Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By: Kat Mulligan

Thomas was new to the city. He had no friends, no sense of direction, no weekend plans. He had been reduced to a loser, and felt as if he were speaking toddler-level French to a group of Parisians who judged him only on the intelligence that his subpar language skills inaccurately portrayed. That is to say, who he was elsewhere did not matter. What mattered was how quickly he would stop asking locals where the nearest metro station was.

However, the hollowness of Thomas’ new life afforded him the privilege of filling it on his own terms. He could start wearing stripes. He could learn pottery. No one he had kissed in a dingy bar bathroom would scrutinize him on the streets of this new city, and that meant he was free to begin the process all over again and kiss many more women whose faces were impossible to discern in the low lighting.

With this optimism in hand, Thomas cozied up to the city’s nightlife like a moth to a flame. In an attempt to flesh out his evenings, he wandered down the sidewalk and sized up every bar he passed. Sometimes he got a drink or five. But what was glaringly obvious was that Thomas remained a loser. He talked to no one, not one single terrasse patron or gin aficionado. He drank alone and wore peacoats. The full sense of his doom crashed down on him like a piano plummeting from a cartoon sky.

One night, unwound by tequila and determined to take life by the reins, Thomas meandered through the area of town that was popular with students from the local university. It was a Friday, and the streets were swollen with noise. From one apartment lodged perfectly in the middle of the row, there came an outpour of rowdy business majors slinging red solo cups, divested of shirts and accompanied by former-bullies-turned-nursing-students in skinny jeans.

Thomas, in his brogues and corduroys, would have stuck out like a sore thumb in this crowd. He was, on the other hand, the same age as the partygoers, and had had just enough alcohol to even be able to silently and drinklessly stare at a wall and feel no shame. Capitalizing on this rare moment of boldness, he parted the sea of sweaty pectorals and made his way inside.

As expected, no one approached him to talk Baudelaire. But, after doing a few laps around the kitchen island, he eventually found himself in a conversation with a nice brunette whose family, she told him, had the lowest average height in her home state of Illinois.

“It’s your turn to tell me a fun fact,” she chirped, poking Thomas in the arm.

Thomas thought long and hard. Memory recall had never been his strong suit, and the pressure was mounting—this girl Marie was the first person he’d talked to in his new city beyond the corner store clerk and the pharmacy employee who had retrieved the condoms from behind the glass case back when Thomas had more hope about his recent move. He was an honest man, but on the other hand, he figured he’d never see Marie after tonight.

Having weighed these odds, Thomas replied, “I’ve never had lunch before.”

Marie was astounded. “What do you mean you’ve never had lunch before? How is that possible?”

He gulped. “I eat a big breakfast.”

Marie asked loads more questions, Thomas answered them, and so passed the time. Lying didn’t bother him if it meant he could share a genuine laugh with someone. Marie was easygoing, and Thomas needed someone to go easy on him.

When he informed her that he was a stranger to the city, she snatched his phone out of his pocket and saved her number in it. That was the start of Thomas’ first friendship in his new home.

When Marie didn’t answer Thomas’ texts the day after, the concept of hangovers refused to cross his mind. He figured his luck the night before was a product of vodka cran overconsumption, and that he’d have to rebuild his social life from ground zero. His messages looked like the messages of any loser—nonexistent.

Nursing his wounds, Thomas fell back to the streets that evening and found another typical university party in the same area. This one was even sweatier than the last, but Thomas, having already built up a tolerance to mullets, remained unperturbed. And just like last time, he found himself in the company of a well-mannered girl who had just enough understanding for his dressing habits to exchange a few drunken words with him.

“You’ve never had dinner?” Maisie shrieked.

“I eat a late lunch,” Thomas replied.

“Give me your number right now. I need to hold onto you.”

Just like that, Thomas had made his second friend.

The next day was Sunday, which for university students meant a morning of vomit and an evening of books. Parties would be put on pause until next weekend. Thomas, having made stellar progress in the friendship department the past two days, took no issue with this.

