Fucking Meg Ryan

I slammed my bed back into the wall, only to have it flop back down. My face felt like I had been laying on cement in July and hurried to push it back into the wall, making sure it stayed. I grabbed Floozy and put her on my beanbag chair, her meows growing louder as I ran around my apartment with such intensity that sweat beaded on my lower back. The phone shrieked from the wall, the spiral cord twisted into one giant knot around itself. I grabbed it off the hook as I went to open the fridge, leaning away from it with my entire weight, which caused the door to unstick with the sound of a vacuum releasing someone's stomach. I stumbled back, ripping the phone out of the wall.

“Sylvie. Baby. Please talk to me. I can help you with whatever you need. Please just don’t--” Hang up. Too Late.

I slammed the phone back onto the receiver. I didn’t want her “sorry I ran off to Vegas with my new husband and left you alone in fucking Bakersfield with a cat to make up for it” apology. I threw off my shirt and left it in the middle of the floor. I sat down with the expired jar of pickles and put Floozy, who had been pawing at the torn half of a photo of my mom, onto my lap. She looked up at me with her one eye and attacked the top of my bare chest with her claws, digging in every time I tried to move her. My air conditioner hadn’t worked in weeks, and I really couldn’t afford to get it repaired. I didn’t even know how I was gonna pay rent or for gas to drive to class or for anything at the moment. Sitting half naked in a half empty bean bag, I screwed the top back on the jar and decided that I needed something else to eat besides mushy pickles. I picked up the cat and moved her off of me, but she just wrapped herself around my wrist, clawing for dear life.

“Flooz, get the fuck off”, I griped.

I got stuck staring at the back of this girl’s head in the line at the supermarket. I had a feeling that I had seen her somewhere before. She was running her fingers through a heap of fried peroxide curls that she had gathered, eventually tying it up with a raspberry velvet ribbon. She swayed back and forth on her feet, smoothing her spotted dress against her thighs as she rocked. She was short, her head could only reach my chest even on her tiptoes. She tossed a candy bar up in the air, catching it with every fall. Her gum popped with every smack of her glossed lips, freckled nose scrunching up every so often. I wondered what those lips felt like on skin, what she was able to do with the tongue that hid behind them. I imagined her head buried between my legs, velvet ribbon peeking out of the space between my thighs.

She quickly shoved the Zero bar into the pocket of the huge brown utility jacket she had over her dress without so much a glance around. The man in the three-piece suit in front of her held his Rolex up to his face, rolling his eyes at the amount of time he’d been waiting. I don’t blame him. I’d have been equally pissed off if I actually had something to do with my life. The blush faded from my cheeks but came rushing right back as soon as Little Miss Cherry Bomb looked me in the face. I looked down at her pocket and she let out a “Shhhhh” along with a wink. One of the packs of forty-five cent Top Ramen fell out of my arms, since I’d been too lazy to get a shopping basket. I just stared at it, as did the girl, and the suit-man. None of us moved to pick it up, almost like there was some unspoken rule that it should just stay on the ground.

The girl finally got to the cashier, who just stared at her like she knew she’d taken the chocolate bar and it was above her paygrade to actually do anything about it. I looked to see what she was actually paying for, since she’d just stolen the candy. On the conveyor sat a single tomato. The cashier finished ringing her up and the girl told her to not even bother bagging it. She took the tomato right in the palm of her hand, looked at me, and bit a chunk out of it like it was an apple. She smiled with all of the red, pulpy mess covering her teeth, and I chuckled for some reason. She spun away after paying in all dimes that she had pulled out of her jacket.

Outside of the supermarket, the girl leaned against a brick column with what looked like her entire body weight, both knees locked out in front of her. She held a cigarette between the fingers of the same hand that held her half-eaten tomato.

“Do you got a light?”

Her voice was deeper than I thought it’d be, but I chalked it up to the smoking. I panicked at her question because I really, really wanted to have a lighter to give her. I wanted to have something that she needed from me, a reason to stick around.

“A what?”

“A fuckin’ lighter, dude? Do you?”

“Oh no, sorry.”

