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walking toward the sound of your voice

At an indoor flea market in State College, Pennsylvania, I buy a set of antique green glass measuring cups, a smutty novel by Anne Rice, and a roughly hewn bar of Amish lard soap that smells distinctly animal in nature but promises to clear up both my face and any poison ivy I may ever get. R doesn’t buy anything, although she comes close with a box of dinosaur jelly jars from the 80s. R is getting her doctorate in psychology at Penn State, and she is absolutely bonkers for dinosaurs.

We do a 12-hour pub crawl with the people in her program, who are lovely, all of them from places like Memphis and Michigan and wearing funny hats, which is the theme. They’re impressed that we’ve been friends for as long as we have. “She was a bitch in high school,” R tells them, which is true. She hands me her beer to finish. “But she’s nice now.”

“Significantly less putrid!” I promise, although I’m actually not. I order a giant plate of nachos to compensate, both for the lie and for all the mean stuff I did when I was fifteen.

Back at her apartment she makes me a turkey sandwich with cheddar cheese and hummus and tells me she’s sorry I got hit in the boob with a flying quesadilla, which is a thing that happened during Hour Eleven. I don’t particularly mind. “You know what my favorite part of going out is?” I ask her, sitting on her futon in my pajamas and my spex, Netflix glowing red on the TV. In the four nights I am with her we manage to blow through the entirety of Party Down, which does weird things to both of us in terms of getting crushes on Adam Scott and needing to say are we having fun yet? as often as possible.  “Coming home and eating a turkey sandwich.”

On Monday we get tattoos in a shop we have researched not at all, which is either brave and spontaneous or extremely stupid. Happily, neither of us get blood poisoning. The guy who inks a quince below my collarbone is named Justin and absolutely refuses to be charmed by me, which I take as both a challenge and a personal affront. “How do you practice being a tattoo artist?” I ask him. His face is very close to my face. “On like, an orange or something?”

“An orange is nothing like human skin,” Justin says. Still, he smiles at me before I go and I think: victory.

Every morning R makes a pot of coffee and sits on the chair next to the futon to talk to me, like we used to debrief in the hallway before homeroom. The sun comes in through the sliding doors.