By the Bookstore

Initially, we went not knowing what to order, asking for a couple more minutes to look at the menu, scared that the bouncer was bouncing the restaurant (though we’d later learn that there was a club upstairs). We were drier than a temperance union, but still MSG-hungover the morning after — so we soon learned to diligently down the water, ice cubes in empty cups rattling like dice as we frittered short segments of our lives away to greasy hypertension fried rice and steaming bowls of heart attack noodles. We went, back when one of us still had to ask for a fork, when only half of us were really sold on the whole idea of food so bad that it was a must-have. We went on the way home, on the way to the bookstore, on the way to class, and ordered hot mystery tea in once-white teacups, slurping noisily while the girls two tables over silently sipped suspiciously pink soup with crazy-long straws. After, we swung back outside through the glass doors with heads pushed down to the cold, hands in coat pockets, gastrointestinally queasy and mostly sated.

Later, we went drunk. Sagging from the hot weight of liquor-laced sodas, sticky in beery button-downs, we went crooked and sideways and stumbling. We went on non-Newtonian nights that were too fluid for real plans, too solid to pass up, nights turned in-between by malted gulps and lemonade and pretzels. We left in the middle of our meals to retch in the squalor of our own bathroom stalls (and, if we were brave, returned for a second round); we still haven’t paid someone back for the one time a card was thrown down carelessly (“Pay me back later!”), the receipts now too lost or water-blotted to divvy it up right. We spent more time taking a piss, again, or fidgeting by the restroom door with our legs crossed, than sitting down and enjoying the spread. We called it a classic. We called it the grimiest place ever. We called it a — a — but the words ran too slurred, and we too blurred, to recall exactly what. “But don’t you remember?” we lied the next week. “That’s definitely what you said.”

It was the ambiance, it was the experience, it was the terrible decor. We went and asked for the same tables over and over. We grinned under the familiar sickly yellow light that made smartphone photos grainy. We retold jokes in the morning remembering who was sitting across from whom. “You had to be there,” was the stock explanation for why we all laughed in the same way and at the same time, like a hive-mind, like spores grown in the same soil. We sweat, we shivered, we tried not to stand by the door in wintertime. But we always, always, entered — as a party of three, four, eight, sixteen — and always tipped fifteen percent.

Much later, we went craving salt and oil, and we went craving company — never mind the food. We went with spicy wontons even if only one of us wanted them; we went with shrimp fried rice the one day we said we should change it up; we got Peking special sauce and beef chow foon every time, though, every time, because they tasted like last year. We bullied some of us into double-dipping scallion pancakes and drained scorpion bowls three-straws one-mouth, hoping that the big white bouncer, the one with the ears and the buzzcut, wouldn’t ask us for identification. “We didn’t know it had alcohol,” we claimed when we were asked, once, to prove our age. He left. We all stared significantly at each other across the table: congratulations, guys — we dodged a bullet there. We were gluttons, sloths, seven deadly sins and seven thousand deadly calories apiece in the lateness of consequence (though none of us ever did get a fake ID).

We went on birthdays. It might have been the first time our waiter served patrons a supermarket Oreo cake, the price sticker still latching the lid to the black plastic bottom. There’s still a picture on someone’s timeline, from someone’s album, of us cutting the cake with a chopstick, into one-too-many slices so that we had to convince one of us to eat two. We went before job interviews, after concerts, because it was the only place open, because it was the only place we could agree on. We almost went for Thanksgiving. We went for no reason and went to the gym the next day. We went before midterms, cramming dan dan mian instead of historical dates, reveling in the questionably-clean tables and the feeling of, “Yeah! This is what’s most important: time with friends. Making memories. The real deal.”

We collected the fortune cookie fortunes like coupons that never expired, like receipts for a product we suspected would fail. Air-padded packaging torn to free a hollow blossom; a harsh scraping as we extracted a slim slip of blue-printed destiny, “You will use your ideas for great benefit,” we read. “The one you love is closer than you think,” we said knowingly. We laughed at, but believed: “You will soon achieve perfection.” We ate the cookies; we left yellow shards in puddles of soy sauce. Our calling card became a pentagram of discarded wrappers and a scattering of crumbs and between; at the center, the oily leather booklet in which one of us had signed and calculated, incorrectly, the tip. We saved the little notes on bulletin boards, in wallets, in drawers, and back pockets, hoping to someday recover one and say sagely, “The odds of hitting your target go up dramatically when you aim at it.”

We went at the halfway point, before love and movies and mountains and money changed who was at the top of our text messages. That time, we stayed for hours. We talked about bathrooms, about failed hookups and (imagined) sexual tensions, about tradition, about how this was the year we would turn our lives around. We admitted faults and confessed that yes, we probably still owed you for one time; or yes, we did get a bit annoyed that one time you came home shirt translucent from drool and orangey vomit. Even: yes, sometimes you’re the worst. But the important thing, we concluded, the all-important thing, was that we were in it together, and we were here together. We read our fortunes to each other, as usual, accidentally skipping someone. A few fortunes were left behind, floating in a full glass of water.

Going to bed that night, we went various ways. We went home. We went to wilder and weirder parties. We went out of our way to bump into the kid we’d been texting all night. We blacked out, passed out, came out, and realized that like the tables and chairs on Saturday nights (Sunday mornings) everything was getting a little messy to squeeze us all in there (“It’s okay, we’ll take turns standing.”) For a few months after, we didn’t return.

In that time between, muscles and memories went unpracticed. We argued over moldy bowls in the fridge. We kept petty accounts of whose drinks were whose. We sullenly left the room when the parties were not for us. “She’s actually so annoying,” we agreed, privately. Or, “He’s such a douchebag.” We thought, sometimes, that we hid it pretty well: that our pointed comments could be blunted by the cushioning laugh beneath or that it had just been a bad day; but bad days uninterrupted became bad times, and friends calling out friends during bad times became a slow constriction into worse.

We found other people like us, but with whom our motivations, faces, platforms, favorite fruits were unknown and unset, with whom our words were unguarded by the expectation that undergirds camaraderie. For months, we went swing dancing, rode the bus, sampled parties, rose through the ranks, Snapchatted strangers, acquiesced to kisses, kissed someone into acquiescence, burned toast, played Texas Hold ’Em, ran outdoors, divulged secrets, and practiced violin, until finally it’d been long enough that we could go back together. But even when the time was right, it was a monstrous effort to even think of the return. We were busy with the dance, acquiescence, abdication, divulgence, indulgence, so we did not have time to remember to go back. We passed by the bookstore, approaching the place, and looked right, or became interested in the used-books cart. We ate burgers and burritos and deep-fried green beans. We spent nights in someone else’s room rather than in the fluorescent vinyl-lined booths. We were too busy, too tired, too intoxicated, too full, too fat, too lazy to go. We tried, half-heartedly, to move in concert but strings had been cut, and we had, like crystallized honey, become hard, still essentially sweet, but left so long without a churning mixup that we clung fearfully to the bottom of the jar.

We go sometimes, now, with girlfriends and new friends and nonfriends, or alone. We order out.

Originally published in Tuesday Magazine’s Fall 2015 issue.