"Oh. My. God."
Cady groaned, holding her hand to her head. It felt like it might split open at any second, her brain abandoning her to find some less hostile host.
Then it all came back to her.
Regina calling her out, Aaron ignoring her, falling in front of everybody. Janis.
"Huh?" Janis sat up abruptly, rubbing her eyes.
"My head," Cady mumbled. Something pulsed inside her head, threatening to blow her skull open. Her mouth tasted like a swamp. It felt like she had been hit by a car. Had she been hit by a car? She racked her mind.
No. Just the fall. And then Janis.
"I have Tylenol and ibuprofen if you want," Janis sat up and stretched at the other end of the couch. She looked at Cady, a shy smile creeping into her features. Cady didn't think she'd ever seen Janis look shy before. Brave, ferocious, and passionate, but not shy.
Janis turned and smiled at her bed mischievously. "Guess we never made it there last night, huh?"
"Made it where?" Cady asked, feigning obliviousness. She put a hand on her forehead. "Yes please on the Tylenol," she moaned before Janis could reply.
Janis stood and walked to the bathroom, opening the cabinet under the counter and pulling out a little plastic bin of medications. She checked labels until she found what she was looking for, then stood and tossed the bottle to Cady. Cady caught it and moaned at the sudden movement and the havoc it wreaked on her head.
Janis laughed and grabbed a cup from on the top of the microwave-minifridge combo she had, filling it from the sink in the bathroom. She handed the cup to Cady, who tossed the pills back and drained the cup. She burped loudly and then covered her mouth, embarrassed. Janis just laughed.
"So, I have cereal and milk out here. If you want eggs or anything like that, we'll have to brave going inside the house."
"Do you ever go in there?" Cady asked.
"Not if I can help it."
"Oh."
"I feel like Lucky Charms." Janis stood and grabbed the box from the desk next to the minifridge. She poured herself a generous bowl and then looked at Cady, holding the box up. Cady nodded and Janis poured a second bowl. She only had almond milk, which was fine with Cady, since she wasn't used to much dairy anyways—they didn't really drink milk in Kenya.
The two girls sat on the couch and munched in silence. After a few minutes, Janis flipped the tv on from sleep mode and resumed the episode of The Office she had been on; together, they watched it finish. Neither laughed, even at the funny parts.
When the episode finished, Cady stood abruptly.
"So, about last night—" Janis turned and faced her, finally.
"Yeah, I'm so sorry about that," Cady cut in quickly. "I shouldn't have drunk so much; I probably totally embarrassed myself. Please tell me that the pants only came off once we were ready to sleep?" Cady pitched her voice much shriller than it usually was. She could feel the lie sitting there in the air between them, sinking in. She was going to play dumb.
Well, ok, fine. She was doing it with Aaron, might as well do it with Janis too, right? Maybe if she pretended hard enough, she could actually undo the night before, and her awful mistake, and be fresh and pure and remember vividly all the amazing firsts she would have with Aaron. Maybe. If Regina didn't ruin her first.
"Are you serious?" Janis finally asked.
"What?" Cady asked blandly, fighting to keep her face innocent and blank. "Did I do something really bad? Ooh, tell me!" she feigned excitement, sitting back down on the couch.
"You don't remember?" Janis asked, disbelief raising her eyebrows.
"Remember what? What happened, Janis?" Cady asked, intensely interested. If she really didn't remember, she'd want to know, right?
Janis stared at her levelly, her mouth open as if she were going to speak. Cady watched emotions flit behind Janis's eyes: confusion, then anger, then disappointment. They settled on resignation.
"Nothing," Janis finally relented. "You just like, dropped your pants. So I could take care of the cut," Janis gestured vaguely at Cady's knee before turning away from her.
Cady looked down—she had half torn the band-aid off while she slept, but it didn't really matter since the cut had scabbed over. She peeled it off, folding it up into tiny chunks before daring to glance at her friend again.
Janis just sat there, refusing to look at her. What would Cady do if this were real? How far should she say she remembered? She wracked her mind for a moment—she could pretend to remember everything up until the fall. That would be a good stopping point.
"Oh. My. God." The mortification sounded believable, even to her. "I fell in front of everybody. In front of Aaron."
Cady slumped back down onto the couch, putting her head in her hands. She peeked cautiously at Janis, but she was still sitting there, looking away from her. Was it mean to talk about Aaron now? Well, if she didn't remember last night it wasn't.
"You should go." Janis didn't look at Cady as she spoke.
Terror climbed down Cady's spine. Had she slipped? Did Janis know? What had happened?
"Janis—"
"Just go. I'll see you later."
Cady stood reluctantly. Janis was still turned away, hiding her face from Cady. She couldn't see—was Janis crying?
"Go."
Cady spun and fumbled with the lock on the sliding glass door, finally getting it open. It was dewy and cold outside—she slid the door shut and shivered, dashing across the yard. Her phone was dead, but she'd just have to walk home or find a phone to call her parents. All she could think about was Janis—did she know?
