Page 42 of Guy's Girl
“I’m...” Ginny taps her glass and searches for the right words. “Fairly anxious.”
Adrian’s eyebrows rise. “You are?”
Ginny is downplaying. Her anxiety is all-consuming, an imaginary checklist her brain goes through every day, hundreds of times a day. If she’s satisfied every item on the checklist, her anxiety will temporarily quiet, let her focus on other things. If she hasn’t, then she’ll spend the next three hours mentally reviewing every piece of food she’s put into her body that she shouldn’t have.She can’t remember one thought she’s ever had that wasn’toverthought. For nine-tenths of the day, for no reason whatsoever, she feels like she’s going to die.
One of the trickiest parts about anxiety-based fear is that so often the thing you fear does not actually exist. Like rejection. Or loneliness. For that reason, you cannot cure Anxiety simply by going into the world and actively seeking whatever it is that is stressing you out, though if you can—by all means, do it.
“I’ve always been that way,” Ginny says. “I operate at a baseline anxious frequency of about twelve times the natural human standard of stress. It has, as a rule of thumb, ruined nearly every aspect of my life.”
All the boys laugh except Adrian. He rubs his thumb over the rim of his beer. “I would never have guessed.”
Ginny shrugs. “I don’t exactly advertise it.”
“No. You don’t.”
He’s looking at her funny. She blushes, looking away, and wonders if she overshared.
There was very little that the Murphys kept secret. They were a wide-open Midwestern family, with too much food at dinnertime and too little discretion about their bowel movements. “Was it a five-wiper or a six-wiper?” Willie would ask Crash when he returned to the table after a twenty-minute trip to the shitter.
“Seven.” Crash would drop into his chair and unfold his napkin.
The kids all oohed, clapping. Heather sighed, shaking her head.
“Boys,” their mother said. “No bodily functions at the table.”
No one except Heather ever bothered to say Ginny wasn’t a boy.
Ginny has a suspicion that Adrian’s family wasn’t like that. In fact, if she had to put money on it, she would guess there was zero talk of bodily functions at their dinner table.
“That’s our Gin.” Tristan reaches out and wraps an arm around her head, blocking her face. “Anxious little butterfly.”
“Eat a dick and die,” she says into his elbow.
“I would tell you to do the same,” says Tristan, not releasing her from the headlock, “but, with Adrian here, I don’t think I have to.”
The next Friday, like clockwork, Ginny’s text arrives.
GINNY:Hey. Day drinking with the boys tomorrow. Want to come?
He doesn’t need to ask to which boys she is referring.
ADRIAN:Yes
***
On 3rd Street in Williamsburg, between a warehouse and a coffee shop, there’s a bar called the Freehold. It’s not a fancy bar, but it isn’t a dive, either. It’s bi-level, half inside, half patio. There are orange painted murals and floors sticky with spilled beer. There are watery $16 margaritas and girls in platform sandals and boys doing lines of cocaine in the bathroom at 2 p.m. There are, above all, hordes of interns, postgrads, and the occasional creepy forty-year-old.
This type of venue is not Adrian’s favorite, but it isn’t his least favorite, either. It falls in the middle, somewhere between waiting for the subway and watching men put on two-act plays in Washington Square Park. It might ultimately leave him filled with a deep sense of despair, but at least the people watching is good.
“Adrian!”
He finds his friends over by the bar. Clay is paying for their first round of drinks. Finch is scanning the room as if he thinks he’s going to see someone he knows. Tristan is looking at the sticky floors with his lip curled in distaste.
And Ginny. She’s waving Adrian over, smile wide, margarita spilling over the side of a plastic glass as she bobs up and down.
“What’s up, man?” says Clay, putting down the pen.
“Can you believe we’re at the Freehold, of all places?” Tristan sighs. “You know, the William Vale hotel has this gorgeous rooftop bar—”
