she should put a pickle down there.
She said she thought that was funny so she let him fuck her.
“What about you?” she asked. “What’s your story?”
“I dunno,” I said, lighting another cigarette. “Same sorta stuff I guess.”
I never asked her for the beer.
***
About two weeks after that, she missed a shift at work. We tried calling but the phone just kept ringing. We spent our day bitching about her, really, more than covering for her. It was rude. Typical, but rude.
None of us cleaned the bathroom that day. We were all gonna wait for her to do it when she came back.
Some of the guys totally missed the bowl on purpose when they pissed, just to be dicks.
The next day our boss let us all know that she wouldn’t be coming into work anymore: She had fallen off her fire escape, her parents had said, not crying.
The funeral was going to be Wednesday if any of us wanted to go.
I don’t think any of us went. Not even the ugly one.
We never talk about her now. We hardly ever talk at all now.
