Upper-Body Strength

This is how we burn bridges with friends.

 

Upper-Body Strength

 

My hands felt frozen in my lap – damn air conditioning. I kept looking at the ceiling, glaring at the fan that spun unapologetically beneath the large vent that pumped the cold air into the room. Every second the blades spun I wished I were somewhere else.

“Are you cold too?” Ryan asked, shivering next to me. I rubbed my arms again, uselessly trying to brush the goosebumps from my skin.

“Cold is an understatement,” I said, smiling weakly as he nodded and laughed. Jeffrey, his date, leaned over and squeezed his hand underneath the table. I looked away as they kissed – only to witness the lip-lock of the second couple who had squeezed into Ryan’s SUV with us thirty minutes ago. I frowned. At least I’m only the fifth wheel.

Jeffrey and Ryan had been together for two months now, and I had spent enough time with them to not be uncomfortable. Ryan had been my best friend since middle school – his choice in men had changed at least twelve times in the past seven years – and Jeffrey seemed like a nice enough guy. Very down to earth, very sweet, and quite entertaining.

They were still kissing – the second couple, Anna and Carl. I had to give them points, because they were an unlikely couple. Anna didn’t date guys shorter – or darker, for that matter – than her, and Carl didn’t date anyone. But here they were, tonguing one another under bright lights in a crowded restaurant, her white skin looking whiter against his dark complexion. I rolled my eyes and decided to focus on the bartender in front of me.

“Anna!” a shriek sounded from the front of the restaurant. I heard Anna’s lips smack against Carl’s as she looked up to see who had shouted her name. In a moment, we all knew.

“Danielle!” Anna squealed, immediately wrapped in a hug by a small teenage girl with dark brown hair and a high voice. A tall guy with a buzz cut and white sneakers shifted his weight uncomfortably next to the backside of Danielle, clearing his throat subtly and looking around the restaurant with feigned interest. Oh great.

“Don’t tell me – the boyfriend?” I said to the boy, extending my hand to him. His attention fixated on the source of my voice and he broke into a polite smile.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he chuckled, shaking my hand. “Nick, actually.”

“Ah, Nick. Fine name, friend,” I said, releasing his grip and returning my numb hand to my lap. He smiled bigger now, nonchalantly putting his hands in his front pockets. “I’m Rachel, friend of your girlfriend’s friend.”

He nodded and opened his mouth to say something when his arm was suddenly clenched by the entire left side of Danielle. “Guys,” she beamed, “I want you to meet Nick, my boyfriend.” She squeezed his arm tighter when she said his name, and his face contorted in a quick wince.

“Hey,” he sighed.

“Hi, Nick,” the group responded, creating room for them on the far end of the two tables we had pushed together when we arrived. I sat at the end, with Ryan and Jeffrey on my left and Anna and Carl on my right. Danielle and Nick slid their chairs as close as possible around the end of the table, holding hands and grinning.

It was me, and them. Six of them. And me. By myself. Sipping raspberry iced tea and shivering underneath an unforgiving fan. I was stuck with them for the next fifteen hours. Oh hell no.

I guess I didn’t notice it as much when it was just me and another couple – ideally, me and a homosexual couple. It was just not as bad. I could rock it solo; in fact, I was so good at it that I managed to stay single for seven months. Self-entertained – that’s what I called myself. Who needs a man to cramp my style, to tell me my neckline’s too low or my heels are too high or my hair’s too short? In my opinion, the only purposes men served in a relationship were to pay for things, drive, and make out in public places. What other use they served was hardly apparent to me, sitting at this table with three pairs of folks in relationships.

Anna talked to Danielle. Ryan texted. Jeffrey played Tetris on his phone. Nick looked at the menu for entirely too long. These people weren’t even paying attention to their significant others. If it weren’t for the other tables, televisions, and satellite radio playing overhead, I’m sure the only voices we’d be able to hear would be those of the chattering females on the other end of the table.

It felt like high school all over again. Didn’t I graduate from this? Didn’t I go to college not to play the wallflower game within my own group of friends? Anna and I had been close since sophomore year, and she was the entire reason Ryan and I were here. Drive ninety minutes out of town to go see your friend while she watches a house for a family friend – eat some free dinner – watch a couple movies and talk till morning. That was ideally the plan. But instead, I watched three couples ignore each other and the level of dark red liquid in my glass diminish by the means of a bright blue straw.

