The next morning, someone came knocking before the sun was even warm. I stumbled out of bed and went to the door, eyes still half-closed and already cursing whoever it was that had shown up so early. I opened the door and found Adam standing in front of me. His demeanor was one of extreme aggravation and exhaustion. His eyes were red with bags under them, and his
hair was uncharacteristically a mess. It looked as though he hadn’t slept at all the night before.
          “We need to talk.”
          “And you couldn’t wait until a normal daylight hour?”
          “No, I couldn’t.”
          I stepped aside and let him in. He sat on the edge of the couch and crossed his arms.
          “Aren’t you going to sit down?”
          “I imagine it’ll be a short conversation.”
          “Where is Venna?”
          “What do you want, Adam?”
          “I want to talk about what happened, yesterday.”
          “So talk.”
          “What happened? What was that about? Why did you take your slipper off and run down the street like a maniac?”
          “I was dizzy.”
          “That’s not an explanation.”
          “Why does it matter?”
          “Because it was embarrassing as hell, and it felt like you had completely lost your mind out there.”
          “Well, sorry for embarrassing you.”
          “Don’t deflect.”
          I sighed. “I have a seizure disorder.”
          His eyes widened and he sat back. “So you were going to have a seizure? Right there, in public, where everyone would see?”
          “Yes.”
          “Why’d you take off your shoe?”
          “Because I can’t have anything around or touching my foot when I get that feeling.”
          “Why?”
          “I don’t know.”
          “So you have to just walk around without shoes on?”
          “Yes.”
          “You didn’t tell me this.”
          “I don’t know you that well.”
          “And you thought a public place, in the middle of the street with people all around, was the perfect time to let yourself get to that point?”
          “Excuse me?”
          “I’m just saying, isn’t there medicine for that?”
          “I take medicine.”
          “But it doesn’t work?”
          “Not always.”
          “Does it hurt?”
          I paused. This was a loaded question that I had never answered before. I had been asked many a time, but I never answered. It was in part because I was a private person, but I also
expected people to respond with pity that I didn’t want to see.
          “No, it doesn’t,” I finally said.
          “Oh.”
          We let silence wash over us, both of us at a loss as to what to say. I didn’t need to wonder what he was thinking. I could see it on his face. He wasn’t sure what to say to end it without looking like a terrible person. I could have helped him through it, given him some kind of out,
but I didn’t.
          “I need to think,” he finally said.
          “If you don’t want—”
          “I didn’t say that. I just need some time to think.”
          “Fine.”
          “I’ll call you.”
          “I instantly believe you.”
          He got up and left. I watched him walk out, feeling awful. Eddie was right; we were a burden. We would always be a burden, and we were all meant to be alone. I pushed it out of my mind and went back to bed.
          I laid under the covers all day, sleeping and waking up periodically, unwilling to join everyone else in reality. I didn’t eat anything, and I didn’t go take my medicine. I didn’t care. I almost wanted my body to lose control. I wanted to be frozen in place, biting my lip, counting the seconds until it was over. I wanted it to happen, because this time, it would be in my control.
I wasn’t slave to it. I caused it. I had power over it; I decided when it came and when it went.
          An hour later, my bedroom door opened, and Venna jumped onto the bed next to me. I kept my eyes closed and tried not to acknowledge her, but she was impossible to ignore. She started shaking me over and over until I finally gave in and pushed her off the bed. She fell onto
her stomach, but this didn’t faze her. She got onto her knees and started shaking my arm violently.
          “Ari, Ari, Ari, Ari!”
          “Go away.”
          Her expression changed when she got a good look at me. “What happened?”
          “Nothing.”
          “You’re still in bed.”
          “It’s Sunday.”
          “Something’s wrong.”
          “What are you so bubbly about?”
          She handed me a blank piece of paper. “Look!”
          “A piece of paper. Nice. Norman Mailer know about you?”
          “Don’t be condescending.”
          “What am I supposed to be excited about?”
          “Sound Down is having a party!” she said excitedly.
          “And that information is written with invisible ink?”
          “No. Everyone knows that they put up blank white papers all over the city to announce secret parties!”
          “How is it a secret if everyone knows?”
          “Don’t ruin this for me.”
          I laid back down. “Go by yourself.”
          “You did nothing, today. It’s Sunday night. Please, don’t be pathetic. You’re only twenty-four once.”
          “Could say the same for twenty-five.”
          “You need a social life!”
          “I have a social life.”
          “All you do is work.”
          “I need sleep. I can’t be late, tomorrow.”