Besides, Marie had finally responded to his text and asked him to coffee for Tuesday, while Maisie had proposed they go leather glove shopping together on Thursday. Just like that, Thomas’ hollow life was filling up with furniture and losing its echo.

Thomas’ rendezvous were great successes. Unfortunately, both Marie and Maisie were occupied that weekend and had no parties to report nor accompany him to. When Friday evening rolled around, Thomas, by now addicted to company, went back on the prowl.

He found another, even sweatier party, where he talked to another, even better-mannered girl named Riley. On a roll, yet seeking variety, he told her he had never eaten breakfast before. It took some convincing, but she eventually believed him, and by the end of the party her number sat snugly in Thomas’ contact list.

A few days later, Riley invited Thomas to a movie with some friends. Sympathetic to his loneliness, she thought it a nice way to integrate Thomas into the community. The next step would be to obliterate his comb-over, but there was still plenty of time for that.

When Thomas showed up to the cinema, he was astonished to see Riley flanked by none other than Marie and Maisie. He was even more astonished that he had managed to meet the only three women in the world that didn’t gossip. None of them had made the connection before this meeting that they all knew Thomas. Moreover, none of them thought Thomas’ lie interesting enough to mention to one another, nor to bring up at any point during the course of their budding friendship with him—for, after this movie, the four of them would go on to cultivate the tightest-knit bond since quadruplets in utero.

With Thomas adopted into the friend group, every day was a party. They hung out every chance they got—sipping smoothies, telling ghost stories, weighing the pros and cons of Marxism. Thomas, with his loser days behind him, was adrift in a sea of bliss that only deepened when the school year ended and his three girlfriends, divinely unemployed, were free to hang out with him from sunrise to sunset.

Splendid! But when was he supposed to eat?

Thomas’ elation quickly rotted, and his bones were soon to follow. His lie, which had been his creation, now threatened to be his ruin. His ticket to friendship was as thin as Bible pages. Every miserable pub crawl and chip bag would rise from the dead if Marie, Maisie, and Riley ever found out that he had lied to not one, not two, but all three of them about the very eccentricity that drew them to him in the first place. He had plenty of eccentricities, enough to keep his friends interested in him—who wouldn’t want a friend who used to collect accordions?—but this one lie was strong enough to wipe out every subsequent truth. Everyone wanted an accordion collector, but no one wanted a liar.

In order to preserve this falsehood, Thomas would have to go without food in their never-ending company. If he ate breakfast in front of them, then Riley would object. To Riley’s objection, Marie would say, “No, it’s lunch that he doesn’t eat,” and to Marie’s correction Maisie would interject, “You mean dinner, right?” All would unravel.

The obvious solution would be midnight snacks or clandestine bathroom feasts. What the girls didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them, right? That may have been true, but what the girls didn’t know would, in fact, hurt Thomas, whose mother had warned him against taking food outside of designated meal times. Snacking, she said, leads to all types of perversions. It was simply off the table.

So, for the sake of his blossoming friendships, he sucked it up, and the girls, who avoided gossip like the plague, never suspected a thing. They spent every waking hour of every waking day together, profiting off the hard-earned summer that rose from the ashes of a grueling winter. They took trips to various bodies of water. They visited the children’s petting zoo. They learned how to hotwire cars. Thomas especially enjoyed their smoothie outings, for the ill-defined medium of a smoothie allowed him to sneak nutrients without raising complaints about common mealtime schedules. His friends lovingly teased him for how much he loved his smoothies—almost as much as they teased him for how much he loved water, which Thomas guzzled like a participant in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.

But no amount of water could slow his emaciation. Thomas’ life brimmed with small wonders, but his body was hollow. His eyes retreated into his skull. His ribs became two dozen little exhibitionists. While it was still a lie that Thomas had never eaten breakfast, lunch, or dinner before, what was true was that he no longer did—and simultaneously at that. His one truth was this. Then his other truth was that he loved his friends to the moon and back.

But he never got the chance to say it out loud before he shriveled up and died.