Party Girl by Lexington Bailey

     Tripp CC



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Party Girl

   The first drag always made the sides of my tongue tingle. I knew it was my body nudging me not to smoke, but I ignored it. I only smoked when I was sad and drunk, anyway. I crushed the empty Newports box and let it fall to the bottom of my bag next to the two-week-old receipt from when I bought it. 
   I sat on the edge of the deck and swung my feet over the side, letting my bare legs dangle into the night sky as I rested my arms inside the railing. The hem of my dress danced in the spring breeze. It was unusually warm and felt good to release my legs from their pants prison after months of bitter cold, even if I hated this dress.
   All the back porches in Chicago are the same. Rickety wood structures stacked on top of each other so urbanites can have fresh air while under constant threat the whole thing will collapse beneath their feet. It feels like how us Big Ten graduates, now junior accountants feel after moving here - convincing ourselves we’re happy while the world swallows us up. They also always smell like old beer and dirty socks, but I think that’s just the way wood ages here. 
   The sounds from the party pulsated as the sliding door opened before getting sucked back inside. I didn’t turn around to look, instead watching smoke curl up towards the moon as it escaped my lips. 
   “Mind if I join you?”
   I didn’t recognize the voice, but I scooted over to make room. A splinter caught on the back of my leg, another strike against this dress and the porch.
   “Can I borrow your lighter?”
   My shoulders slumped. I was hoping to avoid small talk out here, but I still dug around my purse and passed it to the stranger. Hopefully, they wanted to sit in silence and smoke, too. The unfamiliar body took up the majority of space on the balcony while I pushed mine into the corner. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to make myself smaller to accommodate.
   I peeked at the face next to me. It was soft all over, but his piercing green eyes cut through the dim porch lighting. He had a mop of curly brown hair poorly tamed by one of those mini beanies guys wear to signal that they drink oat milk lattes and have deep thoughts about feminism, so it’s okay if they hit on you at the bar after you tell them you’re not interested. If his skinny jeans had been ripped at the knees, and I was surprised they weren’t, there’d probably be the edge of an American Traditional eagle or snakehead peeking out. I tensed and straightened my back, ready for the situation to turn unpleasant.
   “I appreciate it.” He lit a neatly rolled blunt, probably one he bought instead of making himself, and leaned back into his hands as the warmth enveloped him. “I get so claustrophobic at parties. Thank god every apartment in Chicago has one of these.” He knocked the wooden deck and handed back my lighter.
   We let our deep breathing and the occasional bird call fill the space between us. I tried to settle back into solitude.
   “So, how do you know Ricky?”
   I really hated how approachable I looked. No one ever left me in peace.
   I closed my eyes trying to picture this Ricky person. Cait has a tendency to wander off as soon as she spots her friends, so she’s probably never pointed them out to me. Was it the guy with the anime tattoos? Or the person with the trying-too-hard to be ironic political t-shirt?    Maybe the girl with the braid to her butt who never smiled? 
   “I don’t. I’m here with my girlfriend. They play kickball together.” I tensed. Here comes the disbelief that someone in a dress with long blonde hair and perfectly painted nails could have a girlfriend and then the inevitable attempt to “be the guy who turns me straight.” 
   But instead his whole face lit up. “She plays on RHOKB? The Real Housewives of Kickball? That’s awesome! My ex-boyfriend, Kyle, used to sub in sometimes and I loved going to games with him.”
   I coughed on my inhale. His outfit definitely had not screamed queer. I felt a small pang of guilt for judging him the same way so many men judge me. But all the tension in my shoulders also released.
   “Yeah, it’s a good time, I guess. I don’t play or anything, I just come to parties sometimes. But Cait’s very into it.”
  “Is she the one with the really short bleached hair?” He looked back towards the party, as if he could spot her through the crowded kitchen.
   “No, she’s in a red floral dress that looks like mine with a bow in her hair, probably manning the jungle juice. She’s very protective over her secret recipe.”
   Cait had spent an hour getting her dark hair to curl before we left. We’ve been purposely coordinating our outfits recently so it’s clear to everyone that yes, we are two women who wear dresses and are in a relationship with each other. Matching was her idea and she found me duplicates of her favorite pieces. I usually hated how they looked on me - red was definitely not my color - but for her I’d wear anything.
   “It was tasty, I don’t blame her.” He grinned and went to take another pull on his blunt, but stopped before it reached his lips. “Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t offer you any.” He held it out to me.
   My mind went to the last time I accepted an offer like this and how Cait’s eyes instantly clouded when she caught a whiff of it on my jacket. I missed weed and how it made me feel, but it wasn’t worth an argument later. I shook my head and tried to let my cigarette make up the difference.
   “Suit yourself.” He took a long drag, as if he was smoking enough for both of us. “How long have you two been together?”
   “Since college,” I replied. “We were both part of this senior showcase, her for a play she did as her capstone project and me for a research poster. They had so many posters that they had to put some of us in the performing arts space as overflow. The rest is history.”
