Free You Must Go and Win: Essays by Alina Simone Page A

room, the yelling resumed.
    “And what about Terrence? Is he, like, some kind of fucking carrier too? Is that what you think? Both of us are carriers?”
    Terrence was Becca’s boyfriend; I had met him once. He was a typically scruffy hipster, and not a bad candidate for carrier, actually.
    “I never said that you had fleas, I just said the bed —”
    “What about her? Don’t you think maybe she’s the carrier?”
    “Becca, I really don’t—”
    “Well, I want to know why you don’t think it’s her. I’m supposed to be your friend. I’m the one who’s been living here for a year—who the fuck knows where she came from and what she brought with her?”
    I stared out my lone window at the bricked-in alley and the sad, weed-filled lot beyond—a vista one might well describe as
brownfieldy. I had been in Brooklyn for less than a week and now here I was, listening to two girls fighting over whether or not I had fleas and feeling nostalgic for the ghetto I never had. Still, I thought to myself, better a flea in Brooklyn than a tick in Carrboro.
    “—only two days and you’re already throwing my private property out in the trash.”
    “I know you’re upset about the futon but you know you owe me a lot more than that.”
    “This isn’t about money, it’s about respect , Sarah, and trust .”
    “Okay. You’re right. I was wrong to throw out the futon without asking. Sorry. But what’s that got to do with last month’s rent, or the gas—”
    “This is unbe fucking lievable.”
    Then there was a BOOM! The walls shuddered once and seemed to sigh in the sudden stillness. I waited for a minute before easing open my door to find Sarah there, sitting on the couch, staring straight ahead. For the first time since we’d met, her perpetual perkiness—a quality that made you either love her or want to lace her yogurt with arsenic, depending on your disposition—had been drained away.
    “Hey,” she said, not looking at me. “I guess you heard all that.”
    “I’m really sorry, Sarah—this is my fault.”
    “No, it’s not your fault. She owes me money for a lot of other stuff. She’s just using this thing about the futon to get out of it.”
    “Oh,” I said softly. “Well, I’m really sorry.”
    “When she first moved in she was really, really cool.” Sarah made a limp motion with her hand. “We were friends. It’s only been lately … since the money …” Then she trailed off and when she looked up I noticed that her eyes, which were very big and very blue, were filled with tears.
    I didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t known each other long enough for fleas and tears.
    “Um. Well … if it helps any, I would like to offer you a nobility point.” This was something Josh thought up, the nobility point.
    “Wh-what?”
    “A nobility point. It’s like, you know, when something really shitty happened, but at least you did the right thing. Becca stole your money, but you never stooped to her level. If it were me? I would have told her to go jam it straight up her ass.”
    Sarah blinked at me.
    “So, uh, here,” I added awkwardly, patting her shoulder.
    “Oh,” Sarah said. “Well, thanks.” And then Sarah smiled. And then she laughed.
    And that, I realized, was the first truly good thing to have happened since I left North Carolina.
     
     
    It was a total coincidence that Sarah happened to work as a music publicist for Lea. She hadn’t mentioned it in her apartment ad and I’d found out only after agreeing to rent the room. It had been two years since I’d met Lea, yet it was an encounter I still remembered vividly because it was, in every sense, a deflowering that marked the end of innocence and cleaved my life into “before” and “after” eras. This all happened back when Josh and I were still living in Hoboken, not long after I’d released my first EP, on a tiny label. At the time I was doing all I could to promote the release, playing every show that came my way, no matter