The only flaw in Callie’s plan for Laura was that it had failed to take Laura’s mom’s finances into account; though they’d both gotten into NYU, Callie’s family was willing and able to pay for it, while Laura’s family—reasonably, Laura thought—refused to let her take out enormous loans when she could go to a good school much closer to home. She had feared that they would lose touch once Callie was in the city. But Callie was not the kind of person who would leave a project unfinished. They also both found that it was hard to create the kind of easy intimacy they had with each other with anyone else. They had a legacy of secrets and inside jokes. Combined, they were more powerful than they were apart. So when the roommate who’d been in the second “bedroom” of Callie’s apartment moved out to live with her boyfriend, she’d called up Laura and told her there was a spot for her, if she had $650 and wanted to move to New York and claim it. She did.
“So how do you know … the Clips?” Laura asked as Callie circled her, tweaking the hem of the dress, smoothing stray pieces of her dark hair into a half-up, half-down situation.
“I had a class with the drummer once, and then I saw them play a few weeks ago at another thing and afterward I went backstage, etcetera.”
“Etcetera?”
Callie shrugged and continued. “It seems like musicians are the people you should know, right? Plus, they’re all hot.”
“I’m looking for people who can help me book shows, not boys to hook up with. And don’t ask why can’t I do both—you know I’m not good at multitasking.”
Callie laughed. “I forgot about your vow of celibacy.”
“I’ll have plenty of time to slut it up when I’m famous. I mean, when I’ve accomplished something.”
“What are you going to write songs about in the meantime, though, if not love? Or at least sex?”
Callie’s desire to basically pimp Laura out had always been a little bit tiresome. Laura tried to distract her. “I wrote a song about egg sandwiches this morning. Want to hear it?”
Without waiting for Callie to respond, Laura put down her drink and grabbed her guitar from the other room. “ ‘Bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll,’ ” she sang. “ ‘Or sometimes just egg and cheese. In a greasy paper sleeve, I eat you on the street.’ ” She played a few more lines and then noodled around a little bit. “I’m still trying to figure out the chorus,” she admitted.
Callie scrunched up her nose. “I don’t think that one is going to be climbing the charts.” She motioned for Laura to come sit by her near the makeup mirror. Laura put down her guitar and complied.
A few minutes later Callie finished doing Laura’s hair and stepped away from her quickly, as though preventing herself from continuing to fiddle with and potentially ruin a perfect creation. They both looked at Laura’s reflection in the mirror for a moment with satisfaction.
Something about Laura’s looks hadn’t made sense in the context of their hometown. To be pretty there, you had to be symmetrical, straight-haired, and small-nosed, ideally white, ideally blond. Within those parameters, you could be pretty or just blandly palatable, like a pat of butter on a squishy dinner roll. Laura’s big eyes and off-kilter nose made her look different from different angles, which made figuring out whether she was attractive too confusing for the consumers of the buttered rolls. But with the city as her backdrop, she was starting to make more sense. She didn’t have the perfumed, deliberate, and commanding hotness of a Callie. But in their dim apartment, backlit by the lamp Callie kept next to her futon mattress on the floor, she had the look of an ingénue about to step onstage, lit with an anticipatory glow.
* * *
The band was playing at one of the terrible bars on Bleecker Street unofficially reserved for NYU students and tourists. There were booths and tables, and a waitress in tall black boots who smelled like patchouli came around and sloshed red wine into their glasses from a giant bottle with no label. It tasted like the smell of the industrial-strength cleaner that whoever mopped the hallways of their building used in order to push the ancient dirt around. After a few sips, though, it grew on them. Though the lighting left the musicians in a pool of dimness, Laura stared at them. Specifically, the guitar player. She hoped that he wasn’t the one who Callie had etcetera’d. He reminded her of a boy from her hometown who’d played Jesus in a high school production of Godspell, skinny and tall with long, pale stringy hair, and he never ever looked up from his guitar. His arm muscles were ropy and hard, and there were holes in his stained white T-shirt. He looked incredibly sad. Suddenly Laura was embarrassed to realize that she was imagining what it would be like to have sex with him. Embarrassed because it was so cliché, and because her imaginings were immediately so vivid and compelling.
The music he was playing, which she almost had to remind herself to notice, was objectively good but not in a way that Laura actually liked. She forced herself to admire his technical skills so that, if she met the guitarist, she could tell him about what she liked in a detailed way and impress him with her musician bona fides. The waitress refilled their wineglasses. Then the band took a break and everyone went outside for cigarettes. Callie put her head close to Laura’s as she lit her cigarette, leaning in so far that her hair brushed Laura’s face.
“So?” she asked. “You seemed into it.”
“I’m not really a fan of this kind of … purposely distorted, less-catchy Television-song thing. It’s just really heterosexual and derivative,” she was saying as the short black-haired drummer came up behind Callie and lifted her into the air by her tiny waist.
“You don’t like our music!” he said to Laura with a kind of prideful leer. Clearly, he didn’t care at all what she thought of his music.
“Owww, you’re hurting me,” Callie whined, batting ineffectively at her pseudo attacker.
He turned his leer toward Callie. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“This is Laura, she’s my new roommate. She’s a musician, too.”
“Are you coming to our party afterward? I promise it’ll be fun, even if you’re not into our heterosexual, derivative songs.”
She nodded mutely, unable to think of any interesting or clever way of saying yes. Letting Callie be her ticket into social situations made her feel like she was back in high school, both cozily familiar and disappointingly regressive.
The drummer gave Callie a squeeze and put her down. The guitar player was standing under a streetlamp alone, smoking, and Laura let herself stare at him. There was something about how he’d looked playing guitar—his focus and his passion, which he’d seemed to be trying almost to conceal. It wasn’t cool to be passionate, but he was, and that made her feel tender toward the part of him that couldn’t protect itself from being seen. He glanced up, catching her in the act of staring at his fingers and lips, and he caught her gaze and held it, held it and let his lips curl into a lazy half smile around his cigarette. She felt the blood rise to her face as she dropped her gaze, trying to pretend that she’d been aimlessly staring into space. She’d never felt so powerfully attracted to anyone before. When she looked up again he was talking to the drummer. The whole thing lasted a fraction of a second, but it was still enough to get Laura through the rest of the show.