The bartender finally takes pity on me, walking over to refill my shot glass, kindly waiting for me to toss it back so she can fill it again before leaving the bottle within arm’s reach as she turns to serve someone else. While I stand here surrounded by people I don’t know, at the birthday party of a friend of a friend of Carson’s, because he felt bad about me being alone on my last night in California, getting scolded like a pee-wee cheerleader who flipped off the opposing team.
It only happened once, and it was only because my friend Tess told me one of their cheerleaders whispered that my toe-touch was trash, and Tess dared me to do it. A Flanagan never turns down a dare.
“Like, sixty-two years young, with a perfect, shapely, tight ass,” Carson goes on, making me feel even worse for throwing out an immature, cheap shot at my boss of the last four years, and someone I admired and wanted to be when I grew up when I was a little girl dreaming about the future. “I don’t even like lady asses, but my God. You have to give art the respect it deserves when you see it.”
I had my dreams in the palm of my hands, and with one wrong move, they disappeared in the blink of an eye.
“I was doing the lovely Ms. Westwood’s makeup one time before a news interview, and I asked her how she still managed to maintain such a firm, well-rounded derriere, and she told me to eat shit,” Carson muses with a wistful smile on his face as I down another shot. “I still don’t know if she was insulting me or if that woman actually eats feces to look as good as she does at her age.”
“I thought you brought me to this party to cheer me up and to cheer me on before I leave tomorrow on a new life adventure. Not to remind me how epically I failed,” I complain.
Tonight was supposed to be a fun, carefree evening out with a few of the girls from the team. One last night in L.A. to finally let loose and go crazy after four years of not being able to have a life. An hour into our night at a bar by my apartment, and they all ditched me for dates, reminding me I’m a thirty-four-year-old, washed up, ex-pro cheerleader, with no dating prospects anywhere in sight. Not that it would matter anyway, since I’m moving back home tomorrow, but still. I had four years to find everything I felt like I’ve been missing in my life, and I blew it. Professionally and personally.
“New life adventure?” Carson snorts, grabbing the bottle of tequila and refilling my glass, adding a few fingers to his champagne flute he emptied in between yelling at me, and then clinking our glasses together. “You’re moving back home to a tiny, shithole island in Virginia to run your parents’ business that you hate, with nary a makeup artist in sight to make sure you don’t go out in public looking like garbage, and a weird, arranged marriage situation that I still don’t fully understand.”
I do not follow Carson’s lead and throw back my shot, and not just because I may or may not be seeing two of Carson standing in front of me right now, and I’m afraid if I bring the shot glass up to my face, I might miss my mouth completely.
Is this my fourth shot or my seventh? I know it’s a number less than ten but more than three. We’ll call it fourventh. Numbers are hard.
My ass vibrates again with an incoming notification from my phone—the other reason I didn’t inhale more tequila right along with Carson. I quickly set down my shot glass and pull my phone out of the back pocket of my plum-colored miniskirt, hoping Wren is finally getting back to me. Carson has been a great Sip and Bitch fill-in, but sometimes, a girl just needs her best friend. I need her to tell me everything is going to be okay, I’m making the right decision by moving back home, and that I should definitely drink more tequila.
“It’s not a shithole island, and it’s not an arranged marriage,” I grumble, blinking a few times to try to get my drunk eyes to focus on the screen of my phone. “Summersweet is small, but it’s magical. Everyone I love is there, and I’ve missed too much while I’ve been gone. My friends all falling in love, one of them getting engaged, random forest fires…. It will be nice to be with everyone again and not miss out on everything because I’m so far away or traveling all the time.”
Don’t think about how much you’re going to miss traveling, being in the spotlight, the glamour of going to public appearances, putting a smile on people’s faces, helping raise money at charity events. Don’t think about how much it’s going to hurt to never feel the nerves and excitement right before the music starts, when you’re waiting in the tunnel of the stadium, knowing you only have one shot to execute every move perfectly in front of millions of people, and understanding without a shadow of a doubt that all the hard work and sacrifice was worth it. Don’t think about it, or you’ll start crying, and no one likes a drunk crier.