Blast From The Past 1 by Faith Winslow Page B

hair salons and tattoo parlors to fortune tellers and pawn shops.
    Believe it or not, according to recent statistics, there are more than eighty bars included among South Side’s various businesses (if you don’t believe me, look it up on the internet). And, believe it or not, out of all eighty of those bars, when I chose to go out for a drink one night, I actually chose to go to exactly the right bar, at exactly the right moment.
    I couldn’t have even been at Carson Café for ten minutes when, out of the blue, someone came over and said something to me as I was sipping my draft beer, alone in a booth.
    “Holy shit,” the voice said. “Patty? Patty Williams—is that you?”
    I looked up to see a voluptuous, large-chested woman in front of me, with a mop of pink hair atop her head and a bull’s-ring piercing through her septum. Her arms and décolletage were covered with tattoos, and her face was gussied up with makeup. But, still… something about her looked familiar.
    I felt a smile creep across my face as I registered hers. “Yep, it’s me,” I said, “but I go by Trish these days… And, I’m sure you still go by Julie.”
    Julie Benson had lived down the hall from me in the dorms at Pitt. She was a year younger than me, and was one of my more casual acquaintances—and, suffice to say, back then, she was much different. She was thin and had dark blonde hair, and was kind of an all-American party girl, if you know what I mean; nothing like the plump punk princess that stood before me in Carson Café.
    “Wow, I’m surprised you recognized me,” Julie said, sitting down in the booth across from me. “I look a lot different than I used to.”
    “You sure do,” I admitted. “It took me a minute to realize it was you.”
    “I knew it was you the second I saw you,” Julie chimed back. “You look the same as you did in college. You haven’t aged a bit—you still look like you’re twenty.”
    “Well, I feel like I’m forty,” I laughed.
    “So why Trish now? And when did you get back to Pittsburgh?” Julie asked. “I haven’t seen you around here for—what? Six years? So, where’d you go, and why’d you come back?”
    “That’s a lot of questions,” I said, laughing even harder.
    “Asking questions is what I do for a living,” Julie said. “I’m a journalist. I write for the Arts & Entertainment section of the Pittsburgh Metro . So, what’s the scoop, Trish? Tell me your story… I swear, everything you say is off the record.”
    I went on to tell Julie about how I moved to Cincinnati after graduation, and about how I recently got an awesome position in Pittsburgh. I even told her about my relationship with Erik, and about his relationship with Sasha.
    It was really easy to talk with Julie—and it was just as easy to listen. She filled me in on what she’d been up to over the past several years and explained how she’d inadvertently stumbled into a career in journalism, which was a rather interesting story.
    Apparently, Julie didn’t have a job right out of college, so she spent most of her time partying. She went to a concert one night, then read a review of it in Pittsburgh Metro the next day. She didn’t agree with the review at all and emailed the A&E editor about it. He responded by writing, “Think you can do better?”—and, the rest, as they say, is history… She wrote back and accepted his challenge, and he was so impressed with the review she wrote that he gave her a trial run as a reporter and, eventually, hired her, despite the fact that her undergraduate degree was in biology.
    Julie and I sat and talked for about three hours, and we probably could have talked for three more. But when the bouncer came around for last call, we knew it was time to call it quits—and Julie bought us another round, to drink as we concluded our conversation.
    We exchanged contact information and made open-ended plans to hang out again soon. I could tell that this wasn’t one of those