You Must Go and Win: Essays by Alina Simone Page B

crawled out of my mouth.
    “Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
    And then he ran up Hope Street, in search of someone hotter and more fuckable. I made sure he had fully faded from view before turning into our doorway. Then I unlocked the metal gate and stepped onto an echoey landing full of trash bins and debris. There was a bright bar of light beneath our door and I could already hear the music blasting before I turned the knob. When I walked into the living room I found Sarah, hair tied back with a sparkly wrap, broom in hand.
    “Great news,” she beamed. “I found us a third roommate!”
    A third roommate? But the apartment only had two bedrooms and weren’t they both full of Sarah and me? I remember Sarah mentioning that she and Becca had once rented out the ledge on top of the bathroom cube. It was a shelf of space maybe three feet high with just enough room for a futon—ideal for vampires or people who happened to lack a torso. The girl lasted for three months before vanishing one day without a word to anyone.
    “You mean for up there ?” I asked, gesturing toward the bathroom.
    “No, silly! Here .” Sarah waved her hands vaguely at the air around us.
    I scanned the room—the kitchen table? the counter? the windowsill?—and gave Sarah an uncomprehending look.
    “Duh? They’re going to build a room.”
    “They’re going to build a room inside the living room? But … where ?”
    She walked over to the space right by the front door, the place where we flipped through the mail, the few feet we cut right across without even thinking on our way to go pee. Sarah whirled around.
    “Right … here!” she announced.
    “But that’s hardly any room!”
    “Well, she’s only paying five hundred a month,” Sarah said, shrugging a little.
    “She’s paying five hundred a month to live in the spot we leave our umbrellas?” I could feel the hysteria edging into my voice.
    “I know, bargain, right? That girl who lived on top of the bathroom paid nine hundred. But remember, this girl has to, like, build the whole room too. And have you been to Lowe’s lately? Sheetrock’s ex-peeeen-sive .”
    Sarah went off in search of a dustpan and I continued to stare at the scuffed piece of floor where she’d stood, not understanding how anyone could possibly envision a home for herself in a carpet-sized space whose only amenity was an electrical outlet. Or, for that matter, on top of a bathroom, where someone might very well be pooing right beneath her sweet ear. Yet who was I to judge? I, who slept on an air mattress in a ridiculously expensive room? I, who had only recently rid myself of fleas? Hope Street, I realized, was nothing more than a refugee camp, a tent city for the young, the poor, and the restless, the former residents of flyover states yearning to breathe free; for unwashed, muddled masses in search of opportunity, and dubious men in search of drummer concubines. The sunset gates of the Bedford Street L marked the beginning of our Camino Francés, our Santa Fe Trail, our Yellow Brick Road, and like the first settlers, we would stake our flags in dumpsters and basements, in closets big enough for a bedroll; we would float from room to room holding our laptops aloft like divining rods, in search of free signal. We would
squat here until our acorns took root, until our internships bloomed into production assistantships and our air mattresses filled with down.
    Like it or not: I was one of them.
     
     
    The holidays were upon us and while I was fairly certain that I could handle Christmas, the approach of New Year’s Eve had me considering seppuku. The day had always been an exquisite torment. I mean, was it humanly possible to have enough fun to fulfill the potential of New Year’s? There would be a man in a parka on TV reporting from Times Square. In reality, he couldn’t be colder if someone slipped a frozen can of Diet Coke between his balls, yet he would be smiling with all forty teeth. And he would be