Today on Midwest Weird: “You’re Invited” by Jane Lovell.
Jane Lovell is a writer and zine maker from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has previously appeared in Abyss & Apex Magazine.
Like the story? Hear more in our interview with Jane!
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Submit your own work to Midwest Weird at www.midwestweird.com!
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: A short story by Jane Lovell, titled “You’re Invited.” Read by the Midwest Weird team.
As Ruby waited on the curb, cold and embarrassed, she decided she never should have come to Berlin. But how could she have refused? She’d never set foot outside of Wisconsin before, and the magazine fellowship found her housing and covered the cost. It was the opportunity of a lifetime.
There were a few other young reporters on her team, all Europeans, who had invited her out clubbing with them. When they arrived at a club you might have heard of, she realized she was never getting in. As her friends lined up outside, Ruby panicked and told them to go on
without her.
Now here she was, waiting at the crosswalk in her glittery, middle-America going-out dress. The man next to her was looking down at a piece of paper in his hand.
Then he looked over at her and said, “Ruby Kwon?”
She nodded, and he handed the paper to her. It was a piece of cream cardstock with the words You’re invited embossed on the front in gold script. She flipped it around to look at the back, where her name was handwritten in black ballpoint pen.
The light changed again, and the man disappeared in the stream of people crossing the street.
She doubled back to tell her friends about this strange incident. The line shuffled forward as she told them the story, and then they were at the door. The bouncer reached out and took the card from her. He looked at it, both sides, then handed it back and lifted the rope. As soon as she
stepped over to the other side, he dropped the rope back onto the hook and pointed her friends to the side. They started to argue with him, but he just shook his head. One of her friends turned to Ruby to ask her to come with them to a different club, but she shook her head too.
She was Ruby Kwon from Milwaukee, and she was in. Why would she leave?
Ruby later described the club as carnivalesque. She made friends, although she didn’t remember any of their names afterward. She didn’t recognize any of the music, couldn’t even name the genre, but that just made it cooler. A girl in the bathroom told Ruby that her outfit was
brave, and Ruby didn’t think it was a put-down. That was before she ripped her dress almost toppling over a balcony. That may have been when her phone fell out of its safe spot in her bra, next to the invitation.
After she ditched her new friends on the walk to get döner kebabs, sprinted across a pedestrian bridge in a fit of mad freedom, and ended up back at her front door she realized the phone was missing. Her keys too. Luckily, the bathroom window was open. Her neighbor across
the street was still awake, which should have been lucky as well. Unfortunately, her neighbor was a paranoiac, and Ruby gets belligerent when she’s drunk. After a few hours drying out at the police station, she found enough German to explain that she was breaking into her own
apartment.
That's the story Ruby told me when she got back to the States after finishing her fellowship, but that’s not how she described it. The only way I can describe her attitude is bragging. Her eyes glazed over when she told the story of that night and all the ones that came after, like she missed it. The rest of her fellowship cohort was invited to apply for full-time,
permanent positions at the magazine, but she wasn’t. She didn’t think there was any connection to her clubbing, not even the fact that she showed up to work hungover multiple times.
The first time she told me about Berlin, she showed me the card. It was just as she described it, white and gold. A few weeks later, she had some friends over for drinks and told the story again. I asked her afterward if she could show me the card again, and her face fell.
“I don’t have it anymore,” she said. “I gave it to Pike.”
I asked her why she thought that was a good idea. I couldn’t imagine a worse place for him than a club. Pike was a mutual friend, more hers than mine, honestly, but we were both there when he struggled to quit alcohol a few years ago.
She explained that it wasn’t like that. They had been commiserating over relationship troubles; his girlfriend had recently broken things off, but he didn’t feel like he had closure. As a joke, Ruby suggested that he take the invitation to into a house show that his ex’s band would be
playing that weekend. He did. Then, she said, he texted her to say the night went great and that he finally had the closure he needed. She heard later from the host that Pike had broken an upstairs banister and refused to pay for the damages.
I ran into Pike at Ruby’s birthday a few weeks later. When I met up with him on the patio, he had a beer in hand, and I finally got to ask him about the house show and how it went.
“Good, man,” he said. “Real good.”
He said his ex’s friends seemed thrilled to see him. People kept pulling him aside, telling him how glad they were that he was there, giving him drinks, and consoling him about the end of his relationship. He hadn’t even known some of the things they told him, not about her cheating on him or that she was telling people his sobriety didn’t mesh with her lifestyle. I was horrified, but he just kept repeating that it was for the best, that he felt so much better now.
