8Times Like These || Foo Fighters
ROXANNE
Peeingwhile wearing a romper is always a weird experience. You basically have to get fully naked. I perch on the toilet in Monroe’s bathroom, my black one piece from Zara pushed down around my knees as the print ofGirl With a Pearl EarringMonroe has hung on her bathroom wall stares down in judgement at my immodest state.
Stare all you want, Dutch girl. You like these titties?
Yep, always a weird experience.
Monroe is a massive nerd. Who hangsBaroque artworkin their bathroom? She’s moved into a bigger apartment than the one we used to share together and filled it with even more books and scholarly decor.
“So let me get this straight,” she calls, loud enough that I can hear her through the door. “Your plan is to spend three weeks living in a bus with Cole so you canavoidgetting back with him?”
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds!” I shout back.
I finish up in the bathroom and shimmy back into my romper before rejoining Monroe in her kitchen.
“Zip me up?” I request, turning around so she can help me with my zipper. I hold my hair out of the way as I explain Cole and I’s promise to each other about the tour. “You know how many times Cole and I have broken up, and it always ends with us getting back together. We do the same thing over and over again, and it never works. So I’m trying something different. Instead of trying to live without each other, I’m going to get us to live together but nottogether, you know? So we can prove to ourselves that this really is over.”
I turn around and find her giving me a perfect calling-you-on-your-bullshit look.
“I know it’s probablycomplètement fou, okay? But if I get this job in Toronto, I want to at leasttrynot leaving everything in pieces when I go. We can’t keep doing this forever. We take and take from each other, and soon there isn’t going to be anything left. He already lost his family because of m—”
“Roxanne,” Monroe cuts me off, barking my name in the voice she uses to scold her employees.
“Everyone’s always trying to tell me that’s not true, but it is,” I argue. “There isn’t a happy ending for us. There’s never a happy ending for me. I just...I don’t have it in me. It’s like I have this reflex that makes me fuck shit up. So this has to end.”
My voice is shaking by the time I reach the end of my little soliloquy. I can’t meet Monroe’s eye. I stare down at the tiles of her kitchen floor until my view gets blocked by a face-ful of her hair as she throws her arms around my shoulders.
“Mon dieu, you are such a fatalist,” she mutters, patting me on the back before letting me go.
She leads us back to her living room, where we take seats on the couch and continue drinking the elderflower cordials she made us.
Monroe is the kind of person who drinks elderflower cordials.
“You know, I’ll never forget the day he showed up on my doorstep looking for you,” she muses, swirling the ice around in her glass. “It was that summer you ran away from Montreal, and—”
I glower at her. “I didn’trun away.”
She glowers right back until I sigh and give in.
“Okay, yes. I sort of did run away.”
RunningtoMontreal had helped me escape my problems back home. When shit hit the fan with Cole for the first time, runningfromMontreal seemed like it would work just as well. A few days after my eighteenth birthday, I took off with a suitcase and ended up in Quebec City for a year.
“I’d never seen someone look so...hollow,” Monroe tells me. “It was like you were a Dementor and you sucked his soul out and took it with you.”
“Wow, thanks. That’s really making me feel better.”
She shakes her glass at me. “Hey, you’re the one who’s convinced that you’re destined for tragedy. All I’m trying to say is that you two...You colour each other in, you know? Yeah, sometimes those colours clash. Sometimes they’re so bright it hurts, but...the longer you stay apart from each other, the more I see you both fading.”
I sip my drink in silence for a moment, unable to come up with a counter-argument because sometimes that’s exactly how I feel: faded. Nothing is as bright without Cole in my life, but maybe people just weren’t meant to live in that kind of Technicolor.
“Anyway, what do I know about it?” she continues. “I’m twenty-six, and I still always end up dating guys who live with their moms. My only experiences with epic romance are sitting up there”—she waves towards her bookshelves—“so you do what you’ve gotta do. I’ll be here at the end, whatever happens.”
I lean over to clink my glass against hers. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a good friend?”
“Duh I’m a good friend,” she preens. “I’m also an excellent bartender. The two have lots of transferable skills.”
