Free The Black & The White by Evelin Weber Page A

thank Zozo, who was sitting on the leather banquet chairs
with her booker and several other models, for getting us into the
club. It was a small room, but getting to her through the crowd of
people on the dance floor was difficult.
    I sat down next to Zozo and told her
thank you.
    “ Hey, no worries. What’s
your name again?” she asked.
    “ Isabelle,” I
said.
    “ That’s right! I’m so bad
with names.” She introduced me to several of her
friends.
    “ Hey, you want to go to the
ladies room?” she asked.
    She stood up and took the arm of her
friend from the ad I recognized, turned, and beckoned me to come. I
looked to find Carin, but she was not in sight. However, I ran into
her in the bathroom hallway, sloppily kissing her dance
partner.
    I followed Zozo and her friend into a
bathroom stall. Zozo removed from her purse the same sort of
contraption Kim had put in her nose, and offered it to her friend,
who took it and began snorting. Then she passed it back to Zozo,
who also snorted. They offered it to me, but I said no. I found it
disgusting that they would share the same inhaler.
    The girls giggled.
    “ You’re such a mess,” Zozo
said to her friend. “Look, you have it all over your face.” Zozo
leaned forward and licked the white specks across her friend’s
cheek.
    “ You can’t waste
it.”
    Gross, I thought. I wondered why
hygiene didn’t seem to be a concern to either of them.
    We walked back to M.D.’s table. There
were several new female faces.
    “ Where’s Carin?” I asked
Kim, who was seated on a banquet chair, preparing herself a
cocktail.
    “ She left with that guy. She
was wasted. I love that girl! She cracks me up.” Kim handed me a
drink. “Here. Have a drink. Where were you?” she asked.
    “ The bathroom, with Zozo.” I
explained.
    “ Blow?” she asked. “Those
girls have noses like vacuums. They do it all day!”
    I looked over to Zozo. She looked so
young. I wondered at what age she had started to do
drugs.
    Kim then handed me another drink.
“No,” I replied to her question.
    I hadn’t thought about Dani all night
until that moment. I didn’t quite know what spurred the memory, but
I suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion.
    I remembered one of the first few
times I had gotten drunk. It was my twenty-first birthday, and
college friends of mine kept handing me shots of vodka. By the end
of the night, although I didn’t want to drink anymore, the social
pressure was strong enough to make me force the liquids down my
throat. Dani was next to me the whole night, keeping me upright and
wiping me down as I spilled drinks on myself.
    “ Haeti , you don’t have to drink it just because they bought it for
you.”
    Moments later, he carried me up the
stairs as my friends cheered to me, “Happy Birthday!”
    I suddenly now wanted Dani to be
around, to comfort and look after me, much like he had done many
times before.
    Kim must have noticed a change in my
mood, because she asked me if I was upset with her.
    “ No, I’m just tired and I
drank a lot. We’ll talk, just not here.” I kissed her cheek then
waved goodbye to Zozo, who was dancing with two of her equally waif
model girlfriends.
    I came home to yet another quiet night
in my apartment. I resisted the urge to call Dani.
    The next day, after work, I went to
get a cat from the local shelter. I named him Meowser.
    “ He is a precocious Bengal,”
the lady at the shelter explained. “Some lady left this guy here
and traded up for a more exotic cat.”
    “ Oh, that’s sad,” I
said.
    “ You’re telling me. You get
all sorts of reasons, but they’re never any good,” she explained as
she opened the metal cage so that I could get acquainted with the
cat.
    “ You’re going to love this
cat. He drools.”
    “ A drooling cat? That’s
awesome,” I said. “A cat with identity issues was a cat made for
me.”
    He purred immediately as I held him in
my arms. This cat was made for me.
    The next day at work, I was