“I needed to know,” he said. Every time he said it, he took another sip of his beer.
When I was collecting my things at the end of the evening, I noticed Pike’s work jacket on the bed near mine. I checked the pockets, and there was the invitation. It had to have been the same one - it was bent from being cupped against Ruby’s sweaty boob all those months ago - but
it didn’t say Ruby Kwon on the back. It said Cory Pike. The name was written in pen. I took the invitation. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t trust the thing. I kept it in my jacket pocket for a while, but eventually I stuck it in a box of loose documents I kept meaning to file away. When it was with me, I kept being tempted to use it. Why not sneak backstage at a concert? Why not breeze past the host stand at an exclusive restaurant? Why not invite yourself to a stranger’s picnic, if you happen to get hungry while you’re at the park?
There’s a good reason why not: I was worried the card didn’t actually work. That I would show it to some gatekeeper somewhere and they would laugh in my face. My greater worry, though, was that it would work. What was I supposed to think about that?
The question “Is it magic?” could have been put to rest if it suddenly had my name on the back as soon as I picked it up, if the letters in Cory Pike mutated into Eric Gillespie. It didn’t, though. I didn’t look at the back when I was shoving it into a box, and I didn’t take it out again until I decided what to do with it. So I don’t know when Pike’s name turned into my sister’s.
Jessica is a statistical researcher, and it makes her annoyingly grounded and insightful. She’s also a complete geek about it. I brought her the card and told her the whole story, and she listened while toying with the corner of the card. When I was done, she carefully slipped the invitation into her purse and folded her hands on the kitchen table.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” she said. “But I can't believe you. You can’t prove to me it’s not your friends playing a big joke.”
Over the next month, Jessica texted me updates every few days. She was treating it like a study to test the card’s function. First, she used it to get into a movie theater without a ticket. Then to buy alcohol without showing her ID — that didn’t work. Then she got a table at a
Michelin-starred restaurant without a reservation. Meanwhile, we theorized about where the card could have come from. Handed to Ruby by a stranger on the street — its creator, or just someone who wanted to get rid of it?
I didn’t notice at first that I hadn’t heard from Jessica in a while, about her experiments or otherwise. It was late fall, and my boyfriend and I were arguing a lot about how to spend the holidays. Whatever arrangement we came up with, no one would be happy. It never felt fair that Michael was always traveling across the country to my family’s Thanksgiving, when his parents were in town. He didn’t see them, but that didn’t stop them from calling. Sometimes, he answered.
The situation should have been settled, but in the middle of November, he surprised me. He talked to his mother on the phone, and it went better than usual. We were invited to Thanksgiving. As much as I didn’t want to spend time with his asshole homophobic parents, I
agreed to go, as long as it was just for dinner.
Jess came over the next day to give me an update on her card experiments. She looked rougher than the last time I’d seen her, almost deflated somehow. She curled up on my couch and told me the whole story.
The previous weekend, she attempted her most audacious experiment yet. She used the invitation to get into a statistics conference that was being held downtown. It worked so well that the organizers apologized for not having a name tag ready for her. She admitted, though, that this was more selfish than scientific: One of her personal heroes was presenting at the conference, and she wanted to meet him. On that front, it was a huge success. She approached him after a panel, and they hit it off immediately.
My heart sank as I watched her describe the rest of the weekend. She wouldn’t stop smiling. Everywhere they went outside of the conference center, she paid for his drinks and food and even cover at a bar. All told, the cost must have been in the hundreds of dollars. I pressed her about it. Didn’t she feel like he was taking advantage of her hero-worship?
Of course she didn’t. She was hosting him in her city! Was all the late-night drinking she described considered normal and professional in her field? Because it wasn’t in mine. She faltered, then. There was one thing she regretted, she said. On Sunday night, he invited her and some of his students back to his hotel room with a couple of other statistics professors. That was one thing she promised herself a long time ago that she’d never do. It seemed silly now, given how much she trusted her guy, but she didn’t know these other professors.
“I just wish I would have stuck it out,” she said. “I know it would have been worthwhile.”
After that, she laughed and said that coming back to work was a huge bummer. “I guess everyone heard about what a whirlwind weekend I had,” she added. Her colleagues had been avoiding her or acting chummy in a way they never had before.
“That doesn't seem like a good thing,” I told her. “Any of it.”
“I think you’re just jealous,” she said.
I tried to convince her that I could not give less of a fuck about her professor crush, but she didn’t believe me. Before she left, I asked for the card back, and she looked confused.