“Hello, folks!” a waitress said, appearing between Ryan and me. Oh thank God. “My name is Brianna and I’ll be taking care of you tonight. Can I get you two something to drink?”

Danielle and Nick had shown up late – something about a lie to her mom that hadn’t exactly worked as she had planned – and looked surprised that we had already ordered drinks. “I thought you were going to wait,” Danielle had hissed to Anna as she sat down.

“We did wait. We haven’t ordered our food yet.”

“Yeah…but you ordered drinks,” she pouted, opening her menu. I rolled my eyes again. Is she seriously upset about this?

“Just a Coke for me, please,” Danielle said quickly, nudging Nick to make him order.

“Coke,” Brianna the waitress who would be taking care of us tonight repeated, writing the order on her pad. “And for you, sir?”

Nick blushed slightly at the punctuation of her sentence and cleared his throat again. “Just water, thanks.”

“Water? Okay. Now, are we ready to order or would you like me to come back?” Brianna asked. I was ready to order – had been for the past fifteen minutes while we waited for freaking Danielle to show up – but Danielle’s immediate distressed expression at the mere notion that our courtesy had caused us to choose a main entrée made the waitress nod and say, “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

The entire meal went on like that – Danielle acting like the sixteen-year-old she was, Nick saying nothing like the boyfriend of a chatty girl he was, Anna and Carl sucking face, Ryan texting, and Jeffrey playing Tetris. While we ate, Danielle gossiped between sips of her Coke and bites of her burger, and Anna responded to the news that was only important to Danielle. The rest of us stayed silent, eating quickly and throwing expressions of annoyance or please-God-kill-me-now at each other. Finally, the waitress and another hostess took away our plates and asked if we wanted dessert.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have said what I said. But the soup hadn’t warmed me any, the air conditioning had not lessened in intensity at all, and the ice in my fourth glass of iced tea had started to chill parts of me that I wasn’t even sure had nerves. Poor circulation had plagued my extremities for as long as I could remember, but this atmosphere was making my patience thin, my hands seize, and my entire upper-body weaker than usual. I didn’t do cold well – and it had iced over my mood beyond hating myself for agreeing to play houseguest in a house full of paired off happy people. I was done playing nice with Anna.

A smile creeping across her rosy lips, slightly swollen from too much kissing, Anna started, “Do you guys have—?”

“I swear, Anna,” I cut her off, “if you ask for anything involving ice cream, I will punch you squarely in the stomach. Just for future reference.”

The ice from my glass had slid into my voice, and the expression on Anna’s face melted from excitement to shock. The waitress, sensing a disturbance in the air, quickly walked away to dispose of our dishes. I stared at Anna, eyes hard and jaw set. The table fell silent – even Danielle’s trite chatter had ceased. They all glanced at me, then looked at Anna. Her eyes narrowed and she sat up straight.

“We have three cars, Rachel,” she said simply. “We don’t have to eat dessert here.”

“I’m too full for dessert,” Ryan cut in quickly, breaking Anna’s glare in my direction. “Let’s just get the check and leave.”

I got up from the table and walked to the bathroom. Too much iced tea. That wasn’t the first mean thing I had said to Anna tonight. Snide remarks under my breath about her PDA with Carl – a guy she didn’t even like that much in the first place – and noticed eye rolls concerning her immature conversation with our immature dinner guest had probably touched more nerves than one. But I couldn’t control it. I had been suckered into this trip by a promise of spending time with a friend whom I hadn’t seen in over two weeks. Did she say it was a couples’ night? I couldn’t remember.

Staring in the bathroom mirror, I started to wash my hands. They still felt numb, less frozen than before, but still shaking and slightly discolored. I wondered if frostbite could be seen on a black person.

Back at the table, the check had been paid, Danielle was prattling on about some friend of hers to Nick, and Anna’s throat was filled with Carl’s tongue. Ryan looked at me as I slid back into my seat.

“Are you still cold?” he asked. Jeffrey’s hand rested on his knee beneath the table, but his eyes indicated he meant more than the goosebumps on my exposed upper arms.

Sighing, I nodded slowly.

