Old Friends and Strangers
written by: Rachel Placer
Fiona wakes up to a welt the size of a Bagel Bite in the middle of her forehead with a vague recollection of slamming her skull into her bed frame while trying to straddle the Thursday night karaoke DJ from the local Heights Tavern. She rolls over to her side, knowing no one else will be here on account of her sending him on his way after he couldn’t get it up because of the vodka. It wouldn’t be so annoying if they weren’t always so apologetic about it, she thinks.
There’s a banging sound that won’t stop, and she assumes it’s from the hangover until she realizes it’s coming from a door. Her front door. It better not be Mormons, she thinks as she heaves off her bed and walks barefoot on the cold floor down the stairs. She looks down at her see-through white top. Or Girl Scouts. Her nipples are soft and rub against the fabric. I’ve got traffic cones on my chest, she thinks. She is definitely not in the proper attire for Girl Scouts.
The person is still knocking when she gets to the door. She would look out the peephole to see who it is, except she still hasn’t taken down the garland from Christmas her neighbor Becky offered her for free. The green pines block her view. Huge safety hazard, she thinks, but when have I ever had unwanted visitors?
She swings the door open and is faced with a pink-haired, black-eyeshadowed face. She has seen this person before.
“Wanna relapse?” Regret asks and holds up a tequila brand Fiona doesn’t know. It’s golden. The worst kind.
“You’ve got the wrong sister,” Fiona says.
“Oh,” Regret says, scrunching her nose up in disappointment. “Really?” she asks, cocking her head to the side.
“For Neghan?” Fiona asks.
“Yeah!”
“She’s upstate,” Fiona says. She doesn’t add that last, she’d heard her little sister was in rehab in Michigan for the fourth time.
“At least it’s not needles,” Fiona’s mother said when the call came from the court-mandated facility.
“She totaled a car, though,” Fiona responded.
“Well, she didn’t kill anyone,” her mother said back. That was the last time they talked, around Easter time. Boiling eggs always makes her mother want to call people.
Regret looks at Fiona and sighs. The glass bottle slumps in her hands and hits her thigh.
“This is what happens when I do ecstasy,” Regret says. “I forget addresses.” She pauses, thinks for a second. “And usually end up eating ass,” she says, more to herself than to Fiona. Then she laughs it off like it’s nothing and waves her hand.
“Well…while I’m here..” she says and tries to peek over Fiona’s shoulder through the hallway entrance. “Is that sexy brother of yours still staying with you?”
“Half-brother,” Fiona says.
“Tomato, tomato,” she says back, only she pronounces them the same both times. She stands on her tiptoes hopefully.
“He’s in jail.”
“Jesus, is your whole family like, messed up or something?”
“Or something,” Fiona replies.
Regret is still standing outside. “I feel like we could really get along,” she says.
“I feel like you’re saying that so you can get a taste of the A.C.”
“Well, I am sweating balls out here,” she says and motions to her black jean leggings. It’s still slightly cool, but the sun seems like it’s itching to come out. It’s almost noon. Regret flicks her nose at Fiona’s door.
“Why do you still have Christmas decorations? Is it like a party in July kind of aesthetic?”
“Yeah,” Fiona lies.
“So…” she says expectantly, tapping a beat-up sneaker.
“I was actually just about to go out,” Fiona says.
“Huh,” she says, eyeing Fiona’s pajama pants and ratty top. “Well, I can come with. Just gotta put the old morning pick-me-up down somewhere.” She swings the tequila bottle like a pirate.
She tries to take a step in, and Fiona steps in her way.
“I’m not really interested in making old friends,” Fiona says.
Regret purses her lips, “I mean, we’ve been cool before,” she says. “What’s the big harm?”
Fiona’s head is definitely pounding at this point. She guesses she could use a Gatorade. She sighs. She slides her slippers on. The white fuzzy kind.
“There’s a gas station up the street,” Fiona says.
“Yay!” Regret pushes by Fiona and nearly skips down the hardwood-floored hallway into the open kitchen. She sets the liquor on the kitchen counter.
“When did you get rich?” she asks, looking to the left at the huge TV panel hanging from the living room above the stone fireplace. “Do you have a husband?”
