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Abbi swears to merciful Jesus that she hears the word coming before Morgan even pops open her bubblegum mouth.
“Trifectaaa!” she shrieks, throwing up her weedy, white arms like it’s New Year’s Eve and not a freezing, sleet-grey December evening. A freezing, sleet-grey December evening that Abbi explicitly booked off work from Big Apple Catering.
“Don’t, Morgan, I am seriously so mad at you right now,” she grunts, letting her jaw go slack so Morgan knows she means it. Her face feels bright red and slick with sweat as she shakes snow from her sleeves. “I had to take three trains and bus to get here, okay? I don’t even know where I am right now, dude. Is this, like, Ukrainian Harlem or something?”
Morgan puppy-pouts, hands clasped under her pert little chin.
“But Darcy is here! And you’re here and I’m here and-”
“Bitches!” Kevin’s high-pitched voice suddenly squawks from the back end of the chrome tiled kitchen and he comes barrelling down past the industrial fridges, hair sticking up like he’s been dragged ass-wards back through a bush. “Quad assembled! Where’s Darc?”
“She’s changing.” Morgan rolls her eyes and allows her shoulders to slump for half a second, then she’s back, pixie-primped as ever.
“She’s changing?” Abbi echoes. “Morgan, you told me service had already started! I frickin’ ran here.” She tugs off her massive camo puffer jacket to reveal her catering uniform underneath. “Now I’m gonna stink all night.”
Morgan throws two bony arms around her in something that, perhaps in Connecticut, constitutes a hug.
“Nooo, Abbi, pleaaaase don’t be mad at me,” she mews. “It’s not my fault one of the servers suddenly didn’t show. I just wanted you heeeeere.”
Try as she might to steel herself against Morgan’s kicked-puppy routine, Abbi feels herself soften up.
“It’s fine. I’m not mad,” she sighs and shuts her eyes. “Just let go of me. Please.”
At last, Morgan acquiesces. When Abbi opens her eyes a moment later, she is still standing there, waiting for what comes next. Kevin chews on the inside of his cheek, eyes never hitting the same spot twice.
Abbi takes a deep breath, finds her zen.
“Okay,” she announces. “It’s fine. I’m here. I’m present. Where am I needed?”
The line of silver dishes stretches out along the industrial counters, sweating faintly in the white light of the humming fluorescent bulbs. Satay skewers and cheeseballs - all the usual suspects done up just enough to warrant serving at a Christmas party.
“Appetizers!” Kevin shouts too close to her ear. “Pigs in blankets is on you! Go! Go!” He throws her down the aisle like he’s bowling waiters.
Shiny-faced, Abbi pops out into the liquid calm of the party. A quiet burn of Christmas tunes pipes out of speakers in the wall. She thanks the requisite deities for the low level lighting and drags a lock of lank brown hair over her forehead in an effort to hide her still obvious sweat.
Silver tray extended, she keeps to the corners, trying not to muse too long on her scarpered evening of binging on Season 3 of Breaking Bad in bed with a bag of Fritos and intermittently masturbating about the guy who just moved in across the hall. Trying not to think about how she really would rather not see Darcy, who has been semi-hostile to her since their Hamptons trip and flaunting her new boyfriend like some sort of knuckle-duster.
“It’s because you two MADE OUT, Abbi. DON’T YOU REMEMBER???,” Morgan had cawed across the diner booth, unhelpfully, picking like a bird at her fennel mac n’ cheese, when Abbi had made the stupid decision to try and go to fucking Morgan, of all people, for some catharsis.
It takes ten minutes after this reverie for her to realise that it’s a photography gallery she’s in, and that the attendees are, for the most part, young ectomorphs with bow ties, brothel creepers and only the barest hint of holiday cheer - the odd scattered sequin, here and there a touch of Fairisle, nothing overt enough to look like an effort.
It’s another five minutes before she bothers looking at the walls - art galleries have a habit of making her routinely depressed and hostile. Depressed because it’s not Abbi’s art on the wall, and hostile because, well, it’s like the stupid wall suddenly thinks it’s too good for her drawings.
She stops short, staring up at a black and white piece at the empty edge of the exhibit, trying to form any kind of thought about it.
“I’m pretty sure it’s a butthole,” says a voice suddenly beside her. It belongs to a rather petite girl with wiry hair in a rhinestone imprinted crop top. She’s staring at the picture. The dark, pocked valley caught on paper.
