Recovery
Recovery
“I’d arrived from Ibiza with only a backpack. The flight was so easy there was no reason to say no to Elliot’s invitation. At school, he and his friends were called The Intellectuals — studying philosophy or art history and dabbling in esoteric drugs. He’d been the one who organized lavish parties, which had grown from dorms, to rented Victorians, to his family’s island home. His twenty-seventh birthday was an excuse to throw another, and of course, he would. I was a year younger, but had already had enough brushes with the twenty-seven club to value survival over revelry.
Elliot and I were both in Europe but he hadn’t seen me in years, and he was inviting the person he’d known — the party girl-turned-DJ who spun night into day. Still, his email was an unexpected gesture, and I took it as a sign of something shifting. Elliot didn’t mention me mixing, because we were friends. Friends who gathered on islands.
We spread from the villa’s foyer into the living room making introductions. I met women who looked like models because they were, and their boyfriends who were as witty as the women were beautiful. There were more of Elliot’s nouveau European friends than I’d expected, and Cal was the only one from school I knew. He was his usual buoyant blonde self, and when we hugged, he ran his fingers down my arms.
We divvied up the rooms, and I took the front one with a four-poster bed and matching vanity table, where a different woman would’ve made herself up. The last time I saw my dad’s wife, Laurie, she gave me a basket of lotions and creams — insisting her regimen would restore my youthful luminosity, as if anything topical could turn back my twenties…”
Short story for Derailleur Press about ambiguous loss, sobriety and island revelry.