Gone From Memory - A Short Story

“I can’t really tell you what it was about Heather Laurie and Janine Vega that I loved the most. We were all different, yet alike in so many ways. The three of us were inseparable soon after we met in junior high. When we went on to high school, even some of the teachers at Martin Van Buren referred to us as the Three Amigas. Well, that was a long time ago. Either way, they were my best friends. Yet, we let an asinine thing - one stupid man actually - ruin it all.


“It’s been two full years already. It’s been two years of no emails, no phone calls and no text messages or get-togethers. Heather and Josh got hitched in a little ceremony near his parents’ house in Far Rockaway in late 2006. Then they bought a house and moved upstate. I only know this from hearsay, not like I was invited to the nuptials or anything. Janine was so distraught over Heather’s betrayal that right after graduation, she left her apartment in Jackson Heights and moved to Florida, where her parents had moved a few years earlier. I ended up married and living on Long Island. It was like following a rulebook. Isn’t that what all us Queens kids end up doing? What’s worse is that neither one of them knew that I slept with Josh, too. I got caught in their crossfire and lost both of them at the same time. Yes, I slept with Josh once, while he was, how should I say this delicately, in between relationships with my friends. Please don’t ask me for an explanation, because I don’t have one. My then-boyfriend, now husband, Eric and I were broken up at the time. I was pushing for a ring and he was pushing for a shared lease. We got married at City Hall on Valentine’s Day 2007. I’d forfeited the big wedding bash of my dreams because I had lost my best friends. And what would my wedding day be without them? Afterward, Eric’s best friend Mike gave us a tip on a really inexpensive house in Plainview. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, but we took it anyway. We closed on it quickly, but the joy of it was lost on me, since I knew I would never be able to have the girls over to celebrate. When I think about it, it still makes me so angry. It was all just shit! Shit that goes down between friends and lovers.”

***

It’s December 31, 2003 and Heather, Janine and Nadine Dezi are at Hector Rotunda’s annual New Year’s Eve bash. They have been friends since junior high school. They make sure to celebrate the arrival of a new year together every year, since they turned 15 years old. Before they were allowed to go out and party on New Year’s, they had slumber parties at each other’s houses on December 31, but now they’re in college, so they can go out and have their fun!

Hector and Janine are seeing each other, although the three of them have known him since junior high school, too. He was a huge nerd back then. He was so not worthy of their attentions, or so they thought. They don’t say this out loud, but they are pretty sure they’re the three hottest girls at this party. Well, even if they don’t say it, plenty of guys tell them and plenty of girls hate them, so it’s all probably true.

Hector’s dad is a professional DJ, meaning he actually spins records for a living! The guy is old, but he is like a classic car and everyone adores him. He is a throwback to the 1980s’ days of street break-dancing and the birth of rap music and he knows how to spin. None of the girls can recall that era, they were all born in 1983 and spent the better part of the 1980s learning to walk, talk, go potty and eat with a fork – only not in that order. They have no exact memories of those ‘glory days’ of dance and music, except from pictures and stories that Hector shares with them. Mr. Rotunda, although he asks that everyone call him Manny, reserves a great space in the Bayside area of Queens every New Year’s Eve and his son, Hector has all his friends come for a party.


Janine just recently discovered she had a thing for Hector. When she told Heather and Nadine, they asked her if he asked her out or the other way around. After a bit of nudging, Janine admitted she flirted her way to dinner and a movie. Nadine is at the party with Michael Garnett, her go-to guy when she is dateless for an important event. He’s nice enough, but more in that brotherly way. He plans on going to college abroad anyhow, so Nadine doesn’t want to waste the energies on him of relationship-hood. Heather came stag and she is mighty pissed off about it, but she’s drinking enough to quell the rage. She is so funny! She had a dramatic breakdown while the girls we’re dressing for the party at Janine’s. She put her hand to her forehead and claimed she could not be seen arriving at the party of the year without a guy. After toppling onto Janine’s bed in her dramatic finale, Nadine and Janine took one of her arms each and dragged her upright. “I’ll do her make-up and you do her hair, OK?” Janine said to Nadine. Nadine, who couldn’t stop laughing, agreed. Heather sat on Janine’s bed like a rag doll and let her friends go to work on her party look.


