Olive Juice

“It took me a long time to tie it.”

“Clumsy fingers.”

“I even stared at the mirror and everything.”

“How long?”

David sighed, pushing his fork around on his plate. “An hour.”

“An hour,” Phillip said, snorting into his hand. “David.”

“Yeah, well you should have seen attempts one through sixteen. It looked like I was trying to hang myself.”

“An hour.”

“Speaking of excuses to dress up. Nice shoes.”

“Buddy, I’ll have you know these are limited-edition Converse,” Phillip said with a scowl. “Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah, you and five thousand other people have the same shoes.”

“Out of seven billion people. That’s—that’s, okay, math is stupidly hard, but I’m pretty sure that’s a very small percentage of the population. Do you know what the chances of me running into another person with these exact shoes is?”

“There’s a reason for that.”

“Excuse you,” he said, affronted. “These are brilliant.”

“They looked like they were made by someone who’s colorblind.”

“No accounting for taste.”

“Not your taste, that’s for sure.”

“You can just shut up,” Phillip said. “You philistine. Just because I wasn’t there to do your tie for you doesn’t mean you can take it out on my shoes.”

And that—that might have been too much. It wasn’t Phillip’s fault. No. It would never be Phillip’s fault. David was just as much a participant as Phillip had been. But the idea that Phillip hadn’t been there, hadn’t tied his tie for him was too much. The bowtie on the ill-fitted tux had been already pre-tied, hanging in the closet in a wrapped bag in the back. But this tie? This was the first tie he’d worn since… he couldn’t even remember when. Probably some meeting, like the group Phillip had found, other people having been through the same thing. David hadn’t wanted to go, but Phillip

said it’d be a good idea, and please, David, just do it for me. Please.

That had been in year two and the trail was so cold it might as well have been ice, no matter what they’d chosen to believe at the time. He hadn’t yet discovered the joys of waking up after spending four nights in a row chasing the bottom of a bottle. But oh, it would be coming, and there wasn’t really anything that could have stopped it.

But first, the group meetings, the people who showed up a little dead-eyed, a little frumpy, saying this is my wife or this is my son or it is my father, he isn’t sick, he really isn’t, he was just gone. The cookies had been stale, and the coffee might as well have been tar, and they talked about missing-white-woman syndrome, that extraordinarily odd little thing where people go missing every single day, but it’s the upper-class white girls or women that get all of the media coverage, their blonde hair and blue eyes selling much better than a Hispanic woman or a black man. Men in general didn’t get much press. They were just gone. Probably running from their responsibilities. After all, it wasn’t like men could get taken, right? That was just sounded implausible. That didn’t happen.

It was the pretty white women, always. They were the ones on the cover of People, they were the ones whose awkwardly shot cell phone videos of that slightly drunken day at the beach were shown on CNN and Fox News, saying, “Look at this all-American girl, in the prime of her life, have you seen her? Sure, four women of color have gone missing while you’ve watched this, but look at this woman. She’s more important than all the others.”

Alice was black.

She’d been on the news.

For a little while.

But her videos hadn’t been on TV, at least not on the national stage. Not even the one where she’s grinning at David holding the camera, saying, “Is this really for me? Did you really do this for me?” while she’s unwrapping a present, the snowman paper falling around her. She’d been in her pajamas still, her hair up lazily in a bun, her eyes a little puffy with sleep, but she had looked amazing, and even the local news hadn’t played it, so he’d uploaded it to YouTube under the heading HAVE YOU SEEN HER?

It’d gotten just over three hundred views. David was convinced half of those came from himself.

Yes. That might have been the last time he wore a tie. Trying to go to that group. Hearing about missing-white-woman syndrome and knowing the missing woman in his life was black and two years gone, and wondering if anyone still gave a shit about her aside from him and Phillip. He’d eaten a cookie. He’d drank the coffee. He’d smiled when he was supposed to, answered a question when called upon.

But he’d never gone back.