   Cait had looked so beautiful that day. She wrote a one-woman stage adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and all day she shuffled around in a Victorian-era lace dress trying to break free of the room as a performance art piece before the show.  I was so enamored I barely talked to anyone about my poster. I don’t even remember what my project was about.
   Cait was my first girlfriend. My first anything, really. Unless you count when Eli Jameson and I kissed during truth or dare at camp and then secretly held hands by the lake for two days. I hadn’t thought of myself as much of anything before her, but she’d given me an identity as well as a partner. It felt good to belong somewhere and to someone.
   “Well that definitely explains how she ended up on the team. I don’t know what it is about gay theatre people and kickball, but I swear they make up the entire league.”
   “Who are you here with?” I was starting to warm up to the guy, or maybe it was just the nicotine settling my nerves, but it was sort of nice to talk to someone.
   “With Kyle. The tall skinny guy with the pink glitter on his face. We’re still friends and for some reason he thinks it’s better to show up with me than by himself even though he’s only here to scout out another relationship. I think he just wants a back-up option in case he can’t find someone else to go home with.”
   I nodded. I knew how that went. In the first few months of me and Cait, before we were actually me and Cait, she did the same. She said she liked the way I looked next to her because everyone always wanted to know who the gorgeous blonde girl was. Going to parties, much less queer parties, was new to me, so I followed her lead until it became our normal. Most of those nights I went home alone. That was still usually how it went, but at least now Cait would be next to me when I woke up.
   “I know I deserve better than this, but it’s nice to feel wanted. And I’m just as likely to find someone at one of these parties as he is.”
   I looked out towards the dim city lights stretched out ahead of us. I was almost at the end of my cigarette and desperately wanted another. I wasn’t ready to go back inside and be Cait’s arm candy. But if I didn’t, she’d complain that I wasn’t social enough. I took one last deep breath in and crushed the butt into the railing. It slipped between my fingers, tumbling into the bushes below. 
   “I should find Cait.” I said lightly, trying not to seem like I was hiding out here. 
   He looked up at me, his eyes catching the light again, but this time appearing softer than before. “It was nice talking to you, uh. Oh shit, I never asked for your name.” 
   “Julie.”
   He gave me a sheepish smile. “Lukas. Nice to meet you, Julie. Hope to see you around sometime.” He turned back towards the night sky, surrounding himself in a cloud of smoke.
   Vaporized sweat and cheap alcohol hit me as soon as I opened the door. The apartment had filled up in the last ten minutes and my hair began sticking to the back of my neck.
   I looked above the shag haircuts and kitschy accessories for Cait’s matching red dress. My own itched as I squeezed through the congested, damp bodies. 
   I finally broke through a group belting a show tune I didn’t know and found Cait where I expected her to be. She was next to a long folding table topped with an array of oversized liquor bottles and off-brand juice, face turned away from the crowd and buried into the neck of a broad-shouldered woman with close-cropped hair. My stomach dropped.
   Even though I could fill a bingo board of lesbian archetypes that she’s cozied up to in front of me over the years, it still hurts to see. This was something I accepted when we first started dating; if I wanted to be with her and part of the queer community here, I had to be okay with an atypical relationship. And aren’t all queer relationships atypical anyway? This was barely any different from what Lukas described between him and Kyle. And Cait knew tons of other couples who had the same dynamic. This is just what compromising in a queer relationship looks like.
   So why did I still feel so shitty?
   “Julie! I’ve been looking all over for you!”
   Cait broke free from the woman and threw her arms around my neck. I could smell the alcohol on her breath as she left a pink lip print on my temple. My body didn’t know if I should relax into her embrace, or push her back towards this other woman and her Old Spice drenched clothes. 
   Cait grabbed my wrist, pulling me towards where I found them. Her slender fingers were stronger than they looked and I knew there’d be dark purple bracelets there in the morning.
   “Ricky and I were just talking about you.” Cait turned away from me. “Julie’s an accountant for a fancy firm downtown and Ricky does drug testing for a harm reduction program. I just love smart women!”
   Ricky, I guess, put her arm back around Cait’s waist, pulling her close. Cait still held onto my wrist, keeping me next to her. I picked at the splinter on the back of my leg with my free hand, trying to keep my mind occupied with something other than them.
   Their conversation faded into the rest of the noise around us. Despite my best efforts, all I could think about was how each of her fingers felt against my skin and the little bursts of electricity shooting up my arm. I thought about how good it feels when she tells me she loves me over our avocado toasts in the morning or when she comes home with a Snickers bar in her grocery bag because she knows they’re my favorite. I thought about how she holds me after every bad phone call with my parents back in Iowa, or how she kisses me in front of the jeering protestors at Pride.
   Cait is the only person in the world who can make me feel this way. She is the first person who saw me for my whole self and not just who society wanted me to be. I don’t know who I am without her.
   I twisted my wrist so I could thread my fingers through hers. It’s me and Cait, Cait and me.

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A graduate of Northwestern University, Lexington Bailey (she/her) is a queer writer and statistician currently residing in Washington, D.C. She believes in the power of literature to perceive what others can, or will, not. This is her first publication.