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naomixhill · 4 years ago

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“Aren’t you the one who got expelled from DeSales?” These were the first words that you said to me as you approached me at David’s bonfire in 2011. We were seventeen years old. A group of us came here after a Friday night football game. There were a handful of neighborhoods in our village, perhaps five important ones, but the one we were in that night was the best – the one where sophistication meets elegance meets English-inspired architecture. There was a twenty-seven Jack Nicklaus golf course in front of David’s home. Inside the house was a grand reception room, medium sized ballroom, martini parlor, two dueling libraries, a small art gallery, and a wine cellar. Throughout the home, opulence of the tenth degree: marble floors and 18’ high ceilings and two servants. Just beyond where I was sitting, there was a heated pool, veranda, and small tennis court. Jews get everything. This whole village was Jews, new money snobs, and plastic surgery. But I never minded.

You repeated the question, “Hellooooo, Naomi, right?” I looked up at you with red, glossy eyes. I was stoned, and David’s two servants had been serving Cabernet since we got there. I smirked, raised my head at you, and said, “Who’s asking?” You extended your hand and introduced yourself with the charismatic, all consuming smile that I would one day become familiar. I did not return the warm reception; I had a magical sadness about me that year that began with the death of my rapist and ended with my name being the topic of more than one scandal. I hardly remember much of the year at all, but I remember meeting you there that night. In That Place.

You acted like you were meeting a celebrity. You mentioned a few of the rumors that spread around DeSales about me, most of which were incredibly true, and I told you that night, “It doesn’t matter what people say about you unless you believe it.” You told me that you had just transferred to the village school and that you were incredibly lucky: You lived in a modest home on the edge of town that had not been seized by Wexner for further construction of his brick empire. I was completely awestricken by you. You were so bold, so empowered to speak truth, so nonchalant in the way you spoke, and had this magnetic flowerchild persona. If it hadn’t been for you that night, I would have drank alone at the firepit of David’s home. It was true that I was still frequently invited to events that year and next, but I was never really one of these people and I always remained on the outskirts of parties and social gatherings. When the night ended, I told you not to talk to me again. You needed a fighting chance to assimilate in this odd, wealthy village school that was more reminiscent of an episode of Gossip Girl than a place in Ohio. You were never going to get that if you associated with me.

We reconnected in February 2014. It was a historically brutal winter in Ohio, frequently closing down the university, and I was frailer at 106 lbs, more contemplative, and battling an autoimmune disorder that was so severe that I was sure it would have killed me. Looking back on it now, there is no doubt in my mind that your antithesis to everything that I was saved me. From the moment we reconnected, there was rarely a moment that we were apart. Every morning, you held back my hair as I spent the morning vomiting into a dormitory toilet. When I would try to crawl back into bed, you would force me into a warm bath, lay out clothes for me, and often blow-dry my hair when I was too weak to do so myself. Without fail, and for the entire semester, you would walk me to the cafeteria, watch me eat breakfast, and we would undoubtedly end up back on the bathroom floor for several more hours. But you’d still make sure that I attended my afternoon classes, even if that meant sitting on the business halls’ floors in effort to see that I didn’t leave. You were the only person who knew how bad my health had gotten that year.

Because to everyone else, I was confident and had accomplished in my studies precisely what I had in my social circle of business students—complete mastery, complete command. I was fastidious, wearing almost exclusively Brooks Brothers button downs that tucked into dark colored slacks or designer jeans, and carried myself with an air of superiority that few ever questioned. In school and in the finance society, I was the best. I maintained a portfolio of investments that had achieved a 56% return that year, and when I shared my opinion on what our club should be investing in, I was rarely wrong. It awed some, and frustrated many male egos that couldn’t understand it. I was an excellent financial analyst to be, interviewing at several bulge bracket investment banks in New York and Chicago that year. And when anyone questioned me or alluded that I couldn’t possibly being doing as well as I was, I would raise my prominent nose nostrils at them and say nothing at all.

I didn’t dress, walk, talk, or play like other college students did. I was incredibly aloof and malicious, whereas you were a never-ending ray of sunshine. You were bohemian and buoyant and wise all wrapped into a blonde package of beauty. My persona was much more overpowering and chilling. Yet, you liked me, and you held my secret, and no one ever questioned why you—the special education major—were in the business hall at 2 pm, 4 pm, 8 pm, and 10 pm everyday. In fact, most of my companions that year really preferred you to me and it was often a relief to have you there as a shield.