“Hey guys, let’s get out of here – Rachel’s going to freeze to death,” Ryan announced to the table, standing up. The heterosexual couples roused themselves from their activities and stood as well. We left the restaurant, my high heels clicking on the wet pavement of the parking lot.

“We’ll just follow you to the house, Anna,” Danielle told us as the group divided at Ryan’s car.

“Sounds good,” Anna said, climbing after Carl into the backseat.

For five minutes, no one said a word. The music on the CD we had made specifically for this trip played quietly while rain started to fall. I shivered next to Carl and stared out the window.

“If you guys are going to be b*****s tonight, then you should leave,” Anna’s voice coldly cut across the small space. “I’m dead serious. If you’re gonna be in a good mood, then great, you should stay. But if you’re going to be rude and inconsiderate, then I don’t want you in my house. I don’t want to deal with that tonight.”

No one said anything. What Anna failed to mention was the betrayal she had instigated two weeks ago at a party – when she made out with Carl after listening to my drunken babbling about liking Carl for the past five years. What Anna failed to acknowledge was the lack of consideration she took in telling me that she had made out with him. What Anna failed to understand was that she really wasn’t that important in my life anymore to deserve the luxury of my anger. She had made the past two weeks secretive and deceptive, trying not to mention Carl’s name around me, trying not to tell stories about him when I was around, trying to conceal her further involvement with him.

It wasn’t Anna I was angry with at the beginning. I was annoyed with Carl. He knew I liked him. He was oh-so-well aware. And I’d given up on him once he started making out with my circle of friends at parties I attended. He was entitled to his own decisions, sure – but did he have to make out with those decisions in my vicinity?

Being friends means not lying. Being friends means understanding when two groups of your friends don’t get along. Being friends means talking about the issue instead of just ignoring it and hoping it goes away. Anna was not so much a friend anymore.

Another minute passed as these things floated through my shivering conscience. This time I chose my words carefully as I straightened and looked into Ryan’s eyes through the rearview mirror.

“Can we go home, please?”

We got out of the car at the house Anna was watching, and the straight couples went inside immediately, not waiting for us to follow. As I climbed out of the car, tears fell down my cheeks. I turned to Ryan as he walked around the car and begged him, “Can we please go back to Denver? Please? I don’t want to be here. I’m all by myself…and she’s being a b***h still…and Carl’s here…and I hate Danielle…and it’s raining and I’m scared of lightning…and I tried to be nice but I can’t – I just want to go home. Can we please go home…?” Sobs choked me and made me stutter. Ryan wrapped his arms around me, pressing my cries into his chest to keep the sound from Anna’s possible earshot.

“Okay.”

He walked into the house, and Jeffrey put his arm around me, wiping my tears with his sleeve. “He’ll fix it,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, he’ll fix it.”

A minute passed and Ryan came out of the house, hands and arms carrying our bags we had dropped off earlier.

“Let’s go.”

We loaded up the car, climbed inside, and drove away just as the rain started to body slam the ground. The lights in the big house made me sick – the whole property looked like undernourished people in black skin should have been picking cotton from the backyard and milking cows in the garage. I definitely couldn’t sleep in a house that resembled a plantation mansion.

Too much alienation for one night.

Seventy minutes, three hydroplaning near-death experiences, and one bathroom break later, I stood at the foul line of the thirty-seventh lane in a bowling alley. My toes wiggled in the unattractive slippery rented shoes, and my ten-pound ball weighed down my three-fingered grip on it. Cosmic lights twirled from the ceiling, casting terrific designs on the lanes and bowlers alike. Red Hot Chili Peppers dreamt of Californiacation on big screen televisions in between the digital scoreboards overhead, and the crashing of balls hitting pins rung in my ears. My hands had regained feeling since we got out of the car.

Anna’s text message to Ryan half an hour before we decided to still do something epic, just the three of us, claimed she was not in the wrong, but it didn’t feel that way. I saw Anna’s face on every pin, and Carl’s devilish grin in every ball. They deserved each other.

“Why do I keep rolling ones?” I asked, yet another ball rolling into the gutter that hit one pin magically. Ryan giggled – he was winning – and shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re not doing it right.”

I rolled my eyes and walked to the ball return area, waiting for my bright orange missile to return to my possession. As it rolled out of the dark hole, another hand reached for it at the same time. I looked up and locked eyes with an attractive blonde man with perfect teeth and a striped Polo shirt.

