Invitation

My housemate called me into the kitchen. I was sitting in bed, drinking coffee and swiping through a dating app. “I found something,” she said. “I’m not sure what it is.” My brain went to tumors, lumps in breasts and armpits. Nudes, once sent in drunken, lonely states, now posted to the social media platform my grandma was on. But my housemate just pointed to four mouse droppings on the stove.

They looked like burnt rice against the polished white metal. My sister tried to cook when we were younger, only simple things like Rice-a-Roni. She would switch on the stove and then returned to texting the older boy she had been giving hand jobs to in the high school parking lot. She had a hot pink Razor phone. It made me sick to see her with it and me without. I knew she really liked this older guy because she texted him with actual words, spending minutes pressing the same button on the keypad, all just to get a single letter. And then the smoke alarm would go off and the rice was black and stiff like the mouse poop on the stove in my adult life. My sister and I would give up, walk down the street to Taco Bell and order a burrito for each of us, a quesadilla to split.

My housemate slipped on rubber gloves and pulled out the bleach spray. “We’re not gonna let these fuckers get any further,” she said, in a voice I’d never heard before. I coughed on the chemicals. I hadn’t even brushed my teeth. My housemate went to work and I closed the door to the bathroom, sat on the lip of the bathtub, elbows on knees. If this was the sixties, someone would’ve showed up to take my picture, captioning it something helpless and sexist despite best intentions. These days, if I wanted a photo depicting emotion other than a smile, I had to ask explicitly for it myself, and by that time, it all devolved into anxiety.

I flushed the toilet out of habit and rejoined my housemate. She was talking about the night prior, about how this was all probably because of our friends who invited themselves over to make us dinner. Neither of us were sure why they insisted on coming over, rather than inviting us over to theirs, but now my housemate guessed it was because they had mice of their own. Our apartment, with its soft corners, nothing at a right angle, was a kind of refuge.

Our friends had brought all the ingredients over in brown paper bags. “You didn’t have to bring your own fish sauce,” I said, as one of them pulled out a dark bottle. “We have some.”

“Huh?”

I looked back at the bottle. It was whiskey.

The other friend tapped around her phone until she connected to the speaker on the dining room table. Slow grandmother jazz leaked through the kitchen. Our friend, the one unpacking the bags – Charlotte is her name – swayed back and forth like a car in traffic.

My housemate and I watched from the table, wine glasses growing warm in our sweaty hands. A pot of salty water boiled on the stove. Indistinguishable vegetables desiccated in the oven. Butter and garlic burned in a frying pan. They insisted we could not do anything to help, not even when dishes piled up on the countertops. My housemate looked at me from across the table. I talk a lot about leaving this city for a new one, because I am still convinced that it is this place that is the problem and not me, but now I wondered how I ever expected to live with someone other than my housemate. We both know how to do dishes and so much of the world was still trying to figure it out.

Charlotte tore prosciutto with her hands and tossed the jagged scraps in with the burning garlic and butter. Slivers of the soft, pasty fat flew to the walls. Andrea dumped bowtie pasta into the boiling water, pulling away when it splashed back. I poured more wine into my glass. A drop of the red liquid raced down the lip of the bottle and I brushed it back with my finger, brought it to my mouth.

Andrea held a glass of whiskey, ice crackling, and announced that dinner was ready. I wasn’t hungry, but my stomach made strange, deep noises.

“Sounds like you’re ready!” Charlotte said, hand on my shoulder.

I smiled.

Andrea spooned pasta and vegetables and sauce into each of our bowls. She said something about her Italian heritage, about feeling at home when she cooked like this. I looked around the kitchen, previously pristine, now scattered with every pot and pan we owned. Half of a juiced lemon rested on the rug.

Andrea and Charlotte looked at each other, opening their mouths and then closing them, as if beginning to say something but fearing interruption. Andrea motioned toward Charlotte, pressed her lips into a smile, and finally spoke. “And we wanted to cook for you because, uh, we have some exciting news –”

“We’re dating!” Charlotte jumped in. Their hands reached across the table to meet.

The thing is, I thought Andrea and Charlotte already were dating. When we went on walks, they held hands. When we went to clubs, they danced up on one another. When we watched movies, Charlotte laid her head in Andrea’s lap. I even made jokes about being the third wheel and everyone had laughed.

“Oh!” my housemate stepped in. I had been staring out the window, quiet. “Congratulations! That’s really – that’s so exciting.”

“Thanks,” Andrea said, thumb brushing back-and-forth over the side of Charlotte’s hand. “We’re pretty excited. This feels like a new beginning.”

Charlotte looked at me soft, like a mother. “Hey, don’t cry. This won’t change anything about our friendship. And you know, Mel, one day you’ll find someone who makes you feel like we do.”

I brought my wine-stained finger to the well of my eye. Charlotte was right. I was crying. I stumbled over congratulations, apologized, said the wine had gone to my head. I pushed the pasta around my bowl and stuffed a huge bite in my mouth.

My last girlfriend broke up with me after eight months. She said I didn’t love her enough. I stared at her short blond hair, her boyish figure. I told her it wasn’t true. I told her I loved her very much, more than she knew. “No, Mel, you don’t,” she said, hands in fists as I stood in her apartment stairwell, one floor below her. Under different circumstances, it all could’ve been very romantic, staring up at her blue eyes, wishing I could drown in them. Her voice was high and sharp as it bounced off the metal stairs. “Mel, I fall asleep thinking of you – wanting to be held by you, just wanting to be with you all the time. And you put in headphones and turn your back to me. I wake up in the middle of the night worried that you’ve gotten strangled in the cord and –” She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, and trudged back up the stairs. I sat down on the landing and pulled a joint from my backpack. I thought about smoking it but decided not to, dropped it on the ledge for someone lucky.

And now I was dusting under the radiator, something I’d never done before. My housemate was still going on and on about the motherfucking mice, about how we would make them wish they never crawled into our motherfucking apartment.

I looked at the walls, their faded yellow paint, and went at them with a rag and cleaner that smelled like orange candy. If someone showed up to take my picture and found me like this, frizzy hair and morning-breath mouth as I scrubbed at what I couldn’t see, I would pick up the old juiced lemon from the carpet, bite the bitter rind between my teeth, and spit it at the camera.

Lauren Weber is a queer writer and nonprofit worker living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She spends her days walking along the Mississippi River, cooking with her housemate, and dreaming about taking public transit again. This is her first publication.