The Divorce Party

*This story was born from the idea that sometimes the most interesting thing you can do with a rule is break it. Thanks for reading, I hope it made you laugh as much as it made you blush.*

Roz had been told the apartment would be empty except for Jacob. That was the arrangement, made over a text exchange so businesslike it could have been two lawyers scheduling a deposition. She was bringing the last box of kitchen stuff, he was bringing the paperwork, they would sign, and then they would never have to stand in this hallway again.

The box held a blender, two mugs neither of them could claim, and a garlic press they had bought together on a Saturday when they were still the kind of couple who got excited about garlic presses. She was twenty-three now, had been married at twenty-two, and the whole thing had lasted six months, which was barely enough time to unpack, let alone divorce. She pressed the buzzer anyway.

The door opened and it was not Jacob. It was a woman about her age with dark hair and an oversized cardigan, standing there barefoot like she paid the rent.

"Oh," the woman said. "Oh! You must be Roz. I'm Sara."

"Right. Sara. Yeah, he's mentioned... huh." Roz shifted the box on her hip. She had pictured Sara as a concept, not as a person holding a glass of wine in her kitchen doorway. "Is Jacob here?"

"Bathroom. He'll be out in a sec. Come in, come in, sorry, I'm blocking the whole..." Sara stepped back and gestured vaguely at everything.

The apartment still had that half-eaten look, boxes stacked in the corner, one chair at the table, a couch they both technically owned. Roz set her box on the counter next to the single blender that lived there now, apparently. Jacob emerged from the hallway pulling a sweatshirt on, looking like a man caught doing something he was not actually doing.

"Hey," he said. "You're early."

"You said seven. It's 7:02." She looked at Sara, then back at him. "I thought it'd just be us for the paperwork."

"Sara was already here, and I figured, you know, no secrets, transparent process, all that." He said it a little too smoothly, like he'd rehearsed it in the bathroom. There was something smug underneath it, some small proud flicker Roz recognized from their marriage, the look he got when he thought he was winning something.

"Transparent process," Roz repeated. "Like we're a nonprofit."

Sara laughed, then covered her mouth like laughing was against the lease. "Sorry. Sorry. It's just, you two talk like that in real life? He does that. The deadpan thing. I thought he invented it."

"He did not invent it," Roz said. "I invented it. Ask him."

"He claims he invented it," Jacob told Sara, getting three glasses down, then stopping at three, then getting a fourth like it cost him something.

So that was the evening, then. The four of them. Roz sat on the arm of the couch, the couch that was half hers until the paperwork went through, and thought about how she had a date scheduled for after this. Stewart, twenty-six, met at a design conference back when she was twenty-two and still married, a casual friend who had texted her that morning asking what time he should come by her place. She had said nine. There was still time for this to be a weird preamble and not the whole evening.

"Okay, so, before this gets any weirder," she said, "I'm proposing a rule. As a joke. Mostly as a joke."

Jacob squinted at her. "Go ahead."

"Rule one. Nobody mentions the divorce. We are four adults drinking wine in an apartment, and the divorce does not exist. Signed papers sit on the table like a decorative centerpiece, and we talk about literally anything else."

"I love it," Sara said immediately, too fast.

"It's a good rule," Jacob agreed, and there was that flicker again, because agreeing to not mention it made him look easygoing, unbothered, a man so over it he could joke about it.

The rule survived maybe ninety seconds.

"So how long were you two married, actually?" Sara asked, settling into the couch cushion. "Like, total?"

There was a silence with a lot of texture to it.

"Sara," Jacob said.

"What? I'm allowed to ask. We're all being normal. Normal people ask normal questions."

"Six months," Roz said. "We married at twenty-two, we met at orientation at twenty-one, and it lasted six months, which honestly is barely a podcast episode."

"Six months," Sara repeated, and Roz watched her do the math on her own relationship, two months and counting, and saw the little wobble cross her face. "That's so fast. Why'd you even..."

"Rule one," Roz said, pointing at her with the wine glass. "Broken already. You broke it. That's a foul."

"You can't foul the host," Jacob said.

"I'm not the host, I'm a guest with a blender."

"Okay, new rule," Jacob said, leaning forward, elbows on knees, going full facilitator, which had been his role in every argument they'd ever had. "Rule two. No one sits on anyone else's lap. I'm just saying it now so we all know where we stand."

"That's such a specific rule," Sara said. "Like, who was about to sit on a lap?"

"Nobody. It's a preemptive rule."

"It's a weirdly controlling rule," Roz said, and then heard herself, and he heard her too, because that had been one of her words during the separation, controlling, and the whole room heard the echo of it.

"I'm being organized," he said stiffly.

"You're being organized," she agreed. "Sure."

The buzzer went, mercifully, and Sara jumped up to get it, and that was how Stewart entered the situation, holding a six-pack of something local and looking around the room like a man doing a quick headcount.

"Hey, Roz." He kissed her cheek, easy, casual, no negotiation, which was the whole appeal of Stewart. Then he looked at Jacob and Sara and back at Roz. "So. These are..."

"The ex-husband and the ex-husband's girlfriend," Roz said. "Stewart, Jacob, Jacob, Sara. We're doing rules. It's going great."

"Rules," Stewart said, dropping onto the couch next to Roz and cracking a beer. "Like party rules? I love party rules. My buddy did a themed thirtieth, everyone had to talk in rhyme, it was hell."

"Rule one is no one mentions the divorce," Sara recited.

"Rule two is no laps," Jacob added.

"And rule one has been broken twice," Roz said.

