anything could happen
Tai
Shiny leaves flutter across the forest floor as Tai sinks beside a willowy oak tree, resting her head in her hands. It’s been another week of sleepless nights, chugging mug after mug of her roommate’s terrible over-concentrated coffee, running in sprints up and down the street, Internet searching until her vision blurs. She can’t remember the last time she had a good night’s sleep, and she’s only in the first semester of her second year at law school.
It’s been 8 years since she wandered in her dreams, but something still stops her from fully letting go into the annihilating darkness. She doesn’t know who she is when she’s dreaming. These days, she barely knows who she is when she’s awake.
So far, the lack of sleep has had surprisingly little effect on her grades at Columbia Law School. She’s still acing her classes and wowing her professors, studying by day and tossing back shots of tequila by night at the grubby little pub close to campus where grad students huddle to complain about their advisors and sing bad 90’s karaoke.
On the outside, she’s thriving. And on the inside, she’s a little bit of a mess. Some days she misses the confidence, the power, she had at seventeen, the way she knew exactly who she was and who she was going to be. She misses locker room dance parties, trips to the mall, feeling like she could actually talk to her family. She even misses trigonometry class, where she’d spend most of her time daydreaming about her crush and doodling in her notebook.
She misses all of it: the joy, the pain, the ability to feel any emotion except dread. She misses so many things that most days she feels like she’ll shatter from the weight of everything she lost.
But most of all, she misses Van.
Van
“You’ve bartended before, right?” The portly, bearded man doesn’t give her a chance to answer before he continues on with his spiel. Van is grateful because in all honesty, she hasn’t really ever bartended, unless you count the years she spent as a kid popping open the tabs of Budweiser cans for her mom.
“Good. Great. It’s not hard. I’m going to give you these keys and let you close up whenever you feel like it. Make the drinks however you usually do it. If something’s sticky, clean it up. Make sense?”
Van nods, although that doesn’t seem like the most hygienic strategy.
“You get to keep all the tips. In return, don’t contact me unless I contact you first. I’m busy, and the last thing I need is some bartender newbie calling me every five minutes to ask what’s in a sidecar. So leave me alone and for the most part, I’ll leave you alone. Deal?”
Still processing, Van takes the keys (which are quite sticky) from Bard, the bearded bartender, and sticks them in the pocket of her overalls, gazing around at the dimly lit pub.
“Alright, then,” she says, as cheerfully as she can muster, but it feels like the words are coming from someone else’s mouth.
Bard looks satisfied. “I’ll see you later then. But uh, hopefully not.” With that, he pushes open the batwing doors and leaves Van to take in her new domain.
How the hell did she end up here? One minute she was graduating from Oberlin with a film degree, receiving a plethora of awards for her self-directed musical and feeling like things were starting to fall into place.
The next minute she was back home in New Jersey, dealing with the fallout of her mother’s funeral and feeling positively shattered.
And now, she’s standing in the middle of a pub that only the most despondent of grad students seem to frequent, without a clue how to tend a bar or make any cocktails besides a shitty coke and whiskey. But, it’s better than nothing, and being in the city gives her space from the New Jersey suburbs she grew up in, and even more space from the wilderness that had once claimed her.
Pushing her memories aside, she goes behind the bar and examines the setup. Lemons, limes, various types of liquor, a few unlabeled substances in Mason jars. Yeah, she’ll be just fine.
Her first customer walks up, his baseball hat covering his eyes. “Just a whiskey for me, thanks,” he mumbles.
“Uh, the cheap kind or the expensive kind?” Van asks, immediately cringing because she forgot which one was “well” and which was “rail”. Or maybe those were the same thing?
Baseball hat boy points to a bottle of Four Roses on the shelf behind Van’s head, shrugging his shoulders. “Whatever that one is,” he says.
Van nods and pours him a shot. He slides her a five-dollar bill and she pockets the change, already feeling more confident in her newfound position.
The next few hours pass in a blur of bedraggled customers, each one less socially apt than the last. Desperate for conversation, Van tries to crack jokes with the bargoers, making obscure movie references and commenting on their choice of apparel, but gets little in the way of a reaction from any of them. Finally, she sighs and takes a seat on the barstool by the cash register, simply observing and ruminating on just how much has happened in the last week.
Van’s used to change, an old pro at going with the flow. Lately, that’s been harder.
She longs for security, stability; a moment of peace, perhaps. God, why has that been so hard to find? Ever since she…
But no, she won’t think about that now. Can’t think about that now. She just needs to put one foot in front of the other, manage this dive bar, and stay out of trouble. She’s in the city now, and she’s never felt more anonymous.
Tai
Tai wakes with a start, her back still resting against the tough bark of the old tree. The sun is going down, and the leaves are less fluttering and more crashing in sharp, threatening shapes as the wind whips through the trees. Suddenly, the familiar comfort of the forest feels more like an open wound, and her skin stings from the cold breeze. She stands quickly and checks the time. 5:15. Shit, the last train leaves at 5:30. If she runs to the station maybe she can still make it back to the station by then.
Sprinting, her canvas tote bag falling off her shoulder, she takes off through the woods, heading for the main road that will lead her back to the tiny, decrepit Little Wood train station.
She’s been coming here for a couple months now, just to get away from the city and have a chance to breathe. But this is the longest she’s ever stayed, and she doesn’t know what the vibe of the town is at night.
Little Wood is a small, unassuming town, one not many people know about even though it’s a mere hour’s train ride from the city. Tai thinks that might have something to do with its creepy atmosphere, the ghost town feel and the way there are never any birds. Yet to Tai, it feels oddly like home. At least, more like home than her apartment in Morningside Heights ever has.
She makes it to the station just in time, sliding onto the last car just as the doors are closing. She finds a place to sit in the empty caboose and prays to whatever god that she won’t fall asleep, as exhausted as she is. Something about the lull of the train is especially soothing, and she blinks hard to fight away another bout of restless sleep.
The train keeps chugging along, the darkness giving way to bright city lights as it carries her away from her quiet little tree-filled sanctuary into a city that’s never felt more foreign.
Van
Van is closing up, wiping down the bar (“If it’s sticky, clean it up” echoing like a stupid mantra in her head), closing out the tabs of the last few customers who are now drunkenly stumbling onto the street. All in all, not a bad night for her first bartending shift. She has a feeling she’ll win the crowd over with her quips eventually.
Just as she starts to flip the “Open” sign in the window to “Closed”, a familiar and yet absolutely unexpected face appears in the entryway. Van stares for a few moments, unable to believe what she’s seeing. Finally, attempting to gather her thoughts and feelings which are now scattered all over the pub, she speaks. “Tai?”
“Hey, Van,” the voice she knows so well replies, as Tai steps inside.