“Ten, nine, eight…” the entire room at Hector’s party is staring at the large plasma TV Hector rolled into the room for the occasion. On the television, Dick Clark is overlooking the altered New York City skyline in the frigid evening’s most coveted job. The towers are missing, but the crowd is growing in the insanity of Times Square. “Seven, six, five…” Janine gives Hector a peck on the lips, then runs across the room where Heather and Nadine have already found each other and are holding hands. Oh, boy, she thinks, Heather looks about ready to fall down! She inches through the people and grabs hold of Heather’s free hand, smiling at Nadine. This is part of their annual routine. They hold hands and ring in the New Year together, and then they go to their respective beaus and seal the 12:01 a.m. moment with a big kiss. Only, this year, Heather will be, in her own words, “making out with my champagne glass”. She’s a riot. “Four, three, two…one! Happy New Year!!”

***

The 2004 school year is underway. All three girls attend Queens College. This is their freshman year and they plan on making it memorable. Although, they have yet to decide exactly what they will do to make this happen. Heather and Janine took advanced courses in Spanish and foreign relations. They both received great grades in Spanish in high school. Janine wants to be an international media liaison between Latin America and the United States. Heather wants to teach high school Spanish or ESL courses to adults. Nadine stuck to her Media and Liberal Arts courses. She decided in Mrs. McNeil’s current events class back in high school that she wanted to become a journalist.

They meet up at the student life center café at 2 p.m. almost every day for a bite to eat in the afternoons. It was beautiful out today, a nice sunny, fall day, so they met on the quad under an old tree. They feel the swelling of possibilities surround them. Their whole lives are ahead and in every plan the three are as one. Yet even in the midst of life planning, there’s time to bitch about a boy.


“Ugh! I am so over Hector! He’s such a loser! Can you believe he’s dropping out after just this one semester? Yup, he told me today. Says he wants to follow in Manny’s footsteps. Hello? I am not going to marry a guy who’s going to be an overgrown DJ all his life!” Nadine snorts and Heather asks, “Oh, are you already planning your wedding?” Janine gives Heather the evil eye, and then continues. “No, I am not planning to marry any time soon. I am just saying that I’d be embarrassed to tell my kids’ teachers what my husband does for a living! Besides, I don’t trust Hector around the party circuit as a career. He’d probably be juggling honeys at every club. No way, girls. I am not down with that bull crap! He needs to go!” Like the great friends they are, Nadine and Heather nod in agreement and then proclaim Hector a dirty player. They tell Janine she can do so much better. They tell her she was too hot for him anyway. Being Janine, she tosses her long, curly honey-brown locks to the side and agrees with them. Nadine and Heather leave out the part about what a nice living Manny Rotunda makes and how he has his family living it up in a great big house on the Island and how his wife, Beatriz is just fine telling every one of her five kids’ teachers what her man does for a living. They leave that out because clearly Janine is over Hector and this is more about making a clean exit for her and less about what he wants to do with his life.


For five days in the summer of 2005, Nadine, Heather and Janine go to a ranch spa in Tucson, Arizona to celebrate turning 21. All three sets of parents weren’t comfortable having the girls go off alone, but Nadine can talk a dictator off a war plan. Besides, the girls got glowing grades in their sophomore year of college and managed to keep the partying to a minimum. They figured their parents owed them this trip! At the ranch, the friends take full advantage of the massages and facials. They take an early morning yoga class at a cliff overlooking the resort. They spend their days in big, fluffy robes and cushioned flip-flops discussing the greater meaning of their lives and other such nonsense. They sit outside their shared room, reading, drinking fresh lemonade and talking…mostly talking. They make promises about their weddings and their futures and how they’ll buy homes on the same block and how their kids will grow up to be great friends.


That December the girls opt out of Hector’s party because Janine is still pissed at him for “becoming a loser” and she can’t bear to face him. Instead, they get invited to Josephine Brady’s house party in Forest Hills. Josephine goes to school with them and lives right off Union Turnpike in an apartment building with a doorman. She and her boyfriend John are on the 8th floor. They can afford to live there because John is older and works on Wall Street. The girls don’t care too much for Josephine, but hey, they had to have plans for New Year’s Eve!


When the Three Amigas arrive to the building, they realize that this party will be on a much, much smaller scale than they’re used to with Hector Rotunda’s bash. Still, Janine tells them they have to think outside the box and so they take the elevator up to the party.