"Three times if we count the blender as a divorce reference," Stewart said. "The blender is clearly a divorce artifact."

The blender sat on the counter between them, gleaming under the kitchen light, and Roz had to admit the man had a point.

"We should order pizza," Sara announced, phone already out. "Pizza makes everything normal. Jacob, you want your weird one, olives and no sauce? I know your weird one by heart now."

And there it was, the little flex, delivered with a bright innocent smile. Roz watched Jacob's ears go pink, watched him enjoy it and hate himself for enjoying it.

"I'll just have whatever," Roz said flatly. "Stewart, you?"

"Pepperoni. And I gotta say, this is the best divorce I've ever been to, and I've been to one other one, my cousin's, and there was a bouncy castle."

"There was not a bouncy castle," Roz said.

"There was a small one. For the kids, but adults used it. It got emotional." Stewart stretched his arm along the back of the couch, not touching her, just adjacent, his whole deal in one gesture. "So what happens after the pizza? Is there a program? Speeches?"

Jacob pulled the folder of papers out of a drawer and set it on the coffee table with a soft slap. "The program is this. We sign these, and then..."

"Rule one," Roz said.

"I was going to say and then we eat pizza."

"You were going to say and then we sign these."

"Maybe." He opened the folder anyway, fanned the pages out, and slid a pen across the table toward her, and the whole room went quiet in that specific way rooms go quiet when a document is the main character. "Look, it's all standard. Everything split down the middle. The couch, the blender, the..."

"The blender is mine," they both said at once.

"I bought it," Jacob said.

"I returned it and bought it back when you broke the pitcher, so it's mine, that's settled, it's in my box."

Sara looked between them with an expression Roz could only describe as delighted horror. Stewart drank his beer like a man at a very good play.

"You know what," Roz said, picking up the pen, "I have an idea. Since rule one is dead and rule two is stupid, I'm proposing rule three. Nobody signs anything until after pizza. We are going to eat like four normal adults, and then we will do the paperwork, and then everybody goes home."

"I can get behind that," Stewart said.

"Fine," Jacob said. "Rule three. Pizza first."

"Democracy," Sara said, and ordered the pizzas, and read Jacob's weird order out loud to the guy on the phone, olives, no sauce, extra weird, while Jacob stared at the ceiling.

Roz sat there with the pen still in her hand and thought, huh, she had come here expecting forty minutes and a signature, and instead she was going to eat pizza with her ex-husband, his girlfriend, and her sort-of date, in the apartment she still half owned, on a Tuesday, and some part of her that she was not going to examine was having a genuinely good time.

The pizzas arrived in twenty minutes, which Sara declared a miracle for a Tuesday, and they arranged themselves around the little table because the coffee table had a folder of divorce papers on it now and nobody wanted to eat near that. It was a table for four, technically. It had been a table for two, once, with a plant in the middle that Jacob had kept alive out of spite.

"Okay, get in," Sara said, sliding the boxes onto the table. "Careful, Jacob's is wet."

"My pizza is not wet," Jacob said.

"Olives with no sauce is a wet pizza, babe. I'm sorry. I love you, but it's true."

"See, that's the thing," Stewart said, pulling a pepperoni slice off his own pie and folding it in half like an animal. "Olives and no sauce, that's not a preference, that's a cry for help."

"It's a texture thing," Jacob said.

"It's a texture thing," Roz repeated, and Sara laughed before she could stop herself, and then they were all laughing a little, even Jacob, who was laughing at himself in a way he had maybe learned from her, or she from him, hard to trace the lineage anymore.

Roz reached for a napkin at the same time Jacob did, and under the table her knee bumped his knee, and it was nothing, it was a table for four, knees live close together at a table for four, and she pulled back a fraction of a second too late for it to read as nothing and too early for it to read as anything. Jacob kept eating. Her knee stayed where it was. Nobody said the word knee.

"So," Stewart said, "I wanna hear the story. How'd you two meet? I feel like I should know this, we're at a party together."

"Orientation," Roz said. "Grad school orientation, we were both twenty-one, we got put in the same group and we spent the whole day making fun of the icebreakers."

"She made fun of the icebreakers," Jacob said. "I laughed. That was my whole contribution for about a year, honestly. Laughing."

"Then he got bold and drew me a cartoon," Roz said. "It's how he flirts. It's honestly how he does everything."

"I proposed by cartoon," Jacob said, and then heard himself, and Sara looked at him, and Stewart looked at Roz, and Roz said, "Rule one," and everyone drank.

The thing about the knee was that it stayed. It was doing a very good impression of an accident that had simply not resolved itself. Roz could feel the warmth of it through her jeans, which was a stupid thing to be able to feel, and she was constructing a sentence to redirect the table when Stewart set down his crust, reached over, hooked an arm around Sara's waist, and pulled her sideways onto his lap.

"Rule two," he announced. "Somebody had to break it. This party was stalling."

"Hey," Sara said, wobbling, laughing, a beer coaster stuck somewhere it shouldn't be. "I'm the girlfriend of the guy you're not supposed to provoke."

"I'm not provoking anybody," Stewart said. "I'm just a large man with an open lap and a commitment to chaos."

Jacob put his slice down. Roz watched him watch his girlfriend sitting on another guy's lap, and she watched something move behind his face that she recognized, because she had been married to that face, and because she was currently feeling the identical thing in reverse, and because she was twenty-three and proud and slightly drunk on one beer, she stood up, walked the two steps around the table, and sat down directly on Jacob's lap.

"There," she said. "Evened out. Symmetrical. Thematically consistent."

"That's not," Jacob started, and his hands came up and