She finds the remote in between mustard yellow couch pillows and flicks it on.
Fiona wonders if this is her opportunity to grab her keys and sneak out.
But Regret looks back at her like a mind reader, throwing the remote back. “Alright, let’s go!” She never took her shoes off, so she struts straight back out into the daylight.
The Stop N’ Go gas station is only a five-minute walk up the street to the left, where all the college kids go for drunk cigarettes, but no one calls it that anymore. After a pregnant woman was knifed by her baby daddy in the parking lot last year, everyone just calls it the Stab N’ Grab.
Fiona once went there for condoms and wasn’t paying attention to which ones the cashier put in one of those little white plastic check-out bags. When she got home, she saw they had given her Magnums. Flattering, but completely useless. Since when is regular not the assumed order, she wondered.
They walk in silence for approximately ten seconds before Regret casually throws out: “Remember when you had that fling with that boy who liked to hunt? Didn’t he shoot a horse like right in front of you?”
Fiona looks at her sideways. “Who told you that?”
She shrugs. “I just know things.” She walks on. “Didn’t you still fuck him after?”
Fiona tries not to gnaw on the inside of her cheek. She can see why Regret and her sister got along so well.
Regret opens her mouth again and Fiona’s thinking no matter how insistent she is when they get back to the house about spending time together Fiona is sending her on her way, when a voice calls out from the corner of Wellington and Dreck-Smith, right before the gas station parking lot, “Is that you Fifi?”
“Fifi?” Regret mouths before the figure gets within feet of them.
“Shut up,” Fiona/Fifi mouths back.
Fiona was born way before the stupid baby hippo at the Cleveland Park zoo claimed her name. And Fiona’s mom wasn’t even a hippie who wanted her kid to be special. She’d never even heard of the song “Shadowboxer.” She was a Scottish accountant on her third baby, and when she had Fiona thought her baby was dead for sure because she came out ghost white and not even crying. Fionn in Gaelic means pale. The pronunciation is different and typically masculine, and not even fair to Fiona now, who tans easily and doesn’t resemble her mother’s Scottish ancestry. Her mother, who now teaches A.I. how to answer middle school kids’ homework questions.
“You’re contributing to the dumbification of America’s youth,” Fiona once told her mother as she click-clacked on the computer.
“They’re doomed regardless,” her mother replied, reading glasses on, trying to answer a boy’s question about a science report. “How do you spell aardvark?”
Fiona told her to Google it.
So maybe she had an era of responding to a derivative like Fifi, which sounded like someone who wore lip gloss and always mated her socks. She seemed to be one of those girls whose hearts lived in their vaginas and would enjoy a boy texting her good morning the next day. Someone who a guy like July could be into.
That’s who flashes her a smile now, black hair spiked up naturally and piercing blue eyes trying to figure out the dynamic of her braless figure being leaned into by a fuchsia-mohawked girl whispering very loudly into her ear, “Oh, he’s hot hot.”
July looks Fiona up and down, lingering on the greenish-blue bump on her forehead that Fiona had forgotten was there until now. He takes a hit from the firework he raises to his mouth.
“Oh, that was from softball,” Regret jumps in, covering for her.
July quirks his mouth. “Are you a lesbian now, Fifi?”
The temperature has most definitely risen. The swelter is making her underboobs soggy with sweat.
“I mean, the fit is a little butch,” Regret agrees.
Fiona wants to strangle her.
“How’s June?” Fiona says back at him. She knows that’s the girl July last was hooking up with. A pretty curly-haired bassist in a band called Rat Trapz. She posted a coming-out story recently.
July gets dark in the face. He takes another puff of his firework. Fiona can see the burn mark on his forearm from an incident with the grill. And then he recovers, grinning, but it does not really reach his dazzling eyes.
“Anyways, take care,” he says.
“Right,” Fiona says, grabbing Regret’s hand and pulling her toward the gas station’s entrance.
Fiona catches Regret in her peripheral making the call me sign. July winks back at her.
“He’s not the one who shot the horse, is he?” Regret asks, Fiona still pulling her as Regret watches his back wistfully as he walks away.
“Nah,” Fiona says.
“Good.”
“He was worse.”