Pathetic, Syl. I stood in front of her a little too statue-like for a little too long, I think, because she screwed her firetruck-red eyebrows together and narrowed her eyes at me, probably trying to figure out why this I was sticking around despite not having a lighter. Under the confusion, though, there seemed to be a bit of an amused look about her. I took a step backwards that ended up being more of a stumble than a step. I noticed that she had little uneven bangs sitting right above her unnaturally red eyebrows. She scuffed one of her chunky boots across the concrete and shifted her weight back onto her legs. I choked on whatever I was trying to say next, my thoughts incoherent and my legs carrying my body away from the awkwardness I had just brought about.

I heard shoes scuffing the ground behind me and turned back to see her curls bouncing as she skipped behind me. Her chest didn’t even move at all, and I couldn’t help but wonder her tits looked like under that dress, and then wonder what the fuck was wrong with my brain for that.

“Hey”, I stopped walking, “Statue bitch, wait!”

How endearing. I had earned a nickname.

“Yeah?”

“Are you twenty one? I kinda told this guy I’d bring wine to this thing he’s having tonight and I sort of accidentally put my fake in the dryer and it fuckin’ melted.”

Coming back out of the grocery, I handed the girl the black bag. She grabbed the neck of the bottle of Pinot and let it slump to her side carelessly.

“Where the fuck do I know you from?”

So I wasn’t the only one who recognized her. At least I hadn’t lost my mind. At least.

“Um.”, I trailed off, trying to mentally pinpoint her.

“Wait. You took that stupid painting class with the apples. The one at the BCA.”

I nodded as my tongue stuck itself to the front of my teeth. I knew her.

Two summers ago, I started teaching this still life painting class at the Bakersfield Cultural Arts center because I was strapped for rent money. The regular attenders included Mrs. Rosalin that owned the bookstore two blocks over from my complex, Marc, who looked like he could either be 16 or 28, his best friend Lucas that looked and smelled to be one more bong rip away from being permanently high, always bringing a skunk musk into the classroom behind him, and the occasional straggler. One Thursday afternoon in mid-July, the door swung open and slammed into the wall hard enough to cause the pile of apples on the table to topple and roll onto the tile floor. A thin, short girl made her way in, almost flinging herself onto the stool behind the easel closest to me. This would be one of the stragglers. She had a black ponytail on top of her head with strands falling down to touch the freckles that covered her cheeks. One of her eyebrows had a slit shaved into it, which intimidated the hell out of me even though I knew she had to be younger than me. I knew this, in part, because of the tiny mountain range of acne that peaked on her chin and the way she had covered it with makeup a little too orange for her skin, the way I had when I was her age. The way everyone did when they were her age. She steadied herself on the stool, perched with one chunky combat boot on the spindle, hands between her thighs on the seat. She watched my demonstration with an amused smirk, an air of confidence about her. She stared hard at the apples that I had placed back upright since her entrance.

Some time passed through the three-hour session, and the girl remained intensely focused on her canvas. The room had skinny, rectangular windows lining the area just below the ceiling, and at the perfect time of day, the sun would filter through perfectly. If you were to look up and watch the streams of light, you could watch the dust swimming in the sunbeams just to dissolve into invisibility in the gaps between. What I noticed is that in the direct line of this light, which the girl happened to be sitting dead in the center of, her milk-white skin became a translucent pearl. The tangle of veins below the surface showed themselves to me as she sat, concentration stuck on her features. At some point, I stopped painting the apples entirely, leaving round, red blobs all over my canvas. I was stuck staring at the way her freckles smeared across her round nose and how in the space of the slit of her brow, microscopic hairs were beginning to sprout up, speckling the skin with black dots. I knew she couldn’t have been older than sixteen, but for some reason I justified that with the fact that I had only just graduated highschool. Two years ago.

At the end of the session, I walked around to look at all of the canvases that the students left behind. At the very front easel rested a canvas depicting a bowl of apples resting on the large chest of a nude woman.