In the summer of 2015, we moved into an off campus apartment in what would be considered the Chinatown of Columbus, Ohio. With my full-time job in financial services and lucrative investments from the prior year, I had tried to convince you to live downtown in a high-rise apartment, but you wouldn’t have it. You always wanted to pay your own way, and Chinatown was what you could afford. So we lived there with Ethan Allen furniture, your bohemian nonsensical decorations, including a plethora of crystals, bags of cannabis, and music posters. By the end of the summer, I was showing signs of recovery, though the months of medical bills had put me in a tougher spot financially than before. I was still able to casually pay our rent and fixed expenses, afford food, and pay my own tuition without much concern. Though it was in September that everything changed.

You worked at a Bob Evan’s right behind the university that summer to save for college, but you had racked up $17,000 on a credit card that was accruing monthly interest. You wanted to save, but you were forced to pay that down and there was never an expense that you met that you didn’t like. It has always been who you are: you spend too much on others, too much on holiday decorations, too much on latest clothing styles, too much online, too much on fast food, just too much. So even though you worked your sixty hours a week until that political bill made everyone like you work thirty-seven and a half hours and not a moment more, you couldn’t make tuition. And I couldn’t help you.

I remember one night we were in Cincinnati for a Cal Scruby concert when the idea came to me. I said, “There are a lot of girls in Pi Phi that I know that use this escort site to make fast cash, and you are much prettier and have a much better personality.” So while we waited for the concert to begin, we turned the Marriott hotel room into a glamorous studio for photos, and wrote you a descriptive, alluring profile on that website. Looking back on this now, I am not sure what I was thinking except that it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do, and everyone else was doing it. An older, established Cleveland man solicited you within the hour. You planned to meet him later that week. A thousand dollars just like that.

But that fateful morning, you confessed that you couldn’t do it. And I knew then that if you didn’t return to school that semester, you might never. And I thought about your credit card debt, your newly broken down car, and your ambitions slipping away from you. And I couldn’t let you, the brilliant bohemian with so much to offer to the world, possibly lose it all that easily. So I knew what this all meant for me, but the way I saw it, and still see it, is that it was the least I could do for the person who likely saved my life. So I became you: I went to a hair salon that day and dyed my harsh, almost black hair, to bleach blonde; I bought extensions; I bought baby blue eye contacts; I used makeup to manipulate a small mole on my cheek; I contoured my face, used drugstore eyelashes, and it was convincing enough. That night, I wore a pink kimono with ripped jeans and pale high heels. I wasn’t nearly as tall as you, but I hoped our Cleveland man wouldn’t notice. And he didn’t. And that was that.

These visits continued twelve times, and we never spoke about them. It was our next big secret, and one I never planned to mention them to a soul. Your fall tuition was paid and I was relatively healthy, and we had our oasis in Chinatown. Everything was finally alright, it seemed, until December.

There was only one problem: That Piece of Shit Heroin Addict. Back in the summer before the school year began, you had met Josiah. Perhaps it was my jealously of losing part of you, but I never took to him. You could have had any of my friends majoring in finance – we both know that they all loved you, and could have given you the life you wanted – but you chose him. I am certain that your biggest flaw has always been loving flawed people and thinking that you could positively influence the outcome of their lives’ through love and belief alone. Josiah was everything that I loathed about a person: he was uncouth to a fault, sported a horribly unkempt appearance with long, blonde, greasy and tangled hair, had terribly patchy facial hair, had lightly yellowed teeth from years of smoking and drug abuse. Best of all, he drove a sports car. His family was from the neighboring county, and in Ohio, if you don’t live in the capital county, you might as well live in the middle of a fucking farm wasteland infested with heroin, blue-collar jobs, and Mountain Dew.

I tolerated this boy in the summer because you loved him. But it worried me when you would come home at 3 a.m. with him and his cronies, and they would all end up sprawled out on the floor of our apartment. These people were not good enough for you, and they brought you down with them. I would have done anything to better myself that year—I associated myself with the most elite people our university could offer, all of whom today ended up becoming prominent investment bankers and private equity directors, some traveling internationally, some making over half a million dollars annually – but you always found yourself attracted to the bottom.

He manipulated you. He told you lies about me, and made you think differently about me. He fed you drugs. He sedated your sunshine and stole your youth. And then in December, he convinced you that I was nothing more than a haughty, arrogant, self-serving person, which perhaps was right to some degree, but never with you, and that you needed to leave. So one night in December, when I was traveling, you stole everything out of our apartment – right down to the kitchen table and bath curtains – and left me to come home to nothing. You never returned my calls or texts, and it was more than a year before I ever got an explanation.

You went from my fascination to my friend to my caregiver to my roommate and best friend to my deepest regret.

