By LUKE DEEBLE
“After all, when in Rome.”
Clare leaned back and laughed, her cheeks flushed crimson, and her eyes unbelievably wide then half-shut, three distinct lines forming at each outward-facing corner of her eyes. And she did not look at anyone, only down, out, past, through, as if she were speaking to ghosts. The corners of her lips puffed up her cheeks, her hair was a sightly mess of sweat and the smell of riverwater; she looked as if flustered by someone with whom she was in love. She was happy now.
“They invented the Bloody Mary roud’ bout here?”
“You’d know, wouldn’t you? I just figured Queen Mary”
She was talking to the boy beside her, a short Brit teen with thin, fleeting blonde hair named Ron. His taller redhead friend next to him, at the very end of the bar, fiddled his thumbs. On the outside of each of his hands he had drawn a shaky x in black marker. He was Steve from New York.
“I thought the Mary they burned in Salem was the bloody one”
“Noo.” She laughed.
“Oh?”
“We have the Queen Mary. It stinks and it’s stationary”
“It’s a ship,” her friend clarified.
“Ah”
“You fuckers aren’t pinning this on us,” Clare laughed. “Bloody Mary is Queen Mary. That’s why she comes every October.”
“They put on Halloween shit that is. You guys have halloween?”
That was Clare’s friend again. Clare was on the end of a row of nine girls, all unmistakably American – though they inched toward the accent as the night crawled on – all unmistakably under nineteen as of September 1st (which was, unbelievably, in two months), all white to some degree and dry (not in one important sense) and flaking and tired, and all unusually muscular and erect besides a scrawny girl with a sharp face at the opposite end who now shouted at Clare that she had better take this one slowly and maybe after that take a break for just a little bit.
“Obviously Queen Mary doesn’t actually come to the Queen Mary fucker” Clare laughed. “Or does she.” She laughed, moving backwards again.
“Listen Claritin” Ron said, hunching his back ala campfire storytellers. “I’ll be honest with you. Queen Mary is Bloody Mary. Don’t we know it, here. She was born here.”
“Oh!” she said. “My name is Clare.”
“Did-”
“But that’s crazy! No shit,” she said, punching him in the shoulder and forming an “oh” with her mouth that opened her eyes, and for a second they seemed to be focused on him.
“That’s true?” she asked, looking to Steve, Ron’s friend, who waited a second.
“Yes,” he said dryly.
“No shit.”
“Only there’s something you get wrong. Like it’s not so much three times as much as it is” (one of the British pauses) “fourteen times, though there are those for whom three is enough that there’s no stopping the next eleven.”
Ron looked in confusion at Steve, confused as to his intentions.
“And the bit about the mirror, it’s true enough that a mirror helps, no doubt. You can’t see her without the mirror, no doubt. But the main thing is to make sure the bartender can hear you. And, really, saying “straight vodka” or “Bramble” or “Pina colada” or something like that works just as well.”
“Fuck off”
Clare had been following just enough to see that she was being insulted. She twirled her chair around and called for another drink.
Her friend sent this up seat-by-seat to the scrawny girl who had shouted at Clare. This girl thought a moment, then took the unusual – usually impossible and unnecessary – step of coming down to the first seat to berate Clare face to face.
“Listen Clare–”
“Uh-huh”
She slouched down and craned her head up mockingly. The girl was below her eye level.
“I want you to hold off on this one, okay?”
“Huh?”
“You need–”
“I’ve listened to you enough, I’m having fun now”
“Look, we want to keep having fun…”
“So let me, fuck” – “fuck” said indifferently. She was having fun.
“Listen, last time – “
“Listen today you fucked us Joan” – still smiling, in fact her teeth beggining to show, genuinely delighted – “like you always fuck us, keeping shit slow, like its you they have the vomit buckets for, and we fucking lost and so this is makine me fucking happy now —” She talked quickly but not passionately, moving her head in haphazard circles — “Like I’m not fucking out there to feel the most fucking pain I can” – she got louder — “I feel so much fucking pain and I love it and then we go out today and we’re watching their wake fade into water you could do your make up in.”
“Ease up, ease up,” urged Ron, and then Joan tore into him because she didn’t want to tear into Clare, and Clare slipped through. She stopped thinking about the race, as she had before Joan brought it up again. Across the bar there was an old mirror with a rusted silver perimeter; she was just able to see herself in it. And she found that for once she was beautiful, she looked at her eyes and saw through them, and she laughed to herself, and her hair looked golden. Then the feeling left her and there was nothing again, the dull press of alcohol against her frontal lobe.
And she let out in curdled screams
“bloody mary
“Bloody mary
“Bloody mary
And she froze. They looked at her. She stared at the mirror and dropped her glass. She was as she had been the night before at the concert in the beautiful Anglican church lit by wax candles.
“Did you see her?” asked Ron, wry.
“…”
“…”
“Yes, but she’s gone now.” And she forced herself upon and kissed the very straight daughter of an Orange Country evangelical pastor.
Writer | Luke Deeble ’29 | ldeeble29@amherst.edu
Editor | Lainey Noga ’26 | enoga26@amherst.edu