She’d left the clinic early to meet her best friend, Sunny, at the Taproom, a cavernous establishment with leather booths on the main level and a sticky dance floor in the red-lit basement. She and Sunny had spent many good nights on this dance floor—nights that, in retrospect, blurred into a single, sound-filled ball of light. A firework.
Sunny had texted her that morning. Meet for drinks later? There’s something I want to show you.
Yes, Ariel had said. I have news for you, too.
There were many things Ariel liked about Sunny, but a big one was that Sunny understood what it was like to escape one life and slip into another. She’d grown up dirt-poor in Petersburg, Alaska, and understood down to the minute how hard she had to work to outrun the life her parents had lived. She had a ten-year plan that did not involve marriage or children but rather a PhD by twenty-eight, a job with benefits by thirty, and a starter home by thirty-five. In this way, she was living the kind of life Ariel had imagined for herself when she left home six years before. Sunny did not fool around with men or drugs but allowed herself, every Saturday night, to dance her brains out at the Replay. This is how she and Ariel had met: two women who were too shy to ask a waiter for more water but who elected to booty-grind for three hours straight, shouting explicit lyrics until their throats were raw.
Sunny was sitting in their usual corner booth, drinking a ginger smash and reading something on her phone. The left side of her head was shaved so that when she wore her hair up, like she did now, she took on a feral, Mad Max look Ariel found at once frightening and chic. Another thing Ariel admired about Sunny was that she always looked good. Tonight she wore nude lipstick, a brown peasant dress that flared out at the wrists, and silverware earrings—a tiny fork dangled from one ear, a spoon from the other. When you wear sweatpants, she’d once said to Ariel, your thoughts wear sweatpants, too. Ariel had thought then of her mother, who used to wear the same shit-caked Levi’s for a month straight.
When she saw Ariel, Sunny set her phone on the table, screen-side down. “Bring it in,” she said, standing for a hug. She smelled like she always smelled, of the DIY shampoo she made from castile soap and coconut milk. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay,” Ariel said. “Same as everyone else—confused. Shell-shocked. Ready for a drink. You?”
Sunny returned to her ginger smash. “I’m pissed, but it’s better than being numb. I was worried I’d be numb.”
“Same,” Ariel said, although she did feel numb.
They spent their first drink exchanging stories and complaints, citing different news articles they’d read and different theories they’d concocted. While Sunny thought it was cowardly to move to Canada, Ariel didn’t see the problem—why not go where you wanted to go? Why was it anybody else’s business? Plus, poutine. They were on their second drink when Ariel asked Sunny what she had wanted to tell her.
“You go first,” Sunny said.
“Okay.” The nervous knot in Ariel’s stomach tightened. “Dex—he sort of proposed.”
A dribble of ginger smash snaked down Sunny’s chin. “He what? When? How? Why?”
“Last week. The morning after the election.”
Just as Ariel had imagined, Sunny’s eyes bugged out. “Is he insane?”
That had been Ariel’s first thought when Dex slipped onto a knee that morning. Either he was insane or extremely hungover or both. The night before—election night—he’d gone to a bar where you could get a PBR and a shot of whiskey for five dollars: the Hillary special. He’d tried to convince Ariel to join.
“Don’t you want to be out so you can celebrate?”
“You’re assuming he’s going to lose,” Ariel had said.
“Of course he’ll lose. All the numbers say he’s going to lose.”
“But what if the numbers are wrong?”
“They won’t be,” Dex had said. “You’ll see.”
In the end, he’d agreed to come home at ten, to be with her. But ten o’clock came and went. Then eleven. Then twelve. As the hours passed, her disbelief about the election transformed into rage at Dex. When she called, his phone went straight to voicemail. Too frazzled to sleep, she toggled between the news and a YouTube video of baby goats playing with a lemon.
Dex had stumbled in at three in the morning, humming a song from a car advertisement. He fell into bed and wrapped his arms around her. “It was fucking crazy out there. Everyone was so sad, and Buddy kept buying everyone tallboys—”
“Your phone was off,” she said, removing his arm.
“Buddy took it from me.”
“He won,” she said, her body hot with anger. “You weren’t here, and he won.”
“I know. You were right.”
“It’s not about me being right.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“It’s about you not being here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“I’m sorry, Ariel.”
He put his arm around her again, and this time she let it stay there. Eventually they fell asleep.
Like all mornings-after, the sun had risen, bright and oblivious. The newspaper appeared on their porch, parents walked their children to school. It was a beautiful day: sunny, temperate. Beside her, Dex lay with his face smashed into his pillow. She examined the freckles on his shoulder and recalled how she used to trace them, running a finger from his ear to the top of his spine, down the side of his body, over his pancake butt and down the back of his thigh and over, where his legs came together. She used to love touching him, loved the way she could abandon herself with him, how he abandoned himself with her, both of them shedding whatever it is that separates humans from the rest of the animal world and reverting, temporarily, into their most basic selves: scent, hunger, pleasure.
Now, more than five years in, she wanted to wipe the freckles into her palm, toss them out, start over. She wanted to begin again in the place where she loved Dex absolutely, an inflating love that colored her life the way a sunset could cast an ordinary field into lambent silver. Their first year together, everything he talked about carried a certain magic: huevos rancheros, the Far Bar, PBR. She had spent many months believing these things were intrinsically superior because Dex liked them, and because they were unfamiliar to her, as exotic as the names of foreign cities. When she finally drank a PBR, she could hardly believe the taste; it was an awful, cheap beer, somewhere on the spectrum between urine and water. The first time she went to the Far Bar, she discovered a dead fly in her rum and a peephole in the women’s bathroom. Like this, the years had cooled the fire in her belly. But it was the way love worked, wasn’t it? Nobody could stay in puppy love forever—it would be madness. Nothing would get done. The whole world would slip away in a daydream of sex and brunch.
The morning after the election, Dex had kissed her on the nose, his face smelling like a headache. “Happy first day of the apocalypse,” he said, rubbing his eyes—eyes so beautiful Ariel had once tried to search online for their exact color in Behr paint. Shallow Pond wasn’t exactly right, but it was close.
She said, “Oh God, I thought it was a nightmare.”