In fact, for the next six years, you tried to contact me sporadically, pleading for forgiveness, but there was nothing that I could offer you. At times, you would comment on my life events that you could see through social media. You told me how happy I looked in my wedding photos, but little did you know for those four years that I was getting beaten, evens sometimes being held at gunpoint, literally; you told me how successful I had become from my work, but little did you know that I was facing more than one harassment suit; you would tell me you were happy that my life had become so wonderful, but you had no idea that at the very time you sent that, that I was sitting in a hospital waiting to be radiated for cervix cancer. And through all of it, I thought of you frequently, sometimes spitefully, sometimes with more regret than a person can carry, sometimes with fondness.

But I never returned any of your correspondence until last week. And now, here we are at a Panera in a rundown suburb, and I am staring right at you. The passage of time has not been your friend: you wear bold framed glasses that remind me of Buddy Holly. Pregnancy has turned your beautiful blonde hair into an ashy brown shade and your long, cascading curls have been cut into curly short strands. You have gained perhaps thirty or forty pounds, hidden under a large, flowing hippy blouse – so that has remained, your style.

When I approach you, you throw your arms around me for what feels like an eternity. I had planned to dig into you; I had wanted you to feel the internal war that has been raging inside of me since your departure. But I can’t do it. As you pull away from our embrace, you try to speak but your lower lip trembles. Your eyes are red and strained and you weep as you grab for my hand. People around us begin to stare, but my sole focus is on you. I suppose it always has been. You begin a long soliloquy of apology, that at times is so incoherent and sincere, I can only help but think that this has eaten away at you for as long as it has me. So I don’t chide you for abandoning me, I simply smile and say, “I Forgive You.”

As we catch up, it seems our friendship is a marker in time for you much like it is for me. There was before you, you, and after you. Your “after you” is dark – things have been much harder for you for the past six years than they have for me. One unplanned pregnancy, another planned pregnancy, multiple lost jobs, government assistance, an alcoholic partner, and death threats galore. It is hard to imagine the young bohemian that I once knew has achieved such a disappointing life. You never finished college and you work as a PSA in a hospital. You mentioned repeatedly how tired you are, and I see you: it’s a spiritual exhaustion that knows no bounds. It is the type of exhaustion that one can only feel when they have done nothing that they set out to do in life. I am familiar.

I often take your hand in mine. We talk until the Panera closes, and then promise to meet again soon.

#b #memories #best friend

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delarchives-blog · 8 years ago

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It couldn’t be real. No one could be that good of a cook. No one. Nevada looked around the kitchen, through the trash, in the pantry, anywhere that Del might be hiding the boxes of muffins that he said he was going to make. Or even just any boxes to any of the food that he must be getting as take out from somewhere when they were not looking.

While the kitchen was fully stocked from the pantry, to the fridge, and every cabinet in the house Nevada still refused to buy into it. It was all for show, or it had to be. Every meal they had, night after night, was perfect. Never burnt, plain, under cooked. The only way that could happen is if it was an actual professional making the meal. While Nevada didn’t know much about Del she was pretty sure he was not a professional chef in his down time.

She was almost completely through the kitchen with her head inside the oven looking for some sort of hiding place that Del used to make it look like it was home cooked food when she heard the someone walk into the kitchen and Del clear his throat behind her. She pulled back quickly, hitting her head on the top of the oven in the process. “Shit.” Nevada pulled herself up quickly from the floor rubbing her head. “So um.. hi.”

fter a weird run in with Nevada, Delaware heads straight to he grocery store with his Mother’s ingredient list in his mind he heads to the smaller, organic foods shop in town. With necessities like crystallized ginger and locally made honey, Del would rather spend the extra money on the good stuff. Especially since he’ll be baking.

He makes it home in time to fill the pantry and have about an hour spare time before he starts dinner and dessert. The entire hour is spent on a work assignment due at the end of the week he hasn’t had the chance to get around to, and by the time he’s finished his first read through, the clock reads four-thirty.

He doesn’t expect to see or smell Nevada in the kitchen. She’s rarely in the lower floors of the house, unless it’s meal time or she thinks no one else is home. When he turns the corner, he’s greeted with her backside sticking up in the air and her head and upper body in the oven. With a clear of his throat, Delaware does nothing to keep the amused tone in his voice.

“Is it time for your Slyvia Path phase already? I thought we had another twenty years or so.”

“You know what this is your fault.” Nevada is still rubbing her head, mostly out of instinct since the pain is already gone. “It’s just so cold in the house and I hate the cold so I was just trying to get warm.”

