Confession #1: Black Eye Friday
If you ask my family why my brother and I don’t speak anymore, eventually someone will mention a night called Black Eye Friday.
The details change depending on who’s telling it, but the story always includes the same ingredients: too many drinks, a sister-in-law who had been side-eyeing me for years, and a rumor that I once hit someone with a mason jar.
Like most legendary family disasters, the truth is a little messier than the version people like to repeat.
Twas’ the night after Thanksgiving — the unofficial holiday where everyone who grew up together ends up at the same bars, pretending they’ve matured since high school.
Spoiler: we had not.
From the beginning, my sister-in-law seemed personally offended by my existence. I was younger, I made money modelling, and most of my friends looked like they’d wandered out of a casting call. To her, this meant they were all obviously plotting to steal her husband — my brother — who, I should clarify, was not exactly Brad Pitt, but then again we are related and spite living in the south-I’m not a brother fucker.
Her solution was simple: keep him away from any woman she considered a “threat.”
Which was ironic, because long before my friends were ever around, my brother had already been making questionable romantic decisions on his own and sampled about everyone in the dating pool.
The real punchline came years later.
She spent an impressive amount of time worrying about younger women, attractive friends, and imaginary competition. Meanwhile, the only person she ever fully trusted him to hang out with — the one person she was absolutely convinced was completely “safe” — ended up being the person he eventually cheated on her with. Best part, it was a geriatric DUDE! Life has a strange sense of humor like that!
But on that particular Black Eye Friday, none of that irony had unfolded yet.
What had unfolded was tequila. And family tension. And the kind of simmering resentment that had been quietly building for years.
She showed up after several drinks had already been consumed, which is never the ideal moment for two people who don’t particularly like each other to reconnect in a crowded bar.
What happened next depends on who you ask.
Some people remember yelling. Some people remember chaos.
And somewhere in the middle of all those versions lives the rumour that I allegedly hit someone over the head with a mason jar.
I will simply say this:
Glassware should never be present when alcohol and unresolved family dynamics are sharing the same table.
The best part of the whole night wasn’t the yelling or the chaos — it was the exit.
She calmly walked me to the door like a pageant winner escorting someone off stage, wearing the sweetest smile imaginable. The kind of smile that says “Oh this is perfect. I will absolutely be telling this story for the rest of your life.”
And she gently nudged me out the door like she’d just completed a community service project.
I remember thinking in that moment that she looked incredibly pleased with herself, like she had finally won some long-running competition that only she had been participating in.
Which, in hindsight, was probably the most on-brand thing she had done all evening.
Funny how families work like that. Entire decades of history get reduced to one chaotic night, and suddenly that becomes the official version of who you are.
Some family stories get buried.
Others get served at every holiday for the next twenty years.
This one apparently came with a mason jar.
Brutally yours, Verity Noir
New Orleans taught me many things. Discretion was not one of them.
😘
— Crescent City Confessions
