Pineapple Street(57)
“Fuck,” she whispered. She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and brushed her teeth. She didn’t think she had thrown up, but her tongue felt strange and her throat hurt. She had a bruise on her forearm that she didn’t remember getting. She threw her jeans and blouse into the hamper and pulled on an old soccer jersey. She had three texts from Cord about tennis. He had reserved them a court at noon. It was already eleven. She texted Lena.
Did I kiss Curtis McCoy?
Lena texted back immediately. I am so glad you are not dead. You only had three drinks but you were WHITE GIRL WASTED. Maybe stomach virus?
LENA, DID I KISS CURTIS MCCOY???
Um yes that happened
But I hate him, Georgiana texted back, and threw herself onto the couch. Why the hell would she kiss Curtis McCoy? She had a vision of herself pressing her face against his, him pulling back. It was too horrible to contemplate. She ate four pieces of toast and drank two Vitaminwaters before putting on her tennis clothes. Cord had been essentially stalking her—he still hadn’t said a word about Brady, so he clearly had no idea why she’d been ghosting him—but if she canceled tennis he would show up at her place and make her talk. She wasn’t in any kind of shape to have a conversation, never mind one that required obfuscation or careful lies.
She met him on the ground floor of the Casino, and they hit for an hour, Georgiana screwing up her footwork and missing easy shots and serving like a complete asshole. When they finished Cord teased her gently. “You a little hungover, George? Big night last night?”
“What makes you think that?” she replied icily as she changed out of her tennis shoes.
“Um, maybe the fact that you stink of booze or that you sweat a line of eye makeup down your cheek? Did you even wash your face last night?”
“I did not,” she admitted.
“Did you sleep at a dude’s?” Cord asked. “Did you hook up with someone?”
“No, God.” Georgiana’s face prickled with heat.
“Oh you did. You had sex with someone. You got a maaaaaan,” he started singing.
“Stop, Cord,” Georgiana said, annoyed. Cord grinned and zipped his racket into his case. They walked down the stone steps and onto Montague Street. Georgiana felt wretched. Her face was red, her hair was dirty, and, apparently, she had mascara all over her cheek. As they walked, Cord linked his elbow through hers like they were a courting couple promenading in Elizabethan times. He knew he had pushed too far and was trying to make up for it. As they rounded the corner of Montague and Hicks they nearly smacked into another couple, a man and woman walking a big greyhound. Georgiana locked eyes with the man. It was Curtis McCoy. There was a moment when they both stopped and time froze. Georgiana felt lightheaded, woozy with humiliation. And then Cord said, “Whoops, hey big dog,” and led her on by the elbow and Curtis quickly looked away. He and the woman continued down Hicks with their dog, and Georgiana let her brother chatter, carrying on a one-sided conversation all the way to her apartment, where she would lie on the couch and stew in a fetid swamp of anger and self-recriminations for the rest of the day.
* * *
—
Georgiana had her first panic attack the summer before college. At the time she thought she had just smoked too much weed, but in retrospect the dizziness, the closing in of her vision, and the sense that her heart was no longer working were a product of a life she felt was spinning out of control: moving away, leaving her friends behind, the knowledge that outside of her neighborhood and school nobody cared who her parents were, and the bit of glitter and fairy dust that came with being Darley and Cord’s sister couldn’t help her anymore. In the weeks following Brady’s death, she felt that old panic nipping at her heels. She would be in meetings at work and feel certain she was sliding out of her chair, unable to remain upright. She would speak and her face would go numb and her mouth would go dry. She would hang up in the middle of calls as the words stuck in her throat. She had a bottle of Valium her mother had left in a handbag, and by breaking them in half she managed to ration them out, but when she shook the bottle and heard the sound of distinct pills hitting the plastic cap, she called her GP.
Her physician was away for the week, and Georgiana wept on the phone to her receptionist until she made her a same-day appointment with a doctor who had agreed to fill in. He was old and kind, and when Georgiana described her symptoms, he pulled a large drug manual from his bookshelf and read her descriptions of the different choices aloud. Regular antianxiety medications could take two weeks to begin working. He wrote her a prescription for sixty Klonopin and told her to take them morning and night.
The day of Brady’s memorial she swallowed one and a half pills before putting on a black dress and taking the subway to the Upper East Side. She sat with a group of her colleagues in the back and watched Brady’s parents, both broken with grief, greeting family at the front. They both worked for Oxfam; he was following in their footsteps. Brady so closely resembled his mother that it pained Georgiana to look at her. At the service his best friend spoke, his older brother spoke, and Amina spoke. Amina was small and elegant, in her early thirties, and Georgiana felt herself staring. This was the woman who held half of Brady’s heart. His friend, his brother, his wife—one by one they stood and laid claim to Brady’s memory. But he had loved Georgiana too. She knew it, and yet she suffered alone, groggy and dizzy from the medicine, listening quietly in her pew as Brady’s wife cried and wrapped her arms around his family.