Fiction: We Should Do This Again Sometime

By Mallory Smart

 

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a Thursday afternoon.

My husband, Evan, was “vacuuming” the living room with the Roomba with a focus that implied that this moment mattered more than it actually did. I wiped down the kitchen counter and coffee table, even though the only thing that had touched either all day was coffee mugs and the cat.

“Do we look like a total wreck?” Evan asked over the Roomba while putting out Bath and Body Works candles that we never used.

“Nah,” I muttered. “We look like people who’ve moved six times in fifteen years.”

The Roomba finally docked, and I could hear myself think.

“We didn’t move that many times,” Evan argued while clearing out the dust filter.

“No. It’s EXACTLY six,” I said. “I counted earlier while I was scrubbing the sink.”

He nodded like that was useful information and dragged some contraption for collecting cat hair over the rug.

Nick and Riley were coming over.

We used to see them constantly. Whole weekends together at one point. If I were to check my iPhone photos from 2014, every pic would either be of us chilling with them, our cat, or the words “Illuminati Confirmed” scribbled in some inappropriate place. Bobby was usually there too. Not really part of the group exactly, just on the periphery. Our lives were made up of Starbucks hangouts, bonfires, late nights at the movies that no one paid attention to, and random trips to IKEA. Hell, one picture just showed us at a McDonald’s in the dark. Pretty sure we were trying to watch a meteor shower or some cosmic thing like that. We had the kind of friendship you assume will continue forever because you’re not old enough to realize that most things quietly dissolve.

Now we only saw them about once every three years.

It had become a running joke between my husband and I.

“Three years?”

“Guess it’s about time to see Nick and Riley again.”

The weird thing was that it usually happened right around the time we started thinking about moving. Not after we decided or were actively looking. Just when the idea started creeping in and the Ikea app became a fixture on our phones. Around the time when wherever we called home suddenly felt smaller. When the neighbor’s dog seemed louder. When you started looking at Redfin more without meaning to.

Like clockwork, that’s when Nick would text.

“We should get together soon.”

We’d negotiate a time over a period of months and before you knew it, sometime around that 3 year mark would be the settled upon date.

I neurotically wiped the counter again. The place still felt temporary even though we’d lived there over a year. A stack of unopened boxes sat in the basement and the couch was angled slightly wrong because the living rooms from the early 1900’s weren’t built with 21st century furniture in mind.

“You know what’s wild?” I said out loud to no one in particular.

“What?” Evan stopped and took a breath.

“They’re still in that house in Barrington.”

Nick and Riley had lived in the same place for fifteen years which was about the entire time I knew them. Same street with the same row of identical homes. I joked that it was like Edward Scissorhands but that comment was always lost on them. Every time we visited, the place looked exactly the same. Same grayish blue couch. Same rugs. Same feral cat watching us from upstairs.

I’m not sure when, but at one point we realized that their grayish blue couch was the exact same IKEA couch we had in our second apartment. Not similar. The same one. Twins.

The doorbell rang. Or at least that's what my phone said. Thank god for doorbell apps.

Our cat bolted down the hallway and into the designated closet she hid in when intruders came into her home.

“Three years?” Evan shrugged to me.

“Three years,” I sighed.

Then he opened the door while I pretended to be in the middle of doing something.

Nick stood there holding a bottle of wine like no time had passed at all. Riley stood beside him already looking past me into the house. Her eyes said “give me the tour” and mine said “this is it.”

“Hey,” Nick fist bumped Evan. “Cool place.”

“You guys move a lot,” Riley said, stepping inside. Stating the obvious every three years.

“Yeah,” I said. “We get bored easily.” Because that’s just how I roll. When everyone else is awkward, I’m the Chandler ready to save the hangout.

After pleasantries were exchanged and coats collected, Evan poured Bulgarian plum brandy into four shot glasses like he was measuring chemicals. I opened the wine. A bottle of cinnamon flavored mead my sister had given us as a wedding gift years ago manifested as well.

But the Bulgarian plum brandy was the main event.

My polish friend said that Bulgarian plum brandy was actually something his family would heat up when he was a kid and he’d drink it like NyQuil when he was sick. I chased mine with a La Croix that tasted like cough syrup and gagged.

Nick took a sip of the brandy, swished it like mouthwash, and winced.

“Tastes like an abortion clinic in Iceland but with plums.”

Riley stared at her shot glass like she was checking it for a pulse. I kind of spit some of mine back into the glass.

