“Explain it then!” I yelled at him, trying to convince him into telling me. I didn’t even know what I did, let alone understand why she was mad at me. She seemed like a loyal friend in the pictures of us together. So why was she acting like this, especially right after my accident? She could have had the decency to at least wait until I remembered before she got angry at me.
Oli stuttered slightly. Then he stopped what he was doing and just fled to the kitchen. I heard him clanging glasses together and slamming cupboard doors. Did he just run away from me?
I yelled at him again, “What are you doing in there? What did I do?”
He popped his head out of the kitchen, flicked his long hair to the side of his head, scratched his tattooed arm and then came back towards me with a bottle of wine and some whiskey.
“Whiskey or wine?” He said, trying to avoid eye contact with me.
“Stop avoiding the question.” I said.
“Wine it is then?” He placed down the glass and smiled at me but I didn’t even care to move a muscle back.
“What did I do to her?” I said again, for the third time.
“Alright, alright.” He said. He picked up a picture from the scrambled mess of the collection from the coffee table and handed it to me. It had two girls, both wearing fishnet tights with black boots. They were wearing all black, but the photograph had cut out their faces so you could only see them from the waist down. “So basically this happened a long time into your friendship and our relationship… maybe you’d known us all 6 months or so…” He was still being hesitant.
I held the photograph upwards. “Who is that?” I said.
Oli looked like a deer in the headlights, like he wanted to just take off there and then. But he stayed calm and proceeded. “So I don’t actually know her name. Nobody did. You never talked about that night again. And Mercedes was so upset and diminished about it, that she never even bothered to tell us her name either. The name isn’t important. All we know about what happened is that Mercedes is a lesbian. She’s always been one, but she’s never really gone on dates or looked for romance with other girls. She slept around a lot though, I heard.” He sniggered a bit and then tried to carry on. “But one day, she met this girl that ‘changed her life’ as she told us over and over again. She’s a wary person about relationships, so she didn’t rush into introducing her to us at all. She’d be out of town for weeks because she was spending time with this mystery girl.”
I’m looking at the photograph. I must have met the girl if I had taken a picture of her, from the waist down. “So what happened?” I asked him.
He let out a huge sigh. “You were supposed to be by my side that night. We were at a house party, and they wanted my band to play a few songs in the living room. You were watching me sing for ages, and then suddenly, I look up and you had disappeared. Next thing we know, we hear a window being smashed, so everyone freaks out, especially the host of the party, who shut off the music and started screaming at everyone, telling them to leave.”
I’m still so confused. “What? A window? What happened?”
He took a sip of his whiskey, pouted as the wave of bitterness hit him, and then slammed the glass down. “What we think happened, although Mercedes never actually told us, was that you went into the kitchen, and her girlfriend had come in through the sliding door at the party. You told me they were arguing when you came in, and you were in the middle of it. You told me that Mercedes girlfriend was so angry, she grabbed you and made out with you in front of Mercedes, and then suggested that you were a better match for her than arrogant Mercedes. Then the girl ran out of the sliding door, slamming it behind her so hard that the glass smashed. And Mercedes never heard from her again. She was devastated. And she’s always thought it was your fault.”
My fault? If they were already arguing, her girlfriend must have only kissed me to make Mercedes jealous. Why would Mercedes hate me for that? Come on. That’s just stupid, and childish. Fuck her.

Notes