“You’re OK, right?” Tara asked.
Willa was swaying in front of the bathroom sink, trying to wash the puke from her hands but unable to get the automatic faucet to cooperate.
“Get a Lyft back to the Standard,” Tara said. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
And Willa was alone. Later, when she tried to piece together the night, the memories would come like the snatches of light from a pulsing strobe:
A water, please.
What?
‘These pretzels are making me thirsty!’ Remember that? Ha, ha, ha never mind you are an infant. I’m gonna sit right here.
You can’t sit there.
Says you. I know the secrets of the universe.
What the fuck? Dude, is she with you?
Yeah, she’s with me. C’mon, get up. You’re too pretty to be sitting on the sticky floor. Lean on my shoulder. You look like you need a drink. Here, have this.
Thanks. What is it?
Don’t worry about it.
Cool.
Wanna dance?
Yeah.
Woah, don’t fall.
I think I need to lie down. I’m gonna be sick again.
Wanna go somewhere? Come on — lemme take you somewhere.
Who are you?
I’m Jason.
Jason? From high school? How’s your mom?
Let’s get you out of here. You can come back to my place and get cleaned up, lie down, whatever you want.
OK. Yeah. No, wait. That’s my ass. Your hand is on it. I don’t think I know you. I’m trying to be good.
Whatever, bitch. Good luck.
Next she was on a colorful Tilt-a-Whirl, her eyes unable to focus, a mwomp-mwomp-mwomp in her ears. Her arms wouldn’t move. Someone was laughing. Willa stumbled through the club door and into the night air.
The next feeling she remembered was cold blacktop against her cheek.
And then the strobe went dark.
The next time the light came up, Willa was in her bed at the hotel, awakened by a small but very angry gremlin inside her skull who was speed-bagging her cerebrum with fat fists. She was still wearing her black bodysuit and jeans but her boots were off. One of her pant legs was damp — had she peed herself, but only on one leg?
Her mouth tasted like she’d made out with a horse.
Willa was immediately flooded with shame. Most of the night remained lost to blackout, but she was certain that whatever had happened was her fault, the result of her own inability to keep her shit together.
Oh, God. Had Pete texted during the night? Even worse, had she texted back?
She fumbled on the bedside table for her cross-body bag and pulled out her phone, which had a 9-percent battery charge.
Yes, he had texted. And yes, she had texted back.
7 p.m., Pete: “Having fun?”
8 p.m., Willa: “Definitely! I thought we were going to get food somewhere but instead we’re on the rooftop of the hotel, having drinks. The view is amazing.”
8:02 p.m., Pete: “Are you drinking too much?”
8:05 p.m., Willa: “OK, I need you to get off my back. Neither of us is perfect.”
8:07 p.m., Pete: “What does that mean?”
9 p.m., Pete: “All OK?”
9:30 p.m., Pete: “You OK?”
10 p.m., Pete: “Hello?”
10:30 p.m., Willa: “Sorry can’t be looking at my phone all the time. Good.”
11 p.m., Pete: “Alright, I’m off to bed. Love you.”
Then the texts stopped.
That wasn’t so bad, Willa thought. Then she opened her Instagram account.
She’d been tagged in dozens of photos posted — and cross-posted with a public setting on Facebook — by Dee, Shelly, Axel, and Ben. They all looked fresh and happy, and Willa looked a mess. Eyes half-closed, drunk smile on her face. A few specks of white powder on her shirt. Getting hoisted out of the hot tub by employees at Le Bain. Lying down on the cobblestoned street in front of the hotel. Sitting on the floor underneath the bar at Girl Pwr.
She looked sloppy and pathetic.
Willa quickly tried to untag herself from as many photos as possible, but it was 10 a.m., so the damage was done.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Pete. “Wow, Willa. Just saw the photos on Facebook. What the fuck?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” she wrote back. “They kept pumping me full of drinks until I couldn’t see straight.”
“Yeah, OK,” he wrote.
Anger sliced through the shame in her gut.
“You have no right to judge me,” she texted. “I judge myself plenty”
“You’re my wife, so I do have the right,” he texted. “You’re making us both look bad.”
Now she was furious. Just before the trip, she’d decided not to confront Pete about his relationship with Beth, not yet, because it gave her a get-out-of-jail-free card, her own irresponsible actions lower than his on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Shithead Behavior.
Willa had tucked that card away and wasn’t sure she’d ever play it. Some people seemed almost gleeful when they caught a spouse doing something wrong, like a TV detective spreading out incriminating black-and-white surveillance photos on the table in the interrogation room. They seemed to relish the gotcha moment, maybe because it momentarily gave them a sense of control in all the misery.
But that didn’t sound fun, or satisfying, to Willa. She really didn’t know what she was going to do.
What she did know was that Pete had no right to give her a hard time right now.
“I’m my own person,” she texted. “And I gotta go. We’ll talk when I get home tonight.”
She rolled herself out of the bed and into the bathroom to wash last night’s make-up from her face. A momentary interest in breakfast passed as she threw up again. She managed to brush her teeth, change into leggings and a T-shirt, and lay back down in the bed.
Willa had thought she’d been invited to New York for a celebration, but this had turned out to be something much darker, like a hazing ritual or a public flogging. A reminder of who was always in charge.
How could they have left me behind at the bar, she wondered, and how did I get back to the hotel? She went through her Lyft receipts — nothing — and the rest of her texts in search of clues.
She spotted one from Tara, at 4:30 a.m.
“Hey, I found you in the alley next to the bar and got you back to the hotel. Hope you’re feeling OK today.”
Panic, and more bile, rose in Willa’s throat. She’d ended up in an alley? How had she gotten there? Jesus Christ. Had anything happened to her that she couldn’t remember?
She clutched a pillow to her chest and sobbed. I’m a 41-year-old, unhappily-married mother of two little kids who has a dog named Chicken and lives in a lovely little suburb of Atlanta and drives a Nissan Leaf and goes to the community pool with her neighbor-friends and designs pretty logos for entrepreneurs and is mildly bipolar and gets so disgustingly drunk that she passes out, alone, on a filthy side street in New York City.
This is not the life I thought I’d have, she thought. This isn’t who I thought I’d be.
She couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to make some changes. She had to.
And she would start by getting away from FitFams.
About time, Willa!!!