An Ode to Champagne Bitch

I’m young, thrumming with life, and I got into this club for free. 

I packed light when I left home so I’m not wearing the right shoes, and I am uncomfortable, but in the way you always are when you’re eighteen. 

A sparkler is thrust into my hand, and I reapply my plumping lip gloss. We are partying with these guys tonight, some friends of some brand which some boring man I know owns. The promoter we’re with is supposedly a creative director and smells like Paco Rabanne, acne cream and the sour, metal note of blood. He’s the kind of guy who comes right up to you when he sees you, who talks incessantly with hot breath, ripe in your face. He won’t ever meet your eyes, not fully. 

I am scared, this close to the sparkler because I am covered in hairspray (flammable) and shimmer oil (also very flammable). I lean away from the sparks and I realise I am caught up in a procession already. Paco Rabanne hangs back as the group totters, following after the curve of a bottle cradled gently in a cooler full of sparkling fire and ice, and overpriced mixers. The girls I came with are swaying in front of me, and I watch them stumble towards the Man. He’s presumably the one who has ordered this bottle, and looks on with delight through a pair of thick obnoxious sunglasses. Paco Rabanne joins the crowd and they fistbump, like the douchebags they presumably are. 

I manage to get caught up in the moment, trying to remind myself that no club entry is ever truly without cost and that I should probably smile if I want to make it through the next few hours. I close my eyes, dance to the music and enthusiastically wave the sparkler around while bending to adjust my heel for the eighth time. I don’t realise how close I am getting to the Man until I look up from my shoe and he is there, under the lights. 

Everyone is filming; I remember, distantly, that it’s his birthday. He looks sweaty and menacing up close, and I make an alarmed face which I know will show up in the background of several Snapchat stories with captions of ‘hbd to HIM’ and ‘my bro 4L’ the next day.  My eyes adjust to four different iPhone’s flashes and the fire of the sparklers all around us. He grins widely at me with all of his veneers, sweat-slicked and scary. I remember that just because I can see his teeth, that doesn’t mean that he is smiling, and I refocus my gaze away from his hair gel to look again. He is baring his teeth at me like a dog. 

I see that he is gripping a bottle of champagne and a wicked long knife, and he’s pointing both right at me. 

Time doubles, then triples, as terror takes me by the collar. I can hear my blood rushing, pounding like bass in my ears. The party slows and seems to pause while I analyze him. I take stock. The knife looks like steel. The champagne is Moët. He’s pushed the sunglasses up into his hair, and so I can see his eyes. As his iris catches on the sparklers’ light it seems like his whole gaze is swallowed up with black. 

The knife is grazing the shoulder of the bottle. He’s pulled the knife back and now he is really driving it right at me. I bring up my right arm. I think I take a breath. Everything but the blade is going in slow motion. I watch it, that fast, fast knife, as it flattens, slipping towards me down the neck of the bottle. I can see how sharp it is - it is shaving a strip of the label away from the glass. My lips are stinging from the gloss and it feels like the start of anaphylaxis. There are hands on me, and my hair is catching on someones’ rings as they hold my shoulder. The crowd is hungry, pushing me towards the blade. It looks like it would feel cold if it cut me. 

I feel a weight, then pressure, then a force, as I am jostled first towards then mercifully away from the neck of the bottle and the knife. In my place is a girl just like me - she’s new in the city too, I’ve seen her around - and she has just shoved me, launching me back into the throng of the crowd. 

Cork and glass break away onto the floor near where I have fallen, and it dawns on me that the knife was a Sabre for uncorking the bottle. I file that away, with a mental note of pretentious douchebag, who does that in a club?

I pull the hem of my skirt down and stand up, looking towards the girl who has taken my place. Behind her, I see the Mansmirking gleefully; he never liked me anyways. I realise shoving me aside was probably his idea. Humiliated, I flick my gaze back to the girl. 

She is grinning at the Man and she looks beautiful, triumphant, that she is the one to share this moment with him. She’ll definitely be invited to the afterparty. I am glad to be away from the knife but less glad to be pushed to the floor. I hear myself mutter “bitches can’t say excuse me?” under my breath, and I am just about to flee the scene when I take her in. 

She’s holding two sparklers too - she has the same color wristband as me and she’s also here with Paco Rabanne. She looks like she’s never met humiliation; like she’d make friends with it if she did. Her friends are filming her, and she’s shining, dancing; she’s gorgeous and cool, and I love her jewellery, and I realise I’m not even upset that she pushed me anymore. It was probably an accident anyways, I think, as I watch her lip sync to Pitbull and beam at the room. She seems like youth incarnate, like every woman who has ever lived is pouring joy through her. I look at her for just a second, but in my mind it stretches into more; I notice her stick-and poke-tattoo, I notice how she’s covering her drink while she dances, I notice her invisalign when she smiles happily at the Man.

