It was a bonfire on the Congaree — one of those summer nights where the heat clung to your skin like linen and the bugs outnumbered the conversation. Everyone had brought something: drinks, weed, sexual tension, Uno. Hollywood? Well, she carried... a different assortment of tension. Or maybe I had. Perhaps it was just waiting for us.
We were surrounded by laughter and light. The tiki torches swayed with the river breeze, flickering like they were in on something the rest of us weren’t. She was already keyed up before we even sat down. Not angry — just sharp. Watching. Counting every second I wasted on frivolous conversations with the others. How daring another's leg would push towards mine. She always noticed these things before I did. It never really caused a problem, though. A sly remark here and there, but always a passive, fleeting inference.
But this night, there was this particular girl (we’ll call her Silvana) who’d been a little too friendly earlier in the night. Honestly, we have to use a fictional name here. I couldn't tell you her real name if I wanted to. Inconsequential in my mind, but to our lovely Mrs. Hollywood. OOOWEEE CHIL'! Silvana's timing couldn’t have been worse. She cut into the middle of a conversation, laughing a smidgen too loudly, and reaching for my arm like she owned stock in it.
And like that. Things split.
I don’t remember the first insult. I just remember the shift — how her voice got thinner, more theatrical. Not yelling, not yet. Just performing. For me. For the group. For herself, maybe. That’s the thing with chaos — it doesn’t always burst through your doors with vicious shouts. Sometimes it welcomes itself in with precision.
But it escalated. Fast. Like Niki Lauda, F1 type fast.
Hollywood had routed a collision course that absolutely no one was stopping. Hair, nails, fists, screams. I don’t even think Silvana had a chance to process the situation until she had her back pinned into that smoky dirt, crying into a strange concoction of beer and... wine-drenched shorts. Hollywood yanked a chunk of her hair out with a... tribal ceremony of sorts? Like she’d won something. Then she lit those strands on fire, employing one of the tiki torches we’d brought to keep the mosquitoes off us. And there it was: the scent of burning citronella and keratin, winding through the air like a voodoo curse.
As for me? I just stood there. Embarrassed. Concerned. Staring. Not because it hurt me, but because I knew we looked psychotic. I wasn’t panicked, not even angry. Truthfully, it was a rare moment where I considered the possibility of my own sociopathy — all I could think about was how off-script this was from the couple we pretended to be. We had just come off a spa weekend. We were planning an impromptu date in France. We were supposed to be the couple everyone else envied. Not this.
When I got close enough to look at her, she was crying — not the rooftop cries or the “what’s the point of it all” croons. It was a yearning kind of sorrow—something ancestral, something inherited from the chaos that raised her.
I apologized to the group, not for her or me, but for the sake of normalcy. For the reset. Then I hoisted her over my back like some sad, mythic crybaby. She wailed on me the whole walk back. Not hard. Just enough to keep herself from folding in. Just enough to remind me she was still angry, and maybe always had been.
When we got to the car, she curled into the passenger seat like nothing had happened. Makeup streaked. Knuckles raw. Along with the pristine accompaniment of silence reminiscent of a blackout. The next morning, she woke up fine. Sweet, even.
But even then, I knew. Deep down, I knew we weren’t building a life. We were building a story. Something curated to look like forever, but only because we never let anyone close enough to see the cracks.
That night didn’t break us. But maybe, looking back, it was the first time I saw the ending.