FREED VERSE

“Amanda? Your vodka cran?”

Amelia was blonde, thin, and had too-good-to-be-true lash extensions. She grabbed her drink from the bartender and didn’t correct him on the name. 

“Thanks,” she said. “How much do I owe you?”

Her boss called her Amelia, her friends called her Amy, and her mother called her Ames. 

She was a cheerleader in high school and a frat rat in college, but she had green eyes (which meant she wasn’t exactly like everyone else). Her entry level job as a writer at Politico was fulfilling enough to get her through till Tits Up Thursday, when she went to Marty’s Tavern to watch gaggles of sorority girls take part in the bar’s weekly wet t-shirt contest. Say what you will about staying in your college town, but it sure was entertaining. 

Amelia liked to arrive late and sit at the end of the bar to watch the contest. By the time she cracked into her third drink of the night, the Kappa Kappa Gamma tank tops were dry and the crowd thinned out enough that she could trace the rim of her glass with her index finger while looking off into space in peace. 

Her vodka cran was too sour that night. Not worth the sugar.

She pursed her face in mild disgust and felt eyes on her from the other side of the bar. When she looked up, she saw a guy with a pair of eyes attached to an average-joe visage jerk his stare from her face back to his beer. 

The corners of her mouth curled. Not a full smile, but dimples nonetheless.

Amelia was used to being admired in public. She was pretty, after all: not pretty enough for chiseled men to sweep her off her feet on any old Tuesday, but enough to be catcalled outside the dispensary and fit well into the background of the popular girls’ group photos in high school. So, while the man’s eyes on her didn’t send chills up her spine, his complimentary stare still put a light blush on her cheeks. She sat up a little taller and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, shooting him a humble glance back. 

The lighting in the bar was good. Dim. It made it look like there was a sparkle of gold in the corners of Amelia’s jade eyes. 

She returned to her sour cocktail, her reflection wobbly on its surface. Her hair was frizzless (as it always was) and the highlighter on her cheekbones was shimmering in the warm bar light. Even in the drink’s trembling crimson mirror, she could get lost in her own reflection any day of the week.  

The clock above the bar stopped ticking. Amelia imagined what this guy, this not-so-secret admirer’s life was like outside of Marty’s on a Thursday night. Even though his jaw was too slim for his wide lips and the bridge of his nose was so stretched out that his eyes looked like they were in the middle of his forehead, Amelia melted into her glass thinking about the not-so-basic life he led outside the bar. After all, he had the good sense to pick her out of the rest of the scattered crowd of basic girls at the bar that night…there had to be something interesting about him. He couldn’t be exactly like everyone else if he wanted her. If he was a musician, he liked to spend his Saturdays riffing on the boardwalk with a guitar case closed for tips; a dude’s dude, he was the sober one in the group who always suggested In-N-Out at the end of the night and made sure everyone got home safe; or he could’ve been one of those vegans who doesn’t tell people about it until he cooly orders a tofu scramble at brunch. 

Whatever he was, he wasn’t for her. But the compliment was still nice. 

Amelia looked up from her vodka cran, the afterimage of the guy’s imagined life still staining her cheeks rouge. Besides the two of them, there was no one else sitting at the bar; everyone else was scattered around the room in tight circles, laughing their slightly slurred three-drink laughs and cracking their inside jokes (which, Amelia noted, were probably more universal than they thought). She turned her attention back to the guy, expecting him to meet her eyeline and smile. Sweat a little, maybe. Think he had a chance.

But he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was leaning over the bar, hailing the bartender over and craning his neck up to ask him a question. The bartender gave the man a curt nod, then reached under the bar and placed a napkin and pen in front of him. The guy slouched in his stool and tipped an invisible hat to the bartender, who walked away with a grunted chuckle to continue cleaning up the residue of the sorority girls’ wet t-shirt contest. 

The man glanced at Amelia with a smile. She barely had enough time to feel the blood rush to her face before he turned his head back down and started scribbling something on the napkin the bartender gave him. 

He was scrawling too furiously for it to be a grocery list. Too slow for a ransom note, but maybe (just maybe) the right speed for a declaration of love. 

Amelia took a swig from her drink. So she wasn’t crazy, then, after all: this man, whose name she didn’t know, whose hair had too much gel in it, who she had to squint at to find attractive, had noticed her. She’d been seen.

