Before leaving, they decide it’s going to be “one of those nights.” One of those nights where you black out. One of those nights where you fall in love with someone in the bathroom, kneeling over a line of cocaine. One of those nights where you fall into a web of memories only to forget by the time the sun rises over the east. Mako Discotheque in Genoa, Italy, didn’t even open until 11:30 at night. A queue began filling in a sardine-like manner at around 10:45, and the American students didn’t show up until midnight. Beforehand, Alexa handed out a dosage of Adderall for each of the boys: Heming, Eli, and Mack. Alex is somewhat of a ring leader in the sense that if she were to jump off a bridge, so would Heming, Eli, and Mack. The night before, and not too far from the previous suggestion (despite its implication of supposition), drunk on wine and high on the artistry of being twenty in Europe, she stumbled down a short and narrow shit-stained street, high heels flung in the sand and nearly nude body wading into the Ligurian Sea at Vernazzola Beach. Eli and Heming trailed behind her with little to no regard for wiping out the footsteps she’d taken in the sand—evidence of Alex sunken into nothing. 

“I know you’re not about to wear your Converse to the club tonight,” Heming said to Alex as they stood in front of the bathroom mirror, his air of judgment unable to be masked as playful. 

Thin black tights ran in torn seams up the length of Alex’s legs, a black skirt hugging her thighs. At her feet, faded white leather sneakers. “What’s wrong with it? Do you actually expect me to go to the bar in heels?” 

The two squabble back and forth, Heming raising sentiments of European club attire and Alex firing back with an argument hinging on her mental and physical well-being. The conversation ended with Alex’s feet in camel-brown and cream-heeled sandals. The pair—Alex and Heming, Heming and Alex—came together as two people who might’ve known each other in a past life. Whatever Alex was thinking, Heming said first. Whatever eye roll Heming was about to conduct, Alex beat him to the punch. 

Nearly the whole group– the four of them– had met at orientation for the study abroad program. Fast-forming late March friendships blossomed into early May miseries that love company, their hopes to fall from the petals of flowers blooming in a French spring. At orientation, they’d learned the hard truth of their “rigorous, extensive language training:” It really was “rigorous” and “extensive.” Based in Grenoble, this particular course is hosted by the student’s university as an option to complete second-year language requirements and is taught by their university professors. All twenty students learned to curse their school’s romance language department, wondering how they could be so cruel to jam 30 weeks of foreign language study into 24 four-hour class sessions. Their class schedule and required activities left them only one weekend away from their home base in Grenoble, France. At Alex’s insistence, the group went to Northern Italy to spend a weekend drinking wine, eating pasta, and complaining about returning to France. “I never thought I’d be so happy to leave France,” Mack had said, gaining shared sentiments from the others. 

In circumstances such as these, friendships form fast—Alex knew this. Heming fell into place almost immediately as her best friend in the program. He liked Lana Del Rey, and so did she. She loved being dramatic, just as he does. Heming’s eyes are the first she looks for when something goes awry, when something funny happens. There’s comfort in this fast-acting friendship—something so seamless must be built to last. 

On the other side of the same coin is Mack. He reminded Alex too much of her boyfriend from home– the one she fights with often, whom she tells Eli, Mack, and Heming that she’s going to marry, despite the fact that she stays up at night attempting to silence all the reasons to leave him. Mack and Jones, Alex’s boyfriend, have the same tongue-in-cheek humor that makes Alex laugh, the same brown eyes for drowning in, the same constellation of freckles across the top of their perfectly pointed noses. Except Mack had everything Jones didn’t. He had a particular touch of emotionality that Jones lacked, a degree of humanity Alex missed, and a look in his eyes that keyed Alex into everything they couldn’t say, as to do so would be too illicit. Under the light of Mack’s gaze, Alex felt understood, and the warmth and familiarity of such a feeling was the most significant missing piece in her relationship with Jones, keeping Alex up at night and counting the days until she felt love for Jones again. 

Jones was mundane, but Mack– he was celestial. 

Thoughts of Jones resided in the space between the eight lost hours of time difference from France to Chicago. Most of the time, while she was abroad, at least, she forgot she had a boyfriend at all. When they were home, though, she loved him. Or when they were together, she loved him. It was when she was alone that the thoughts caught up to her. Early in the morning, late in the afternoon, into dusk. Watercolor-painted sunsets are perfect for pondering. She’d sit by the ledge of her apartment, wondering if it was ever possible to stop loving someone, and if it wasn’t possible, does that mean she never loved him at all? Midwestern nights couldn’t face what became so clear on the Mediterranean. 

Forgoing easily forgotten thoughts of Jones, Genoa landed on the top of her head. Tonight, since the disco laid the scenery for “one of those nights,” they decided, quite quickly, that the night was meant to be a tequila night. Four pints from a convenience store bottom shelf sat on the counter of their Airbnb, slowly and then rapidly disappearing into concoctions mixed with orange juice and Sprite, their vision getting blurry, inhibitions falling low. Mack drank the most out of anyone. Being in a fraternity back at their home university, one of the few midwestern public Ivys, none of his friends felt the need to slow him down despite how quickly he began turning a corner. Eli and Alex watched wearily as Mack finished his smooth, drawling Italian tequila pint, his olive-tanned hands stealing Alex’s pint from her grasp when he wanted more. It was only eleven, half an hour before they planned to walk along the Corso Italia, running parallel to a salt-spraying sea. 