At around 10:30, Janine is dancing with a guy named Luke when she spots a really hot guy staring at her from the entryway. She gets all sweaty and uncomfortable, so that when the song ends, she tells Luke she needs a cold drink. The second he steps away, Hot Guy makes his way over to her. “Hi, I’m Josh Annello,” he says to Janine. She is smitten before the last syllable. This Hot Guy…this Josh Annello…flipped out the otherwise un-flippable Janine Vega.

At around the same time Eric Del Guido waltzes his way through the tiny kitchen and small dining area at John and Josephine’s to where Nadine is pouring herself some cranberry juice. She’s driving, so she isn’t celebrating as well as she could if they’d taken a cab, like she wanted to do. He starts to talk to her and she thinks he is both really adorable and endearingly sweet.

As the end of 2005 rolls in on them, Nadine and Eric Del Guido become an item. They giggle and dance and laugh in empty corners of John and Josephine’s place. She almost forgets to walk away and find her girlfriends to hold hands with when midnight comes around. On television, Ryan Seacrest is taking over the main hosting duties of the Rockin’ Eve celebrations for America’s Oldest Teenager, Dick Clark, who suffered a mild stroke in 2004. The television in this place is much smaller than at Hector’s party, but it’s just as well.


For weeks after this night, Eric is all Nadine could talk about, until her girlfriends take her away for a weekend (in Vegas) of debauchery and overall misbehaving. Well, not really, but it sounds good. The late night of 2005 becomes the early dawn of 2006. The music was turned down a few hours ago, when the landlord called to complain to John and Josephine. Everyone is pretty hammered, except for Nadine, who is sitting on a small love seat in the corner with Eric whispering in her ear. Pretty much everyone who is still left is slow-dancing to old school Marvin Gaye music, even Heather, who hooked up at midnight with Janine’s early-evening toss-away, Luke Rowe. Missing from immediate sight, in the dimly lit room, are Janine and Josh. Missing, Nadine thinks, but surely not on some action.


One weekend in January of 2006, they go on a girls-only road trip to Martha’s Vineyard. There they convince Nadine that it is nice about her and Eric, but she seriously needs to keep it in her pants already! Nadine reminds Janine that she is just as bad about Josh as she is about Eric. In the back seat of Nadine’s car, Heather slides down in the seat, looks out of the window and doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have a guy to swoon over right now. She doesn’t feel like she is a part of their clique.



Right after the July 4th holiday, Janine will fly down to Miami and meet her parents to go to visit family in Ecuador. She spends the night before the trip with Nadine and Heather at Heather’s parents’ place in Glen Cove crying about how much she is going to miss Josh. She gives Heather and Nadine copies of her apartment keys, so they can water her plants and get her mail, while she is gone. Josh had to work that night, so he couldn’t be with her. Her friends console her and tell her they’ll keep an eye on her place and on him for the three weeks she will be gone. But even as she is making her promise, Nadine knows she won’t keep it. She and Eric have been fighting a lot and their relationship takes a lot of her time and energy. Nadine wants to plan some away time with him to try to focus on what their issues are.


Right after Janine is gone, the temperature in the city goes nuts. The local meteorologists declare that they’re in a bona fide heat wave and ask everyone to conserve energy and only use air-conditioners when absolutely necessary. Heather’s father starts his ritual summer bitch-fest about the energy bill, which propels Heather to stay away as much as possible, finding other activities with which to occupy her time.


Two days after the holiday, Nadine and Eric go away for a few days to the Poconos to work on their relationship.


Heather is left alone with her shitty part-time job at The Olive Garden, which she hates. She tried for an internship at an English As a Second language summer program, but was beat out by another girl. She was devastated, but didn’t tell anyone how much she was affected by it. Right now, she is sick of dealing with the ridiculous heat and the long, lonely summer nights. With her friends gone and her parents on vacation, too, she decides to go stay at Janine’s apartment in Queens, so she can pump up the A/C, be alone and pretend she has a life.


When she leaves work in the early evening of a steamy Friday night, she walks slowly to catch the bus back to Janine’s. The heat is so suffocating that she welcomes the cooled bus’s arrival like it’s the Second Coming. When she lets herself into Janine’s small, garden apartment, she rushes to the window to turn on the massive A/C unit. It springs to life with a gurgling, thumping sound and she brings her red, sweaty face right to its front. She feels only a little guilty about staying here without Janine’s permission. She convinces herself that her friend would be absolutely fine with this arrangement, so long as she respects her privacy, which she does.