She didn’t know if it was the vodka or the hormones that were responsible for her lightheadedness, but either way she let the blood flow where it may. She may not have loved where it was coming from, but the spotlight was still on her. 

With one last sip, Amelia emptied her glass–as the last sour drops hit her tongue, she saw the shelves of liquor behind distort through its thick bottom. She slammed it down when she couldn’t make out the letters of the Jameson bottle on the middle shelf and turned towards her mysterious stranger, who, at that particular moment, was tongue-deep into the throat of a sleek, toned man standing six feet tall with legs for days and a tight-fitting v-neck to match. The napkin he’d been scribbling lay on the bar in the bromantic duo’s shadow, its corners flapping up and its surface taunting her with its unread (and, let’s be honest with ourselves here, unimportant) message. 

Amelia’s cheeks went as red as the cranberry juice she had just slurped down. She covered the side of her face with her hand. 

A gay man, really?

Wow. This is a new low. 

Are you really that conceited? 

That much of an ego? 

Either you’re delusional, or Andrew Tate sold you your gaydar. 

Or both. Amelia returned her index finger to the rim of her now-empty glass, coating the rim with sweat and her fingerprints staining the residual condensation around its base. She rested her head on her free hand and tried to look off into the distance as mysteriously as she had been minutes earlier, but her far-off stare made her look more like a lazy-eyed lemur than anything else. 

The acoustic cover of “Life is a Highway” playing behind the room’s closing time barstool chatter grew faint in Amelia’s ears. Its notes strung together and its melodies melted into a single chord of southern drawl, then faded to static after Amelia’s fingers wrinkled on the wet glass.  

The guy reminded her of Adrian, oddly enough. The party he approached her at her first year of college wasn’t unlike this bar, actually. The blacked-out girls there had cleared out of the bathroom, the host was secretly hoping everyone would leave soon, and the speakers’ echoes were dull against the frat house walls. She still had some new-in-town innocence in her eyes back then, sure, but other than that it was all the same: Amelia, not quite alone in a not quite dead room making eyes at a not quite cute guy. 

It was the week after she’d gotten her first round of blonde highlights, which, if you think about it, didn’t really make her a fake blonde since she only got them to match her browning roots to her grown-out childhood color. Amelia was sitting on the only couch in the room without slobbering drunks on it, waiting for the clock to strike 2:00 AM so she could go back to her dorm able to say that the night had been at least somewhat worth it. Her black cherry seltzer from the beginning of the night was still halfway full, but the few shots she had taken for lack of anything better to do made her head tight and her vision more than blurry enough. Adrian saw her glancing uncomfortably around the room from the kitchen hallway and strode over to her, sticky solo cup in hand and slurred smile plastered across his face. 

“I like…” he looked her up and down with a searching squint. “…your hair,” he finally settled on. He flopped down on the couch next to her. The remnants of his drink spilled out of his cup and left scattered stains on his muscle tank. 

Amelia blushed. “Thanks,” she said through a glug of her drink. “I like your…face?” 

Freshmen are always awkward at their first party. The alcohol was supposed to help, but Amelia’s liquid courage was more of a puddle she was face planting in. 

Luckily, Adrian was too sweet (or was it sloshed?) to say anything about Amelia squirming in her skin around him. He overlooked her inability to maintain eye contact with him with a wide smile and a glance down at her tits, which took some of the pressure off her to act like she was the perfect girl for him. And they say chivalry is dead! 

“So, uh…” Adrian tripped over his words. “Where your friends at? They dip?”

Amelia shook her head and put her sweating can on the floor by her feet. “No, uh, I didn’t come with anyone. I thought a party was where you go to meet people.” 

The corners of Adrian’s lips lifted, but they were pressed tightly together to dam his laughter. The most judgment he let slip was his ears turning red. 

Amelia’s fingers rushed to interlace in her lap and her face went white. “What, is there something wrong with that?” She tried to smirk her way through the sentence, but any underlying flirtation in her voice was razed to the ground by a pitchfork-bearing mob of insecurity. 

But Adrian laughed it off. “No, no,” he lied, smiling a swiper-no-swiping smile, “there’s nothing wrong with that. People nowadays forget that the point of social gatherings is to, you know, be social.” He paused, then put his arm up on the couch and leaned in towards her. “I like that about you. You’re different. You’re real, you’re raw, not like the rest of the girls that come around here.” 

