Like a kid in trouble, Lyla cooed, “Ooooooh, Grandmaaaaa. Someone was out past her bedtime. We were getting ready to deploy Search and Rescue.”
“Yeah, you’re never out this late! Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl? No judgment!” Sevyn waggled her perfectly sculpted brows at me as I kicked off my shoes, smiling dreamily from ear to ear like a rom-com heroine, and flopped down next to Oak on the couch.
Without moving the rest of my body, I lifted my head and dodged her question by asking, “Were you guys waiting up for me, or do you normally order food at one in the morning?”
“Oh, this? Yeah, this is a pretty common occurrence, but you usually miss out since you’re tucked in by ten,” Oak teased.
Lyla gestured to the table full of egg rolls, dumplings, and three kinds of noodles. “Are you hungry? Want some dim sum? We got plenty. Ass was supposed to be home, but her work trip got extended,” she said, shaking a white paper container in my direction.
“Forget the dim sum! I wanna know, did you get some?”
“Sevyn!” Lyla cried, swatting in her direction.
Sevyn laughed. “What? With a grin like that on her face, I meeeeean . . .”
I felt my cheeks warm and waved my hands to pause their line of questioning. “No, no, nothing like that. I just . . . I had a really great date with um . . . a very old friend.”
A look of shock spread across Lyla’s face. “Oh my God, did you go out with Charlie?”
“Charlie?” I asked, momentarily forgetting that I even knew anyone named Charlie. “Oh no. Actually, it’s a bit of a crazy story.”
Sevyn lifted a wonton to her mouth with her chopsticks and took a bite. “Girl, I watch TikTok on the reg, and I have seeeeeen some thiiiiings.” Her eyes grew wide to emphasize her point, and then she relaxed and went back to chewing. “I don’t think anything can surprise me at this point.”
When I moved to Bushwick a little more than a month ago, I filled my roommates in on the whole Adam situation, explaining the reason why an almost thirty-year-old suddenly found herself in need of a flat with four roommates and was hustling in a job as a singing waitress. When I confessed how starting again seemed wholly impossible, the amount of support paired with their lack of judgment was an incredibly welcomed surprise.
Though they knew about Adam, I wasn’t sure how to explain the Gabe situation or what happened with the mystical phone booth. So as quickly and uncomplicatedly as I could, I detailed my strange encounter with Gabe on Christmas Day and everything that came after.
Finally, when I got to describing the date, I told them about Gabe’s surprise appearance at Mimi’s followed by our Funkytown Le Freak show, all of which ended in the most earth-shattering kiss I’d had in a long while. After all these years, after all this time, when our lips met, it felt like the stars aligned to create a portal, rocketing us back to before it all fell apart. The girls sat ramrod straight perched at the edge of their seats, lo mein noodles dangling from their lips and chopsticks, enraptured by the sheer absurdity and magic of my fairy tale.
Oak pushed her thick red-rimmed glasses up on her nose and motioned with an eager wave of her hand for me to continue. “So, with chemistry like that, what happened? Why’d you guys break up?”
“It’s a bit complicated, but I guess it comes down to the fact that we were on different ships sailing in opposite directions. Gabe was such a good guy, is such a good guy, so passionate about making the world a better place, so unlike Adam. The polar opposite, actually. I can’t stop thinking about the fact that there has to be a reason the phone booth brought me to his doorstep, now, after all this time. Maybe it’s because we’re finally on the same page?”
“I guess it’s true what they say: the greatest love stories are rarely a straight line, now are they?” asked Lyla, who looked like the human version of the heart-eyes emoji.
“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions,” Sevyn interjected, her voice monotone and her face full of skepticism.
“Tell me you did not just throw out an Ariana Grande quote and try to pass it off like prophetic wisdom?” Lyla called out.
Oak chimed in from beside me. “Actually, Ariana Grande may have repeated it, but that little nugget of wisdom belongs to His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”
“Really? Well, whatever, it felt fitting whoever it was that said it. My point is there is no preordained love story; these days you gotta write your own.” Sevyn shrugged and crammed another heap of noodles into her mouth.
Lyla tossed a decorative pillow at Sevyn, who deflected it like a ninja and sent it flying into the kitchen. “Don’t listen to her, Avery. She’s a salty Gen Zer who’s been on one too many bad Tinder dates. She’s cynical of all happy endings.”
“You’d be cynical too if you went out on a date with the Tinder Swindler,” Sevyn snapped.
Oak clapped her hand to her mouth. “OMG, I totally forgot you went out with the Netflix guy!”
“And amazingly, he wasn’t even the worst of them,” Sevyn deadpanned.
My eyes went round. “Worse than the Tinder Swindler?”
“Lyla, tell Avery about the guy who constantly clogged our toilets.” Sevyn threw up her hands dramatically. “I just can’t do it. PTSD.”
For the next ten minutes, Lyla regaled us with tales of Clog the Toilet Guy, an investment banker Sevyn dated for a few months who, for reasons still unknown, liked to flush random objects down the toilet.
“You have no idea, Avery. It was crazy-town. He flushed magazines . . . shoes . . . his own iPhone. And then, one day, I noticed my pet turtle had gone missing,” Lyla said, her tight voice holding back emotion.
Upon Lyla mentioning the turtle, everyone, between gasps of laughter, cried, “OHHHH HAAAAANNNKKKKK!!” in unison. And then they really lost it. Their laughter was contagious, and after a deep snort from Lyla, Oak spit out her matcha, spraying the couch and me with a mist of green tea, causing me to break into a fit of hysterical giggles along with them. The apartment was near silent except for the squeaks and wheezy breaths of side-splitting laughter. And the strange sounds emitted from our mouths caused us to laugh even harder.
Tears streaked down my face, and I grabbed for some paper napkins from under a container. But being unable to see through my wet lashes, I instead stuck my hand right into the fried rice, sending me almost to the floor in a whole new fit.
When I could finally see straight and my lungs reinflated, I sighed heavily and shook my head. I hadn’t laughed that hard in God knows how long. Actually, I did. About six years. The unadulterated joy felt fantastic, as if a weight I didn’t know I’d been shouldering since my fight with Marisol suddenly lightened.
After Montauk, I should’ve called her and tried to fix our friendship, but I was so enraged by her no-holds-barred disapproval of my choices, it was just easier to cut her out, like I did with pretty much any challenge I faced at the time. So that’s what I did. I cut Marisol out and tried to pretend her absence hadn’t left a big gaping hole in my life. But my new roommates reminded me of how essential female friendships were for those belly laughs, the tough times, and everything in between.