The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan

cabinets for this bag of Goldfish.
    “I can’t believe you don’t believe me about this. It’s really pissing me off.”
    “I can tell.”
    “Arrgh! This is really pissing me of f !” His eyes were frustrated and angry in a way I hadn’t seen before, and for some reason it satisfied me. I sat on the couch and opened my laptop.
    In years to come he would whisper it at parties as the cake paraded by or mouth it across a restaurant table at a sibling’s birthday dinner. Cha-cha-cha, he would provoke. Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.
    There was silence for a while and I knew he was brooding.
    “Sometimes I hate you,” he said. He let the words hang for a moment and then came over and sat next to me, tousling my head into the pillow and kissing me lightly on each eye.
    I only tell this story because it reflects why the Yahtzee was so essential.
    * * *
    There were six of us. Danny, the bearded Noah, the delicate Eric, the old artistic director, and Olivia, whom I hated. Cape Cod was abandoned but we were up in the artistic director’s Provincetown shack for a post-cast-party party. Danny was doing summer stock again and I’d driven up for the final performances. I actually ate a lobster by myself before I got to the theater—picking wet meat out of knuckles as I watched the summer’s final families appear from a dune drop-off and bang Boogie Boards against the sides of their cars.
    The show was terrible for two reasons: one, that the show was terrible, and two, that it involved a lot of kissing. They giggled together, Danny smiling with his eyes inches from Olivia’s—pulling at her belt loop and touching her earlobe, which I’d taught him. I wasn’t usually so particular about the girls he kissed onstage but there was something about her I didn’t like. It started the moment I saw them enter together onstage—holding hands—something disgusting growing in the back of my stomach. She was masculine almost, like an attractive cross dresser, and her genuine tomboyishness unsettled me.
    At the party, she wore an actual T-shirt, not fitted or branded, and a flat-brimmed hat with the name of a New Orleans bait shop in neon orange. She drank a beer from the bottle and teased the boys, who didn’t realize they stopped talking whenever she started to tell a story. I’d clicked through her pictures a few times that summer and imagined, on nights when Danny didn’t text back, rehearsals that ended in beers and joints on beaches.
    “Show her the one with the square penis!” Olivia laughed, and we all lunged up a banisterless staircase. “Ricky’s partner is a painter,” she explained. “And he has this painting of a square penis.”
    “It’s not that funny.” Ricky, the artistic director, was as drunk as the rest of us.
    “It is, Rick,” said Noah. “It’s ingenious.”
    “Fuck off.”
    “It actually is!” The house was old and decorated with an enviable authenticity. We wove through rusted signs and relics from the Army-Navy store until we arrived at the painting, where everyone promptly knelt. I stood awkwardly, not sure whether or not I was involved.
    “Get out of here.” Ricky whacked Eric on the back of the head. “You’re not worthy.”
    “We know,” said Danny. “Trust me, we know.”
    “You’re making yourself look stupid in front of your girlfriend, you know that?” It was a line from the play and everyone died. Olivia literally rolled onto her side and I felt an odd nostalgia for my high school friends and the days when everyone shared the same world of people. Noah pulled her up and I noticed the print on her T-shirt for the first time. There was a dinosaur that appeared to be riding a bike below a REX’S FIX UPS AND MIX UPS . It looked familiar: I remembered someone somewhere making a joke about that dinosaur, laughing in some bar about its tiny hands leaning down toward the bike’s handles. Eventually, Noah and Eric went downstairs to pack a bowl and I slipped a hand into Danny’s