Not like the rest. Amelia nearly knocked over her drink, her leg was bouncing so fast.

A moment of silence passed between them. 

I can stop trying to meet people, though, because I’ve already met you.

Oh god, yeah! It’s so fascinating how social connection improves both individual and group fitness. Evolutionarily speaking…

So, uh…what’s your major?

Adrian spared Amelia the embarrassment of fishing for a conversation starter. 

“Are you gonna get home OK? Wanna just crash here?”

He was such a sweetie, looking out for her like that. It was gestures like that, offering her a place in his flea-infested bunk bed instead of making her walk the grueling five minutes back to the dorms, that made Amelia sure of it: Adrian was the exception to the ‘don’t date guys you meet at parties’ rule. He was different, just like her: they were two peas in a pod, just waiting to burst out of this cramped existence. 

Adrian ended up cheating on her with a girl from his frat house’s sister sorority. Amelia caught him red-handed at morning-after brunch: their walk of shame outfits were wrinkled, their bottomless mimosas flowing, their faces rife with shame. Amelia burst out sobbing in the middle of the sidewalk when she saw them, but wiped her tears when she looked up at them and realized she couldn’t hold it against him for cheating. It was kind of a compliment, if you think about it: not only did he want to spare her the pain of getting outright dumped, but the girl he was with looked nearly exactly like her. Thin, blonde, heart-shaped face; to the t, in fact, besides for the fact that she had blue eyes. 

Well, that, and she had an Alpha Phi sticker on her laptop case. 

Maybe that was it. Maybe she just needed to feel like she belonged somewhere, like there was somewhere, someone on this earth that wanted her instead of just half-baked guys she had to convince herself were weird in a cool, quirky way and not a…well, a weird way. 

But, alas. She wasn’t.

Those damn green eyes. 

These fucking eyes, she thought, she pictured, she cursed while slamming her yet-to-be-refilled glass down on the bar. It landed with a thud, but didn’t shatter. 

Those eyes rolled back into Amelia’s head as she rubbed them till she saw colors, static, anything other than her freshman year sob story and the man making out with what was supposed to be her mysterious stranger. 

Amelia pulled her face out from between her hands when she heard the bartender approaching to collect her glass. 

“A kamikaze, please.” He shook the shaker. Handed her the shot.

There wasn’t much lime juice. The triple sec burned. 

Amelia’s face scrunched into a wrinkled mess of power-set foundation and regretful choices. She blinked hard, shaking out her head whenever her eyes weren’t closed. At least when the world was blurry, she wasn’t expected to know where she was in it. 

“I’ll have what she’s having!” a high pitched voice called out from her left. Around the corner of the bar stood a 5’6” girl wearing a plaid skirt and a black denim vest with dainty silver chains hanging off her shoulders. She had thick, grown-out bangs that were too dark to be a natural black, which matched her thick eyeliner and spider lashes. Not that she cared if her mascara was matted–even though her stocky stature didn’t compare to Amelia’s supermodel-long legs, Amelia still felt like she ought to crane her neck up when she looked at her. Put that girl in a pair of heels and she’d rule the world. 

The girl tapped her shot glass on the bar, then downed her kamikaze without taking a beat. Despite all her confidence, her face twisted up even more than Amelia’s had: the girl’s eyeliner disappeared between the creases next to her eyes and her chin recoiled into her neck, creating a kaleidoscopic wave of folded-over double chins in its wake. She smiled from ear to ear after getting the vodka down, then slammed her shot glass bottom-up on the bar and turned to Amelia. 

“Damn, girl!” she said through recovering breaths. “Queen of the Kamikaze over here!” 

Amelia smiled and rolled her eyes, stalling for time while trying to find something, anything to say to convince this so incredibly cool girl who should not be looking anywhere in her direction that she was just as interesting as she thought she was. 

What can I say, I’m a seasoned vet! 

They called me ‘Little Miss No Chaser’ in high school. 

Beginner’s luck?

The girl rounded the corner of the bar and pulled up the stool to Amelia’s left before she could land on a response.

“So, what’s your name?” The girl’s voice was lower-pitched up close. Besides the kamikaze, there wasn’t any alcohol on her breath. She enunciated her words well and looked Amelia in the eyes when she spoke to her. 