          “Mann would never fire you. You’ve only been late—”
          “Every single day.”
          “Why break character now?”
          I rolled my eyes. “Why are we friends?”
          “I bring light into your life.”
          “Debatable. Let’s go. It took me forever to get my hair this perfect.”
          I looked her over. She was in a short, strapless, black leather dress. Her hair was done in its usual mess of impossibly perfect curls. She was wearing make-up, and she looked like a
knock out. She always did. Venna was beautiful. The trail of broken hearts she left behind her were not surprising.
          She dragged me to my closet and started tearing things off of hangers. She looked at each article of clothing, and then either threw it at me or onto the floor. She forgot to take hangers off
a few of them, and the plastic kept hitting me in the nose. She ignored all of my protests, and a minute later, she had put an entire outfit together and left me there to change out of my comfortable pajamas.
          I hesitated, and then started getting dressed. I was barely aware of what I put on my body, but I did bother to brush my hair. I went out to find that my eccentric childhood friend was
rummaging through the fridge, looking for something to drink. She liked to start her parties before the parties, so that her partying mood was just right when she showed up to actual party.
          “Come on! We’re late!” Venna said, grabbing my hand and running out of the apartment like it was on fire. She dragged me to the staircase and refused to let go of me the entire way down. I attempted to pull away, but her nails were digging into my skin and her iron grip was
relentless.
          I followed her down to the street, and she finally let go of me to hail a cab. She pushed me into it first, and then hopped in herself. She gave the driver the address to a restaurant I had never heard of, and he took off.
          Instead of watching the world outside pass us by, I observed the occupants of the car. Venna was holding her phone, taking pictures of us, despite my refusal to actually look at the
camera. She gave up on me and started taking photos of herself. She wasn’t smiling in any of them; rather, she was making faces that I had seen other people make in photos that I had never thought were attractive. She was a beautiful girl, and her natural smile was infectious, but she never displayed it in any of her photos. Her mouth was extended every which way; she was raising her eyebrows, biting her bottom lip, and blinking slowly. She even took a few photos that
captured only the top half of her face. It looked like she was having the time of her life, and we weren’t even there yet.
          The cab driver was less-than-impressed with my friend’s antics. I caught him rolling his eyes at her multiple times, and it seemed like he was driving more erratically to get us out of his car as quickly as possible. Venna reached over and changed the radio station he was listening to. It visibly annoyed him, but he said nothing. He leaned forward and took a few turns that were sharper than necessary. Venna dropped her phone in the process, and I watched a small smile
form on his face. Vengeance, however small, must have been satisfying.
          He finally came to a screeching halt in front of a small building. It was relatively empty, and the people I saw through the window were not at all dressed for a party. We went inside, and
I found it quieter than even a regular restaurant should have been, let alone one that Venna was dressed to attend. It was somewhat small, and only five or six tables were scattered around. About nine people were there, most of them middle-aged. They were all drunk already, some of them passed out in their seats and others drooling on the table. Everyone seemed to be in their own world, including the bartender, who was no longer even serving drinks. He was sitting on a stool reading a magazine, a bored and sleepy expression on his face.
          I looked at Venna, who went to the bartender and knocked on a machine three times. He got up, took one look at us, and rolled his eyes. He pointed to the doors under the bathroom sign.
One was labeled for females and the other for males. There was a large poster on the wall between them, but nothing else. Venna dragged me over to the poster and ran her fingers gently
over it. Finally, she found an opening and pulled on the wall. There was a hidden door.
          “This is excessive,” I said.
          She ignored me and dragged it open completely. Music erupted from behind it at full force. I flinched at the sudden sound burst of sound. None of the other patrons seemed to notice.
They didn’t even look up to see what was going on, most likely because they were either too drunk or it had happened enough times that they had gotten used to it.
          We went down the rickety stairs and found ourselves in the middle of a raging, absolutely illegal, party. People were screaming and laughing, pushing each other and dancing, drinking
and playing games. They were all in their element, and from the moment I stepped into it, I wanted to leave. Venna skipped the last three steps and hopped right in to join them, but I didn’t. I tried to find a space on the stairs that hadn’t been doused in a liquid of some kind. Everything around me was wet or sticky, but I found a spot right in the middle of the staircase that seemed relatively clean. I could only take up half of the step, but it was good enough for me.
          My friend had started yelling out drink requests to the bartender, but I didn’t feel the need to join her to ask for anything. I never drank, and I only went out when Venna forced me to go.
