Revenge in the Sun

Okay so here's how my dumb revenge plan started, and I want you all to appreciate how badly it went off the rails, because it went off the rails so spectacularly that I still can't believe it happened to me.

I'm Frankie. I'm twenty-eight, I sell pharmaceutical stuff to doctors who mostly don't look up from their laptops, and six months ago my boyfriend of two years cheated on me with a woman he met at a "wellness retreat," which is a phrase that makes me see red even now. His name is Levi. He's thirty. He travels for a living, posting sunsets on the internet, and apparently sunsets also post on him, if you catch my drift.

So when I saw on his stories that he was in Ibiza, I booked a flight. Yes. I know. My therapist would have a field day, if I had a therapist, which I don't because I spent that money on plane tickets instead!

The plan was simple. Find Levi. Find someone Levi knows. Kiss that person in front of Levi. Devastation. Closure. Great Instagram story material. That's it, that was the entire plan, and honestly it had more holes in it than the budget hotels I was looking at, but grief makes you stupid and I was very stupid that September.

I landed in San Antonio on a Tuesday, checked into this crusty little hotel with peeling white walls and a ceiling fan that clicked like a metronome, and spent two days wandering the promenade feeling sorry for myself in a very cute sundress. No Levi. But I kept checking his stories like a detective, and on day three he posted a photo of a café on the water with two cortados on the table. Two! Plural cortados! Which obviously meant he was there with someone, right that second, and I power-walked there with frantic, unstoppable urgency.

And that's where I saw her.

She was sitting at a corner table in the shade, this gorgeous tall blonde with tan lines and a lot of freckles, laughing at her phone. She looked maybe twenty-six. She had that effortless holiday look I can never pull off, linen and messy hair and zero effort, and my heart did a little tap dance because I just knew. This was her. The wellness retreat woman, or whatever her equivalent was. Levi's new fling, sitting in his sun like she owned it.

Did I think it through? I did not think it through. I smoothed my dress, ordered a coffee at the counter for cover, and walked over with my friendliest fake smile.

"Oh my god, hi! Is this seat taken?" I asked, already pulling out the chair.

She looked up, a little surprised, and then she grinned this wide easy grin. "Not by anybody real! Sit, sit. You want water? The waiter here ignores you unless you order beer, fair warning."

"Frankie!" I said, sticking my hand out like we were at a job interview. "I'm Frankie. Sorry, I just, you looked friendly and this café is so crowded, you know?"

"Randi," she said, shaking my hand with a nice firm grip. "And yeah, it's a tourist trap, but the shade is free and the wifi works, so here I am." She scooted her chair over to make room. "Are you here on holiday? You've got that look, like you're on a mission."

A mission! If only she knew. I sat down and did my best casual sipping.

"Sort of a mission, actually. Visiting a... friend," I said, laying it on thick. "He's traveling around here somewhere. Levi? Do you know him? Tall, brown hair, always filming things?"

Now I did not know this at the time. Randi took a long slow sip of her wine and got this little sparkle in her eye, and I read that sparkle as guilt. Guilty sparkle! New girlfriend sparkle! In reality, and I learned this much later, she was just amused, because a pretty woman walking up and asking about some guy named Levi struck her as either a scam or a soap opera, and she's the type who enjoys both.

"Levi," she repeated, drawing it out. "Levi... hmm. That rings a bell maybe? Tall guy, camera, always going on about light and angles?"

"Yes. Oh my god, yes, that's him," I said, way too fast.

"And you're a friend of his?" she asked, eyebrows up.

"Old friend. Very old friend. We go way back," I said, which was technically true if you counted two years of dating and one devastating betrayal as going way back. "Are you two... close? Do you see him a lot?"

She laughed, a real laugh, and refilled my water glass without asking, which I found stupidly charming. "You're doing the thing where you ask a lot of questions about a guy while looking at me like I stole your parking spot. It's fine. I love drama and I'm one sangria deep. What's the deal with you and Levi?"

"Nothing. No deal. I just lost touch and thought I'd, reconnect," I said, and then I panicked and asked about the weather.

The weather! I asked a gorgeous stranger about the weather while sweating through my sundress. Randi mercifully let it go, and we just talked, actually talked, for like an hour. She was from Manchester originally, twenty-six, had worked bars all over Europe and was doing a season in Ibiza before figuring out her next move. She had this way of mocking everything gently, including me, including herself, and I kept forgetting to be jealous of her because she was so easy to sit with.

So obviously my brain, being my brain, rebranded the whole operation right there at the table. New plan! Same plan, better target! Seduce Levi's new girlfriend directly. Devastating, poetic, right? Text him a photo of me kissing her and let him marinate in it. I was a genius. I was a monster. I was also, and I didn't fully clock this yet, having a genuinely nice time with a woman for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit.

"Okay, so what are you doing tonight?" I asked, going for breezy. "Because my hotel has this rooftop bar, it's honestly terrible, the drinks are overpriced and the DJ only knows four songs, but the view is insane and I have a room key and no one to be embarrassed with."

Randi tilted her head and looked at me for a beat, and I braced for a no.

