In Twenty Years: A Novel (7 page)

The strangest thing about returning to an enclave that encapsulated your youth is that you feel like nothing should have changed. Like you still have the right to be twenty and carefree and irresponsible. Like you still are twenty and carefree and irresponsible. Lindy has ditched the suffocation of their old house, of the rest of them, sitting around saying things like “Fine,” and “Great,” when nothing is fine or great at all, and now she’s racing down the sidewalk toward Smokey Joe’s, the old dive bar where they used to queue up the jukebox to Prince and grind on whomever they were hooking up with for the month (or the night), when she considers that this is the closest to freedom she’s been in ages. That she is irritated and pissed off and claustrophobic, but still, she’s irritated on her own terms.

She waits for the
Don’t Walk
sign to change, dipping her toe off the sidewalk, then stepping back quickly as a green Jeep flies by, too close, her thin white T-shirt clinging to her from the draft.

Colin chases her down the sidewalk.

“Come on, Linds. Wait up.” He jogs to a halt. “Don’t run off without trying. We’re not so bad.” He grins.

“I’m not running off. I’m going out for a drink.”

One drink, she’s decided, won’t matter. She’s played with fate in much more dangerous ways than this before.

Owen rushes through the shadows, out of breath.

“Wait, wait, I’m here too!”

Lindy groans. “So much for enjoying some solitude.”

“Sorry!” Owen says. “Jesus.”

“Forget it.” Lindy sighs. “Personal space has never been our forte.”

“Since when have you ever wanted solitude,” Colin says, more of a statement than a question, so she lets it go.

The light flips, traffic halting in front of them, and they fall in line with each other like they used to, silent for a bit, Owen’s flip-flops keeping beat against the pavement.

Owen shoves his hands into the cargo pockets of his shorts. “I think I’ve forgotten how it feels to be twenty. Like, no responsibilities, no worries. Shit, man.”

“What
did
we worry about at twenty?” Colin looks befuddled.

Lindy shrugs. “I didn’t worry about much, don’t worry about much now. What’s the point? Life happens.”

“Hey.” Owen perks up. “Don’t you have a song called that?”

A police car flies down the block before she can reply, its siren reverberating around them, its lights bouncing off the neighboring stores. Twenty years ago, police sirens were like background noise, ever present, a part of the fabric of the campus: so too was the nervous apprehension if you walked home solo too late at night or found yourself locked out after dark. It was ironic: the rich kids thrust into the inner city. Of all of them, Annie was the only one who had even come close to understanding the perils that lay in wait behind the shadows.

Lindy risked it once—she’d broken up with her boyfriend the hour before and then couldn’t convince him to escort her home because, well, she’d been a real bitch when she dumped him, callously, unceremoniously, just after he asked her to a fraternity formal—and she was mugged outside the McDonald’s two blocks from their house, just kitty-corner from where they stood now, though a Jamba Juice had long ago replaced the McDonald’s.

Lindy tries to remember that guy’s name, the one who stood his ground and refused to accompany her home, but she can’t recall. Greg? Craig? She remembers him being cute but maybe annoying. She isn’t sure. Bea and Annie told her she was a moron to dump him—he was hot and kind and smart and already had a job lined up at Goldman—but Lindy felt suffocated, like maybe he was too into her, more into her than she was comfortable with.

“I think that sounds pretty wonderful,” Annie had said. They’d been pouring cereal into plastic cups, dinner for the night. “Who wouldn’t want to be loved in that way?”

“There does need to be a balance,” Bea remarked. She mixed some Cocoa Puffs in with Honeycomb. “But I did once read that it’s better to be the one less in love than the one more so.”

“So that’s your plan? To always be the one a little less in love?”

“I have you guys. I don’t need to be in love.” Bea shrugged. “I need an occasional warm body and tequila.”

“Not the worst plan,” Lindy concurred. Though she watched Annie spoon her own Cocoa Puffs and wondered what it would take to convince her that she was worthy of being loved too.

Anyway, regardless of Greg/Craig’s positive attributes and/or Annie’s urging to keep him around, Lindy dumped him. And then she got mugged. And now she’s here, in that same spot, twenty years later, staring at the neon glow of the Jamba Juice sign, and the sidewalks aren’t littered with empty cigarette packs and used napkins and sometimes much more disgusting things like old condoms or the occasional syringe. Greg or Craig is long gone, and she can stand up for herself against any sort of threat, and she is famous and a millionaire and invincible.

“Let’s do this!” she says, once the whirling sirens have faded southward. “Let’s party like it’s 1999!”

Owen slaps her five, and Colin shakes his head but grins.

“Lindy Armstrong,” he says, “you never change.”

“Fuck you, Colin.” She smiles as she says it, but she’s really thinking,
No, fuck you, all I’ve done is change.
After all, she’s a worldwide brand now, a meteoric star, a VIP with an entourage and celebrities on speed dial, and certainly not the girl who cared about making these fools happy. They didn’t get that: that she
did
actually care.

At Smoke’s, all three of them are carded, not because they resemble actual teenagers, but because this is an old Smoke’s tradition. State your name into the microphone and video camera. Lindy had forgotten about it until the microphone is thrust in front of her. But then it’s all so natural to her—the mic out front, the (imaginary) spotlight. So she howls and says, “Lindy Armstrong, bitch!” and the bouncer, who’s dressed as George Washington, does a double take, and then howls back, “Holy shit!” and insists they snap a selfie, which Lindy happily does because finally,
finally
,
someone recognizes that she matters.