It was all a lie, a horrible one at that, but it was what Nevada could think of quickly. She eyes up the bags in his head. While it was clear they were filled with nothing but ingredients Nevada was certain it was just again a cover. The actually muffins were more then likely still in his car and he would go through the act of making them just to send her off at the end and run outside to get the store bought ones.

In her head it made sense, no matter how illogical the idea completely was. Nevada was going to catch him in faking it this time though. Thought part of her didn’t care how the muffins got there as long as she got them, as he said she would.

“So what all does it take to make pumpkin muffins?”

Want to explain yourself pup?” Delaware asks, head cocked out the side. He doesn’t buy Nevada’s excuse, not for a minute, and Delaware waits, leaning against a wall as he looks over at her. Nevada seems to distract herself with the muffins, and it actually seems like genuine curiosity. Whether that’s because she wants to learn how to cook or try to burn the house down, he doesn’t know. Either way, he won’t pass the on the opportunity for some very rare one-on-one time.

With a quick swipe of his thumb, and the rapid speed press of his fingers, he’s sending out a max text message, letting the pack know that dinner will be about forty-five minutes late. The entire pack, minus Nevada, gets the message three seconds later.

“A lot of prep work since we’re making them from scratch. Set the oven to 350 degrees and follow me.” Delaware grabs the pumpkin and eggs from the fridge and starts piling the other dry spices on the counter. With werewolf speed, the ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and a specific set of spices make their way out of the pantry.

Nevada shrugged acting as if she had no clue what he was talking about. “I did just explain. Just to cold in here. I thought being a wolf I wasn’t suppose to be as cold, well that’s a lie.” What was clearly a lie was what she was saying. Nevada has spent the last three months with the pack and by now almost every single one of them in the house had heard her bitch over 600 times about how much she hated the summer and heat.

Turning back around Nevada closed the oven door before turning the oven to the right temperature. She moved to the bar, emptying the bags Del had placed on the counter as he grabbed for a bunch of other spices that she could hardly name herself. For all she knew they could be completely wrong for what they were making but she wouldn’t know in the slightest. She just keep her eyes on Del as he moved around.

“So what is this and what is it for?” Nevada held up the ginger. The hard yellowish colored squares didn’t look like any ginger Nevada has seen before. Maybe he really didn’t know what he was getting and thought just because it said ginger on the bag it was the right thing, even if it looked completely wrong.

“And I seriously hope you are not going to put raisins into them.”

Crystallized ginger. Easier to store and preferred for sweets. In my opinion at least. It’s thin, like a sheet, and you can fold it into the muffins so the taste isn’t overpowering the pumpkin flavor. It’s the secret ingredient.”

Delaware moves with wolf speed, pulling the food processor out from under the stop and lining the muffin pans on the stove. A large mixing bowl goes next to the stove with a freshly cleaned whisk resting inside of it. He gets started by gutting the pumpkin, pulling out the fleshly bits and the seeds and tossng them straight into a side dish. He could roast the seeds, later, and pumpkins with seeds in them just taste fresher.

“Raisins are disgusting,” Delaware answers with a crinkle of his nose. His hatred of raisins knows no bounds. When he was a child, his mother went through a halth food craze. She got rid of all of the sweets in the house, and refused to use chocolate in her baking. Instead, everything has raisins, and Delaware was fooled far too often. Never again.“The taste, the texture, everything about them. If anyone ever smuggles them into this house, I will dispose of them. Can you butter the muffin pan? Just a think layer on the bottoms and sides so that they don’t stick.”

Nevada opens up the bag looking at the ginger as he talks about it. When she reaches for a pieces it’s harder then she expected it to be. Looking it over Nevada takes a small bit off the end of one of the pieces. The taste is over powering. Not bad, but a strong, strange, tangy thing that she wasn’t expecting. Her nose scrunches up and she drops the piece on the counter that she bit off of. “I see what you mean by over powering.”

He moves around the kitchen and Nevada wonders if he would honestly put this much work into faking it but she still doesn’t believe he is a good of a cook as the food they have been eating would make him seem. She watches closely. Following his ask to butter the muffin pan but still keeps and eye on him.

“Hey, at least you seem smart about one thing. Raisins are the scum of the earth, well under that new pack that is here. God can you just go freaky scary alpha on them and kick there ass out of town because if I have to meet another one of them I might die.”

“Some people use powdered ginger, but if you add just a little too much it’s all you taste. Ruined muffins.” He’s not used to Nevada’s undivided attention, nor her actually asking questions. Not that Delware has a problem with questions, he’s an open book for the pack, but Nevada just isn’t the type to ask.