“More like hand sanitizer on fire,” Riley coughed.

“For what it’s worth,” Evan said, taking a sip of the drink he had grown quite accustomed to, “this is exactly what I imagined Bulgarian plum brandy would taste like.”

“Communism?” Nick asked while pouring himself another shot.

“Soviet era cleaning products,” Evan laughed as he poured another shot.

For a hot minute we mulled about in the kitchen with our weird amalgamation of drinks, leaning against counters and cabinets like people waiting for permission to sit down without realizing that I was the person who was supposed to give that permission.

Nick got more into the brandy with each shot and started telling us about some guy on TikTok who had been making videos about how content creators were ruining the art of storytelling.

“There’s this dude who makes videos about how other creators are ruining storytelling,” Nick said.

Riley nodded. She was less like a wife and more like proof for everything he said.

“He filmed one in a parking lot crying about it.”

Evan looked weirded out but in an intrigued way.

“Did it do well?”

Nick shrugged and downed his final shot.

“Two million views.”

“Fuck.”

“In the lit world people don't cry in parking lots,” I said, not entirely sure if that was accurate. “They just wait for their friends to have a mental breakdown so they can turn their text messages into a ‘profound and vulnerable’ CNF for a Tier-1 journal. One guy even went to the funeral of a writer he definitely didn’t know in real life just to get the description of the casket right. He was nominated for Pushcart.”

Nick laughed.

“That’s bleak.”

“It’s accurate,” Evan nodded while pouring more brandy for himself and Nick.

The conversation drifted the way it always did when the four of us were together.

Evan finished his drink and looked around the kitchen.

“Why are we all still standing?”

“No one wants to commit to sitting down,” Riley said while looking at me.

“That’s because if we sit down the night officially starts,” I shrugged while pouring the red wine they brought into a dessert wine glass. 

Nick carried his shot glass and the bottle of mead into the living room and dropped into our IKEA chair like it belonged to him now. Riley and I took the couch that our cat had desecrated. Evan gathered the rest of the drinks and followed us.

For one hot minute nobody said anything. The night had officially started. 

It was a kind of silence that never used to happen with Nick and Riley even when we were close, but one that I’d slowly gotten used to throughout the years. It wasn’t awkward. Just suspended. 

Shockingly, Riley’s voice was the one who broke it.

“So, I’ve been reading Devil in the White City.”

Nick smiled and looked over at it next to him.

I read it maybe a month ago and never put it back on the shelf.

“Why don’t we do World’s Fairs anymore?” he asked.

“Too many serial killers?” I offered.

Riley laughed.

“Who the fuck knows. The internet?”

Slowly, the conversation drifted toward H.H. Holmes because there is no Devil in the White City without a devil.

“Holmes was smart. He didn’t just kill people,” Riley spilled her wine. “He picked people no one would come looking for. Calculating."

I nodded slowly.

“It’s true. It’s like legit what the book’s about. Man was a success because during the World’s Fair you could disappear a person in Chicago and it would take forever before anyone noticed.” 

Riley made a face. “That’s if anybody notices.”

“Yeah, but you can’t really get away with that kind of thing these days,” I shrugged. No World’s Fairs. No serial killers. Nothing but brandy and four people not being silent about murder.

Nick tilted his head playfully.

“Why not? Who says you can’t get away with something like that now.”

“Phones,” Riley said while lightly slapping the back of his head. “Everyone’s texting constantly. Social media. TikTok. It’s literally your job. Everyone has a phone and someone would notice if you just vanished off the algorithm."

Nick swished his drink again like mouthwash.

“Nah. That's just an obstacle. Those kinds of things can be fixed. Easily.” He leaned back and swished the mead around in his mouth with the confidence of a man who also made a living off of exploiting other people’s idiosyncrasies and luring them in with a charming personality.

Riley raised her left eyebrow in a way that I never could.

“Easily?”

Nick shrugged, spilling some perfectly disgusting mead on the floor.

“You just find someone nobody would immediately miss if they went missing.”

The whole room went silent. I could hear the neighbors outside. Riley taking a deep breath in. Our fridge humming in the kitchen.

Evan was looking down at his glass for what felt like a solid minute and finally said it.

“Bobby.”

The name landed in the room with the kind of weight that our century-old floorboards couldn’t support.

It sounded less like a suggestion and more like a culmination. No one questioned why. All those years and nothing had really changed.