At the club, dominated by a population of Italian locals, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to the students yet nevertheless was, Mack stumbled about, spilling Alex’s drink, hanging onto Eli like a blind man, bothering Heming with that long-gone look in his eyes and a smirk that Alex wished could be reserved for only her. But, it never would be– not as long as Jones waited for her at home. Cheeks flushed with shades of crimson and cherry, ankles rolling with pressure from wearing three-inch heels, Alex and Eli found themselves in the bathroom, chattering away like school girls.

“Alex, you’re going to die when I tell you this,” Eli said, a manic look behind drunk eyes. “But you can’t tell anyone.” 

“Tell me,” she slurred in response. 

Eli looked around the single-stall bathroom wearily as if ears could be listening to the secrets he was about to share. “Heming and I hooked up.” Oh, an important fact: Eli is gay, too, making it even more baffling why Jones couldn’t stand the idea of Alex going on a trip with a group of three guys. (“Literally only one of them is straight,” she’d told him when they argued about this exact moment. “I don’t care who’s gay. Mack is straight, and so are you, and I don’t trust him.” The conversation ended there. Alex went anyway.)

“NO.”

“Yes, it was so weird,” Eli began, “as soon as we were alone in his room, he started, like, taking off his clothes and kissing me, and I just sort of went with it.” 

If Alex had been sober, her skin might’ve felt a cast of goosebumps light up or noticed the sinking feeling in her stomach, telling her something wasn’t right. But she wasn’t sober, not even a little bit, and so she said, “holy shit, how come you didn’t tell me sooner? This is INSANE,” in the way that girls do when gossiping. 

Eli’s affinity for chatter, giggles, and silliness is what Alex liked most about him. Nothing was ever too serious when Eli was around. They poked fun at one another, Eli unable to get enough of the humor that was Alex’s inability to get her shit together. Stains sank into her clothes (as the messy eater she is), polish chipped off her nails, and French didn’t quite sound right coming out of her mouth. The list goes on. “Messy, messy girl,” Eli says with a broad, contagious grin at least every other day.  

“I know, I know.” From then on, Eli and Alex were a team without either of them realizing it. 

The night waged on. Despite being enhanced by strobe lights and Tequila Sunrises, Mako Discotheque offers nothing much of note. Mack, drunker than Alex had seen a man in a very long time, asked her to take him home, purely platonically, he claimed, but she refused. Why should she have to leave early just because Mack couldn’t handle all the tequila he insisted on drinking? Moreover, how could she justify leaving the club with him– the boy Jones so furiously disapproved of? She couldn’t. She hadn’t spiraled quite that far away from herself yet. Alex sent him home with Heming and called it good. All Heming needed to do was put Mack in bed and let Eli and Alex into the apartment when they got back in about an hour. 

Two hours later, Heming did not let Eli and Alex back into the apartment. Though three and a half hours later, he finally did. By then, Alex’s voice was hoarse from screaming at the window, begging someone to hear them and let them in the building, and blood covered Eli’s skin from when he fell off the terrace trying to scale the walls of the apartment in an attempt to find their way inside. 

Heming came outside with his face flushed and eyes heavy and found Alex in tears and Eli resting his head on the sidewalk. For the first hour they were outside, Eli and Alex called and called, leaving message after message. Voicemails turned into screeches, Alex’s naturally kind-mannered temperament fading into anger, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, waking up anyone within a half-mile radius. Inpatient Italians yell back at her in a language she couldn’t understand. At an hour and a half, the pair decide it’s time to take action. 

“Okay, let’s just try to keep our heads on straight,” Eli tells her.

“Right, right, okay.”

“We left the balcony doors unlocked, right?”

“Right.” 

“We’re going to climb up there.” 

“No.”

“Yes,” he insisted. He’ll do it, Eli said. It’s only the third floor, she reasoned. It’ll probably be fine, he agreed. Eli attempted twice, cutting his hand the first time and falling half a story to the ground after his second. Bleeding, bruised, and broken, he laid his head on the concrete, making the rigid floor comfortable enough to stay the night. 

“I can’t believe this shit,” Alex said.

“Moi aussi.”

“C’est incroyable,” She barks a laugh as she says it, the pure absurdity of the situation not lost on her. 

Alex had called Jones in a state of panic, trying to explain to him how scary it was that she was about to– quite literally– sleep on the streets of an Italian town she knew nothing about. “Can you stop crying and being a little bitch? You’re being dramatic– you’ll be fine,” Jones said. “Fuck off,” Alex responded, breaking her heart as she said it. Never had they spoken to each other like that; something had broken, and both of them knew. 

Once back inside, Heming lay in bed next to Mack, which struck Alex and Eli as odd, considering Alex and Heming were sharing a bed for this trip. Thoughts of splintering love and a wasted two years spiraled in her mind, her head too full to deeply analyze the scene before her. She went to bed, dreaming of time machines and payback, American soil and familiarity, melancholy song lyrics and how she could convince herself to pretend that conversation with Jones never happened. 

Author’s Note