“I thought it was a vagina at first. You know, like one of those flowery-cooch paintings. But now I’m pretty sure it’s a butthole.”
“You sure it’s not, like,” Abbi struggles for an alternative. Now that the word butthole is in her head, it’s very hard to think of anything else. “Like a collapsed balloon.” The words come out without consideration. It makes her wince.
“Nah,” says the girl. She flicks a finger at the placard beside the photo. “It’s a butthole. Hey, niiice, is that pigs in a blanket?”
Abbi feels her scooping impaled sausages off the plate. The little white card literally says:
anus, $1500
Abbi doesn’t know what to say. She could do with a shot of vodka, however.
As she turns, she realises that the girl is staring at her now, eyes intense.
“Hey! Are you an actress?”
Abbi starts.
“No…?” she replies. Clearly, she is a waitress at a shitty Christmas gallery party.
“Seriously? Oh my God, you should be. You have like this whole… Jewish Catherine Zeta-Jones thing going on.”
A laugh curdles in her throat. This must be a joke.
“Thanks,” she says, mildly, feeling a blush crawl up her cheeks.
“Ohhhh my God!” Morgan’s voice floats out of the ether behind her. “I’m literally always thinking that, Abbi! Aren’t I always-” Suddenly, she’s popped up there beside Abbi’s elbow, a tray half-full of champagne flutes on one hand. “Oh my Goddd, Ilana?!”
The girl in the rhinestones deflates, busted.
“Oh. Hey, Morgan,” she mutters.
“Ilana!” Morgan gasps, “You can’t just. Blow. Us. Off! We were looking all! over! for you. For like! An hour! I had to call my best friend Abbi to fill in for you!”
The wires meet in Abbi’s head.
“Hey, are you the girl who didn’t show up service?” she asks, her collar suddenly seeming restricted.
The girl raises her shoulders.
“I stepped out for a smoke,” she says, straight to Morgan, “and then I saw all the food coming off the van and I was like what the shit, man, these bougie canapés look dope. So I crashed instead. So sue me.” She shrugs. “Munchies, y’know?”
Morgan’s voice is tremulous.
“I can’t buh-leev-”
The girl reaches out, takes another two pigs off Abbi’s tray and sticks them in her mouth.
For an instant, there is silence. The girl, Ilana, takes full advantage of this, lifting a glass of free champagne from Morgan’s tray.
In her head, Abbi counts to three and then allows herself to get fully ticked off with the situation at hand.
“You know what, that champagne does look great, Morgan. Thanks,” she blurts out, grabbing a glass by the stem and chucking it back without a single bacon-wrapped-sausage toppling over on her tray. Who says two years of catering work doesn’t breed bankable skills?
“Abbi!” It’s as if she’d thrown the drink at Morgan instead of just drunk it. Abbi can see white all the way around the girl’s eyes as she gasps. Then it’s like something chokes her as the air gets halfway down her throat and she throws up a bubble of giggles instead. “I know, right? Totally. Totally have some, Abbi. I mean, we’re not technically allowed to drink until after-”
Abbi takes another glass.
This appears to max out Morgan’s last limits. She sputters for a moment and then swivels about on one precarious, bony heel and storms off with all the gravitas of a three-year-old child.
“Bitch cray,” Ilana says, solemnly, without skipping a beat.
Abbi is not sure whether or not to agree out loud. She doesn’t particularly feel a conspiratorial kinship to anyone in the Tri-State area at this particular minute, only a kind of dull crash-and-burn who-gives-a-fuck feeling which is starting to feel pretty good, actually.
She turns back to the girl who ruined her perfect December’s evening tucked up in bed, watching critically acclaimed cable TV three years too late.
“I’m Abbi,” she says, as bitterly as someone like her can manage. “I’m filling in for you.”
“Ilana,” the girl says, evidently mollified. “Sorry, dude. About bailing on you.” Abbi rocks back on her heels, somehow waiting for more. Maybe, she thinks, it’s just that she’s waiting for another wonderful second of Morgan being not-there.
“You are Jewish though, right?” Ilana asks with a suggestive crook of one eyebrow.
“Uh,” Abbi can’t believe she’s being asked, but her voice comes out supple and thoughtful. “Sorta.”
“Nice,” the girl grins, sanguine. “I can always sense when someone’s one of God’s chosen people.”
-
It takes another fifteen minutes for the two insta-drunk glasses of champagne to hit Abbi’s system. In this time, she decides that no one at the party is eating, ergo: no one at the party is going to miss an additional waitress. With her tray empty, she takes a hike back to the kitchen unit and drops the platter into the sink.
