1.

Know your muses. At the bar, pretend to browse the booze-streaked binder like it’s a doctor’s office People, like you might as well look at it since you’re here, even though you know better and you’ve spent weeks covertly planning this shebang. Planning it under the cover of happy hour with your colleagues who say oh, sounds good, let’s do it when you toss out the idea beside their classroom door, where eighth-graders push past you like you’re window dressing. Teacher’s helper, that’s you, with your happy hour ideas and extra pencils and poker-faced “walk please” no matter how many times the girls in their baby tees rush past and wrap other girls in gossip and hugs, reminding you just how ferocious friendships can be. Just how precious.

Walk please. That’s you. But tonight, it isn’t.

Tonight it’s Cher and Stevie and Tina and Shania, those names that pop like neon on the laminated pages you turn with fingers trembling and electrified. The names you’ve held onto since college when you lived in a campus apartment with your girlfriends, you and Melissa and Lexi and Lauren, power quartet, singing out finals week into a plug-into-the-TV karaoke machine that Melissa bought off the back of a truck in Times Square. Those names.

Search the book. Pause. Debate as you sip your gin and tonic. Then scribble down a song code (that, no matter what, always looks like a bank account number) for the soulful first dance ballad from your wedding. Tried, true.

Then second guess yourself. Scribble it out and pencil in another. Let’s go, girls. Because it’s 8 pm and there’s already a low buzz in the air. Because there’s a posse of twentysomethings sipping margaritas in the corner and two men in sparkles and cowboy hats holding Stellas at the bar. Because you and your teacher crew are here in vintage flannel clutching sweaty 2-for-1s, crow’s feet tap-dancing around your eyes as you trade god I needed this, what a week with one another.

What this crowd needs, now that you’ve looked around, now that you’ve put your finger on it, is an opener. That’s what Melissa called it. A kick in the ass. And you, you are just warming up.

2. 

Make a mental jukebox. Collect songs like recipes and file them away, ready to pull out at the right time, like you do when you’re feeling a pumpkin curry or paella with sweaty chunks of bacon and black-eyed prawns and nothing else will do. Think of that paella because two girls just walked into this bar, their faces free of worry and loss and all that shit that comes with age, and it made you think of that time in Barcelona when you met up with Lauren from your power quartet, the same Lauren from college. She was in Paris sharpening her French and running ten miles a day along the Seine as you stumbled through Italian in Rome, through a semester of one-euro wines and shitty hookups and grizzled men accusing que bella when you passed.

You and Lauren both smiled like idiots when you saw each other at the hostel. You were smiling like these girls are smiling at each other in this bar, with that look that says where the fuck have you been, I’ve missed you, I have so many stories. You missed nights dissecting your sophomore crushes over lukewarm chicken parmigiana in Commons. Missed silently rooting her on from the second row as she schooled the assholes in your American Politics class about the right to choose. Missed her showing up early to every International Relations club event you held, even the time she had a cold, because that’s what friends do and Lauren never half-assed anything. You’d missed her in this practice round of what would come after college, when you’d have to face the world alone.

But in Barcelona it was all about your dance floor reunion. Just you and Lauren and two guys, friends with identical euro-trash mullets and silver chains around their necks that glinted in the strobelights, all of you just arms and legs thrashing to choruses of call on meeeee from the global techno-trash jam of the mid-aughts. (You never could find a way to work that one into your karaoke repertoire.)

You’d laughed afterward because you’d each thought the other guy, the one you hadn’t made out with, had been more attractive. “You should have said something,” you screech at the stars, even though it didn’t really matter, even though you knew you’d never see those guys again and you would always have each other, as you stumbled down Las Ramblas in search of food.

Feel the saffron hit your nose the way it did that night, like a suckerpunch, when you finally found a place to eat. Feel it hit you in the face like it did when Lauren made paella for the power quartet once you’d come back to campus. She made it after making an apple tart so good you ate two slices even on your sugar-free week. Food was always her love language.

Smell that saffron fifteen years later even though you’re at this bar in San Francisco with your coworkers. The ones who know you as their fellow teacher or helper. Maybe as their friend. But not like Lexi or Melissa or Lauren, not like Lauren.

Look at the girls at the bar and wonder if their friend love is as fierce as yours. Wonder what song they will pick, and what song they will pick in fifteen years, looking back on life the way you are now. Let’s go, girls.

3.

Bring cash. Shove some tens and a twenty in your wallet or, better yet, your pocket, so they’re ready when you need them. And when you need them is when the crowd thickens and that list grows to a page, when Chris or Todd or Jake at the DJ booth half-shouts “an hour” into your ear over the chorus of I’m just a girl as you lean over the plastic folding table flashing your two-drink smile and a shrug.