"I know, I know, the wheels are sweet, but you've actually gotta get in if they're going to take you anywhere," Damian leaned over Janis to speak to Cady out the passenger window of his mom's minivan. He had somehow cajoled her into lending it to him for the day so they could go to the mall in Chicago—Janis's favorite art store was having a massive sale and they had all agreed to go together.
It was Sunday. Cady had spent Saturday recovering from her mythic hangover and debating whether or not to text Janis. She had opened and started a new message over a dozen times, but each time she was at a loss for what to say.
If she tried to talk about the kissing, then it was admitting she had lied about not remembering. And if she told Janis it had been some stupid drunken mistake, then she was still admitting to lying, and she would probably hurt her feelings. Then there was the fact that she had been drunk, but Janis hadn't been—did Janis like her? Like. . . a lesbian thing? Cady had shivered at the thought of it—Regina would never talk to her again if she revealed she had shared her first kiss with Janis, the space dyke.
No, Cady decided, it would be best to just stick to her story and ride it out. They would get over any awkwardness eventually, and she wouldn't repeat the same mistake again.
"Sorry!" she smiled at Damian as she slid the sliding door shut behind her. "I thought the doors were automatic."
"Honey, we're styling, but we're not that styling," Damian rolled his eyes.
He filled the car ride with peaceful chatter—Janis laughed along with whatever he said and bantered back and forth like usual. Cady watched her in the rearview mirror—her dark eyeshadow was back on, the same plum colored lipstick, the same sad look on her face, hiding in her eyes. Janis kept catching Cady staring at her, and then they'd both glance away awkwardly, Damian noticing the lull in conversation and pursing his lips but not saying anything about it.
They pulled up to the art store after a solid forty-minute drive—Cady didn't think she'd ever be so excited to see endless blank canvases and metallic tubes of paint. Janis looked like a kid on Christmas morning.
Before Cady could make it inside, however, Damian grabbed her denim jacket and yanked her back out the doors. Janis didn't notice in her rush over to her favorite oil paints.
"What do you think you're doing?" Damian asked Cady incredulously, picking up as though they were in the middle of a conversation.
"What do you mean?" Cady asked. She widened her eyes the way Gretchen did whenever she heard a choice piece of gossip—a look of pure innocence.
"Oh, don't you be coy on me now! Janis told me about last night."
"Jeez, you think she'd tell me what I did before telling you, but I guess not. . ." Cady rolled her eyes.
"Cady, don't be stupid. Look at what that implies—that Janis would do that stuff with somebody who was too drunk to consent. How do you think that makes her feel?"
Cady's heartbeat sped up. Janis had told him everything. How could she play this off without painting her friend as some sort of rapist? She said the first words that came to her mouth.
"Oh my god, are you saying we cuddled? You're making all this drama over us cuddling? We cuddle all the time. Chill."
"You know what you did."
"No! I don't!" Cady was shocked to find herself yelling. Her face felt hot—from raising her voice or lying, she couldn't tell. "I have no idea what happened Friday night, all I remember is embarrassing myself in front of my crush and having Regina maybe find out that I liked him, and now both you and Janis are acting all weird and won't even tell me what happened!"
Damian eyed her for a moment, as though gauging whether she was being honest or not. Cady felt her heart pounding in her chest, a staccato drum pattern. It was a stalemate, Damian watching her, waiting for her to slip. She couldn't let that happen though—even though she could feel her cheeks reddening, her heart pounding, she held out, staring him down. He didn't know her well enough to read the signs.
"Fine," he finally relented. Cady let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.
Would this be the time to ask what happened? Or should she drop it? She had guessed cuddling—would she normally be happy with that as an answer?
"Fine what?" she finally asked. It felt stupid and lame, but she needed something from Damian—some sort of assurance that they were ok, that this wasn't the end of their friendship or anything.
"Just fine. You're fine. Janis is fine. Everything's fine. Let's just go in, ok?" Damian took off before Cady could answer. She followed him in, where they joined Janis at the canvas racks.
"Can I see the colors you chose?" Cady asked excitedly, trying to sound bright and happy.
"Sure," Janis held out the basket she was holding.
"Ooh, that's gorgeous," Cady remarked, picking out a bright pink color.
"Of course you'd like it, it's perfectly plastic," Janis retorted. Cady froze in doubt for a moment when she heard the spite in the words, but then she caught the look in Janis's eye—the sarcastic twinkle she had whenever she told a good joke. This was Janis trying to mend the weirdness between them. Cady laughed.
Just like that, the awkward bubble that had surrounded them in the car ride over popped. Sure, it still didn't feel natural or fluid like it had before, but the tension in the air, the way that Cady had felt like she needed to hold her breath whenever she looked at her friends—that was gone. They would be ok. Cady would just pep it up, keep it flowing. She could do this.
She needed Janis and Damian to be ok, because tomorrow she'd have to go to school and face Regina and Aaron and everybody who had been at the party and watched her fall. That would be hard. She'd need good friends to see it through—Janis and Damian were so good for that.