Birds of California(27)
“Isn’t all sex recreational?” Sam points out.
“You know what I mean.”
Sam doesn’t, not really. “I’m not having any kind of sex with Kimmeree,” he tells her, “not that it’s any of your business. And I don’t have a girlfriend, either, if that’s the information you were trying to get.”
That gets under her skin, which was the point. Sam watches the temper flare in her dark, witchy eyes, like someone blowing on a campfire. He can almost see the sparks flying off her skin and out into the night. “It wasn’t,” is all she says.
“Okay.” Sam shrugs, affecting carelessness. “Fine. I’m just saying, you don’t have to go around hating everyone for fun. There are plenty of other ways to spend your time.” He pops a fry into his mouth. “You could join an Ultimate Frisbee league, for example.”
Fiona laughs, not nicely, and loud enough that a delivery driver glances over at them as he climbs back into his car with a giant bag of food. “First of all,” she snaps, “I’d rather perform my own root canal. Second of all, I don’t hate everyone for fun—I hate most people, because they deserve it. And third of all, I was in a psych hospital, not rehab. It’s different.”
That shocks him—not the information itself, necessarily, but the sound of her saying it. Sam is quiet for a moment before eventually he nods. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
“No, you were going to google it,” she fires back. “Or maybe you already googled it, I don’t know.”
He did google it, actually, the day he went to see her at the copy shop, so he doesn’t say anything. He tries to imagine her there, sitting in her sweatpants with the door locked playing checkers with the other patients. Everything he knows about psych hospitals he learned from watching movies and TV.
“I’m not embarrassed,” she continues, her voice all brass and bluster. “Frankly, more people in this business should spend some quality time in a mental health facility.”
“Hey, you won’t hear me arguing,” Sam says. Then, before he quite knows he’s going to ask her: “What was it like?”
He fully expects her to tell him to mind his own business, but instead Fiona seems to stop and consider it, like possibly nobody’s ever asked her to describe it before. “It was quiet,” she finally says.
Sam nods. The sound of her voice is almost nostalgic, like his mom when she talks about going out to the bars with her girlfriends at UW-Madison in the eighties. “Seems about right.”
“Everybody expected me to fight it,” she continues. She’s gazing across the patio at the cars whizzing by on the busy street, their headlights gleaming in the dark. “But, like, why would I have fought it? I was messed up, obviously. I never said I wasn’t messed up. I wanted to be, like, less messed up, so I went to the place and I did the fucking thing, and still for the rest of my life nobody is ever going to let me—” She breaks off, looking almost startled to realize he’s still listening. She shakes her head. “Forget it.”
Sam gazes at her across the table, her jaw set and her expression haughty. She looks like a queen facing down a losing war. It’s the most she’s said about her past—the most she’s said at once, period—since he walked into the copy shop the other morning. Just for a moment, it occurs to him to wonder what else she might be keeping to herself.
“People are taking our picture,” she announces suddenly, nodding across the patio at a couple of teenage girls in babydoll dresses faking the world’s least-convincing selfie; they look away when he glances over, muffling giggles behind cupped hands.
Sam shrugs. “I hadn’t noticed,” he says, which is bullshit, and he and Fiona both know it. The truth is he’s got a sixth sense for people looking at him, and he never stops worrying that one day they won’t care enough to do it anymore. Sometimes it feels like he’s got a perpetual leaderboard in his head: Does he have fewer Instagram mentions than he did a couple months ago? Did fewer girls check him out at the gym? How many search results come up when you google his name? Isn’t that exhausting? Erin asked him once, and the answer is yes, of course it is, but also he doesn’t know how he’d possibly stop. “Quick, you better do something weird for the camera.”
“Gotta preserve that personal brand,” Fiona agrees. “Any thoughts?”
“Could scale the side of the building and perform the first act of 1776 as a one-woman show, maybe.”
“Slather a bunch of animal sauce on my face like a mud mask and lie down by the dumpsters so the raccoons can lick it off.”
“Take my car,” he suggests, “and I’ll start screaming about how you stole it.”
Fiona smiles. One of the selfie girls lights up a cigarette, the match flaring like an old-fashioned camera bulb. “Do you still smoke?” Fiona asks him.
“Huh?” Sam frowns. “I never smoked.”
Fiona frowns back. “Yes you did.”
“I definitely didn’t.”
“At the wrap party, you told me you did.”
“What wrap party?”
Fiona makes a face. “You know which one,” she accuses. “The last one.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“The one where we—” Fiona gestures vaguely with her cup, tipping it back and forth between them. “You know.”