Heather logs on to Twitter and tweets that her mood is depressed and that her overall outlook is negative. Then she pulls out her tiny laptop from her overnight bag, which she is scared to fully unpack, and checks her facebook. No one has sent her any notes or commented on her status updates. She scrolls up and down reading the updates from her friends, realizing with a doomed heart, that everyone is doing something or going some place. She feels completely alone on the planet. STATUS UPDATE: “Heather Laurie is pretty sure everyone on earth in on vacation, except her!”


She doesn’t know why she feels the need to share this, but she does, then she shuts her phone and her computer and turns on the TV in Janine’s bedroom. She decides that while she waits for the unit to cool off the entire apartment, she is going to take off all of her clothing and cool down. As she does this, the exhaustion of work overwhelms her and she drops down stark naked on Janine’s bed and falls fast asleep.


Heather has an unnerving dream. In it, she is out of breath running after Janine and Nadine, whose careers have taken off and whose lives are wonderfully full and exciting. She, on the other hand, is still waitressing at The Olive Garden, still single and still living at home with her parents. In her dream she is jealous of her friends and terribly upset that she can’t keep up. She is about to catch up to them and ask them to wait for her life to unfold, when she is suddenly aware, in that eerie awakened state, that she is not alone. Startled, she wakes up to find Josh, lying next to her, kissing her bare arm.


Heather leaps from her place on the bed, tossing Josh off it and onto the floor. She inches back on her haunches horrified; yet sickeningly pleased. “Josh! What the fuck are you doing?” Only after she asks him the question, does she remember she is completely nude and tries to grab a bunch of the bedspread in one hand to cover her body. But his knee is on it and she is only able to cover a leg and half her left breast. Josh apologizes only for startling her, and then adds that she looked so gorgeous lying in the bed that he couldn’t resist. Unable to come up with a witty response, Heather mumbles, “Yeah, right. You have Janine and I look gorgeous. Tell me another one, Josh.” He seems oddly insulted by this comment, so he tries again to tell her she doesn’t realize how beautiful she really is. He is saying everything she needs to hear and all that she has longed to hear from him, but she has to play deaf because this could all get very bad.


As she is gathering more of the bedspread to her unclothed flesh, Josh inches forward. He kisses her slightly open mouth powerfully hard and demanding and she is unable to push him away. Since that first night at Josephine’s party, she has had a crush on Josh, though she never admitted it to anyone. She had been so drunk that night that she decided it was her impaired judgment that made her want to kiss him. She was so jealous when he fell for Janine, livid that she wasn’t the one he noticed that New Year’s Eve. At the same time, seeing Janine so happy with Josh made her genuinely happy for her friend.


Her head is a madness of lust all of a sudden and her reasoning all but leaves her. He is whispering in her ear something about mistakes and regrets, but she doesn’t want to hear him, she just wants him to keep doing what he is doing. He is kissing her body now, the curves and hollows of her shape all aimed toward his burning lips. She is unable to stop him. Janine’s face goes in and out of her mind like a fading photograph. She cares and then she doesn’t care. This is all so new, a man lusting after her when he has already met either Janine or the equally beautiful Nadine. Although she wants to be strong and be loyal to her best friend, she can’t be. She wants this man right now. She doesn’t want to accept that there will be consequences for whatever happens here.


In a moment, Josh quickly removes his clothes and is on her, crushing her beneath him in her best friend’s bed. Then he is in her, part of her, unable to separate his body from hers. Janine is his real lover, Heather thinks, but right now she is not a part of this wicked equation. Heather allows herself to be lost in Josh, as well. She wraps herself up in his embrace and gives all of what she can to his needs and her own. She imagines she is someone else and that this man belongs to her. She convinces herself that his heart is hers alone. She gives him everything she has in her, the way one does with a life partner, without shame or inhibitions. Then, like a momentary thought, as they inch toward a forbidden conclusion to this entangled heap, it is over.


