Good Girl by Anna Fitzpatrick

Author:Anna Fitzpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flying Books
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

We end up at a mildly trendy bar that’s too crowded to get into on weekends. Tonight, it’s pretty sparse. There’s a DJ who looks barely old enough to drink, self-consciously fiddling with his laptop, playing popular R&B songs. Sasha lets out a whoop as he puts on an early song by a Toronto rapper that seemed ubiquitous when we were living together, one that I never deliberately listen to but somehow still know all the words to. “Come on!” she says. “I haven’t heard this one in forever!” We put down our bags on one of the sticky tables. We’re the only ones dancing. Sasha closes her eyes and raises her arms, spinning in a slow circle, out of sync with the music but utterly content, and I join her, feeling like I’m in a music video while looking like I’m at a kid’s bar mitzvah. We forget about Ryan, about work, about good and bad and everything in between and dance until the bar closes and it’s time to go home.

Sasha flops on the bed and falls asleep almost as soon as we get home. I brush my teeth and take off my makeup and change into pyjamas, but I don’t feel like sleeping. I open up Facebook on my phone and idly scroll through my newsfeed for a few minutes, stopping occasionally to like a friend’s selfie. I look up Henry’s name and see he’s recently gone to a party that resembles a rave; in every photo, he’s with a different woman, mugging for the camera. He’s growing a beard, it seems. I decide it looks terrible on him. Then I see what Malcolm is up to. He doesn’t update his Facebook much. He’s much too smart for social media. Except for Twitter, but he only uses that to follow news outlets, politicians, and meme accounts. Still, there are enough photos to click through, and I feel a sense of calm just looking at his face. This guy likes me, I think. This handsome man thinks I’m great. I send him a message, a quick :), something for him to wake up to. It’s been a full day. This is the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other since we started hooking up a couple weeks ago.

I’m still pretty drunk. Opening my laptop, I see Vertigo is paused, and, in another tab, the Freddy Kreuger movie I refused to watch because I know at some point in the franchise Freddy goes to hell, and I don’t have the bandwidth for that. It reminds me of a Looney Tunes cartoon. A few seconds of googling and I find the short, “Satan’s Waitin’,” from 1954. The whole thing is online. “The future is magic,” I drunkenly whisper before clicking play, closing a pop-up, closing three ensuing pop-ups, and clicking play again. The cartoon unfolds on the screen almost exactly as I remember it.

Sylvester is chasing Tweety Bird over the roofs of tall buildings. As a kid, I was never sure which characters I was expected to root for in these cartoons.

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