I suggested that we should head off in time for the last bus and Melissa promised to send on the photographs. Bobbi’s smile dropped a little but it was too late to suggest we should stay any longer. We were already being handed our jackets. I felt giddy, and now that Bobbi had gone quiet, I kept laughing at nothing on my own.
We had a ten-minute walk to the bus stop. Bobbi was subdued at first, so I gathered she was upset or annoyed.
Did you have a good time? I said.
I’m worried about Melissa.
You’re what?
I don’t think she’s happy, said Bobbi.
In what sense not happy? Was she talking to you about this?
I don’t think she and Nick are very happy together.
Really? I said.
It’s sad.
I didn’t point out that Bobbi had only met Melissa twice, though maybe I should have. Admittedly it didn’t seem like Nick and Melissa were crazy about each other. He had told me, apropos of nothing, that he’d expected a dinner party she’d arranged to be ‘a nightmare’。
I thought he was funny, I said.
He hardly opened his mouth.
Yeah, he had a humorous silence about him.
Bobbi didn’t laugh. I dropped it. We hardly spoke on the bus, since I could see she wasn’t going to be interested in the effortless rapport I had established with Melissa’s trophy husband, and I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.
When I got back to my apartment I felt drunker than I had been at the house. Bobbi had gone home and I was on my own. I turned all the lights on before I went to bed. Sometimes that was something I did.
*
Bobbi’s parents were going through an acrimonious break-up that summer. Bobbi’s mother Eleanor had always been emotionally fragile and given to long periods of unspecified illness, which made her father Jerry the favoured parent in the split. Bobbi always called them by their first names. This had probably originated as an act of rebellion but now just seemed collegial, like their family was a small business they ran cooperatively. Bobbi’s sister Lydia was fourteen and didn’t seem to be handling the whole thing with Bobbi’s composure.
My parents had separated when I was twelve and my father had moved back to Ballina, where they’d met. I lived in Dublin with my mother until I finished school, and then she moved back to Ballina too. When college started I moved into an apartment in the Liberties belonging to my father’s brother. During term time, he let out the second bedroom to another student, and I had to keep quiet in the evenings and say hi politely when I saw my room-mate in the kitchen. But in the summer when the room-mate went home, I was allowed to live there all on my own and make coffee whenever I wanted and leave books splayed open on all the surfaces.
I had an internship in a literary agency at the time. There was one other intern, called Philip, who I knew from college. Our job was to read stacks of manuscripts and write one-page reports on their literary value. The value was almost always nil. Sometimes Philip would sardonically read bad sentences aloud to me, which made me laugh, but we didn’t do that in front of the adults who worked there. We worked three days a week and were both paid ‘a stipend’ which meant we basically weren’t paid at all. All I needed was food, and Philip lived at home, so it didn’t matter much to us.
This is how privilege gets perpetuated, Philip told me in the office one day. Rich assholes like us taking unpaid internships and getting jobs off the back of them.
Speak for yourself, I said. I’m never going to get a job.
3
Bobbi and I often performed at spoken word events and open mic nights that summer. When we were outside smoking and male performers tried to talk to us, Bobbi would always pointedly exhale and say nothing, so I had to act as our representative. This meant a lot of smiling and remembering details about their work. I enjoyed playing this kind of character, the smiling girl who remembered things. Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’， but she said she meant it as a compliment. Mostly I agreed with her assessment. At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterwards think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am.
Melissa sent us the image files from the dinner party a few days later. I’d expected Bobbi to dominate the photo set, along with maybe one or two token photographs of me, blurry behind a lit candle, holding a forkful of spaghetti. In fact, for every picture of Bobbi, I appeared too, always lit perfectly, always beautifully framed. Nick was in the photographs also, which I hadn’t expected. He looked luminously attractive, even more so than he had in real life. I wondered if that was why he was a successful actor. It was difficult to look at the photo set and not feel that he was the primary presence in the room, which I definitely hadn’t felt at the time.