Please Welcome the Former Queen of Medieval Times

I’ve been Googling around to learn how to break up with a friend, and with good reason: Anne has boned me again. When she texted earlier to ask if I wanted to go to a bar with her and her boyfriend, Pete, what she meant was, Wanna go to a bar with me and Pete and Pete’s friend on a surprise, blind double date an hour from your house? I’ve been hesitant to distance myself from Anne because I don’t have that many people in my life right now, but the cost seems too steep as I buckle myself into the back of her Subaru and shake hands with Dan, a beefy tank top in a Mets hat.

“Dan plays soccer with Pete!” Anne announces, her voice competing with Otis Redding’s. Once the internet teaches me to renounce our friendship and cut her out of my life, I will miss her taste in music. “He’s an accountant!”

Dan shrugs into his mediocre biography dump. “I work in Syracuse with my dad.”

“Cool,” I say, fighting the urge to press on my eyelids until I see spots. “I’m currently unemployed.”

“But you used to work at Medieval Times,” Anne cuts in, wagging a sky blue fingernail near her rearview mirror. “Bea was the queen,” she says. Her hand drifts over her polished red topknot. I suppose I’ll miss her hairstyles, too.

From the passenger seat, Pete turns around to face Dan and I.

“Oh, Bea,” he says, smiling a gleeful, shitty grin. “Did you get fired?”

“Did you?” Dan echoes, raising his eyebrows and simultaneously apologizing.

Pete fidgets with the collar of his salmon-colored shirt and laughs. As usual, he’s overdressed, his hair slicked back with a product whose smell reminds me of the ill-lit men’s shoe section at Macy’s. Pete started growing his hair out after we broke up last year. We started to get serious, and I balked: I brought him to my parents’ for dinner, squirming as he shook my dad’s hand with too much gusto and overpraised my mom’s Ancient Roman-inspired roast tuna. A social studies teacher, he nodded with genuine interest when she told him how the Romans ate dormice but not tomatoes, which weren’t introduced to Europe until the Conquistadors brought them back from South America. I looked at his head, cocked and smiling at my weird professor mom as she got lost in her favorite facts, and I knew that I had to end things. Pete could fit into my family, could fit into the newer, lighter life that I was cobbling together, but he wouldn’t be enough in the long run. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed his confidence, his love for his career, his gym-membership body: the specter of commitment appeared, and I disappeared. I did it cruelly, too, telling him that I was in love with my ex-boyfriend. Always had been, I said. Always will be. Since then, he’s rightfully and spitefully hated me.

Pete narrows his blue eyes. “Did you, Bea? Get fired?”

In the driver’s seat, Anne’s shoulders tense. Here’s the order in which we all care about what happened between Pete and I: 1. Anne. 2. Anne. 3. Anne. 4. Pete. 5. Me. I don’t know why Pete lets Anne invite me out with them, or why she continues to do so. Every time I’m with the two of them, they end up in a fight about something ridiculous, like who loads the dishwasher better or whose kindergarten teacher was more inspirational. Don’t worry, I want to tell Anne. I'm pretty sure that this is our last night together.