"You had me at terrible," she said. "Genuinely, the worse the DJ, the better the night. What time?"

"Nine. Nine o'clock, rooftop, ask for Frankie's tab because I'll be the one nervously rearranging the napkins," I said.

She laughed again and wrote her number on a napkin, which felt gloriously old fashioned. "There. Text me so I have yours. And Frankie? Whatever your Levi situation is, I hope he steps on a plug. Barefoot."

I liked her so much it was genuinely inconvenient.

I went back to my hotel and immediately spiraled. I texted my best friend Maggie a nine-paragraph explanation and she replied with one thumbs up and the words "are you sure about this," and I replied "absolutely not but here we go," and then I spent forty minutes choosing between two dresses that looked nearly identical.

Levi, meanwhile, I was still keeping tabs on. His story that afternoon was a video of a sunset with some caption about presence and letting go, which, from the man who cheated via Snapchat, was rich. I screenshotted it for motivation. Tonight, I told myself, the plan goes live. Rooftop bar, two drinks minimum, charm offensive, and then the photo that ends the whole sad chapter.

At eight fifty-five I was up on the roof, checking my hair in my phone camera like a lunatic. The sky over the promenade was doing that peach-to-purple thing that makes even ugly places look like postcards, and the terrible DJ was already butchering a song I half knew, and the elevator dinged, and out came Randi in a little black dress and boots, waving a bottle of something in a paper bag.

"I brought contraband," she announced to the whole rooftop. "The drinks here are robbery and I refuse to participate. Frankie. You look great, oh my god, that color on you."

"Randi. You brought your own bar, that's so, wait, is that legal?"

"Absolutely not," she said cheerfully, kissing my cheek hello, which shorted out about half my brain. "Come on, corner table, best view of the trashy sunset. Tell me everything about your Levi situation, because I've been thinking about it all afternoon and I have theories."

And she sat down across from me, poured two glasses, clinked mine, and looked at me with those amused eyes like she already knew there was more to this story than I was telling.

She had no idea. Neither did I, honestly. Neither did I!

The rooftop bar, as predicted, was terrible. The DJ had moved on from butchering one song to butchering all four, the drinks were eleven euros each, and there was a seagull up there with us who seemed personally offended by everything. Randi poured her contraband into the bar's glasses like this was completely normal, and honestly? On that roof, at that hour, it kind of was.

"So your Levi," she said, stretching her boots out under the table. "Is he the one who broke your heart or the one you broke?"

"Neither. Both. He's my ex, we dated two years, and I'm not here for him, I'm here for, sun. Wellness. Presence."

"You said the word presence like it physically hurt you."

"It did. It did hurt me, Randi."

She laughed and reached for the bottle again, found it empty, and made a face. "Right, that went fast. Excuse me, I shall negotiate with the enemy."

I watched her weave over to the actual rooftop bar, and I watched her get stuck there for a solid five minutes, because the bartender was a big cheerful Spanish guy named Mateo who spoke maybe ten words of English, and Randi's Spanish was basically "hola" plus aggressive pointing. I could hear fragments drifting over. "Hierbas," she kept saying, tapping the menu. "Hierbas, sí, dos."

Mateo nodded a lot. Mateo brought back two glasses of something cloudy and green-ish and extremely full.

"Oh no," I said when she got back. "What did you order?"

"I ordered hierbas, it's an Ibizan thing, this herb liqueur, it's lovely, you'll love it, it's like drinking a meadow." She took a sip and paused. Her eyebrows did something complicated. "Okay, so, either Mateo has never heard of hierbas, or this is hierbas and someone's grandmother's cough medicine."

I tried mine. My whole face relocated. "Randi. Randi, this tastes like a forest fire."

"It does. It tastes like the forest the fire is in." She was wheezing with laughter now, thumping the table, and the seagull left in disgust. "He gave us doubles. Look at them, they're enormous. Mateo, you beautiful man, you've given us doubles of a mystery."

Mateo, from across the roof, raised his glass at us and shouted something joyful in Spanish that we absolutely did not understand.

"He's toasting us," Randi said, raising hers back. "Or sentencing us. Hard to say."

We each took a few brave sips of them, and then Randi tipped the rest into a potted palm when Mateo wasn't looking and flagged him down for two big waters and a bowl of crisps, and somewhere in there I stopped tracking Levi's story refreshes entirely, which was honestly the most therapeutic thing that had happened to me in six months. We talked about her worst bar job, which involved a bachelor party in Prague and a fire extinguisher, and my worst sales call, which involved a doctor who kept an iguana in his office, and I laughed so hard at one point that I did that silent thing where you can't breathe and just slap the table, and Randi looked delighted about it, like my terrible laugh was a personal achievement of hers.

"Okay, it's getting late and my phone is at four percent," I said eventually, holding it up like evidence. "And four percent Frankie makes bad decisions."

"Four percent Frankie sounds like my favorite person alive. Come on, I'll walk you down, I want to see this legendary clicking ceiling fan."

"It clicks. I named it. It's called Kevin."

"You named your ceiling fan Kevin, oh my god, yes, please, lead the way."

So we took the ancient elevator down three floors