Exhausted, Josh sleeps through the night. She falls asleep, too, but at 3 a.m. she wakes up to find this was not a dream. Her heart is pounding in this darkened bedroom that is not her own; so much so that she swears she can see sparks emanating from her chest. Josh’s arm is draped across her still goose-fleshed breasts and his soft snore is close to her ears. She is utterly shocked by her actions and disgusted at her inability to stop what happened. Her friends seem so far away now. In her mind she pictures them laughing with her and gets a sharp pain in her stomach. She has absolutely no one on earth to talk to about what she has done. Without moving, she lies under the weight of his arm and shame of her actions and lets the tears stream down the sides of her face until the sun comes through Janine’s pretty bedroom curtains.

***

“Our trip to the Poconos was a big mistake. Huge! Eric and I fought pretty badly about our relationship. He sees it going one place and I see it going to hell, since that one place is far, far away from marriage and a future with that guy. Holy crap! He gives new meaning to commitment-phobic. Seriously, I am so done with him!” Nadine flips onto her stomach in her bed and cradles her cell phone to her ear. At the other end there is dead air. She jumps off the bed and heads to her computer, opens up to facebook and changes her status from "In a relationship" to "Single" It gives her a sense of power and freedom. STATUS UPDATE: Nadine Dezi is happily single! Present all offers! She cracks up at her witty remark. At the end of her ear, still silence.


She has been back in town for about four hours now. Her suitcase is opened on the floor regurgitating dirty clothes that need to be laundered. Eric dropped her off and went home and she couldn’t be happier. “Heather? Hello? Are you even there?” Heather is back in her old bedroom in her parents’ house in Glen Cove. She realizes she has been absently trying to fold her laundry, while Nadine was talking to her. “Yes. I’m here. Sorry. Go on.” Nadine sighs loudly. “What’s the matter with you, Heather? Ever since I got back, it’s like you’re pissed at me or something.”


Heather opens a drawer and drops her folded underwear into it, then switches her cell to her other ear and kicks the drawer closed with her knee. “It’s nothing. I’ve been putting in a lot of hours at the restaurant and I’m just tired. That’s all.” Heather hopes this sounds remotely like the truth and will squash any more questions from Nadine and, for a moment, it does. “I thought that was a part-time job? Whatever. Well, okay. Are you working tonight? Maybe we can grab a bite to eat and I can fill you in on some of the more brilliant highlights of my week with Eric.”


Heather snorted. Oh, like this is what she wants to do. Listen to Nadine rehash the shortcomings of her clearly hopeless relationship, while she is still wallowing in the error of her ways with Josh in Janine’s absence. It’s been four days and she hasn’t spoken to Josh once. He called her twice and left voicemails, both times. She wouldn’t listen to them. He sent her a couple of texts, which she immediately deleted, terrified of being caught with them and of what he might be saying in them. Probably something along the lines of, “Go to hell, you cheap slut!” Or maybe the more damning, “Janine will hate you forever! Some friend you are!” Either way, it had been four days since she and Josh made love all night. Four days since she woke up with his naked body next to her in the bed he and her best friend shared in equally intimate moments. Even the thought revolted her. She was a slut! She was an awful friend and a weak human being! She was everything she herself hated in other people. It had been four days since she called out of work and spent an entire day washing, cleaning and removing any and all evidence of their rendezvous from Janine’s now spotlessly clean apartment. If Janine noticed the difference, her plan was to say she was bored one day and cleaned up for her.


Heather and Nadine meet at Cabana in Forest Hills. To start, they share a Camarones de Coco appetizer, which is basically coconut-dipped shrimp over maduro mash, which is like sweet, fried bananas. Then Heather orders a Paella Valenciana and Nadine orders Arroz con Pollo. They flex their language skills, ordering in Spanish and are laughing and talking about Eric and how his undying love for Nadine doesn’t seem to include marriage. Yet, Eric is such a puppy dog about pleasing her. They are enjoying their time and Heather almost forgets what she has done. It’s like old times, minus Janine, who will be back in seven more days.


Before the night ends, after Heather has kicked back a couple of margaritas and they both convince the hired entertainment to let them sing the old school Spanish ballad, Cielito Lindo, Heather decides she has to tell Nadine what she has done. On the drive back in Nadine’s car, still in the warm afterglow of their good time and while Nadine bangs out the chorus to the song, Heather thinks of a hundred different reasons why not to tell her about Josh. None of her reasons are valid and she knows it. She has to tell someone and Nadine is her best friend, too. If only the fates or the gods or the planetary guides could have foreseen what would befall all of them after tonight, surely one or all would have warned Heather to keep her mouth shut!