“Amy,” she said. Amelia looked the girl up and down, noted the ripped seam at the bottom of her miniskirt, and went chartreuse with the sudden awareness of how nauseatingly normal the name ‘Amy’ was.

“Or, at least, that’s what my friends call me.” 

Rough fumble, decent recovery. Hopefully.

“Oh! So that means we’re friends?” The girl smirked at her. “Doesn’t take much to win you over, I see.” 

Amelia crossed and uncrossed her legs a couple of times. The vinyl on the barstool stuck to her thighs. Her poker face was crimson.

“Oh! Uh, I wasn’t trying to say–” she stuttered. 

“Oh, so we aren’t friends, then?”

Butterfingers on the recovery. Whoops.

Amelia’s eyes were darting around the room too fast to catch the subtle dimples on the girl’s face. She put her chin in her hand and willed herself to look into the girl’s eyes as she spoke.

“Sorry, sorry. Let me start over.” She sighed. “My full name is Amelia, but my friends call me Amy since Amelia sounds so…pedestrian.”

The girl’s eyes were blue. Of course, they were blue.  

“Pedestrian?” The girl asked with a raised eyebrow. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe pedestrian in a badass pilgrim kind of way, but a name like Amelia in today’s day and age is kinda like having a dirt bike in the middle ages. It’s cool.”
Amelia tried to laugh, but her throat closed. She smiled, crossed and uncrossed her legs again. Tried to take the just-took-a-kamikaze look off her face. Failed.

But the silence didn’t seem to bother the girl. She cut the quiet with a snort and said, “Either way, Lia is a better nickname for Amelia than Amy. Amy, for god’s sake! What are you, a Subaru mom on her way back from the farmer’s market? No offense, Lia,” she looked Amelia in the eyes and smiled, “but I think your friends hate you.”

She pulled out an aluminum cigarette case. It was the same shade of silver as the chains hanging off her vest. 

“Want a drag?” she said, sticking a cancer stick between her two front teeth while she fished for a lighter from the bottom of her faux leather purse. “Marlboro. Red. Good.” 

For all this girl’s sauve, not even she could string together a sentence with a cigarette between her lips. Amelia nodded at the offer and the girl passed the Marlboro to her, then lit it between her fingers without asking if she was ready. 

Amelia took a puff. Breathed it in about halfway, realized she hadn’t smoked a cigarette since senior year of high school, and blew the smoke out before she started coughing. The girl didn’t notice she didn’t take the full drag, or at least she didn’t give any indication she cared.

Amelia sat up straighter in her backless stool and took another drag. She emptied her lungs on the exhale and dangled the cigarette between her fingers.

“So, I’ve told you two of my names,” Amelia said. “Plus, you invented a new one for me. Does that put me in the running for knowing yours?”

A bold play from the home side. 

The girl laughed. “I guess you’re right about that one.” She stuck out her hand. “Rowan. Nice to meet you.” 

Oh?

Amelia switched the cigarette to her bad hand and, slightly holding her breath, shook Rowan’s hand with an exaggerated firmness. “Formal introduction. Nice touch. Good to meet you, Ro.” 

Rowan rolled her eyes and laughed. “Good one. Next thing you know you’ll be saying we’re friends!”

And it’s in. Photo finish. The crowd goes wild. 

Amelia broke off the handshake and passed Rowan the cig. She took a hit through a smile and turned her head away from Amelia to blow the smoke out. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a male voice yelled. The bartender barrelled over to them. “This is not an opium den! Take the smoking outside!” 

Rowan shrugged and got out of her seat, the cigarette cradled between her teeth. She made for the back exit and looked over her shoulder as she pushed the door open. 

“Come with?” It was all she could manage without the cigarette falling out of her mouth. 

The corners of Amelia’s lips rose, probably more than she was willing to admit (or realized, for that matter). She hopped off the bar stool and followed Rowan into the bar’s back alley. 

They were only able to get a couple drags off the cigarette–it almost completely ashed out between laughs. Amelia made a futile attempt to blow a smoke ring with the last puff, but ended up coughing so hard that the butt fell out of her hand onto the asphalt. Rowan laughed at her, stomped on the butt with the tip of her boot, and kicked the crumbled filter under the dumpster. 