“How do you get worse than that?” Regret asks, and Fiona could say how big of a slut he was and share his questionable political views and mention the time where he held her down between the laundry and drying machine but she tears away and marches to the front of the Stab N’ Grab instead.
A weathered man in a red shirt sitting on the curb looks up at her. It’s One-Armed Adam.
“Spare some change?” he asks. He has a Vietnam War Vet cap on. Fiona’s uncle was a Vietnam Vet, but the orange gas messed him up pretty bad, and he would always catch coughing fits during her and her cousin’s choir performances in elementary school.
“Come on,” Regret whispers, and it’s her turn now to try and pull Fiona along. But Fiona stops and pulls out her wallet from her sweatpants.
One-Armed Adam is harmless even when he’s having his breakdowns. The cops sometimes sweep him up if he starts howling, but usually, he’ll just want you to tap dance with him, even though he’s barefoot, or he’ll talk about the one time he was at the zoo and a snake started talking to him. Fiona is pretty sure he stole that idea from the first Harry Potter book.
Fiona fishes around but only has a twenty in cash. She pulls it out and hands it to him. With his good left hand, he puts the brown sack down and reaches out. It’s a crisp, straight bill, but it almost seems to wilt when it falls to his fingers. His arm doesn’t bend at the elbow. He has to shove it in his cut-off jean shorts pocket awkwardly. It looks almost like it hurts. He grunts.
“God bless you,” he says. His watery brown eyes meet hers for a second. She wonders if he coughs badly and has grandchildren who miss him at their recitals. Then he looks down and mutters “Fuck those Mac and Cheese bites,” which are the best seller on the fryer at the Stab N’ Grab, but Fiona thinks maybe One-Armed Adam knows something they don’t so when they finally enter, the little bell ringing to notify the cashier, she stays clear of the grease section.
Regret picks out gummy bears and Crunch bars and opens the bag of Doritos before she pays. When they get to the cashier, she looks at Fiona, “You’ve got your wallet, right?” Her mouth is full of orange chips.
Fiona pulls out her credit card.
Regret scales the packs of cigarettes behind the cashier’s head and the smaller wall decorated with condom brands.
“We have to fight the patriarchy,” she says as she shoves her mouth with more of the addictive triangles.
“What does that even mean?” Fiona asks as the cashier hands a receipt to her. She crumples it up and shoves it in the same pocket as her wallet.
“It means,” Regret says as they turn to leave, “fuck condoms.”
“Oh god,” Fiona says, rolling her eyes.
“I’m serious,” Regret says. “It’s not like the men are getting tested. I say we do the same. Let them catch something that gives them cancer for once.”
“But we are the only ones at risk for dying. You’re going to catch like HPV or something.”
“My mom says everyone had HPV back in the day,” Regret says as they pass One-Armed Adam, who half-heartedly lifts his shoulder. Fiona interprets it as a wave goodbye.
Fiona is more taken aback by Regret’s mention of a parental figure. “Your Mom?”
“Yeah.” Regret sighs. “Nostalgia.”
“Oh,” Fiona says. Sweat drips down her pits and trickles all the way to her ribs.
“She’s cool or whatever,” Regret says. “Just can be hella depressing at times.” She gives a full shrug. “Smokes too much, but everyone’s got a vice.”
“Well, tell your Mom everyone in this generation does not have HPV, and we should wear condoms.”
Regret pats Fiona’s arm. “That’s why we have vaccinations.”
Fiona shakes her head as Regret walks ahead of her.
“You have a charger, right? My phone is dead,” Regret calls out, waving a bedazzled iPhone 11 in the air.
No one uses that kind of phone case anymore, Fiona thinks. Then she wonders where her own phone is. She hasn’t seen it since this morning. She wonders if her mother is in the egg-making mood.
When they get back into the house, Fiona finds her a charge,r but it’s not the right kind.
Regret scrunches her nose up in thought. “I’ve got to run some errands anyway. I’ll be back later. Then we can party.” She strokes the tequila bottle like it’s a child. “Watch her for me,” she says, and then is gone.
When the door closes behind pink hair, Fiona realizes she didn’t even buy a Gatorade. She fishes around for her phone but can’t find it. She gives up and gets back under her covers in her bedroom.