“You did what?” Nadine swerves the car suddenly and narrowly avoids hitting a hydrant making a left turn. She is trying to steer the car and look at Heather in the face at once. “Heather, please – oh God - Please tell me you’re kidding! You did not screw Josh! Did you? Ohmigod! Are you freaking insane? What the hell were you thinking? Do you have any idea what this will do to Janine? Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit! Jesus, Heather I have no idea what to think or say! And in her bed? At her own place? Eww! What the fuck? This is low! This is about as low as I have ever seen anyone get. I don’t even know what to say to you.”


In the passenger seat next to her, Heather is a heap of sobs and snots and regrets, gasping for air and saying “I’m sorry” over and over again. She feels like Nadine is about to slap her, but she doesn’t. That will come later, courtesy of Janine, when she finds out what happened. When she gets out of Nadine’s car at her parents’ house, still crying, Nadine doesn’t even say good night. She makes a harsh, screeching U-turn on the street and peels out of there. Well, what did she expect? Sympathy? Heartbroken at the night’s turn of events, Heather drags herself inside, grateful that her parents, back from their vacation, are still jet-lagged and sound asleep.


Heather and Nadine speak a few times by phone after their night out, but their talks are strained and uncomfortable. Nadine heard the whole story and, although she still cannot believe what Heather did; she real believes that she is sorry. Tomorrow, Janine comes back from South America. Nadine plans on greeting her at her apartment with champagne. She called Josh to make sure she wasn’t infringing on any plans he might have and pretended she didn’t know about him and Heather. He was vague, to say the least, and mumbled something about work and about seeing her the next day after she got back.


Josh went to see Heather at work the same evening after he spoke to Nadine. He caught her on a break outside and walked up behind her. “Look, you can’t keep ignoring my calls and texts,” he said. She turned around startled, but remained poised. “Yes, actually, I can. Janine comes back tomorrow and I want whatever happened to stay in the past. Do you think you can manage that? I feel awful enough. What we did was unforgivable. Try to understand that it was one time and it was wrong and stupid and now it is in the past!” She turned to walk back in, but Josh grabbed her arm. “No, Heather. It is not in the past. It is not over. It was not stupid, or a mistake. I fell in love with you and I can’t stay with Janine if there is nothing there. It isn’t fair to either one of us.”


Heather stops short of looking into his eyes, her vision focused on the crucifix he always wears. She is not able to process what he has said, nor able to accept his love because of how it came to be. She takes a deep breath, and then manages to look at his face. He looks worn and he is unshaven. His eyes are watery and gaunt, like he has been crying, or tormented, or both. Instead of his usual tucked-in shirt and khakis, he is wearing an old wrinkled, green T-shirt and faded jeans. As she is about to tell him how important Janine’s friendship is to her and how they can never be together, he pulls her close and starts to kiss her. And she does not stop him.


Heather doesn’t make it home that night after her shift. She calls up her mother and tells her that, in honor of Janine’s homecoming, she and Nadine are staying at her place. “If you need anything, Ma, you can reach me on my cell.” But Heather ends up in a place far from the place where she told her mother she would be. She ends up in Josh’s apartment on the 5th floor of a rundown building in Corona. It’s a small studio that she has never been in, but imagines Janine has visited countless times. They surrender to each other again because they can’t help themselves. As the night grows darker, Heather’s feelings for Josh grow more intense. She soon realizes that he was right. There is something and she can’t keep pretending that it isn’t there.

***

When Janine first bursts through her door, Nadine thinks a bronzed goddess has entered the room. She looks absolutely breathtaking. Her hair has lightened from the sun and is a crazy kind of a peanutty blond hue. Her skin is like heated molasses. “Wow! You look amazing!” Nadine tells her. They hug for a long time in Janine’s living room. She notices the champagne and the flowers. “Josh?” She asks Nadine expectantly. Nadine looks down and blushes. She is suddenly sad for her friend. She knows that in the next few days a lot of hell will come to her doorstep. “I brought them for you,” she tells her. Nadine notices the soft scent of warmed sun and coconut oil on her friend’s skin. She is a little jealous that Janine went to this exotic country for the summer and all she did was go to the Poconos and end up losing a boyfriend in the process.