 She’s flushed. She looks free, totally caught in the siren call of freshers, like she’s floating above us. She seems like she could go anywhere, or like she could come here, too. 

It’s then that it all breaks loose, and fast. She turns around, flipping her hair to smile at her best friend. The Man seizes this moment, gripping the bottle at the neck, thumb up, and slams it on the ground. She doesn’t have time to stop smiling, to close her mouth, before she turns back around. He shakes the bottle as it sprays, holding it up to her; to her mouth, her chest, her hair. It’s strong at first, rocketing up in a geyser of bubbles and sticky foam. The party loves it, and the room goes wild as the champagne shoots high into the air. Some hits me, but it is mainly sprayed on her, all over her, until the small remainder of the bottle is spilled, forgotten next to us on the floor. I can’t really hear her over the music and the sound of splashing, but I think she was screaming. 

She hadn’t even wiped it from her face when the song ended and a tray of shots appeared at the other end of the booth. Cameras and gazes swivelled away from her, moving with the epicentre of the party. The Man gave her a cursory clap on the shoulder and whooped, loud, in her ear, before striding towards the tray. The crowd that had celebrated her dissipated, content to ignore the ignominy. Drippy spitballs of cheap champagne clung to her dress and she was standing still, soaking, shivering like a dog. 

A second ago she was full of promise and glitter. Now, both of the sparklers they gave her have been doused. 

Paco Rabanna threw a hoodie at her and told her to go home. Her friends waved brief goodbyes to her, throwing them like salt over their shoulders. I followed her to the bathroom and I helped her hold her bra under the hand dryer. She didn’t cry; she just seemed tired. I waited for her Uber with her and while she pulled out a bag, I told her I liked her jewellery. I told her how to get the smell of alcohol out of her clothes. I thanked her for pushing me out of the way. She said thanks, that her necklace belonged to her grandmother, and that she hadn’t even seen me. I don't think she would have said excuse me, even if she had. 

As I watched her cab pull away from the smoking area, I felt Paco Rabanne’s clammy hand on the back of my neck. 

“C'était qui cette fille, une de tes potes? Elle?”  

“Who was that girl, one of your friends? Her?”

I absently flick at the edge of the table where the plastic is peeling, feigning normalcy. 

“Non.” 

“No.”

He smiles at me, all teeth. He is still too close to me. He launches himself into accented English, tripping his way through sentences with a thick tongue. 

“She was a cool girl, for real. She was not lucky though - very, very stupid. I wanted it to be you, with that little white dress you have on - man, that would be hot, no? Comment peux-je le dire - wet t-shirt contest, right?” 

He laughs and I can hear the phlegm in his throat. I am silent. 

“I’ll tell you, well, everyone knows - if you get the spray then that’s all you are. You’re just that bitch we sprayed champagne on.”

                                                 —------------------------------------------------

At the time, I nodded. I went inside, threw up in the bathroom, drank cheap liquor and laughed at more men’s jokes. I swore I would do everything in my power to never become that girl, never do what she did. 

But, what did she do? She was young, and beautiful, at a party with friends. She was in a new city, celebrating her youth. She had subscribed to Saturday night fever, and was ready to reap its rewards. Who would expect to be humiliated? Who would expect that that humiliation would be public? That it would go unchecked? And that it would be hers to bear alone?

Champagne bitch looms large in my mind. She reminds me that club entry is not free; that nothing is. I saw her as a person, and maybe that was my mistake. That night, she was everything I wanted to be; and by the end of it, I couldn’t get far away enough from her. 

I think about her all the time, but not in the way I thought I would. Not with disdain, or secondhand shame, but with something closer to reverence. She was, for one bright moment, untouchable - drenched in light and music, the kind of girl you can’t look away from. And then, in the next moment, she became disposable. Cast aside, an afterthought.

I wonder if she ever thinks about that night. I wonder if she still wears her grandmother’s necklace. I wonder if the smell of cheap champagne ever really came out of her clothes. I wonder if she learned the same lesson I did, or if she already knew: that the line between worship and humiliation is thinner than we think, and often, it’s not ours to draw. 

Most of all I wonder - no, I hope - that she might have forgotten it altogether. I hope that when she crawled into bed that night, still sticky with champagne, she fell asleep and dreamt of nothing. I hope that she forgot that club, those men, and let the memory fade away, until it was just another bad night in a city full of them. I hope that’s true. I hope she is still in the city somewhere; dancing, shining, floating above it all.