“I gave it to Mike when I stopped by on Monday,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you?”
I didn’t have time to talk to Michael about the card before Thanksgiving, beyond confirming that Jess had given it to him and he’d tossed it in the stack of miscellaneous mail on the dining room table.
He hadn’t shown any interest in the card when I talked about it before. He was a few years younger than me with his own friends, and he tended not to care that much about the flow of gossip among mine.
After cramming a week’s worth of work into three days and learning how to bake a casserole, I finally got to clock out for Thanksgiving. I’d done what I could to make a good impression, took out my piercings and baked a fucking casserole, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough to keep Michael’s family from, at best, making veiled comments.
The house where Michael grew up was out in the ‘burbs. It was a long drive, and spent most of the trip looking out the window. We didn’t talk much.
I parked on the street. It was tricky, following him up the driveway while balancing the heavy casserole tray in its thermal bag, because he wouldn’t keep a consistent pace. Marching forward, then dropping to a shuffle, then speeding up again.
His mother opened the door and greeted us by just saying, “Michael.” She had one hand on the door and one hand on the door frame, gripping both tightly.
Michael said, “Hi, mom,” and for a moment, neither of them did anything. My arms were starting to twinge under the weight of the casserole. I could hear a football game playing somewhere inside, and there was laughter.
Then Michael took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. I didn’t have it in me to be surprised, but I do remember thinking You’ve got to be kidding me. His mom’s expression transformed as she took the card. She turned it over in her hands, and although I couldn’t see it, I knew that it now said Michael Duvalier on the back. Card in hand, she smiled up at him and stepped away from the door.
I stepped forward to follow him into the house, but his mother moved to block me. With surprising vitriol, she said, “Not you.”
I looked to Michael for support, for him to show off the confidence I’d watched him develop over the years we’d been dating. He stood behind her, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and said, “Mom, can I talk to you?”
She nodded and held up a finger, silently telling me to wait, before closing the door.
I rested the casserole dish on the porch railing and let my head droop. I shouldn’t have expected this to play out any differently. Of course Michael’s parents hadn’t changed. There probably never was a phone call that went “better than usual.” Of course I never would have pushed back on it, given how guilty I felt about being so close with my family. Of course I was left out here in the cold. Ruby’s friends had never been able to follow her past the bouncers.
It was several minutes before the door opened again. It was Michael, just Michael. That didn’t make me feel better.
“I’m going to stay,” he said, soft and husky, “but you should probably go.”
“You know what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’re going to feel so good about it, but you should hate yourself.”
“I know,” he said.
We stood on either side of the doorway, as far away from each other as we’d ever been.
Lamely, I said, “Do you want the casserole?”
I spent the rest of the night at home, picking away at the corner of the dish I’d meant to be a peace offering to Michael’s family. I watched the first 20 minutes of A Christmas Story on TV and then, pissed at how saccharine it was, ordered pay-per-view porn. I kept my phone next
to me, expecting that any minute Michael would call me to come pick him up, even though I knew that wouldn’t happen.
When he finally did call me, it was to tell me he was spending the night at his parents’.
“I might stay for a couple days,” he said.
All I could say to that was, “Yeah.”
“You think you know everything,” he said. I expected him to finish that thought, but after a moment he just said goodnight and ended the call.
After I got drunk and texted the whole story to Jessica and then to Ruby when Jess didn’t respond right away, I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up in the early hours of the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. I couldn’t stop wondering, why us?
I tried to distract myself on my phone for a while and ended up on a news story about a college student who had died after getting alcohol poisoning and falling down a flight of stairs at a frat party. He hadn’t even been a student at the university; he was a local community college
student. I felt the same tickle of wrongness in the back of my brain that I’d felt the first time Ruby told me about Berlin.
My thumbs were shaky and I didn’t have my glasses on, so it took a couple of tries to google the kid’s name. I found a couple of other local news stories and his obituary, which linked me to a Facebook page his friends had set up in his honor. I don’t know what I was doing it for, besides sick curiosity. I clicked through the pictures until I found one of the kid in his bedroom. It looked like it was taken on a disposable camera; his laughing face was out of focus and blown out by the flash. The desk behind him, though, was perfectly sharp. The surface was a mess, but I could clearly see a white rectangle on top of a stack of books. On the card, printed in blue script, were the words “You’re invited.”
Jane Lovell is a writer and zine maker from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has previously appeared in Abyss & Apex Magazine.
Watch for upcoming bonus episode where we chat with Jane about this story, writing, latest obsessions, and more.
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