They separate and Janine looks around her apartment. “Wow! This place looks immaculate! You didn’t have to clean up, Nadine!” She walks over to the windowsill and slides a tanned, polished finger across it, then stares at it. “You even dusted the windows?” Nadine takes a quick glance around and sees that the guilt-ridden Heather really cleaned up the place. “Well, I…can’t really take credit for your apartment. That’s Heather’s doing. She’s um…sorry she couldn’t be here, too. I just brought the champagne and flowers.” Sheepishly, she points at the spray of yellow roses in the vase on the coffee table. Janine looks at the flowers and smiles. “Speaking of Little Miss Sunshine. Where is Heather?” Nadine walks around to the other side of the coffee table and plops down on Janine’s futon. “She had to work,” she responds, even though she knows it’s not true.


After they catch up on their time apart, Nadine strategically leaving out Heather in huge chunks, she goes home. Janine quickly rushes to her phone to check for messages from Josh. Then she grabs her cell phone and turns it on. Nothing. She is a little bit annoyed about this, but so exhausted, she decides to take a bath and go to sleep. Tomorrow is another day.

***

At breakfast the next day, at the local diner, Josh tells Janine he’s breaking up with her. She is numb with horror as he tells her he has fallen for someone else. He doesn’t want to say whom, but she becomes agitated and he fears she will go into an all out screaming session, if he doesn’t reveal the culprit’s name. Out of respect for Heather and for the love he and Janine once shared, Josh gets up, grabs the check and leaves. Janine, nursing a cold cup of coffee, begins to cry.


Heather knows this is the biggest mistake of her life. She hasn’t even spoken to Janine since she got back two days ago, but Nadine has told her that Josh broke it off with her and that she is inconsolable. She calls up Josh and screams at him for what he has done. Although she fears the mad, deep way she knows she loves him, she tells him never to speak to her again. She decides that for the continuation of their friendship, she has to come clean to Janine. She heads out on the LIRR to Queens to see her.


It all goes terribly wrong.


For the rest of that day, Nadine dodges calls from both her childhood friends who are crying and screaming and cursing about the other. Apparently, they had it out over Josh and it didn’t go over well at all. Janine threatened, and then slapped Heather across the face. She called her all sorts of awful things. Heather tried to fight back by telling her she knows what she did was awful, but you couldn’t help whom you fell for. She tells Janine that she is going to accept Josh’s many pleas and begin to date him. After hearing them filled with such anger, Nadine made her self a stiff drink…then another… then still another. She is done listening to them. She has problems of her own. She and Eric tried to get back together and, as usual, it backfired. He suggested, and she reluctantly agreed, to see other people. She felt like he poured acid on her stomach. She admitted to herself that she loved the sonofabitch…a lot.


Nadine is midway through another drink when she hears a knock on her door. She wonders who is coming to see her this time of night. She peeks through the peephole and sees Josh standing there, his head looking gigantic and ill proportioned through the distorted glass. She rolls her eyes, opens the door and blocks it. “What the hell do you want?” He looks down to the floor, hands in his jeans pockets and says, “Um, hello to you too. Listen, I um…can I come in, please?” He looks pathetic standing there. Nadine thinks back to the good times they have had in the past, when they went out on double dates, him and Janine and her still with Eric. Heather was nowhere in the picture and it suddenly dawned on her that all the time she and Janine had boyfriends and were out having a grand old time, Heather was alone and pretty much left out of their happy foursome. A lump came though her throat as she ushered in this fallen friend. She can’t tell if the rush to her head is the emotion or the alcohol. She decides it’s a little of both.


Josh sits down on the sofa and almost immediately starts to tear up. It is so unexpected that Nadine is at a loss for words, other than to offer him a drink. He nods and she gets him a whiskey, straight up. To her amazement, he downs it in one gulp. “Um, are you thirsty or something?” He looks at her and it’s as if the floodgates of a traitor’s hell open up. He starts confessing everything to her, as if her door read Dr. Something and this was her afternoon session, or as if she is the local priest shrouded in darkness behind a filigreed wall.


