Rebuilding Sabrina, part 4

We ordered Chinese.
Sabrina had gone vegan since the last time we had met, so her order was complicated, but in the end we sat down with some food and started going over her life.
“Let’s face it,” I said. “You always had a horrible taste in men.”
She looked down at her salad. “I was never lucky.”
I snorted, and dug into my fried rice. “Luck is certainly a factor, but you have to make your own luck. You just have a lousy taste in men.”
“Bruno is a sweet man.”
“But please. The only time I met him he never looked me in the eyes.”
She stared at me questioningly. I laid down my chopsticks and hefted my boobs.
“You were dressed too provocatively,” she said.
I looked at her, wide eyed. “It was at your father’s funeral. You really think I was dressed too provocatively at your father’s funeral?”
She shrugged.

“But let’s not talk about Bruno the Trog. What about that other guy— Dylan, the Nazi.”
“He was not a Nazi,” she snapped.
“Oh, come on! The first time we met he called me ‘a Jewish beauty’.”
Sabrina shook her head. “And you mocked him.”
“I told him I’m not Jewish, which is a fact, and he commented on my family name.”
“And you  told him,” she chuckled, “you’re one of the original Mayflower Epsteins.”
“Fuck the guy. He was a racist and a scumbag.”
I did not mention that while she was seeing Dylan she had gently but firmly stopped seeing me, even if at the time I was back in town and we lived three blocks from each other.
“Like you always dated saints,” she said. Then she caught herself.
I gave her a look. “What happened to the guy, anyway?”
Like I did not know.
Sabrina was silent for a moment. “He dumped me.”
“No shit. Then there was good old Joe.”
“I’d rather—”
“Who was fucking you and your sister at the same time.” And probably a few other women, but I did not say. “How long since you’ve last talked to Samantha? Ten years?”
“You are being nasty,” she said. She poured herself a glass of water.
“Honey, I’m trying to clear the rubbish. Your life is littered with the remains of suicidal relationships. You have to recognize the fact and move along. Wanna talk about Peter?”
“It was all of Marissa’s fault! Shegot her moves on him from day one.”
Marissa had been her best friend in the place where she had been working at the time.
“Really? The guy was on the prowl. He came on to me, New Year’s Eve party, 2002.”
She stared at me. “You never told me!”
“I did too! Three days later. You almost clawed my eyes out, called me a slut and said I was trying to fuck your man.”
“Where you not?”
I gave her a hard look. “What, a slut, or fucking your man?”
She blushed. Then she snorted, and made a face. “That’s the reason I don’t have girlfriends. Because they always try and steal my boyfriends.”
“The track record so far proves there’s nothing worth stealing— ”
“I thought it would be different with Bruno,” she said. “I willed it so hard, I discussed it with the universe and I made all the necessary affirmations. It was my fault, really. I should have been more focused.”
“You discussed it with the universe? What the fuck are you talking about?”
I had caught some of that new-age-y crap in the past. The modelling environment was rife with crackpots and weirdos, and I actually knew a girl that had dropped out of modelling to start her own Wicca lifestyle blog. But Sabrina?
And yet here she was, talking with increasing enthusiasm about her special relation with “the Universe”, and her power to influence the quantum whatever with her mind, affirming and manifesting stuff, which seemed to mean that she could get what she wanted provided she believed it strongly enough and said it aloud and lit some candles.
And she was not on drugs.
“You really believe this—?”
“I’ve been doing this for years now. It does work, believe me.”
“Give me an example.”
She spread her arms. “I needed an apartment, I found an apartment. Just like I wanted it, just in the neighborhood I wanted it. In three days. I just extended my ontic powers and willed it into existence.”
All this, with a straight face.
I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “I am sorry, Sabrina, but if this magic thing of yours really works, how come you are here crying in the vegan chow mein because you life sucks?”
That gave her pause.
“It works,” she said in the end. “I only have to understand what am I doing wrong.”
Her new age enthusiastic rampage sort of short-circuited my idea of talking her out of her bad mood. I listened to her rambling, and marveled at this strange creature I had thought I had known.
I had considered her strong and self-assured, and she had turned out to be a wet blanket, fearful of everything.
I had considered a level-headed, rational woman, and here she was expounding the wonders of what was, basically, witchcraft.
I had imagined her life as relatively happy, and instead it had been a decades-long collection of traumas and mostly self-inflicted psychological pain.
But I also felt a pang of resentment. I had considered her a friend, and it now transpired she had always kept me at a distance, distrusting me, thinking I was spreading ugly gossip about her, and generally casting her in a bad light in the first place because I had never been a “proper” girl like she had hoped to be.
And yet I had been the one on whose shoulder she would cry.
We finished our dinner and she insisted to show me her ritual paraphernalia, her Ouija board, her new age crystals collection. At least that kept her mind off that prick Bruno and her broken heart.
We said goodbye to each other and agreed I’d call her the next day, and maybe we’d see each other on Monday. She gave me two books for me to learn about her special relationship with the Universe, and I was on my way.