The upstairs of the bar is dark—dimmed sconces punctuate the walls, muted halogen bulbs hang over the booths, shadowy enough to conceal the enormity of Lindy’s fame for now. Her eyes take a moment to adjust. Though it’s summer session and most of the undergrads have retreated to their jobs as camp counselors, or vacations with their parents (or if they’re really lucky—the Wharton students, most likely—internships with self-important companies like McKinsey or Goldman), it’s still crowded for a Thursday night in July. The air conditioner is feebly cooling the humid air that’s seeped in from outside, and all the girls have tossed their hair into messy buns, exposing their long, nubile necks, highlighting their subtle collarbones, their youthful cleavage. Lindy used to be young and wily too.

She trails Owen and Colin to a booth in the back, near the jukebox.

She watches a particularly lithe undergrad, in a tiny tank top and vacuumed-on jeans, thrusting her hips to the beat of the music. The girl knows everyone is staring, and she lures them in with her long legs, her perfect rhythm. Lindy loves this glorious undergrad for a flicker of a moment until she hates her too. Hates her for her beautiful legs, her lush skin, her gust of immorality.

Everyone always says that youth is wasted on the young, but that’s horseshit
, she thinks.
Nothing is wasted on them. Look at them. Look at how happy they are, how invincible they feel.

She slides into the booth next to Colin and feels the solidness of his legs as she presses next to him. He doesn’t seem particularly put off by this, so she leaves her leg where it is. She tugs her V-neck a little lower—her boobs were always her calling card—and then she bounces around until her crimson hair cascades down her shoulders.

Owen catches her preening. “Aren’t you a lesbian now?”

Colin cackles. “There is no way you’re a lesbian now! Come on.”

“Well, I’m
sort of
a lesbian now,” she says, fidgeting with a used coaster left over from the person who sat there before. The table hasn’t been wiped down properly. She flicks off some crumbs left behind from old chicken fingers. “I don’t like hard definitions.” In fact, she was always a bit of a lesbian, she just never told them. Tatiana is the first woman she’s been public with, but not the first one she’s loved.

She wonders if they’ll call her on her bullshit answer, but neither seems to care too much about her bullshit in general, which is both a relief and an insult. Colin busies himself flagging over the waitress, and Owen orders two pitchers of beer, which used to be five bucks but are now twelve.

“So. Are we done with the Lindy Armstrong attitude, and can the evening now commence smoothly?” Colin asks.

“Screw you.”

“Seriously, Linds. Why come back if you didn’t want to? It wasn’t like this was mandatory.”

“No, seriously, Colin, fuck off.”

Colin seems to find this endearing, so he wraps an arm around her and pulls her into his shoulder, which is just as well, because Lindy doesn’t have an answer for him. What is she supposed to say? That she wanted to keep tabs on Annie? That she wanted Catherine to apologize? That she wanted them all to understand how she’d triumphed without them? That she couldn’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be, not because she wants to be
here
,
but because she didn’t want to be in those other places either. Not playing the Fourth of July show tomorrow night, not really even making out with Tatiana. Is she supposed to explain, here, over stale beer and a grimy table, that she might need a break, just for a day, twenty-four hours, from her bright-lights, big-city life while she contemplates what comes next?

“What about you?” Lindy asks. “Why’d you come?”

“For Bea, of course. You weren’t wrong before. I never said no.”

Before she can reply, a riff rings out of the jukebox, and it takes Lindy a moment to grasp it, maybe because it’s too familiar, something she’s slipped into so many times she can’t even recognize it’s home. But then the waitresses (in too-small, too-tight colonial corsets) squeal, the other patrons’ applause builds to a low thunder, and she realizes it’s
her song
(last year’s hit single “Don’t Apologize—You Already Lost Me”). She uproots herself, standing on the bench of the booth, and bows rather dramatically, and they cheer louder, and then everyone descends around her, snapping selfies, requesting autographs, generally reminding her why she’s royalty and the rest of them are not.

Lindy’s mouth cramps by the time they’re done. She’s used to photo shoots and faking it for the cameras, but she’s weary in a way that drains her muscles from the inside out, like someone took her body and wrung it dry. She tells herself it’s from all this reminiscing, all this overdone sentimentality. She doesn’t do public sentimentality anymore; she saves it for her writing, and since no one sees that much these days either, it’s mostly boxed away, keyed off and private, invulnerable and unavailable for public consumption. Still, though, nearly dizzy with fatigue, she finds herself wishing for solitude again, wishing that maybe she could just have some peace.

Lindy finds a free stool at the bar and leans over, her boobs doing the work to grab the handsome bartender’s attention. He smiles from the opposite counter and makes his way toward her. “We have a Fourth of July special. Blue beer with red limes. You look like a girl who might like blue beer and red limes. Can I interest you?”

“If that’s the type of girl I look like, then I think your radar is broken.”

He laughs easily—great teeth, rich, dancing eyes—and Lindy mulls the option of a one-night stand. How complicated could that be? Not too complicated not to make it worth it.

The bartender pours her a club soda at her request and tells her he’s at grad school here studying Chinese art, which Lindy pretends to be interested in. She fiddles coyly with the swizzle stick and nods her head often while her phone vibrates in her pocket. She ignores it the first time, but by the fourth buzz, she reluctantly gives in.