Somehow, my awkward stiffness had resulted in this girl, whose name I had figured out was Marlowe, inviting me to whatever kickback on whatever street with whatever guy that she blabbed on about for ten minutes after I gave her the bottle of wine. I had clarified that I didn’t actually take the painting class, but rather had taught it. She asked me if I liked her tits. The ones she had painted that day, not her actual tits, which she had to clarify as I turned into a stuttering mess. After our exchange, she walked back off into the grocery to buy a lighter, cigarette tucked into the mess of curls on top of her head. I think she had permed it after she bleached it, because the residual smell on her head almost caused me to gag thinking about the days of my childhood where my mother would open all of the windows while she chemically ruined my virgin hair in the pastel green sink of the upstairs bathroom.

“Just like Meg Ryan!”, she’d exclaim with her hands over her mouth.

What the fuck kind of mother tells their six year old they look like Meg Ryan?

The guy whose apartment Marlowe invited me to without permission was named Beck, and I wondered if his parents named him that because they listened to Loser a few too many times like my mom used to. I wondered if she’d have named me that too if I’d been born after 1994. Beck introduced himself by telling me that he was majoring in philosophy at the community college, like that was something really special. Marlowe seemed to respect him like some sort of god, trailing behind him as he looked at every girl he walked past for way too long and with way too much “fuck me” in his eyes, in her white Nirvana tee that looked like she took scissors to it blindfolded. It barely covered her ass, and every now and then you could see the tiniest bit of black lace panties peeking out of the bottom when she lifted her arms. It seemed like less than seconds after we arrived that she had begun stumbling around, tripping over air. I noticed a flask halfway covered by her jacket that she had tossed over my shoulder when we walked through the door, and realized that she was slammed. She had to have been drinking for hours. Understanding that I wasn’t going to get her attention back anytime soon, I wandered into the kitchen. Reaching behind a couple making out on the counter, I grabbed a beer and hurried out, taking note that I was definitely the oldest person here.

I ran my hands across a faded brown corduroy couch, looking head on at the TV playing Sleepless in Seattle, tracing the individual lines in the fabric and holding back the urge to vomit. I I stuck my finger under a rip in the cloth and pulled out a chunk of foam, flinging it onto the pile of empty bottles at my feet and sinking back into the fluffy seat. I hated Meg Ryan. I white-knuckled the almost empty beer and closed my eyes, a little too buzzed for my own good. I thought about how my mom had been trying to offer me money for weeks, my stupid spiral-cord, absolute shit phone ringing non-stop. I didn’t need her. I tried to stand up from the couch, but it took way more effort than I thought it would, and I ended up having to push myself off with my hands. I walked through the kitchen, making eye contact with a few girls, one of which had a silver bar through her eyebrow, which turned me on for some odd reason. I found Marlowe sitting at the dining room table, crushing up a white pill with the bottom of a beer bottle. She carefully moved the powder onto a rectangle of aluminum foil, making sure not to let any of it get left behind. A girl across the table grabbed the bottle and began crushing her own pill, a long bar looking one that was different from Marlowe’s white pills. While the girl arranged it into a line, Marlowe rolled up a dollar bill and passed it to her. Without missing a beat, she put it in her nose and cleared the line right off of the table. She passed the dollar back over as Beck held a lighter under Marlowe’s foil.

“Watch this, Sylvie.”

While tilting it until the powder left a black trail behind, she inhaled the smoke rising up. She immediately slumped backwards in her chair, a noticeable calm overtaking her body. I looked around the table and noticed that everyone was in just about the same drugged up state, and felt a little pang of sadness that I wasn’t there with them. I kept wondering what sex would feel like in that state, if it even felt like anything at all.

“Sylvie, right?”

Beck was leaning so close to me that I could smell stale beer coming off of him.

“Yeah. We met. When I got here with Marlowe.”

“Oh yeah.” He flung his arm over my shoulder like we were old friends. “Ever had a three-way?”

“No.”

“Wanna? This chick, Rox, won’t fuck me unless there’s another girl there.”

I laughed uncontrollably until Beck walked away shaking his head and Marlowe found me and begged me to take her home with me, almost incoherently. So I did. I decided she didn’t need to know about Beck, but I think she already knew deep down, on some astral level, that he was an asshole.

