Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(15)
Audre: goblin’s asleep
Reshma: there in 5
Forty-five minutes later, they were both sitting on the fire escape in crop tops and cutoffs, their flip-flopped feet dangling through the iron bars. Two floors below them was the owner of the garden apartment, a short, round, older gentleman named Barry Carroll. He spent every summer barbecuing in the garden in Hawaiian-print swim trunks. At the moment, he was grilling hot dogs and listening to early Madonna. He was a generous, helpful, friendly neighbor—but, curiously, he never spoke.
“I wonder how old Barry is,” said Reshma, peering at him over her glam white sunnies.
“Unclear. I feel like he’s beyond age.”
“Like he’s immortal?”
“Maybe he regenerates, like a starfish. Or Groot.” Audre sighed, her shoulders slumping.
Reshma adjusted her position so she was facing Audre. “Talk to me, baby. Which part upsets you the most? Losing your internship? Not seeing your dad? Or spending the summer babysitting and continuing to live on the couch?”
“Yes,” responded Audre.
“Look, it might be fun to stay here for the summer. The city will be empty. Brooklyn will be your playground. You think I want to go to Argentina and ‘assist’ my parents in making yet another album full of dentist office bangers?”
“I mean, yeah. It’s Argentina.”
“But music is their thing. They’re dying for me to follow in their footsteps.” She shook her head. “I’m not trying to be a nepo flop. I wanna be radically different from them.”
“But it’ll still be fun. You’ll meet some hot Argentinean girl who’ll make you happy for exactly forty-eight hours. Watch.”
“You think I enjoy hopping indiscriminately from hookup to hookup?” She tilted her head back, exhaling up to the sky. “It’s exhausting. Try it, you’ll see. Maybe this’ll be your slut summer.”
“Me? You know I’d never,” said Audre, leaning her forehead against the iron bars. “Besides, I’ve gotta focus on my book. I’m struggling to come up with advice that isn’t cliché.”
“How hard can it be?”
The thing was, nothing was hard in Reshma’s life. She didn’t have to obsess about college, her future. Her parents were sixty-five. They’d been pop stars in the UK since the ’80s. They’d been rich for a long, long time, and once Reshma turned twenty-one, she’d inherit millions.
“Well, what would be your advice for living your best teen life?” asked Audre.
Reshma nibbled a cuticle, thinking about this for a moment.
“Number one, keep a daily planner. Two? Always smell good. Three, don’t take drugs from anyone you’ve known less than three months. Four, learn how to give yourself an orgasm.”
“And if you can’t make yourself come,” added Audre, “your antidepressant might be making you numb.”
Reshma raised a luscious eyebrow. “And how would you know?”
“All therapists know that. It’s in every psychology book I’ve ever read.”
“Just what I thought! You know it intellectually, but not from experience. You need to live a little.” Reshma ran her pointy acrylics through her long, thick waves.
“What do you mean?” asked Audre.
“Listen, you give the best advice of anyone I know. But it’s all from psychology books and mental health podcasts. So. Many. Podcasts.” Reshma grimaced. “My point is, your book will be even more meaningful if you lived a little. If your advice came from IRL experience. Would you go to a dermatologist who’d never had a pimple?”
Audre’s fingers flew up to her cheeks, where the shadow of her eighth-and ninth-grade acne still haunted her. “Do I have a pimple?”
“Are you listening? You have writer’s block because you’re lacking authentic inspiration. Especially when it comes to boys.” She took a drag of her cigarette and then whipped her head around to face Audre. “That reminds me. What happened with that kid from prom?”
“Ellison,” said Audre, who’d been dreading this conversation for a month. During prom weekend, Reshma and her ex-girlfriend, a swimsuit model, had been canoodling at her shoot in Hawaii. Since then, every time Reshma brought up the dance, Audre smoothly changed the subject by asking a million questions about Hawaii.
Audre wished she could press a button and erase that mortifying night. It was damn near impossible, considering Ellison kept texting her the same empty, pleading messages.
No one saw it. i promise. pls don’t tell anyone
Ellison went to St. Francis Academy, a castle-like private school nestled underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The good-looking son of a Wall Street business titan, Ellison was the definition of prep school arrogance. (His Snapchat name was, unironically, @KingEllisontheFirst.) Earlier this year, she had debated abolishing the death penalty against him at the citywide debate team championship—and lost. When Ellison won, he actually fist-pumped the air. Annoying. But then… he asked her for a slice of pizza after the meet. A date? She never went on dates. Who had the time? Plus, she was such an overthinker that a casual date was excruciating. But he sprung it on her so fast that yes! flew out of her mouth before her brain caught up.