EIGHT FLOORS (2F)
Eight apartments. Eight lives mid-thought. One rogue firework tearing through them all.
A neon drizzle falls from the sky. Noemie and Amina kiss their cigarettes together on the balcony before lighting them with a single flame. Their eye makeup is tear-smudged.
“Gosh, you and those stupid filter things. There’s no way to make cigarettes healthy.”
Noemie cackles, leaning over the balcony.
“Also those plastic shits pollute the planet. You’re saving yourself at the cost of our fucking planet.”
The girls fall into each other laughing.
“No… you’re kidding yourself AND fucking the planet.”
She aims her disposable camera at Amina who makes a kissy face with her burgundy-wine-tinted lips. The flash momentarily blinds her.
“Bitch, please! What about your disposable camera,” she slurs. “Them shits are not biodegradable. Anyway, all this crap is already manufactured so whether we buy them or not,” HICCUP “the planet is fucked.”
They stumble back inside to perch on the sofa. 2000s girl pop plays from YouTube on their TV. Two empty bottles of wine sit on the coffee table, two more wait their turn. Their long-standing ritual since college: Four Bottles, Two Bitches.
It’s their penultimate night as roommates. On the TV stand is a picture frame crowded with some of their most iconic moments together: Seahawks green faces at Lumen field; peanut butter and jelly costumes at Halloween; making fish faces on a gondola in Venice.
Noemie’s now-fiancé asked her to move in with him two years ago but she said she didn’t think it was the right thing to do before they were engaged. In reality, she and Amina just weren’t done living this.
Now the ring is on her finger and the lease is ending. Amina has accepted a job in Portland. Neither of them have packed a single thing. They still feel like girls pretending at adulthood.
“You know,” Amina starts, “I used to think by twenty-six I’d have a husband and a kid—like twenty-six was so grown up and far away.”
They wrestle with their second bottles.
Noemie groans. “Bro, what is this simulation of adulthood? We out here paying bills and ironing blouses.” Every now and then reality would poke its cold clammy claw into their bubble.
“Who gets to keep the ironing board?”
“Oh shit! The ironing board!”
The drunk women decide to write each other love notes on opposite ends of the ironing board, which they will then ask the super to saw in half. Noemie takes one side, Amina the other. Genius.
Noemie turns up the volume as Amina rummages through the kitchen drawers for a sharpie. The girls squeal at the sight of Gwen Stefani with pencil eyebrows and a bindi on the screen. Both chug from their bottles, throwing their free arms in the air.
“It’s our sooooooong, bitch!”
The floor roars open. Noemie is airborne, flying toward Amina’s outstretched arms.