There’s a spiral of little red and green vodka sourz shots set up on two new trays further down the line, next to heap of discarded skewers and scrunched up napkins. She grabs two and has thrown back one - sour apple - when the reappearance of Morgan makes her spill the second.
“Ugh. Abbi. I am soooo sorry,” she starts to wail. “That girl was so disrespectful.”
Abbi shrugs, the alcohol making her limbs all warm and elasticated.
“It’s whatever,” she says, sipping on a third shot. “I mean, I didn’t want to work tonight either.”
Morgan swings round the counter and starts stroking her hair.
“Let’s find Darcy and then the Trifecta can-”
“Morgan,” Abbi bristles and moves out of reach. “I think I’m just gonna bail.”
“What? Oh my God, Abbi! Don’t be mad at me!”
“Jesus, Morgan, I’m not.” She feels almost a little sick. A stomach-bound combination of I really don’t care, I hate this job and I have a responsibility to this job. This job I hate. Or maybe it’s just all the sweet drinks. She inches toward the opposite counter and picks up her giant coat. “Look, you don’t even need me. And, I’m sorry, dude, but I don’t think you really even needed me at all.”
“But the Trifecta-”
“Morgan.” Abbi puts a hand onto each of the girl’s shoulders, effectively being friendly but also achieving the key aim of keeping Morgan at arm’s length. “My Netflix needs me more than you right now.”
She succeeds in scooting away, fighting her way back through the kitchen unit with all its bags and coats and saran-wrapped stacks of catering food. When she pushes the door open, it lets in a icy blast and a flurry of snowflakes. It also seems to restart Morgan’s system and put her in hot pursuit.
“Abbiiiii,” she’s whining, advancing like a horror movie villain as Abbi makes her way out onto the street.
“Hey!” she hears a third voice. “Zeta-Jones!”
The girl, Ilana, is sharing a cigarette with Kevin on the back steps. Both of them look red-eyed and cold. Ilana’s rhinestones are wrapped up in an ostentatious woolly jacket. Abbi hadn’t realised how high her boots were inside.
“It’s Abbi,” she corrects.
The girl smiles.
“Yeah, I know,” she elbows Kevin. “Hey, isn’t she beautiful?”
Morgan smacks into Abbi’s back, spurring her on down the back steps toward the sidewalk.
“Abbi! Don’t leave!”
“Slut, watch it,” Kevin quacks. “There’s ice all over-”
“I got it!” Abbi yells behind her just as the ice under her feet decides it high time for a taste of hubris and she comes crashing down on her ass on the last step down to the street. “FUCK,” she yells, loud enough that they all seem to hear her and come rushing down behind her like a snowfall.
“Ohmigod ohmigod, Abbiiiii,” Morgan is wailing. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, Morgan,” she grunts, trying to push herself up off the stone steps and onto her feet. Something near her knee stings like a bitch. Suddenly, Morgan shrieks.
“Dude!” Ilana breathes. “Your leg is some strong Carrie aesthetic right now.”
“What?” The champagne fog in her head clears for a moment and Abbi leans up, inspects the skin below her shredded pantsleg. “Aw, crap, dude,” she groans, seeing the good, bloody two-inch gash that’s suddenly opened up in her knee and bleeding down her shin. “I haven’t shaved my legs since June.”
The girl Ilana is stroking her calf, like the lower part of her leg is a kitten that’s slowly being lulled to sleep.
“It’s like a majestic wolf. Don’t even worry about it.”
“Oh my God,” Morgan trembles. “Abbi, what if you broke your leg?!”
“I didn’t break-”
“What if you need stitches!?” In the middle of the word, her voice hits a pitch only dogs can hear.
“I’m pretty sure it’s fine, Morgan,” Abbi starts to say, but the blonde is already dashing out into the street, waving her arms in the air for a taxi.
“We’re in Harlem, you dumb bitch!” Kevin slurs from two steps up. “Where you gonna get a cab?”
“It’s fine,” Abbi finds herself saying. “I can get up.”
When she bends her knee to push herself onto her feet, it’s as if her leg has turned to water. She lands back on her ass.
“Actually, y’know, I think I’m just gonna sit for another second,” she croaks. “This step is… it’s not uncomfortable.”
The girl Ilana relinquishes her intense look and twists about so she is sitting on the step. She pats Abbi’s arm and says nothing.
