The Last Stall on the Left

by Valerie Z Lewis

In the last stall on the left, in the bathroom of the all-ages club, Jenny takes a sandwich bag of white powder out of the center of her bra, right between her breasts, and sets it down on the top of the toiler-paper holder. She takes a broken compact out of her purse, looks up at me, and says, "Do you have a dollar?" She smells like lavender.

Earlier that evening, Jenny shoplifted the compact from Duane Reed. We'd stopped for cigarettes on our way to the club, and even though we didn't smoke that much, Rachel and I had once decided that standing around with an unlit cigarette was a good way to meet guys. Rachel had the most convincing fake ID, so I left her to buy the cigarettes while I followed Jenny down the aisles. She pocketed the compact and then looked at the tester bottles of perfume. "A romantic garden of lavender mists," she read off one label. "Lame." But she sprayed herself with it anyway, and I wondered if using the free testers before you went out counted as stealing. In the parking lot she snapped the compact in half, keeping only the mirror, and Rachel rolled her eyes and said, "Can we go already?"

In the bathroom, Jenny takes a pink Bic disposable razor out of her shoe, and I recognize it as one from my house. She cracks the plastic easily and extracts the blade. She spreads a bit of the powder on the mirror and arranges it into a line. "Do me a favor?" she asks. "When I snort this, cough so no one can hear, okay?" She ducks her head down without waiting for a response, and I cough.

Exactly fourteen days ago, I had sex with the singer from Death Dream. Rachel and I had been friends with him since the summer, when we'd started going to the club every Saturday, and he'd talked to me a lot, but I didn't think he really liked me. Then there was the night fourteen days ago when his brother bought us dinner and drove us back to their place, and in the Burger King drive through, sitting half on his lap because the car was crowded, he pressed his face against mine, his nose against my cheek, his lips on my neck, smelling like beer, lulling me half to sleep, and no one had ever touched me like that before in my life.

The next morning he sat at his kitchen table laughing about something with Mindy's boyfriend, and when he saw me he said, "Hey, buddy. Mindy says she can drive you home whenever." And for fourteen days he didn't answer the phone when I called.

Jenny arranges another line with the razor blade. "You can only have one line. No, half a line." She looks up at me and smiles. "I don't want you getting too fucked up. Your friends hate me enough."

"My friends are bitches." Ever since I started talking to Jenny last week, Rachel, Karen, and Mindy had been making comments about how they didn't like her. Jenny had gotten kicked out of her old high school. Jenny dressed like a slut. Jenny hung out with skater guys. As we were getting ready to leave for the club, Jenny came out of my bedroom wearing tight black spandex shorts, a black bra, and a thigh-long, see-through black shirt, and Rachel didn't even wait until Jenny had gone into the other room before saying, "She's wearing that?"

Jenny snorts half the line and then holds out the mirror and the rolled-up dollar bill. "It's cool if you don't want to," she says, but I've already lowered my head and sucked the powder into my nose as hard as I can. It tastes sticky in the back of my throat, but otherwise I can barely tell I've done anything.

Jenny coughs.

"Did you see him?" I ask her. She's never met the singer from Death Dream, but she says she saw them play once at Jesse's Bar before it shut down, which is weird because I was at that show. It's like we were meant to meet each other. When we'd come in, he was standing by the bar with his brother. He'd seen me, called out, "Hey buddy!", but I'd ignored him, because really. Fucking really.

"You could do so much better," Jenny says. "He doesn't even sing, he just screams, and he thinks he's hardcore, but he's so not." She pours another tiny mound of powder onto the mirror. "If you want me to, I could introduce you to some nice guys who are actually hardcore."

I shrug. "I don't care. I don't really want to date anyone for a while." I lean back against the cold metal of the stall door. "It just sucks, because now he's the only guy I've ever slept with, and I have to walk around for like months with him being the last person I kissed." I could always hook up with Greg, who's had a crush on me forever, but it felt mean to make out with someone while I still wasn't over someone else.

"You're way too pretty for him," Jenny says as she leans over the mirror. "He's ugly, and he's lame, and he has a fat ass."

"Thanks," I say, and I cough.

It was only last Monday when I'd seen Jenny eating lunch by herself in the courtyard. She was sitting at one of the plastic picnic tables, listening to her headphones, ignoring the turkey sandwich in front of her, drawing something on the palm of her hand with a ballpoint pen. Rachel was skipping lunch to make up a Math test, so I had no one to talk to, so I walked up to Jenny's table.

"What're you listening to?" I asked.

Jenny took the headphones off. "Thompson Plaza," she said. She held up her hand to reveal a logo composed of the letters TP. "My favorite band, but I'm totally fickle. Do you like punk?"

I nodded and sat down across from her. "Do you like Bad Chicks Don't?"

She grinned. "Oh my god. The girl who plays bass for them is my cousin. Were you at Battle of the Bands this summer?"

"Yeah, but I left early, after Death Dream played."

She chuckled. "You shoulda left before Death Dream played. They suck."

"They do," I said, staring down at her hands, spotted with ink all over, her fingertips looking burned, or maybe just calloused; maybe she played guitar. "They really, really do."

In the last stall on the left, I'm trying not to cry, and I look down at the mirror between us, the white powder melting into little piles of wet snow as my eyes tear up. Jenny won't let me do any more, but there's plenty left, and I wonder how much I'd need before I could stop feeling like the ugliest, stupidest loser in the world, before I could stop being just another little girl at a club who tried too hard to have a boyfriend and fell for some guy's lame line of shit, before I could just pass out forever and wake up watching some other band, in some other town, as some other person.

Jenny touches my face, at the bottom of my cheek, and when I look up, she kisses me. It's gentle, but she leans into every motion, as if she's prodding me with her lips, as if she's waking me up. She tastes like diet soda and cooking flour, and for a second all I want is to fall through her spider-web thin shirt, crawl inside her body and die.

She pulls back after just a few seconds and smiles. Her pupils are huge. "There," she whispers. "Now he's not the last person who kissed you."

She puts her head down to the mirror, her nose right against the glass, and I cough to cover the sound.

Valerie Z. Lewis is a Writing Professor at SUNY Orange. Her fiction has been published by Fresh Boiled Peanuts, Oysters & Chocolate, Zygote in my Coffee, The Pitkin Review, Torquere Press, SNReview, and Dark Sky Magazine. She lives in New York. http://www.valerielewis.net