after dinner i drove us to la quinta inn so i could check out. a new person was at the desk. she said my room was good until tomorrow morning, and said i could keep my key, in case i decided to come back. alec said ‘we should give the key to a homeless person’ and i said ‘yeah, yeah’ and felt interested in doing that. idea dissolved quickly, i think, but i forget how. we decided to put the beer at alec’s apartment and go to a bar called ‘the grad [something].’ looked at the receipt the check-in person gave me, in a manner that reminded me of how my dad looks at checks at dinner. he will like, stop everything to make a display of how he’s examining the check. he has a story about why he does this. his dad was poor but was somehow friends with a rich man who was involved in building the new york city subway system. when they’d go out to dinner with the rich man, he would examine the receipt—like, really give it a good up-and-down, really consider how much money everything cost. then my dad’s dad started doing that. then my dad started doing that. i usually feel annoyed when my dad does it, like he‘s ‘performing an examinination of the receipt’ rather than examining it, and felt myself being annoyed with myself as i did it in front of alec, wanting to ‘prove’ to him that i in fact, checked in last night, i wasn’t lying. alec and i looked at the receipt. i don’t think the receipt said what time i checked in, so it was possible alec still thought…um…in my mind, it seemed possible for alec to think ‘megan probably didn’t leave new york until very late last night, which is why the check-in person said no one under ‘megan boyle’ had checked in, megan probably just checked in a few hours ago, so she could have an ‘alibi.” alec pointed out the top of the receipt, where it said ‘margaret matlock.’ we said things about how that was probably why they didn’t connect him to my room. felt relieved but also like alec probably still didn’t believe me/thought i checked in right before i came to the coffee shop or something. the only thing i lied about was not reading his facebook message he sent at 4:30AM. i saw it after the interview with juliet but felt committed to staying at la quinta for the night and didn’t feel like hanging out or calling him at 7something in the morning, was a little suspicious about him being asleep when i knocked and then waking at 4:30AM, knowing the previous night he had been up late and it was possible that he had just…ignored my knock…out of spite/intolerance of me being flaky the past few days and inconveniencing him by not having a phone (i understood and didn’t resent him for any of these possibilities or variations on these possibilities).