Tipsy and not at her best, Nadine sits down across from him in a large, stuffed chair and lets him vent. Josh tells her that he and Janine were already on thin ice, before she went to Ecuador. Nadine makes him another whiskey, which he downs once again. He tells her that he didn’t mean to fall for Heather. He admits that he had noticed her before Janine at the New Year’s party the first night. He says he wasn’t looking for a relationship, just someone to make out with at midnight. Nadine rolls her eyes. Typical guy! He says he also didn’t approach Heather because she was drinking so much and didn’t want a regretful girl on his hands at the start of a new year. She refills his glass and again, it is gone in an instant. He tells Nadine that as bad as what they did is, he knows there was a real and lasting connection with Heather; unlike he had ever felt with Janine. Nadine feels stung by that comment, almost as if it had been directed at her. Then he tells her that because of his stupidity and because of the way he handled things, he had now lost both of them. His new love Heather and his ex-love Janine. He starts to say he is sorry over and over, until he starts to cry. Anesthetized by the amount of alcohol she has consumed, since before he arrived, and full of an overwhelming need to comfort him, Nadine stands up, walks over to Josh and straddles him. He looks up at her shocked, but the alcohol is dancing in his bloodshot eyes and his senses are awakened by the pressure and shape of her body.


Before the night is over, Nadine and Josh have sex in almost every place in her apartment. The bottle of whiskey is gone. At the last, they are lying in a pile on the floor like old clothes in her bedroom. They are breathing heavily, spent from all the passion. Yet, when they realize what they have done, when they acknowledge that they took this to a very dangerous place, they both instantly regret it. She can tell that, unlike what he says he shared with Heather, this was nothing but raw, unconnected sex and not a vessel to a deeper connection. She jumps off of him, almost like he suddenly scalded her with hot water. She climbs into her bed and slides under the rumpled sheets, pulling them tightly under her chin. She starts to rock back and forth slowly; the way mental patients do when they’re lost in the midst of their own madness.

“Josh, you better leave.”

***

The silence was heavy with grief. The year came and went and the three friends were no more. Although Nadine tried repeatedly to make them come together to talk things out, it was too far-gone for reconciliation. She tried befriending them separately, but almost always regretted it. All they did was trash talk the other. It became a job for her to try to see which side was right. It was a chore to pretend she too had not betrayed them both.


Whatever friendship was there was now poisoned and destroyed. At the center of all of this mess was Josh, whose lovemaking she still recalled with a regretful heart. She had not felt any connection to this man. She had not had sparks, other than those we all feel in the nuts and bolts of lovemaking. She had not felt good about herself during, or afterward. She did not have lingering desires for him. It was as if that woman who gave and gave and gave that night to Josh was someone entirely separate from Nadine Dezi.


As the space between them widened, so did the frequency of their contact. As graduation approached for them and they didn’t have to have the false cordiality needed in shared classrooms of a campus, the three began to make their separate ways in life. Janine got her degree and moved down south. Heather accepted Josh back, realizing that there was no saving the friendship she had so carelessly destroyed. Their love had been the real thing and so it blossomed and grew into a marriage that lacked the beautiful, smiling faces of her childhood friends. When she got her degree, she found a job teaching upstate and they left.


Time is the enemy of reflection and the friend of regret. It sweeps over our lives and takes with it all the stories we have yet to tell and the ones we wish we had told at some point. Time never stops for us to change our minds, or go back and fix it. Time is always going forward and we are always left to chase it down.


“I can’t really tell you that much about Heather Laurie and Janine Vega anymore. The Three Amigas are no longer friends. They went by the wayside following the charms of one hot guy. One of the amigas won his heart, one had her heart broken and one regretted ever meeting him. And though it all seemed pretty final at the time, I can’t help hoping than one day I can recover the missing pieces of my life. I can’t help expecting to open up my email and see an email from either one of them. I can’t help feeling that I somehow got the short end of the stick because the real fight happened between them. When Josh and I parted that awful day, we both swore that, to avoid any further ugliness among everyone, we’d choose to forget what happened and never repeat it.”


“Some time has passed and maybe they are ready to reunite. After all, our lives are very different now. We’ve all picked a path and followed it. We have all bathed ourselves in new surroundings and relationships, hoping to wash off the filth of our shared past. What if now is the right time? What if I make the first move, since I am the one with good news? What if it will be okay? What if I can make things better? What if I tell them and they can look past it and come to see me?”

Then, with a sudden determination she had not felt before, Nadine picked up the phone and began to dial her friend’s number. She would call one and then the other and the order of her calls would have no bearing on the love she had for both of them. As the phone began to ring in a space far from where she was in her home, Nadine placed a hand on her taut, growing belly and smiled.