Hold his gaze as you reach into your pocket with two fingers. Pull out the twenty and hold it ever so briefly before you let it float into the half-empty tumbler beside the basket. The one harboring white slips with a few precious moments in the spotlight, those moments of redemption and of pure, inextinguishable joy. Of grief and loss and love.

Melissa taught you to do this on your first night out as roommates. It was the first week of your senior year, and you and Lexi and Lauren laughed as you sat around a table wearing leopard print at a restaurant in Charlotte, eating ravioli and drinking cocktails none of you could afford. “A twenty, if things are desperate,” she added.

 “What’s your name?” Chris/Todd/Jake asks. When you tell him, remember to smile.

4.  

Learn the songs with your body. The words will come but it’s the motion that you’re after, the motions of the choruses and the crescendoes, those moments where you throw yourself in with your elbows and shoulders and entire torso, collapsing those lyrics like a bear hug. Like one you’d give a best friend you haven’t seen in years.

Practice throwing your body at the song. Throw your hair at it. Throw yourself at it. Let’s go, girls.

If you’re lucky those girls will answer back ohh whoa oh oh from the faded suit-gray couch in the living room of your college apartment. Behind you on the 30-inch TV screen a blonde woman with a snaggletooth dances to the lyrics beside the Seine, totally crazy, looking not an iota like Shania Twain in this bootleg music video that came with Melissa’s back-of-the-truck-karaoke machine, the video that makes you and Lauren laugh every. Single. Time.

Totally crazy. Sing it with your hair, your arms, your legs, your whole body and for a moment hear the girls answer you back, even here in this bar, two-for-ones, lights, cowboy hats, teaching colleagues, another world and yet somehow not when you sing it. But only when you do it with your body. With everything you have.

5. 

Risk being terrible. The secret of karaoke? It doesn’t matter if you’re bad. Really. What matters is you are up there telling the world that every little thing is going to be all right like you fucking know it. What matters is you wanna dance with somebody and you mean it, show me you mean it.

What matters is that you’re living on a prayer and, even though every regular in the bar hates that song, they’ll still take your goddamn hand if you really want them to, I swear. They’ll ask what’s going on, demand it along with you as you wail it into that cosmos, that question you all want the answer to in a million different ways all your own.

They’ll tell you they want it that that way and that it ain’t nothin’ but a heartache, ain’t nothin’ but a mistake at this bar, and when they sing it along with you, the cowboys with their arms wrapped around each other’s waists, the twentysomethings with their salt-rimmed glasses in the air, you’ll know that you’ve given them everything you have, even if what you have isn’t anywhere near perfect harmony. Know that you have everyone in this bar with you except those girls, yes, the two girls that reminded you of yourself and Lauren, because they have too much to talk about there in the corner booth and besides, they are so much younger than this song, so much younger than you.

Don’t be offended. Because that was you once, with your power quartet. That was you in your own world, in your tiny college apartment with your crappy karaoke machine, singing to each other in a language all your own. That was you trying the high notes you sometimes hit, that Melissa always hit, that Lauren never hit because she was fucking terrible, really, truly terrible at singing, but she always followed the rule. She always took a risk. She never walked when she could run.

And why just run when you can run marathons, Olympic-qualifying-time marathons? Why settle for in-state when you could go to Columbia Law? Why join a corporate firm like everyone else when you could take on nuclear power plants for a public interest agency like goddamn Wonder Woman? Just like Lauren.

Lauren is good at everything but that’s not why she’s your friend or why you love her like a sister, like something running through your veins as fast as she runs through life. You love her because she fucking tries, she fucking throws herself at everything, even karaoke. She’s a hell of a lot better at friendship. She sends you The Joy of Cooking and a chef’s knife, your very first, when you move into your own apartment in DC, and you hold onto it even when the handle half-melts in the dishwasher. You send each other notes and trade calls and she visits you and you go to the farmer’s market, where she explains what ramps are, these green fiddleheads you’ve never heard of, and you promise her you’ll make something with them and tell her all about it. You promise.

Tonight at this bar you think about those ramps and that promise and the fact that you will never sing with her again. That the four of you will never sing in a tiny apartment in a tiny college town with your big dreams and hopes. You can’t keep any more promises to her except this one, the one you made when three of you buried her, when you held hands and told stories about how terrible she was at karaoke and how she was good at everything else and how much you’ll miss her. The promise that you’ll keep going, that you’ll keep singing. What else can you do? Let’s go, girls. The DJ just called your name.

-Katie Hunter

Katie (she/her/hers) is a writer and educator based in Oakland. She recently completed an MA in English with a Creative Writing concentration from San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in the Janus Literary, Agapanthus Collective, the Bold Italic, Porridge Magazine, The ANA, and Hecate Magazine. You can find her at katiehunterwriter.com and @kahunteroma.