Evee's Book

Two old friends meet in a familiar place and finally accept that they might be more than just friends after all.

When I found Evee, she looked like s**t. All things considered, Evee was the prettiest girl I knew, the first girl I’d ever slept with, and my best friend. So if any guy was allowed to say she looked like s**t, it would be me.

 

When I say I ‘found’ Evee, I don’t mean that it was a chance encounter. I’d been looking for her since I heard the rumour that she’d overdosed on crystal methamphetamine somewhere up in Nova Scotia. I know for a fact that E hadn’t done drugs since her cousin, who she adored, died of an overdose on her birthday. She also couldn’t get to Nova Scotia because she didn’t have a passport, which I knew because she told me last month when she had ‘died in a car crash’ twice, and ‘been pregnant with triplets’ all in the same week. I’d found her here that time, too.

 

‘Here’ was a rundown Barnes & Noble in Hoboken, New Jersey. Evee Delaney was a local celebrity back home in New York- local enough that no one gave a s**t about her across the state line. Sure enough, there she was when I walked in, her little actress’s frame wedged soundly between the shelves of horror and erotica. Evee’s life story at a glance.

 

She didn’t look up from her book when I went to stand over her, looking down at her bad skin and bloodshot eyes. “Jim.” She acknowledged simply, turning the page. “How’d you find me here?”

 

I reached down and took the book from her hands, looking at the cover. I knew the dark romance well. Evee must have read this book a hundred times. She was looking up at me expectantly, so I crouched down on the brown carpet beside her, jamming the book between two paperbacks on the nearest shelf. When I looked at Evee, I didn’t see the crazy actress that graced headlines, I say the girl who had stuck with me for ten years, since we’d met in high school. I remembered our first job we’d gotten together here, and stuffing our hormone-soaked bodies between these same shelves all those years back. That was the best s****y job any kid ever had.

 

Answering her question, I said, “You always go here, E. You don’t think about it, but this is where you always end up.”

 

Evee twitched, seeming annoyed at her predictability. She pushed her shocking mane of orange hair out of her too-big eyes and shifted herself deeper into the cavity between the cheap shelving units. 

 

“So, I heard you were shooting meth up in Canada,” I said to break the silence. I didn’t find it awkward when we didn’t speak, but E always got twitchy.

 

“Yeah. I heard I committed suicide by jumping out in front of a speeding train.” She looked down her nose at me from under way too much mascara. “I didn’t.” 

 

“I know,” I said, but for some ridiculous reason, it was good to hear her saying those words in her placating way. I wanted to write her a script so that she would know exactly what to do, exactly what to say to me. It would only have one line. “I promise, Jim, I will not kill myself.” Things were harder in Evee’s world. 

 

We sat quietly for a little while, and then Evee began absentmindedly kicking the s**t out of a bookshelf, so I grabbed her book from behind me and threw it at her. “For God’s sake, E, relax. What are you here for this time, anyway?” My mind flashed to this afternoon, the phone call, her voice, her sobs. I pushed those thoughts away.

 

“There’s just,” Evee swallowed hard. “There’s just a lot going on sometimes, you know?”

 

I don’t think she understood how much I meant it when I said “Yeah. Yeah, I know.” It struck me suddenly how silent the little bookstore was, and that it was probably dark out by now. The store would be closing soon.

 

“Do you want to stay at my place tonight? We’re gunna be kicked out of here soon.”

 

“They wouldn’t dare,” she mumbled, hesitating. She was probably remembering the last time she’d stayed at my place. The press had picked it up as some kind of sex scandal (she’d had a boyfriend at the time) and for weeks people were waggling their eyebrows at me on the street and pointing me out as ‘the guy who screwed Evee Delaney’. Sure, maybe like, five years ago, but now? I frowned, feeling old. Now we were just tired old friends. Which I guess was what we’d always been, since the first day we’d met. 

 

"Nevermind if you don't want to, I can give you a ride home, or somewhere, I don't know, wherever--"

 

“Shut up, Jim.”

 

“Right.”

 

“You’re place is fine. That’d be great, actually.”

 

Before we headed out into the bleak grey of New Jersey twilight, Evee approached the counter and deftly pulled out her credit card to purchase the chubby little paperback she’d read so many times she probably had it memorized. I shook my head in disbelief. She’d probably abused her copy to the point where it had just disintegrated. Evee thanked the kid at the desk and then slipped her hand into mine as we walked out the door.

 

Later that night, with my best friend asleep in my bed, I rolled off of the couch and grabbed Evee’s book out of the bag she’d left on the coffee table. Flopping back down to flip through those familiar pages, I remembered everything. Again, I felt so old. Some nondescript feeling of youth and longevity crawled into my veins as I skimmed the same words that she had read out loud to me so many years ago, back in the Hoboken Barnes & Noble.

 

“Guys should be more like this,” sixteen year old Evee had commented. “I bet a lot more girls would want to get fresh with you if you read this s**t. And seriously Jim, you need all the help you can get. No offense,” she’d laughed, ever the sarcastic one, then continued to bore me with the details of the vampire protagonist’s obscure sexual conquests. It was as if every day of our lives was pasted into these pages like newspaper clippings in a diary. Why did it seem like all of this had taken place in such a distant past?

 

Pissed off at myself for getting all sentimental over a book, I got up from the couch and stretched my sore arms above my head. I heard Evee sneeze from down the hall, which made me smile. Without really knowing it, I was walking down the corridor to my room, slowly feeling my way along the wall. When I got to the threshold, the door was wide open. E never slept with the door shut, I knew that about her. I hadn’t necessarily been planning to just walk in, but then I was in the room, pulling back the covers and crawling in beside her, thinking about how it was impossible to miss something I still had right here.

 

Evee turned in her sleep and elbowed me roughly in the chest, snoring. She mumbled something unintelligible, trying to duck her head under my shoulder. I laughed and said simply “Goodnight, Evee.”

 

I think she opened her eyes, but she didn’t move. “Why am I in your bed?” she mumbled vaguely, but I didn’t bother answering. She was already asleep

Author's Note

If you find any typos or have any suggestions at all, please let me know. : ) And, do I sound like a guy? It's hard writing this shit as a guy. Just sayin.
:edit: ok well, the first time I typed this up, I missed a sentence of dialogue, so if you were wondering why Evee said shut up when Jim wasn't even talking...now you know : )

Reviews

[hiralarious]

Hm, it kind of sounds a bit too feminine at first but since you revealed that it was a male earlier on, I just was in the mindset that it was a guy for the latter part(which had more dialogue, so it was pretty darn obvious). Anyway, I LOVE this.. you could totally write a novel with this(which, if you ever do, I so want to read!). Great writing and I hope to see more(:
I'll read more when I have time, anyway.