I went to a lot of these odd drug-fueled hang outs in the next two weeks. Marlowe had practically dragged me to them, and I had just sat and sipped beers while she got utterly fucked up. I’d walk her out the door around five o’ clock in the morning every time, holding her up as she staggered out of Beck’s. I would lay her across the back seat of my car, drive home as carefully as possible after having a few too many beers, and practically drag her up the stairs when we got back to my building. We would go into my bedroom, where she’d shimmy out of whatever outfit she had put on to get the most attention from Beck-- always with her brown jacket overtop. And then we’d sleep, hours and hours of silence, not waking up until well into the afternoon.

“Good morning, sunshine”, she’d always yawn when she woke up. It was never morning. It was always past two in the afternoon.

The only time I decided to actually try some of Marlowe’s drugs was in my own apartment, not at one of her gatherings. I wonder now where she got the pills without Beck around, and I genuinely believe that she had to be sleeping with him when I’d disappear with a bottle on whatever furniture I found in those living rooms. She had pulled out her stash of a few Oxys, and I had given her a look that she was probably expecting at this point. She crawled towards me and my beanbag and put the dollar she was using into my mouth, and I inhaled the rising smoke. I sputtered and coughed, and Marlowe laughed at me uncontrollably.

I woke up the next day still on my beanbag chair to a wide open front door that filled my tiny studio with an uncomfortable amount of sunlight. Genuinely concerned about where the fuck Floozy was, I found Marlowe sitting outside on the concrete steps that led up to my apartment. Floozy was stretched out in the sun next to her as she smoked a cigarette. I desperately wished that I smoked too.

“So, like, do you not work?”, she asked, facing away from me.

“I just teach those classes in the summer. I just haven’t really looked for another job yet. My mom moved to Nevada with her new husband last month and now I won’t take money from her because she just up and moved. It’s always fucking been the two of us.”

“How do you pay for stuff then?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

I didn’t want Marlowe to think I was the type of girl that still got money from her mom, even though I was. Mom sent the money in a little pink envelope every month, enough to cover the rent and barely enough for food.

She said nothing in response, just reached over to pet Floozy, who leaned into her touch. I longed to be my cat so badly at that moment, watching Marlowe’s thin fingers slide across her back. I heard the familiar ring of my phone in the kitchen, and Marlowe looked genuinely concerned that I didn’t want to get up and answer it. I shrugged my shoulders at her.

“Can I do your hair?”, she asked, drinking from her flask.

In my bathroom, I sat in an oversized tee and no pants. The tile floor was cold against my thighs, and my hair was marinating in perm solution under a plastic shower cap. Marlowe continuously drunk from her flask, starting to become noticeably intoxicated by the mouthful. She held my head under the bathtub faucet, running her fingers through my hair to get all of the smell out.

“Can’t shhhhhampoo for at least forty-two.” She was slurring.

“Twenty- four. It’s twenty- four.”

She laid her head on my lap giggling uncontrollably until it turned into hiccups until those turned into gags. Throwing her head into the toilet, she vomited, retching so loudly that Floozy meowed on the other side of the closed door. She raised her face up with chunks dripping down her chin and laughed.

“Fucking, Meg Ryan! I’d fuck Meg Ryan.”

We finally ended up having sex three days later, after we had started downing shots of tequila at noon. I don’t really know which one of us instigated it, but I’d like to believe that it was her. The heat of Bakersfield combined with the warmth that came from the liquor had caused us to strip down to our underwear, Marlowe with no bra on. Her nipples were pierced with little chrome barbells. She hadn’t left my side since that first night at Beck’s. We’d just spent the past two weeks sleeping in my bed and getting drunk and her doing drugs and not eating. No wonder she was so thin. But we didn’t know anything about each other. I knew she was eighteen, that Beck was her boyfriend officially, and that she was addicted to OxyContin. She knew that I hated my mom for leaving me, but she still hadn’t said anything about it. She didn’t know that my dad left before I was born because he didn’t want to be a teen dad. She didn’t know that my sophomore year of high school, I had an abortion because my mom cried on the kitchen floor begging me not to turn out like her, even though I had already picked out the name Meg because she liked Meg Ryan so much. She didn’t know that my favorite color was a hazy mix between purple and blue because it was the color of my faded teddy bear that I slept with every night when my mom and I lived in the backseat of her Chevrolet Celebrity because we had gotten evicted. She didn’t know that my mom bought me Floozy before she left so I wouldn’t get lonely without her being here with me. I wanted her to know all of these things, to ask me about them. But she didn’t and she wouldn’t.