When she dreams, she sees a man with a horse head. He’s holding her by the wrists, and he’s grinning his great big horse teeth at her, and his big horse nose is in her face, and he acts like this is all normal and asks her what’s wrong as he grips her tighter. Then there’s a bang and she screams and she’s standing in the kitchen she grew up in and her half-brother’s holding his arm all funny at his side and his elbow doesn’t look like it’s in the place it should be and her mother is screaming at someone but she’s not sure who and then her sister is behind her only she’s in a twelve-year-old form which would make Fiona thirteen and her sister says wanna raid the liquor cabinet and they get drunk off Peach Schnapps in the basement as shrieking continues above them. Then there’s a crash of glass and she’s on a bed and a girl is kissing her on the mouth and asking her if this is what she likes and she doesn’t say yes only says don’t tell anyone and then the mattress is swallowing her whole and she’s covered in dirt and there’s roaches and worms all over her face and she claws upwards but isn’t sure which way is upright and when she breaks to the surface she’s in the woods and there’s a man standing above her looking at her like she’s crazy with a shotgun and he says it’s only an animal and there’s a horse lying on the ground but when she blinks it switches into a naked body with blood oozing from its skull. She looks back at the man who is grinning and she looks back at the animal except it has long brown hair and freckled arms and traffic cone boobs and she gets a sickening feeling in her stomach and she opens her mouth to say something but the shotgun is aiming at her now and she hears a sick crack and she wakes up gasping.
There’s a buzzing noise behind the headboard, and she reaches for it, her heart still pounding, as her fingers find her sleek phone case.
It’s an unknown number.
She picks it up anyways.
“Hello?”
“I’ve been knocking for like hours,” Regret says. “Open your dang door, I’m trying to drink some tequila.”
Fiona pulls the phone from her face to check the time. 5:25 p.m. She was out for that long? She really must’ve been hungover. She wonders if she has a concussion.
“Coming,” she grumbles and makes her way back downstairs.
“You need a shower,” Regret says almost at the same time as the door swings open, walking in like she owns the place now.
What I need, Fiona thinks, is a drink.
She’s changed her hair again. Lime green streaked extensions mixed with blonde past her shoulders.
“You like?” Regret asks, picking up her tequila bottle from the island, right where she left it.
Fiona isn’t sure if she is asking about the alcohol or her hair.
“I’m trying to bring back punk,” she says with a sidekick for emphasis. “It’s all about effort.” She opens cabinets looking for cups.
“Where are your shot glasses?”
“I don’t do shots,” Fiona says drily.
Regret takes two wine glasses and fills them each a fourth of the way with the brown liquid.
“You do today,” she sings. She skips over to the TV with her cup in hand and picks up the remote.
The screen flips from black to the local news.
“Can you pull up Spotify or something?” she asks.
Fiona walks first to her waiting glass.
“That’s the spirit!” Regret squeals.
As Fiona wraps her hands around the glass, the red and blue flashing lights of a cop car coming from the TV screen catch her eye. A pretty news reporter with red lips stands in front of yellow tape.
The blue bar at the bottom of the screen has white words rolling across it. Something about a gas station.
Fiona’s eyes scan behind the news reporter’s shoulder, where the EMS team has an ambulance open. A battered hat lies on the cement.
“Is it just me,” Regret says, “or does that man look like he only has one arm?” Her eyes are also on the screen, looking at the man being boarded into the ambulance on a gurney.
“Well,” Regret says, already turning away, “Cheers!”
Fiona feels her shoulders slump. Her body slides into one of the kitchen stools her half-brother purchased for her once he found out she had just been using a lawn chair.
They cheer. Take one. Two. Three.
Fiona’s eyes water. Regret sticks out her tongue and shakes her head like a rock star.
Regret leans her head on Fiona’s shoulder. Fiona can smell the lime dye from her hair, and it burns her nostrils.
“Told you we would get along,” Regret says.
Fiona turns her head to see the news has already moved on. A picture of a mother hippo and her child by a man-made watering hole is projected behind a different news reporter. “Fiona to be a sister!” The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo announcement reads.
Regret’s hair tickles Fiona’s neck.
Fiona wonders if twenty dollars is enough to overdose and die from.
- Old Friends and Strangers - May 18, 2025
