Brat girl summer

“[Brat girl summer] can be quite luxury, but it can also be quite trashy,” I saw Charli XCX say in an interview on TikTok. “Just like a pack of cigs, and like a Bic lighter, and like a strappy white top with no bra.” 

My friend Petra and I drank orange wine at Tommy’s and talked about this without specifically mentioning it on Saturday. The importance of: 

Smoking
Dancing
Thrifted skirts 
Her 2009 Canon digital camera 
The restaurant industry 
Money 
Medium rare steak
Sex 
Clean girls (couldn’t be us, we agreed, you need lots of money and perfect skin) 
Hopping from place to place (drinks to dinner) 
Texting coolly, in dry monotone 
The brat album (briefly) 
Ending up where everyone is (unexpectedly)
Swimming at the concrete pool 
Keeping a diary 
Summer in the city 

We sat at a picnic table after stopping by an art show, where I faux-sipped a spritzer and walked around the gallery, loving the back garden the most, a patio covered with green leaves and lights, catching up. 

“Can I smoke here?” Petra asked our server.

“I’m not a cop,” he replied with a smile, setting a cold bottle of water and two glasses down on the table.

At the warehouse thrift store across the street, Petra fished a worn red t shirt that read MANIPULATORZ on the front out of a pile.

“I think we need that,” I said, snatching it up and and taking it to the cash. We asked the Magic 8 ball beside the register important questions (“Don’t count on it,” it told us).  

It was a blue sky cloudless day with a cool breeze and we walked around with ease, gossiping, texting, recollecting, taking the streetcar over the bridge to dinner.

We popped into a convenience store up the street from the little French bistro, after polishing off radicchio salad and steak frites and chocolate mousse and glasses of red, buying cigarettes and spearmint gum, which we smoked outside the narrow bar around the corner before ordering 8 pm nightcap martinis. 

There is much to discuss when the essentials are quite simple: like boys and art and past apartments, first meetings and new friends (fall in love again and again). Just kids, walking and talking in stride around the city that we love, where everything is romantic and we finally feel at home.