“MORGAN!” Kevin screams again but there’s nothing. “Whatever, I’m freezing my dick off out here.” He turns and slides back into the gallery. Abbi is not sure if he is even cognisant of leaving the three of them outside.
A wintry silence falls over them. Abbi is suddenly very aware of how she hardly see through the fog of her breath and how there’s a thin sugar-dust of snow beginning to fall.
At her side, Ilana is looking at her, still.
“I’ll stay with you,” she says, plainly.
Abbi glances at her, sidelong.
“Thanks, dude,” she mumbles, unsure if she means it.
After a moment, she rolls her head back, looking skywards. For all the years she’s lived in this city she’s never managed to rid herself of a habit of checking the night sky for stars. In the cold evening air, this close to the dark Park, she thinks she can make out one or two.
When she sighs, a tremulous sob almost makes it all the way up to the back of her throat.
“Am I gonna die?” she asks Ilana, mind suddenly fevered.
The girl gapes.
“Oh! No! You’re gonna be great-”
“Because what if it’s, like, one of those things. Like those black ice things.” Abbi hears the words coming but has no idea of their provenance. “Like where it gets infected. And they have to amputate it.”
Ilana shakes her head and all the rhinestones clink together.
“I don’t think it’s one of those things,” she says, peaceably. “Besides. I’ve heard amputees have crazy good sex.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s, like, your range of pussy access is way improved when you’re missing up to half of a limb.”
Abbi sniffs. This is some solace.
“It really hurts,” she whimpers. Now that the shock of the fall has worn off and the champagne is starting to damp down in her bloodstream, it feels like a good part of her calf is on fire.
Ilana pats her arm.
“I know, buddy. It’s okay. I think your crazy friend is gonna get you a Central Park horse carriage to take you to the emergency room.”
Abbi looks out into the dark.
“She is pretty crazy,” she almost whispers. A second later, the reverie is shaken. “I really wish you had some more of that weed you were smoking before.”
Ilana’s eyes go wide.
“Oh, shit! I have, like, half a joint saved.”
“Seriously?”
The girl reaches into her high boot and fishes out a lighter and a twisted blunt in a Ziploc bag. Abbi almost starts to cry again.
“Dude, you’d give me your weed?”
“Chyeah,” Ilana grins, already putting the joint between her lips and cupping a hand around the light. “Just let me take the first hit.”
Less than a minute later, they are passing the pot back and forth like two old geezers on a stoop. Abbi silently swears that, even in this champagne-and-cold addled state, she will never forget this stranger’s kindness.
“I’m sorry about screwing up your evening, really,” Ilana says after a little while. Abbi is holding in an inhale but she lets it out now, long and clean.
After a little while, the pain in her leg begins to dull. Her knees are stiff and her ass feels frozen to the pavement, but she’s cool with sitting a little longer.
“Man, I hate being a caterer,” she yawns.
Ilana huffs.
“You’re telling me. I mean, I’d rather crash this lame twink party than serve up shrimp cocktail,” she adds, jerking a thumb backwards towards the gallery.
“I mean, I don’t even like the people,” Abbi carries on. “I’m done. I’m so done.”
“What else can you do?” Ilana asks, huddling into her leopard print fluff.
Abbi glances at her, suddenly overcome with shyness.
“What?” the new girl prompts, and she blushes.
“I do art, kinda.”
“No shit! You’re an artist?”
“I guess.”
“What kinda art?”
“Like… still lifes, sorta,” she says, with the same energy with which she’d tried to explain her degree of Jew-osity. “Food and stuff, right now anyway.”
“Dude,” Ilana pounds her fists against her knees. “That is so fucking classy. You should do that!”
Abbi nods to herself.
“Yeah,” she says, slowly gaining gumption. “Yeah. I mean. I could totally do that. Like I could get a spot at Chelsea Market. I’m good enough.”
“Yeah, you are,” the other girl grins, showing all her little white teeth. “Man, I wanna see some of this fucking art now. Real fucking classy shit. None of this butthole photography bullshit.”
Abbi finds herself grinning.
“Yeah,” she breathes, winsome. “That or, like. Maybe I wanna be a personal trainer.”
Ilana says nothing. She only tilts her head, drops her mouth open and furrows her brows in a way that Abbi presumes mean oh, speak again, bright angel!
“Yeah, y’know. I go past so many fucking gyms and the people in them look so happy all the time. And, like, some of them aren’t even that skinny, they’re just, like, all muscle-”
“Like, stocky. Like, strong,” Ilana nods along.
