And There I Was
And there I was, overeating, underage, waiting for J at the so-so East Village bar. My nails were red and the lighting cheap gold and the music I knew the boy in the back had found at his other part-time job. He must have meant it as a joke, but then the owner heard his mother’s Argentine voice, remembered his best friend’s short-lived band. It reminded me of Saturday nights in Connecticut, when my sister and I slipped into Anne’s ballet flats and she poured herself a glass, extra ice please, and we swayed to the drawn curtains, a way of exalting the one who had left, performing her to memorialize her, and it was a good thing my mother never found out. And when J finally made it, it was a good thing I had my fake on me. And it was a good thing, for once, that I wore my hair chopped and mixed and short as hell, because the bartenders can never tell us apart, only shot me a warm glance, fingernails moon cratering tip-tapping the wood counter, before nodding: okay.
Lavinia Liang is a writer and attorney. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, The Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, AGNI, and elsewhere.
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