“Oh sorry, is that yours?” he said, quickly withdrawing his hand and straightening.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the ball slowly. “You throw them light too, huh?”

He laughed. “No upper-body strength.”

“Hey, me too!” I exclaimed, grinning and stepping back. “We can totally be friends now.”

I moved away from him and threw the ball down the lane, hitting two pins. I shrieked excitedly, hearing Ryan explode with laughter behind me.

“Way to break your streak, Rach,” he chided, laughing way too hard. Jeffrey tapped him and shook his head.

“Be nice! She’s doing the best she can!” he said, winking at me. As Jeffrey went to bowl, I sat down across the table from Ryan.

“Cute boy,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the guy who tried to hijack my ball.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

When I bowled again, the same guy stood next to the ball return, smiling with his perfect teeth. “We meet again,” he said.

“So we do,” I replied, leaning down to grab my ball. “I see you haven’t taken my ball this time.”

He nodded, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on me. Didn’t he want his ball? “What kind of friend steals another friend’s ball?”

Friend? Did I say that? I grinned. “A crappy one, that’s what.”

My next turn, he was there again. His friends used the lane next to ours, and sat behind us, but I kept avoiding eye contact unless it was my turn.

“I’m Patrick, by the way,” he said, after four frames of witty banter had been exchanged. “What’s your name?” he asked, picking up my ball and handing it to me.

Slowly I took it from him. “Rachel.” I stuck out my hand and he shook it firmly. Strong handshake equals strong man. Good sign.

“That’s a beautiful name,” he said. I giggled and threw the ball, hitting four pins. At least I won’t suck all night. Back at the ball return, Patrick came over after throwing a strike.

“Goodness,” I said. “You’re good.”

Looking at the dead pins spinning on the shiny hardwood, he shrugged. “Dumb luck.” He looked at me now. He had no reason to be there – he wanted something. “You laughed.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. “What?”

“You laughed when I said your name was beautiful. Why?”

Did I? Oh right. “Oh yeah, sorry. It just reminded me of a pick-up line a friend told me in high school.”

“Pick-up line?” he asked. Crap, now he’s curious.

“Yeah. You say you like how my name sounds and I say, ‘If you like my name, you should hear my phone number.’” As I started to laugh, I noticed the invitation in the words that had just tumbled from my mouth. I stopped mid-chuckle and immediately bent down to pick up any ball to throw down the lane.

Jeffrey went to the bathroom after his turn, and I sat nervously at our table while Ryan bowled. Patrick took the seat in front of me suddenly. Oh hell.

“Your name sounds beautiful,” he said politely. Then he just stared at me. I was supposed to finish the line. Cooperate, d****t. He’s cute.

“If you like that, you’ll love my phone number.”

“Oh really? I’d love to hear it.”

I smiled. “Got a pen?”

Two and a half games later, Patrick had my phone number and Ryan had won the last two games. Jeffrey looked ready for some action with Ryan, and I felt tired. All that anger and upper body exercise had made me sleepy. While I put my socks in my purse and my high heels on my feet, Patrick tapped my shoulder.

“So, can I call you sometime?” he said, holding the receipt I’d scribbled my cell phone number on an hour ago. I smiled.

“Sure you can,” I said, standing up and putting my purse over my shoulder. As I started to walk away with Ryan and Jeffrey, I stopped and turned around again. “You are going to call, aren’t you?” I asked. Patrick smiled.

“Yeah, of course. We can work on our upper bodies together.” He raised his eyebrows at me as I started laughing.

“Like that doesn’t sound sketchy at all,” I chuckled, my hand on my hip. He shrugged.

“Hey, I’m just looking out for you. What are friends for?” My laughter stopped but I kept smiling.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “good point.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Patrick assured, winking at me. I waved goodbye and walked away.

“Three points for Rachel,” Ryan said once I got into the car and he drove in the direction of my house. “Removed herself from a potentially homicidal situation, lost three games of bowling, and gave a hot guy her phone number. I think you win.”

Jeffrey poked him in the side and looked back at me. “Well done, Rachel.”

“Thank you,” I said, the grin on my face refusing to go away. “I do what I can.”

Author's Note

Can you see what's going on, or does it tell it too much?