Page 10 of Waves of Time
“I’m here for work,” Aria said, “and to visit my father.” She smiled down at Marc, who reached out to shake Callie’s hand.
“Pleasure to meet you. I haven’t met many of Aria’s school friends,” Marc said.
Aria prayed that Callie wouldn’t bring up the fact that Aria had left school one night a few weeks before midterms. She hadn’t even said goodbye.
“You, too!” Callie said. “Aria, what’s the job?”
“It’s with Sotheby’s,” Aria explained. “Interior design.”
Callie’s eyes glinted with recognition. “That’s incredible. Wow.”
Aria knew that morally, she should have said she was there helping her mother. But there was something so pathetic about that, and she just couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“What are you up to tonight?” Callie asked.
Aria glanced at Marc, who raised his Old Fashion. “I’ll probably just have one more of these before I head on home. Where are you off to?”
“We’re going dancing,” Callie said, pointing back toward a table filled with young women in short dresses. “You should definitely join.”
Aria again eyed her father, sensing that Marc wanted her to go out with these women. Probably, he thought these “college-educated people” would be good influences on her.
“I was just telling Aria that she should move out here for a while,” Marc explained. “Maybe you can show her what life is like here for a twenty-something.”
“Gosh, yes. Aria, Boston is nothing compared to here,” Callie said. “Say you’ll come. Please!”
Not long afterward, Aria and Marc said goodbye on the sidewalk in front of the cocktail bar as Callie and her three leggy friends walked out, clacking in heels.
“Are you sure you don’t want to hang out longer?” Aria asked her father.
“You should have fun,” Marc said. “We’ll have a few more nights to catch up. And your mother said that if all goes well with Rodrick tomorrow, you’ll be back in town soon.”
Aria nodded and hugged him, overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Every time she said goodbye to her father, she was never sure when she would see him again.
After Marc disappeared down the road, Aria turned to greet Callie’s friends: Marnie, Gigi, and Quinn. They’d met at the company Callie worked at, a tech start-up that combined fashion and working out into an app format and could not stop gushing about how much they loved San Francisco and that Aria should definitely move there.
“And you could see your dad all the time!” Callie said as they jumped into a cab. “A win-win, right?”
The cab dropped the girls off at a club with a cover charge of fifty dollars. Aria had never seen or heard of anything like it. As she paid to enter, she found herself thinking that fifty dollars was approximately five tables’ worth of tips back at the restaurant.Could she really afford this?Then again, she’d basically insinuated that she was a top interior designer for Sotheby’s, and she couldn’t give up the ruse.
Inside the club, beautifully dressed twenty- and thirty-somethings danced to pumping beats and sipped cocktails. Callie led Aria to the center of the dance floor, where Aria tried to imitate the other dancers around her: shifting her hips and bobbing her head. In reality, she felt foolish. Just last night, across the continent, she’d been in a reeking basement, listening to Thaddeus play in his rock band.Was it lame that she’d felt more at-home in that basement than here in this ritzy club?
“Where do you live these days?” Callie called over the music.
Aria was stricken with embarrassment. “I kind of go wherever the job sends me!” she lied.
“Aria, that is seriously amazing!” Callie said. She then grabbed Aria’s wrist and dragged her to the side of the club, where the music wasn’t so loud, then bought them two drinks and sat wide-eyed to say, “You have the most glamorous life of anyone I know.”
“Um. Thanks?” Aria sipped her cocktail and eyed the door, wondering if it was strange to just run through the crowd, down the street, and back to the safety of the hotel room without saying goodbye. The truth of it was that she wasn’t very comfortable with Callie right now.Had she ever been?Gosh, those years at Tufts were such a blur now. A blur of crying, of homesickness, of being completely unsure of where her life was taking her. To this, her mother had said:this is the hardest age. Things will balance themselves out soon.
“Seriously. When you dropped out of Tufts, I was like, where is that girl going to go? What’s going to happen to her? And you never posted on social media or anything, so I was a bit mystified. Imagine my surprise when I walk into one of the most expensive cocktail bars in San Francisco and find you there!”
Aria’s smile was beginning to make her face feel numb.
“This city can chew you up and spit you out,” Callie said suddenly, her eyes flashing. “But I’m getting the hang of it. I can show you the ropes if you really want to come out here.”
“That would be awesome,” Aria lied.
Callie giggled and then launched into a story about a guy she was dating in the city, one who worked “pretty high up at Facebook.” Aria faded in and out of the story, unsure of what to say. She’d hardly dated in her life.