There were many social things I did simply because her nagging capabilities were endless, but I drew the line at drinking. There was no moral barrier keeping me from getting wasted. I didn’t
like how alcohol made me feel, and I wasn’t supposed to drink it with my medication, anyway. She knew better than to push it.
          I surveyed the room; Everything froze in place, and the music suddenly vanished and brought the room into a total silence in my head. I looked around at them all. Every individual around me was having a better time than I was. In a corner, I noticed a middle-aged man and a very young woman standing close enough to each other that they were almost attached at the chest. It wasn’t in any way attractive. He did not belong, but she did not seem to mind.
          Along the wall to the right, four blonde girls were frozen at odd angles, holding drinks that had almost entirely spilled onto the floor. They had been dancing to the beat of a very different drum. They looked like marionettes being manipulated by a clumsy child. Two of them had their arms linked and were tripping over each other. The third had her arms up and eyes closed, and the last was doing something that looked like the robot. Whatever they had taken
would make for a painful following morning.
          Directly in front of me, six boys and a girl were crowded around an alcoholic’s dream game of table tennis. Half of the cups were already empty and had been crushed on the tiled floor. The girl had her arms in the air, cheering for the boy whose cups were still full. The small
white ball was caught in the torn and tangled net in the middle. Two boys on either side of the table were tugging it to free the ball, but the force they were using to do so was causing it to tear.
One of them was trying to finish his drink at the same time, but half of the liquid was falling all over his face.
          There were two ginger girls wearing unconventionally long skirts that seemed out of place. No one else here seemed willing to cover anything up. Four boys surrounded them, two resting their arms on the wall behind them. Both girls were trying to hide their excited smiles by
raising the cups to their mouths and pretending to drink. If anything happened to them that night, I doubted that anyone would know. The boys looked shifty, but after a few more drinks, the girls
would never remember their names or faces. I momentarily thought about warning them, but I didn’t. I turned away.
          The bar was overflowing with people. At least thirty of the party-goers were rushing the counter, Venna right in the middle, attempting to elbow a exceptionally tall girl in the stomach.
She was pushing through so hard that part of her black dress went up, and much more of her was exposed than the dressmaker had intended. I didn’t make a move to help; Venna wouldn’t mind
the accident.
          The band was in full-swing. The lead singer was holding the microphone with one hand and holding his guitar with the other. Two other guitarists stood behind him, looking down at their own instruments, more focused on their own fingers than on the crowd. They backed him up on vocals, and were clearly not comfortable playing for a live audience. The drummer was a short Asian girl who had a wide smile on her face and was playing without actually looking at
her drums. She looked like she was enjoying the experience the most. Her hair was flapping in different directions as she bobbed her head to the music.
          The oldest people there were two middle-aged men talking to two girls who looked no older than eighteen. They all looked sober, and none of them were dancing. The girls were just sporting flirtatious smiles and twirling their hair. The men were leaning over, trying to talk above the music. They were all dressed to impress, and both men were wearing the very watches whose advertisement campaign I had pulled out of thin air. It was good to see that our target audience
was so easy to affect. I took a moment to gloat inwardly, and then moved on.
          Someone tapped my shoulder, and I jumped. The music returned, and the people in the room resumed making outlandish attempts to dance in their drunken states. I blinked a few times
and turned. The person who had touched my shoulder was a tall, thin green-eyed boy who looked tremendously bored. He was holding a cup with a drink that looked suspiciously like water, and it was still completely full. He laid a towel on the step I was on and sat next to me.
          “Not drinking?” he yelled out.
          I shook my head.
          “Why?”
          “You’re not drinking, either!” I yelled back.
          He laughed and tossed his cup toward the trash, but missed and hit a girl in the head. He tried to yell out an apology, but she hadn’t felt the hit and had no idea what he was saying.
          “You don’t look like you’re having fun!” he said.
          “Says the guy who came alone!”
          “I’m not alone!”
          “These stairs are for loners!”
          He said something else, gesturing to the rest of the people in the room, but the music was turned up even louder at that exact moment. His voice was lost in thin air. He tried again, but I still couldn’t hear him. I did the only logical thing I could think of at that moment: I shrugged my shoulders, motioned to my ears, and walked over to my friend, who was still struggling at the bar.
          I reached over the counter, grabbed a bottle of something I didn’t recognize, and handed it to Venna. She excitedly took it and dragged me to the middle of the room, wedging me into a
small space in the thick of the crowd. She started dancing and drinking directly from the bottle, smacking into people who were so intoxicated they didn’t even feel it. She shoved me an motioned for me to dance with her, but I suddenly felt very aware of my body’s awkwardness.
