GROW UP GINGER

The club was the same.

Glow High. Same neon, same bass, same line outside, same bouncer who let us in faster this time. Bonnie and Olivia and Megan and me. Twenty-four hours had passed and nothing had changed except everything.

I was wearing a different dress.

I had a phone in my purse with a stranger’s number in it.

I had a cousin — a different one — watching me from the bar.

I hadn’t noticed Mario at first. He’d come with his own friends, a different table, a different corner of the same room. But at some point in the night I started to feel it — that specific quality of attention I had grown up knowing, the kind that doesn’t want anything except to know you’re okay. He had always been like that with me. Watchful in the way of someone who had decided, somewhere along the way, that looking after me was quietly his job.

Ethan arrived around eleven.

He came right to me. He didn’t pretend not to. He smiled at me from across the floor and crossed it in a straight line and there was something different in his manner tonight — more confident, more certain. Last night I had been a question he was asking. Tonight I was an answer he already had.

“I came to find you,” he said.

“Well, you found me.”

Behind him, at the bar, Mario was watching us. His jaw was tight. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move toward us. He just watched, the way he had always watched over me — quietly, without making a thing of it, the way someone does when they care about a person and have never found a way to say so directly. He looked at Ethan the way you look at something you don’t trust but can’t yet name.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Ethan said. “We can catch up.”

“One drink. I have an early morning tomorrow.”

“Understood. One drink it is.”

He led me to the bar. I felt Mario’s eyes on the back of my neck all the way there.

We talked. We drank. He suggested, somewhere around the second drink, that we go back to his apartment — just to talk, just to watch a movie, nothing more. I told myself I had agency. I told myself I was choosing this. I texted Megan that I was leaving and would not be late this time.

Mario watched us walk out. He had half-risen from his chair — I saw it, just the beginning of the motion, before he stopped himself.

I waved at him as we passed his table. He didn’t wave back. He just looked at me, and I knew — without being able to articulate it — that I had disappointed him in some way I couldn’t yet fully see.

I waved at him as we passed his table. He didn’t wave back. He just looked at me — at me, and then at Ethan, and then back at me — with an expression that was asking a question I didn’t want to answer. He had always known how to do that. Ask without asking. Say everything without saying a word.

That was on me.

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