Page 10 of The Swiping Game
5
TARA
Peach schnapps should be outlawedin this country.
No, I take that back—the world. It should be banned from the entire world.
I can handle my wine, but add in half a bottle of peach schnapps? I feel like I got ran over by a bus, that bus backed up, a herd of moose trampled over me, and then that bus drove over me again.
Oh, and add that there’s a marching band playing to the side, and there you have my hangover this morning.
“What the fuck did we do last night?” Tawny says as she plops down onto my bed with me.
“I believe the questions you really want to ask are: what the fuck did we drink, and why do we think we’re still twenty?”
“Why didn’t you stop us? You’re the older, responsible sister.”
“I failed,” I say, though it comes out more like a cry as I try and roll over. “Haven’t you realized by now that I’m a trash adult and in no way should you be looking to me for guidance?”
“You aren’t a . . .” Tawny can’t even get the words out as she leaps from my bed and sprints to the bathroom. At least that’s where I hope she made it, judging by the sounds coming from her right now.
“Fuck,” I groan as I slowly roll out of bed to go help my little sister. It’s the least I can do. Last night’s impromptu drinking fest might not have been my idea, but I can’t let my sister suffer by herself. That’s not who I am.
When it comes to Tawny and me, sometimes I wonder if I’m her sister or her second mother. And that’s not a dig on our mom, God rest her soul. But after Dad pulled the olewe’re out of milk, be back in twentytrick, Mom did what she had to do to make ends meet. That usually meant working two jobs and some days not seeing her at all. So it fell on me to make sure my little sister was taken care of. I guess old habits die hard.
“You okay?” I ask, putting a cold washcloth on her neck.
“We’re never drinking again, okay?”
I laugh, because that’s not the first time I’ve heard that one. “Sure, Tawny. Whatever you say.”
We sit in the bathroom for a few more minutes to make sure she’s okay, when a weird noise comes from the living room. At first, I don’t think anything of it. That’s until it goes from mildly irritating tooh my God, make it fucking stop.
“What’s that noise?”
“Huh?” Tawny says, slowly getting up from the cold, tiled, and very outdated bathroom floor.
“That noise.”
I make sure Tawny is standing upright before I head to the living room. My stomach does a flip as I look at, and smell, the remnants of last night—two empty wine bottles, an empty bottle of the devil peach stuff, and a half-eaten frozen pizza that I now vaguely remember cooking somewhere around three in the morning.
I hear the annoying noise again and head to the couch, where I think it’s coming from. Just as I’m about to reach for my phone, the noise goes off again, and I immediately switch the settings to silent. My hangover just can’t take that this morning.
“What the fuck?” I say as I open my phone. The dinging wasn’t letting me know I have a few notifications. Nope, I have more than a hundred, and it’s all coming from one app.
“Tawny!” I yell, despite it hurting my ears just as much as my throat. “Tawny, come here!”
“What?” she says, slowly walking into the living room with squinted eyes.
“Did we download a dating app last night?”
Tawny’s eyes go wide, as if it’s the first time she’s really opened them this morning. “Oh shit, I think we did.”
I toss my phone onto the couch. “I can’t do this without coffee first.”
“Make it strong,” Tawny says as she goes back to her bedroom, presumably to get her phone as well. I scoop the grounds into our used but still quite functional coffee maker and pour myself a glass of juice as I wait.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, downloading a dating app with your sister on a night you had a few too many drinks and were complaining about the state of your life isn’t a big deal. However, I have no recollection of any of this. Did I message any of these guys? What did I write about myself? For all I know, I could have put “thirty-two-year-old secretary who hasn’t been fucked in three years looking for a slumpbuster.”