Bobby had been orbiting our lives since our twenties. A guy Nick and Evan went to high school with, and for some reason, kept track of. The guy who showed up to things he wasn’t invited to and stayed too long. Bobby had an annoying way of inserting himself into conversations and bending them toward whatever he was obsessed with that month.

Once he showed up to another friend’s birthday party with a Target bag full of old VHS tapes, he insisted everyone needed to see. VCR or not. When we ignored him, he just randomly started explaining the historical inaccuracies in Braveheart, even though no one had mentioned it. 

At another party, he started rearranging our bookshelf by what he called “narrative integrity.” I found a stack of my books he deemed unworthy in the basement.

Nick stared into his once again empty shot glass like it was the only thing that truly understood him. His expression was somewhere between Don Draper and Clark Griswold.

“You know nobody would report him missing for like at least a week. Minimum. Right?”

“That’s not true,” I said reflexively. 

Nick shrugged animatedly and looked at all of us while laughing.

“Seriously, tell me who’d notice first?”

No one uttered a word. The humming of our fridge in the background now buzzed like it had gone to 11.

The room was again stuck in that heavy silence. But this kind was filled with the quiet acceptance of knowing that everyone was thinking the same thing. 

Evan tilted his glass slowly and owned it, “The logistics wouldn’t even be that hard.” 

Riley looked at him. “You’ve legit thought about this.” 

“Who hasn’t?” Evan shot back. 

“He’d get in a car with anyone,” Nick muttered. His fingers were still toying with his shot glass. “Just say you found a vintage Indiana Jones something or other somewhere and he’s in. Boom. Achievement unlocked.” 

“You’d have to stagger his Twitter posts so it doesn’t look scheduled, though,” Nick added. 

Nobody laughed. Just looked off into the distance like our souls had left our bodies because they clearly did.

Nick stared at the coffee table like he was doing math. Evan looked at the social media scheduler on his phone and sighed. 

“Indiana Jones tweets or something weirdly political,” he said to Nick. 

“Park his car at O’Hare,” Evan added. “Long-term parking. Pay in cash.” The four of us sat there just existing in the same space. 

For one brief shining moment, it felt exactly like being twenty-seven again. And then it was midnight.

Finally, Nick slapped his thighs in that Midwest way. Riley met his eyes and started to get up.

“Well,” he sighed after looking at his Apple Watch. “Probably a good place to stop planning the perfect crime.”

They left.

Evan locked the door.

We could finally breathe.

“Well,” he said.

“Yeah.”

We scanned our home.

The coffee table was a graveyard of alcohol and weird decisions.

Four shot glasses. Two half-empty wine bottles. A sticky bottle of mead. Countless crumpled La Croix cans.

Evan looked at his phone.

“Is it fucked that I feel better?” he asked.

I looked at the boxes in the hallway. I thought about Nick and Riley in their identical gray stasis in Barrington. 

We were all going through the same motions, moving or not moving, doing shots and dodging the realization that we had nothing left to say to each other.

Then I thought about Bobby. 

Currently alive. Probably wearing that fedora. Unaware that he was the only thing keeping the four of us in the same room.

I knew Bobby still inexplicably showed up to things he wasn’t invited to. Stayed too long. Talked too much. And managed to make everyone slightly uncomfortable.

For fifteen years, he appeared in the background of our lives like it was the most natural thing in the world.

But maybe that’s just how it works. Maybe every group needs that person that everyone else quietly agrees they wouldn’t miss.

The strange part was that somehow none of us had ever said Bobby’s name out loud before tonight.

I sat down on our IKEA couch and let my head hit the cushion.

“No,” I finally said to Evan. “Not fucked at all.”

I looked at the mess on the table.

The sheer volume of things we’d had to consume just to find a reason to like each other again.

Evan stared at it too.

Neither of us moved to clean anything up. It was all too bleak.

The room was quiet again. The same suspended quiet from earlier in the night. Only now it felt like we had crossed some invisible line together and didn’t know how to uncross it.

Evan nodded and rubbed his hands together slowly like he was still thinking something through.

“O’Hare would work,” he said, not looking up.

Then shook his head like he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

I looked back at him and touched his cheek.

“We should do this again sometime.”

Evan leaned his head back against the couch next to me and closed his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sometime…”

 

 

 

 

 

Mallory Smart is the author of The Only Living Girl in Chicago and I keep My Visions To Myself. She is also the founder of Maudlin House. Socials: IG/Twitter @malsmart and Bluesky @mallorysmart