The steady drumbeat of a headache.
The churning stomach.
The bladder close to bursting.
I wake with all three, plus a sensitivity to sunlight that borders on the vampiric. It doesn’t matter that the long row of bedroom windows faces west, ignored by the sun until early afternoon. The brightness pouring through them is still enough to make me wince the second I open my eyes.
Rolling over, I squint at the alarm clock on the nightstand.
Nine a.m.
Late for lake life. Early for me.
I want to go back to sleep, but the headache and roiling stomach and gargantuan urge to pee pull me out of bed, into the bathroom, then downstairs to the kitchen. While coffee brews, I wash down an Advil with a glass of tap water and check my phone. There’s a joke text from Marnie—that atrocious poster of a kitten dangling from a tree branch that reads, Hang in there!
I reply with a vomit emoji.
There’s also another text, this one from an unknown number. I open it, surprised to see it’s from Katherine Royce.
Sorry about last night.—K.
So she remembers what happened by the fire. I wonder if she also recalls stumbling into the kitchen at midnight. Probably not.
No worries, I text back. Who among us hasn’t passed out in a stranger’s yard?
Her reply arrives instantly. It was my first time.
Welcome to the club.
On my phone, three dots appear, vanish, reappear. The telltale sign of someone debating what to text next. Katherine’s reply, when it finally arrives, is succinct: I feel like shit. To drive home that point, she includes a poop emoji.
Need some coffee? I text back.
The suggestion earns a heart-eyed emoji and an all-caps YES!!!!!
Come on over.
Katherine arrives in the wood-paneled powerboat, looking like a fifties movie star at the Venice Film Festival as she pulls up to the dock. Cornflower blue sundress. Red sunglasses. Yellow silk scarf tied under her chin. I get a pang of envy as I help her out of the boat and onto the dock. Katherine Royce feeling like shit still looks better than I do on my very best day.
Before I can get too jealous, though, she takes off the sunglasses, and I have to stop myself from flinching. She looks rough. Her eyes are bloodshot. Beneath them, dark purple circles hang like garlands.
“I know,” she says. “It was a bad night.”
“Been there, done that, had the pictures printed in a tabloid.”
She takes my arm, and we stroll up the dock, past the firepit, and up the steps to the back porch. Katherine eases into a rocking chair while I step inside to fetch us two mugs of coffee.
“How do you take it?” I ask through the open French doors.
“Normally with cream and sugar,” Katherine calls back. “But today I think I’ll take it black. The stronger, the better.”
I bring out the coffee and sit in the rocking chair next to hers.
“Bless you,” Katherine says before taking a sip, wincing at its bitterness.
“Too strong?”
“Just right.” She takes another sip, smacks her lips. “Anyway, I’m sorry again about last night.”
“Which part?”
“All of it? I mean, Tom is Tom. He’s constantly putting his foot in his mouth. The thing is, he never means to. He’s just missing that filter the rest of us have. He says what’s on his mind, even if it makes things awkward. As for me—” Katherine jerks her head toward the ground below, where she’d dropped like a sack of flour twelve hours before. “I don’t know what happened.”
“I think it’s called drinking too much, too fast,” I say. “I’m an expert at it.”
“It wasn’t the drinking, no matter what Tom thinks. If anything, he’s the one who drinks too much.” She pauses and looks across the lake to her own house, its glass walls made opaque by the reflection of the morning sky. “I’m just not myself lately. I haven’t felt right for days. I feel weird. Weak. That exhaustion I felt while swimming yesterday? That wasn’t the first time it’s happened. It always feels like what happened last night. My heart starts beating fast. Like, illegal-diet-drug fast. It just overwhelms me. And before I know it, I’m passed out in the grass.”
“Do you remember getting home?”
“Vaguely. I remember feeling sick in the boat and Tom putting me to bed and then waking up on the living room couch.”
No mention of fumbling around in the kitchen. Guess I was right about her having no memory of it.
“You didn’t embarrass yourself, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I say. “And I’m not upset at Tom, either. I meant what I said last night. My husband died in the lake. It’s something that happened, and I see no point in pretending it didn’t.”