Things To Say Before I Go

Chapter 9: Jess

I woke up the next morning on the couch with an all-too-familiar pounding in my head. Just a little PSA, kids: alcohol is fun in the moment, but the after party is not a party. It sucks ass. I got up, grabbed the milk from the fridge and two bananas from the bowl on the island to make a smoothie. As an add on to that earlier statement, if you do get a hangover, banana smoothies are the way to fix that. Just a little something I learned in college. 

I drank it down fast, rinsed out the blender and my glass and was on my way up the stairs, my head feeling a little better already, when I heard a knock at the door. I looked at my phone. It was 11:25. This couldn't possibly be Ali, right? Wrong. It was. 

"Hey there, sis!" she said, bursting through the door like a fucking stampede. How one person can make that much noise and be that annoying is beyond me. "Holy shit, did you just wake up? Because you look terrible."

I sarcastically smiled at her. "Yes, and you are early," I groaned, trying my very best to resist the urge to strangle her. "Plus, I was going to meet you at the restaurant. So, in the most affectionate way possible, though it may not sound that way, what the hell are you doing here?" 

"Well I wanted to see my sister and that is not a crime," she said with a wag of her finger.

"Not yet it isn't," I mumbled under my breath. I walked her into the living room. "Stay here while I go take a shower and try not to touch anything." She was the kind of person to obsess over anything and everything that seemed out of place. 

"So where's Brett?" she asked, looking around the living room as she sat down on the couch. 

I stopped on my way to the stairs, slightly thrown by her question. I forgot that I never told her what happened between him and I. 

Frankly, I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to dive back into it at that very moment so I said, "I'll explain at lunch" and went upstairs.

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"Oh, sweetie, I'm so sorry!" I told her everything while we were sitting in the middle of the Chinese restaurant. She reached across the table and held my hand. "I know this is going to be hard, but I promise that I will be here for you." 

At that moment, I wanted to be like Michael Scott from The Office and scream "No!" like he did to Toby. The last thing I wanted was for my sister to "help" me in any way. 

"Thanks," I said in an attempt at a gracious tone. "I'll remember that. But Brett is in the past. Tell me why you're here." 

She took a bite of her egg roll and said, "I just thought I'd stop by on my way back home. I had an audition in Long Island for a show. It's an off-Broadway production of 'Hairspray'. I personally think I'm a shoe-in for the role, but I don't want to jinx it." 

Of course you think you're a shoe-in. If you didn't think that, I'd have fallen out of my chair and had an embolism. 

"That's fun," I said with fake enthusiasm. "Have you talked to Mom recently?" 

Our mother had moved to Maine as soon as Ali finally left home. She once said that she moved because she liked Red Lobster and Maine is full of lobster, so, to quote her, "by the transitive property, Maine has got to be about to bust with Red Lobsters". That's some sound logic, right? Yes, I have considered getting a doctor to look at her. 

Ali shook her head. "Not recently," she said with a shrug. "She called me about two months ago. She seemed pretty disappointed about the Red Lobster thing. She said there weren't as many as she thought and it felt like it was a total waste of her time."