“I could, but their alpha would put up a fight, and she’d probably start with the youngest pup, cornering her until she’s powerless to do anything but submit or die. You’ve never seen a rogue alpha before. She’ll spin you the sweetest tale of lies before slicing your throat, all with a smile on her face,” Delaware says pointedly as the food processor whirls. It’s important that no one crosses the line, no one turns physical, and no one gets hurt. Especially someone like Nevada whose bark is much worse than her bite.

It’s easy to make muffins with a helping hand, and with an extra pinch of this and a little less of that, the normal twenty minute prep period turns into a five minute stretch. By the time they’re finished, Delaware’s got flour in his hand and sugar on his nose, but the batter is completely ready to be poured into the buttered molds.

“Did you want to say for dinner prep, too? I think Lanta’s out patrolling today; hopefully running off that bad attitude.”

Nevada makes a face. “Your not talking about me are you? I would punch the bitch in her tit and run away. That is what high school teaches you now a days.” She hates to think about it, what would actually happen if this new, crazy alpha were to run into her. Nevada wouldn’t turn on her pack, never. She hated half of them, they annoyed the shit out of her most of the time, but they put up with her and she can’t say that about most people. While Nevada still is certain Del is going to kick her out one day saying she is just to much trouble, until that happens, thought she will never act nice to any of their faces, she will stand behind her pack.

She can’t help but enjoy helping Del make the muffins though. She even finds herself laughing as she looks up finding flour on Del’s face. “You missed the bowl, by a lot.” With the muffins slide into the oven Nevada grabs the mixing bowl to move it to the sink. Sticking her finger into the remaining mixture on the side she expects to have the worst taste as she licks her finger.

“You have got to be kidding me.” The words come out before she realized and her brow furrows in confusion and disbelief. It is not at all the worst thing in the world like she was expecting. Instead even just the non-baked mixture is a perfectly sweet, pumpkin, wonderfulness and it makes Nevada look at Del in complete confusion.

“Dinner prep? You mean you fake making dinner and then ordering in right? I mean just because these muffins taste great doesn’t mean I have started to believe that you actually cook everything else to be completely perfect.”

Nevada crosses her arms eye Del. She didn’t mean to just come out and call him and his cooking a lie but now that it was there she couldn’t take it back and waited for him to admit it.

“I’m not a baker,” he says with a shrug of his shoulders, trying to wipe off whatever’s left on him. All of the ingredients in baking are light, fluffy, and Delaware doesn’t care for it. He likes thick sauces and heavy meets and hearty soups and stews. Baking feels like a chore, measuring out this and putting exactly this amount of that in there. He humors Nevada because she’s family now and why not? Fall time is his second favorite time of year.

“That’s disgusting, and unsanitary.” Delaware says with a frown on his face as she dips her fingers into the bowl. Whether her outburst is out of delight or because the muffin mix just sucks, Delaware doesn’t care. He won’t dip his clean fingers into raw eggs and unbaked ingredients. The texture alone makes his frown into a grimace as he looks her over.

“Ah, so that’s why you were in here earlier. And here I thought you were an inspiring poet.” Delaware’s eyes wrinkle is amusement as Nevada stands there with her arms crossed and her face twisted in confusion. She thought he was ordering their food? That would take much more effort than cooking it, and the pantry is always full so they’d be spending a ton of money on food.

“Do you really think I buy all of this food for appearance-sake, let it go bad and then spend even more money on enough takeout for twenty normal humans?”

Nevada stuck her finger in the bowl again this time making a long “yum” sound as she licked the raw mixture off her finger again. She can’t help but wanted to even annoy him now even thought they have been having a good time.

She shrugged looking around trying to find some sort of sign that what she was saying was logical. While the longer she stood there and he talked, the most illogical her idea sounded, even to herself. Yet, she stayed by it. “Hey I don’t know how you get your kicks but I am telling you no one can be that good of a cook that much of the time. I mean seriously have “you” ever burned anything or served anything less then perfect? It has to be take out.”

“A decade or so ago, I made the worst spaghetti sauce you could imagine. There was this weird cinnamon trend going on and I decided to try it. Big mistake.” Delaware chuckles with a shake of his head, pulling out the metal covered pan. It’s easy to get the counter set up in seconds flat with werewolf speed, and while Nevada revels in the fact that maybe, just maybe, he can cook, the entire kitchen is set up and new spices have replaced the old ones on the counter.

“Grab that spatula and come stir this,” he half-asks, half-orders, and when Nevada trudges over to the oven Delaware’s got the smallest of smiles on his face.

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