Fishbowl

“Yeah?” she yells back.

“C’mere for a sec!”

Two seconds later, Allie knocks on my door.

“One second,” I answer for no real apparent reason. She could have just come in, but the fact that she knocked makes me wonder how long she’ll wait for me to give her permission to open the door. Two minutes? Five minutes? Will she kill time, twiddling her thumbs or picking her nose, more likely biting her nails, for ten minutes?

Okay. Enough. “Enter,” I say.

She opens the door and sticks her head in. “Morning. Do you want some juice?”

“No, thanks. Did Nick have flowers delivered again?”

“Yup. You’re not going to believe this. Twenty-one roses.”

“What color?”

“Red.”

Week one post breakup, he sent seven red roses. Week two post breakup, he left fourteen. Week three, today, his present is about as surprising as my feet hurting after a night of dancing in three-inch-heel boots. So the asshole knows how to multiply, whoopee-do. And red…again? Couldn’t he be a little creative with the colors? Why not, say six red, six white, six pink, and what’s left? Three? Three purple? Are there purple roses? What about purple hearts? No, wait. I’m the one who’s wounded. Forget purple. Seven red, seven pink, seven white. It’s not the eighties anymore; he can mix red and pink. He won’t get arrested for clashing.

I roll myself in my cream satin sheets like tobacco and weed in a crisp sheet of rolling paper. “I didn’t hear the bell.”

“Me, neither, I was asleep. I found them outside the door. Our door, not the outside door. I guess the delivery boy rang Janet and she brought them inside.”

“Is there a card?”

“As always. Here.” She skips toward my bed, hands me the card, and then sits down carefully.

“Love you…miss you…” I read aloud. Blah blah blah. Cry me a river. He should have thought of that three weeks ago. Before I spent twenty minutes doing tongue Pilates with some hot, anonymous bar stud who showered me with compliments and cosmopolitans.

You can’t do that when you have a boyfriend, can you?

Maybe you can. It’s just not nice.

“Where’s the birthday girl?” I ask.

“She went to the gym this morning, came home, and now she’s at the library.”

“That’s the way I spend my birthday, too,” I say. “What time is it?”

Allie giggles. “One-ish.”

That giggling is going to put me over the edge. It sounds like urine chiming against toilet water at high speed. Be fair, I reprimand myself. Allie’s not so bad. I mean, how bad can she possibly be? She admires me, for fuck’s sake. She thinks I’m the shit. Just look at her, carefully perched on my bedspread as if she’s afraid her ass will wear the bedspread out. She’s treating it like it’s a shrine, which is totally strange considering what kind of slob she is. I wish I had a couch in here. But there’s barely room for me to walk in here. My room is all bed.

“You have the coolest job ever,” she says, flipping through next month’s copy of Stiletto, which put me to sleep last night. I reach across my nightstand for a cigarette. For a moment I consider asking her to open the window, but then I do it myself. Then I wonder if she would have done it, just because I tell her to do it.

I take a deep drag. I wonder what would happen if I told her to get off my bed. Would she ask why? Would she start crying and think I was mad at her?

Can I tell her to get off the couch in the living room if I want to? It’s mine.

I certainly did my duty in adding ambience to the apartment—a purple shaggy throw rug under a glass coffee table, purple-and-gray throw pillows to match my purple suede couch and leather purple recliner. All courtesy of AJ’s basement. And of course, the dried flowers, gifts from Nick, which I later attached to a metal hanger and hung upside down to dry them out. And dishes. And framed photographs that I “borrowed” from Stiletto.

Is there anything in this place that isn’t mine?

The table, I suppose. Although that’s just a tablecloth covering milk crates. And Allie rolled her computer chair beside it to pass for a kitchen chair. Since I brought everything else, you’d think Jodine could just go and buy a table and chairs.

I exhale toward the window. “My job’s not that exciting. It’s Stiletto, not Cosmo. Sure, I get to see celebrities when they come to the office, but they’re Canadian celebrities. How’s that for an oxymoron?”

“Yeah, but you’re a fashion editor,” she says, emphasizing the word fashion as though it was some sort of golden calf.

“A fashion editor’s assistant.”

She’s now lying flat out on my bed, all reverence forgotten. Maybe she’s trying to duck beneath the smoke. “You can’t start as the editor in chief,” she says to console me.

Apparently not. “I don’t expect to be promoted after only two months, but how long do I have to search through model cards, trying to find the perfect five-foot-eight, one-hundred-ten-pound brunette with that ‘little extra something’? And why does Amanda, my Aren’t-I-Crafty-I-Make-My-Own-Jewelry boss, get all the party invites? Last week, she wet her pants because page six of The Talker mentioned her as one of the guests at a restaurant opening in Yorkville,” I say, getting all worked up. Not that the bar scene in this city is worth the effort it takes me to put on a thong. It’s only Toronto. But Aren’t-I-Crafty acts like every party invite she gets is an invite to the damn Oscars. She acts like my high-school friends who spent years pillaging fashion magazines for the perfect prom dress and then felt devastated when the guys they had their eyes on asked someone else. I used to say it’s only high school, dammit, get a hold of yourself.

I need another cigarette.

My cigarette intake has multiplied exponentially since I’ve moved out on my own. Awful, really, but now that I can smoke without being banished outside, I can’t find any reason not to smoke constantly. Besides the whole lung cancer-emphysema thing, of course. And as a plus it drives Jodine crazy.

When I first moved in and pulled out a cigarette, I thought she was going to detonate. But I told Allie from the get-go that I was a smoker, so it’s Jodine’s tough luck. She tried to be all rational about it, saying I could light up as long as I blew the smoke out the window so as not to pollute the entire apartment.

And she punctuated her suggestion with a cough.

Still, it seems like a fair agreement. But I’ve decided that the smoking-near-the-window policy will only be followed when Jodine is home. Except for in my room—I can’t have it smelling bad, can I?

“Can I have one?” comes a whisper from the horizontal side of the bed.

“One what?”

“Cigarette.” Giggle, giggle.

I nearly fall out of bed from shock. The last time I felt this way was when Nick asked me if we could not smoke up one night because he wanted to be able to concentrate on a presentation he had the next day. I hand Allie a cigarette and try not to gawk. “Since when do you smoke?”

She looks like a child smeared in her mother’s red lipstick. She doesn’t inhale, just puffs in and out like she’s sucking on the smoke. “I don’t (cough, cough). Just sometimes.” She smiles and sucks again.

Halfway through our cigarettes, I hear Jodine’s key jingling in the door lock. Allie turns white and stubs out her cigarette in an empty water glass.

We’re both laughing when Jodine knocks on my door. She doesn’t wait for a “come in.” She just enters.

“You’re still in bed?” she asks. “Do you know what time it is?”

“One-ish,” I say, stretching lazily.

The best part about not being in school anymore is lazy weekends. Spread-eagle days stuffed with omelettes and bacon and home fries and pillows and TV and shopping and restaurants and dancing and Cosmos. I’m capable of sleeping past three on weekends, if left uninterrupted. Which makes me hate my job even more Monday mornings, because I end up falling asleep at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday nights.

Usually, anyway.