          She grabbed my arm and started flailing it around. I pulled away and half-heartedly raised my hands and shook them. One of the boys that I had seen talking to a brunette by the staircase walked over to Venna and jerked his head to a backdoor. Venna looked at me, and I
sighed and motioned for them to leave.
          It was typical of her, to drag me out to a place in which I did not in any way belong and then leave me to fend for myself alone. She would drown me in apologies the next day. It didn’t
bother me. She had come to enjoy her night. If she had been more intoxicated, I wouldn’t have let her leave, but her sober—albeit terrible—judgment was still intact. I watched her walk away,
and then turned to escape. I pushed through the crowd, tripping over a few people in the process.
          Right in front of the staircase, blocking my way, was none other than Adam. He was sitting on the floor, and a brunette wearing a shirt revealing more than I would ever have the backbone to show was in his lap. He didn’t look drunk, but she did. There was something
familiar about her, like I had seen her before.
          I stood there and stared at him. I was shocked, but also not, at the same time. I had expected something bad to come out of our conversation. I didn’t feel any anger, in that moment. I wasn’t upset or hurt by what was happening. It had just come so soon, this time. Not even a day had gone by.
          The girl finally looked up, and they both saw me. His face contorted into a shocked expression that looked almost forced, and he tossed the girl out of his lap. He stood up and tried to take my hand, but I pushed past him and left before he could attempt to speak.
          I made it outside, but he caught up with me and grabbed my arm. I jerked myself free, and then turned around.
          “What could you possibly have to say to make this better?” I asked.
          “I’m sorry!”
          “You knew I was coming here tonight, didn’t you?”
          “How could I have known?”
          “You asked Venna what day this thing was. I didn’t understand what you were talking about at the time, but you know what they say about hindsight.”
          “I thought you would refuse to come.”
          “Do you want me to forgive you?”
          He hesitated. “Of course.”
          “You are such a coward.”
          “What are you talking about?”
          “You wanted me to break up with you, so you wouldn’t have to.”
          “That’s not true.”
          “Oh? Fine. I forgive you.”
          “R-Really?”
          “Yes.”
          “But you just saw me with another girl.”
          “I forgive you, Adam. Let’s just put this behind us and move on. We all make mistakes. You’re human.”
          He didn’t know what to say. I had given him exactly what he didn’t want. He just stood there dumbfoundedly, trying to come up with something to say that would create the clean break
he was looking for.
          I finally recognized the girl he had been with. She was his ex-girlfriend, with whom he had been in a long-term relationship before we met. I had seen them together before, but it had
never looked intimate. He told me that they were just friends. She was engaged to someone else, and she was allegedly in love with him.
          “So, she’s cheating, too?” I asked.
          “We were just talking.”
          I laughed a little. “You’re off the hook, Adam. Goodbye.”
          “Can you at least consider my side?”
          “What’s your side?”
          “You didn’t even tell me!”
          “I wasn’t ready.”
          “We aren’t serious enough for me to just be subjected to having to deal with something
like that, Ari!”
          “Deal with what?”
          “You know with what.”
          “I want you to say it out loud. I want you to say explicitly why you cheated on me, and are now dumping me.”
          “Why do you want to hear something like that!”
          “Prove to me that you are not the coward I see you as.”
          “I’m not a coward.”
          “Then answer me.”
          “You can’t be mad at me when you purposely hid this from me. This is a big thing to keep from a partner, especially because I could be publicly embarrassed, the way I was yesterday.”
          “You were embarrassed?”
          “You walked down the street without shoes on! Everyone was staring at both of us, and you didn’t even seem to care! I received no warning that, that could happen, and now you’re mad
at me for being uncomfortable with being on display like that? You’re mad at me for being blindsided?”
          “I’m not mad.”
          “You should have told me, not strung me along and let me find out you’re like this by accident.”
          “Like what?”
          He looked at me for a long moment, and then finally said, “You’re such an incredible person. You make me laugh, you’re smart, and you are so much fun to be around in general. I enjoy your company more than anyone else’s.”
          “But.”
          “I don’t think that’s enough.”
          “Okay then.”
          “I’m going to miss you, Ari.”
          “Show me taillights.”
          He turned himself around and left. I watched him walk away for a few seconds, leaving the girl he had been with behind. She looked after him, and then awkwardly looked in my general direction. She opened her mouth to say something, but I turned to find my way home before she could speak. I hailed a cab, and twenty minutes later, I was in front of my apartment building. I went up the endless staircase, unlocked my door, and crawled into bed. I didn’t even
bother to change.
          I just laid there and cried.