“Yeah! Like they got meat on them. Power meat. I could do that.”
Ilana puts a hand up, waves it about, gesturing to Abbi’s whole body.
“I’m, like, in love. I’m in love with this right here. This compulsion. You’re like a warrior queen right now.”
“I’ve even got a battle scar,” Abbi grins.
Ilana scrunches her face a moment.
“Think you can walk, maybe?”
Abbi tries her leg. It still looks gnarly as all get-out when she rolls up her pants leg, but she can barely feel the pain now.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“There’s a Duane Reade two blocks down - you wanna go buy a bandage?”
“I wanna go buy some gummy bears is what.”
Ilana is on her feet. She spreads her legs and raises her fists skywards.
“Yessss. That sounds uh-mazing.”
“And HoHos,” Abbi adds, suddenly springing to her feet. It feels weird to stand with all the champagne and vodka sourz and pot and whimsy suddenly floating around in her system. She gets down to the bottom of the steps and Ilana catches her under the arm.
She starts a belly laugh that rocks through her body and catches hold of the other girl. Suddenly, they are rocking with the giggles and slipping and sliding down the icy sidewalk.
“Dude,” she mumbles, vaguely aware that they are starting down the black street. “I think this counts as a Hanukkah miracle.”
-
Abbi wakes up in the cotton-puff cocoon of her own comforter, suspended, briefly, in a hazy soft sensation before the hard truth of her hangover comes crashing down on her skull like a stack of dropped china plates. She groans, sits up, pushes the hair off her face.
Someone else is in the bed next to her. Someone else and a few empty bags of gummy bears.
“Shit,” she croaks, and then: “Hey! Chick from the party.”
The girl from the night before opens one smudgy eye. She has her arms folded up over her head, skinning elbows akimbo, framing her ears, wearing her spangled crop top from the night before.
“This bed,” she starts to say, breathing in long and deep. “Is the bomb. S’it cool if I fart in it?”
Abbi lifts a shoulder, affirmative, then slides out from under the covers.
Her leg stings when she stands up, but only barely. She looks down and sees that it’s bound tight in a fresh white bandage. Her head boggles.
“I’m gonna pee,” she announces and pads out into the hall. Sitting on the john, she tries in earnest to pick up all her loose memories from the night before. Episode six of Breaking Bad. The three subways rides. Morgan. The girl in the rhinestones. Champagne. The cold. Slipping. Pain. The cold. Decent weed and a mouthful of gummy bears. Nothing after that. Nothing, really.
She wonders what happened to Morgan. Then her stomach growls and she stops wondering.
In the kitchen, she finds the sludgy remains of coffee left in the pot and opts for raw pop tarts instead. She goes back into her bedroom with the box under her arm.
“Hey, Ilana?”
The girl is still lying in her bed, now with her legs up in the air and a pair of green headphones inserted in her ears. Abbi can hear the tinny untz-untz of some bump and grind playing as she tugs an earbud out and looks up.
“Kegels,” Ilana says, by way of explanation. She drops her legs and sits up on her knees. “Gimme poptart.”
“We didn’t hook up or anything last night, did we?” Abbi asks, passing her the box.
“Nuh,” Ilana mumbles through a mouthful of crumbs and brown sugar cinnamon. “I dah finkso.” She crooks her eyebrows. “Ah-u inntu dat?” She swallows.
Abbi shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says, a little forlorn as she sits down on the bed. “I’m straight.”
“Oh,” Ilana nods as if she has said something as weighty as I lost all my family in a terrible fire. “That’s cool, man. That’s cool.” A heavy quiet beds down between them for a moment before Ilana says: “Hey, how’s your knee?”
“It’s okay,” Abbi says, touching the bandage. “It feels like… sixty-percent better. I think you might’a nursed me back to health or something last night.”
“Fucking champion,” Ilana grins. “Are you hungover right now?”
“Kinda. We don’t have any coffee or anything though, sorry.”
“I’ve got another eighth in my bag, we could smoke that and then go look for food?” Ilana offers. “I could really go for, like, a good stack a’ribs right now.”
“Ribs?”
“Yeah, did you ever hear that barbecue is supposed to be, like, crazy good for hangovers?”
Abbi stares at her.
“Dude, that sounds disgusting.”
“I know. It’s apparently all the sugar and shit. Pretty sure Martha Stewart swears by it or something. You wanna get some right now?”
Abbi thinks it over for a second.
“Sure,” she grins. “Yeah, dude. Let’s go.”