Philadelphia Weekly

Illustration by Karen Klassen

Seriously, it's like something out of Trainspotting. Our complimentary breakfast is served in a big dreary room that looks and smells like 400 million cigarettes have been smoked in it over the course of its long and battered existence.

At each table are the same kids from the club last night, only in the light of day the guys are sticking with the guys and the girls with other girls, and everybody looks half-dead. It was quite a night, all right. Four girls got on the elevator with us just now, yanking up tired bra straps and laughing, still drunk.

My breakfast is plunked down in front of me: fried tomatoes, soft-boiled eggs, baked beans sliding slowly down the plate's ridge. The other Katie, who's been here only a week, looks queasy and annoyed with me for making her queasier with my Old World breakfast order. I smile at her merrily around a mouthful of slippery eggs. If you can't take the hangover, get out of the pub, Other Katie.

Last night she absolutely panicked. I saw it in her eyes. She'd come all the way from Rhode Island with the idea of meeting a cute Irish guy, and it wasn't happening. She's my friend Emily's friend from home, and they'd met up with me on my travels in Galway for what they kept calling a dirty weekend.

"We're losing time!" she said to me in utter seriousness when we misplaced Emily in one of the clubs and the clock was nearing midnight and she still hadn't made out with anybody. These two girls, it's worth
mentioning, are, like, seven years younger than I am.

They're not shrinking violets either. Both former soccer players with substantial bodies and serious leg muscles, they're taller and stronger than just about every man in Ireland. And louder.

And in their Forever 21 getups-a confusion of colors, straps, alternatingly tight and draped fabric-they were a force to be reckoned with.

We'd set out for the night with high hopes, shivering. It's colder here because it's near the Atlantic: the western sea, as the Pogues sing, the one closer to home. The girls were regarding me as some kind of bad hookup juju, walking around as I was in a cloud of just-broken-up fuckoffitude.

So Other Katie dolled me up like a gangster moll, making the most of the one tank top I'd brought by festooning me with strings of pearls, stroking on layers of smoky eyeshadow and inflating my hair to four times its natural height.

In the first pub my large hair and unpleasant attitude attracted an admirer of sorts. "She's from Philadelphia!" he told the Swiss girls he was trying to impress. "Her boyfriend must've stolen those pearls!"

I smiled and gave him the finger, and he shook my hand. "Fair play to ya," he said, impressed.

By then Emily had paired off with some dude whose northern accent only she could oonderstahnd. Disgusted, Other Katie dragged me out onto the street by the arm, but we got turned away at a club that was admitting only people with hand stamps. I lost her when I posed for a snapshot with a rowdy bachelorette party and stopped at the chipper for a sober-up snack.

Somehow we all met up back in the hotel room, where tensions were running high. When Other Katie discovered that Emily had shorted out her straightening iron, they lost it and started screaming about wasted time and selfishness and people whom you think are your real friends but then totally ditch you.

"We never fight like this!" one of them wailed at one point. I was sitting up in bed and eating chips from a greasy paper bag, wondering where the party was. From somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, dance music was throbbing.

"Fine!" Other Katie finally hollered as she climbed into bed in her sweatpants. "That's fine then!" She leaned over and snapped off the light.

I got out of bed and snapped it back on and stood over them in my droopy underpants. "No one's going to sleep until you two girls make up," I said, hands on hips.

A teary Emily got up and, by way of apology, lay solemnly on top of Other Katie, crushing her until they both started giggling again. Then they put their ridiculous slut gear back on and we went downstairs to investigate the sound that was making our headboards vibrate.