Laying there on my bed, half naked, plastered, and sweaty, we somehow ended up skin-on-skin, mouth-on-mouth. Within seconds, there was no more underwear and her head was between my legs. I grabbed her curls and twisted my hand through them. I could’ve just been drunk, but this girl had definitely never eaten another girl out before. She knew the mechanics, but the actions didn’t match up, which caused me to try and grind my hips into her face. Frustrated, I grabbed her and tried to pull her up onto my face, which just ended up as a drunken, awkward collision of bodies. I wanted this sex to be good so badly. I put my mouth around her nipple, which tasted like quarters, and flicked my tongue over the metal. She shivered in pleasure, but then fell off from straddling me into a fit of laughter. She rolled next to me, flopping down dramatically.

“I’ve always wanted to try a girl”, she giggled, “Cross that one off the bucket list.”

I rolled my eyes and sat up off of the bed, still naked.

“Yeah, you sure tried.”

“Can I cut bangs on you?” Could she do what?

“Um.” And she was already up rummaging through my drawers before I even finished.

She sat me down on my bathroom countertop, angling me towards her so she could see. My bathroom was barely big enough for all of the fixtures, and I have no clue how there was enough room for both of us to fit in there. The initial drunkenness had worn off of me by now, enough to know this was an incredibly bad idea, but for some reason I didn’t put a stop to it. She focused so hard on sectioning off my hair that her tongue remained glued to her top lip, peeking out to show her concentration. She stumbled a bit on her tiptoes trying to reach my head, so she hopped up on the edge of the sink counter across from me. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she began giggling weirdly. She took the rusted kitchen shears in one hand and twirled a piece of hair around her finger with the other, and in one metallic shlink, a chunk of hair fell onto the tile. Then another. And another, all the while Marlowe giggled and swayed. She was definitely still drunk. Somewhere about halfway through, she pulled out her pill bag and put the last three onto her tongue. She blew me a kiss and then got back to work on my hair.

“Ta- DA!”, she slurred in slow motion.

I looked into the mirror, still drunk, and saw a jagged excuse for bangs across my forehead. She acknowledged that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t her best work because she was fucked up. She then twirled out in a pitiful fashion, looking like an alcoholic ballerina stumbling over her own feet. I began to sob in the mirror, watching my eyes flood with tears in the reflection. I slammed and locked the bathroom door, hoping she heard how angry I was. I don’t understand how her bangs turned out so well, and then assumed that she probably hadn’t cut them herself and that I had given her too much credit.

The next morning, I woke on the bathroom floor, door still locked from the night before. The phone was ringing, and I peeled myself off of the hairy tile floor to go and answer it. By the time I finally made it into the main room, I realized how much of a mess we’d made in my apartment. There was broken glass from the tequila bottle, Floozy’s litter box had somehow gotten flipped over, and on the counter was a note from Marlowe.

Sylvie,

Thanks for all the fun, but I’m bored. I’m gonna go back to crashing at Beck’s- can’t wait to tell him I fucked a girl. He’s gonna think it’s so sexy. Watch When Harry Met Sally because you look like that chick. I took something to remember you by. See you whenever.

Marlowe.

I cleaned up the mess that Marlowe had left, and I noticed that I hadn’t seen Floozy all morning. I looked under every piece of furniture in my place, which wasn’t much. I sat on the floor and tucked my knees to my chin, pulling my shirt down over my legs and hugging them. I felt tears stinging the inside of my face. She took Floozy to remember me by. I sobbed because I missed her. Floozy, Marlowe, Mom, all of them. I missed all of them