“Fun night, eh?” Rowan clicked her tongue as she asked the question. Amelia’s smile hardened and she hoped the creases in her forehead weren’t too obvious while she waited for the next words to come out of Rowan’s mouth. She didn’t want the night to be over, but…where else could it go? There were only so many midnights to be struck before the sun came up, only so many cigarettes to put out, only so many nicknames to make up. There wasn’t any mysterious stranger writing their number on a napkin for her, hoping to pick this up some other time, and Ro didn’t seem the type to whip out her phone and say they have to swap Instagrams like her college friends did. 

Amelia was too lost in her thoughts about the night going on longer to hear the rest of Rowan’s goodbye, much less reciprocate it. Something about happy hour, not-so-great expectations, and a night spent looking at the clock.

“But you’re cool, Lia. It was fun meeting you,” she said. “Made it worth my while.”

Amelia smiled and nodded. “You too, Ro. Thanks for the light.” She stuck out her hand, which Rowan shook with an exaggerated grip. 

In the dim light of the back alley, you’d swear both their eyes were honeyed hazel.

Rowan released the handshake, waved goodbye, and turned her dazzling smile towards the empty night road. Amelia put her arm up and opened her mouth to ask for one last cigarette, one last minute. But when she started to script her entreaty to just please for the love of god stay for just one more hour one more minute one more second here with me, please, her tongue tied. Rowan walked to the corner, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. She drove away, and nothing changed.

Amelia let her tongue unfold with a deep exhale.

Maybe it was okay to let a good thing go. 

The bar’s back door was heavy, but nothing Amelia couldn’t manage with a little elbow grease. She grunted it open and stepped inside to the lukewarm air, which was still sticky with remnants from the sorority girls’ wet t-shirt contest. There was the faintest hint of smoke where she and Rowan were sitting. 

The bar was nearly empty by now–last call had come and gone while Amelia was outside, and the only people left in the room were either finishing off their pints or trying to convince their friends they were good to drive home. The bartender was wiping down the bar when Amelia sat down again. 

“Last call was ten minutes ago,” he said without looking up. 

Amelia smiled and set her bag down on the bar. “I’m not ordering anything,” she said. “Just taking a minute.” 

She stared at the spot where the man she thought was her secret admirer had sat. She’d given him more credit than she’d care to admit: when she caught him looking at her, the thought of being swept off her feet to a happy life of kids, picket fences, and golden retrievers certainly wasn’t not on her mind. It was an inkling, but it was there. That’s what got her about him, really: more than the fact that he had two eyes, a penis, and a decent-enough face, he had a future. Or, at least, the idea of one.

She shook her head and lifted her bag to let the bartender clean under it. From this higher vantage point, the seat where the guy was sitting looked so much smaller than it did just a few minutes earlier.

“Thanks,” the bartender grunted after wiping in front of her. When Amelia returned her bag, it landed with a thud loud enough to turn the bartender’s head towards her. His eyes brightened at the sight of her face and he gave her a familiar, recognizing smile. 

“Oh! You’re back, good. Listen, those guys over there,” he nodded towards where Amelia’s faux-boyfriend had been sitting, “Remember them? Yeah, well, they wanted me to give you this.” 

He put a folded napkin in front of her, then smirked and continued moving down the bar. 

“You have a good night, miss…I have no doubt about that.”

 Amelia stared at the napkin. Its corners were getting soggy from cleaning solution the bartender’s rag left behind, so she had no choice but to scoop it up if she ever wanted to know what the guy wrote on it. 

The brown paper was soft between her fingers. She peeled its damp edges apart, holding her breath while waiting for the smudged ink to make out something legible. 

 “CARE FOR AN UNHOLY TRINITY?” it read. “(242) 874-6877. MMF TONIGHT?”

Under normal circumstances, Amelia probably would have lurched at the sight of the offer. Being a bicurious plaything didn’t exactly fit into her idea of what her future held. But, tonight, after the cigarettes and laughing and…everything, really, Amelia chuckled and put the note in her back pocket. 

Amelia slung her bag over her shoulder and made for the back exit. 

“Night!” she called out to the bartender. “Thanks a million!” 

“No problem!” he replied. “You get home…or wherever it is you’re going…safe now, okay sweet cheeks?” 

Amelia laughed and pushed the back door open. “Will do,” she said. “Name’s Lia, by the way.”