My Ride or Die by Leslie Cohen

Author:Leslie Cohen [Cohen, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

11

Amanda

You know how, in your twenties, you wake up to drunken texts from ex-boyfriends or whomever?”

“Of course,” Sophie said, while removing a rubber band from around a package of raspberries. Sophie and I had breakfast together every morning. She woke up earlier than she had to, just to join me in the kitchen, half-asleep, as we put fruit into a blender. We didn’t discuss much, just sat there in contented silence, reading the news and our emails.

I shuddered at my phone. “Well, in my thirties, I wake up to anxiety-ridden Google searches.”

I showed her. My last search, from around three A.M., was pms body hot no fever. She laughed, and then the sound of the blender took over.

At night, we took a great deal of time to talk about our days, sharing anecdotes from work and our dates. Sophie told me what she learned about glass cutting while eating caviar that she scored from a Russian artist in Brighton Beach. There was such a convenience to having the exact person you wanted to discuss everything with right there in your home. Often, I would still be wearing my work clothes and sitting on the sofa in our living room, spreading peanut butter and jelly on a cracker. And Sophie would be sitting in the window.

“I think my latest crush may be more of a friend,” she said.

“That actor you met?”

“I don’t really want to kiss him. I just want to hold his hand and sleep next to him sometimes.”

“Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”

“He does. She’s a yoga instructor and says things like, ‘What’s your favorite season? Mine’s spring!’”

I mimed a person throwing up, then laughed. “Your hatred for spring . . . Just because you have allergies, must everyone suffer?”

“Yes. Everyone must suffer. She was surprisingly okay with me, though, which at first I thought was very mature of her and maybe a sign that she’s at one with the universe and I was about to sign up for one of her classes, but then I realized: Wait a minute. I should be insulted! Am I not threatening?”

I gasped. “Of course you are. You’re very threatening.”

She drew her brows together. “If not me, who?”

“If not now, when?” I smiled. “But are you really just friends with this guy?”

“Are men and women ever just friends?”

“Yes, Plato.”

“But not if you want to sleep with them. And have you ever had a male friend that you didn’t at least think about sleeping with?”

“Of course!”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, I have,” I assured her.

“That’s just because you’re lying to yourself. And myself, I might add. The problem is we only have so many words.”

“Oh, that’s the problem?”

“Yes. We are limited by our lexicon. We say ‘friend,’ but ‘friend’ can mean so many things.”

“I’m iffy on my crush of the moment.”

“The Internet guy?”

“See. When you say that, I picture someone coming to our home to fix the Wi-Fi. He’s a web developer.”

“Sorry. Sorry. So, what’d you guys do last night?”

“We went to dinner and then back to his place to watch a documentary on the use of methamphetamine by Nazi soldiers during World War Two.

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