We can hear the party a block away, the heavy throb of drums and bass and laughter. Throngs of people spill onto the sidewalk, mill in the street. Outside the house there’s a blue velvet cowboy hat on top of a squat cactus.
Before we go into the backyard, Mikey stops suddenly, his face dropping. “Oh, man,” he says, looking down at me. “I completely forgot. The drinking thing. I’m cool with it, but how about you? I want to make sure you’re comfortable.”
I take a deep breath. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s fine. I want to go. I’ll be okay.” I smile. “Swear.”
Inside, though, there’s a little part of me that wonders if I really am ready.
“Shit.” He stares ahead of me at the yard, where tons of people are dancing and milling around. “I really want to hear this band. Are you sure?”
“Yeah. It’s cool.”
“Okay.” He bites his lip and his face flushes. “There’s something else, too, and I probably should have told you, but—”
He’s interrupted by a heavily sweating guy who runs up and yells something unintelligible in Mikey’s ear. Mikey gives me the “one minute” sign with his finger and follows the guy to where the band is playing. He leans down behind some amps. I lose sight of him as I get swept along in a crowd of people decked out in various combinations of sneakers, combat boots, vintage dresses, piercings, T-shirts, and porkpie hats. Everyone here seems much older than me.
The band is a tangle of wires and amps, holey jeans, horn-rimmed glasses and sweat-soaked checked shirts. The music is loose and fiery with lots of raspy vocals and high-pitched howls. The singer splashes his face with a cup of beer, lights a cigarette, throws it into the crowd, and hunches back over the microphone, singing about coyotes and girls and beer and being a garbageman. People are dancing along, red cups held over their heads.
I close my eyes for a moment, letting the music fold over me, feeling the gentle crush of people pushing my body. This is something I missed, being at a party or a show, being a part of people, of something.
I miss the warehouses and basements. I miss the screaming singers, the shredded, bloody fingers of the bassists. I miss the pit at hard-core shows. Ellis didn’t like it, but she came with me anyway, standing at the edge of the crowd while I hurled myself, and got hurled, around in the pit. No one cared for you in the pit. No one asked your name. You fell in and moved and swung and circled and bashed and when you stumbled out, your bruises and cuts felt beautiful.
I feel a brief surge of glimmering possibility: if I could just move forward, one foot, two, I could join the undulating bodies, could lose myself to skin on skin, bone against bone.
But when I open my eyes, I have not moved and Mikey isn’t behind the amp anymore.
“Hello, Strange Girl.”
The voice in my ear sends chills down my neck. Riley. I turn and he grins and moves closer to me. I hadn’t noticed before that there’s a thin scar under his jawbone by his ear. It’s pearl-white, perfect and flat.
Usually he’s behind me, in the cook station, tossing out his little quips to the waitstaff, and I’m only really near him when I have to take dishes into the station, and I try not to look at him when I do that, because my skin starts to heat up.
But out here, up close under the white lights strung across the trees, I can see that his skin is ruddy, traces of pockmarks under the stubble on his cheeks. His brown T-shirt fits loosely over his body, as though he was heavier once but never replaced his old clothes.
And I notice, too, that if I leaned against him, my head would fit right under his chin.
That’s a bad thought, so I step away from him and wrap my arms around my body. However kind of cute he is, he’s a mess, and I don’t need a mess right now.
“So. Strange Girl. How are you liking our fine, hot, and dry state? Our…creative and energetic citizens?” He motions with his beer to the throngs of partyers.
Riley fixes his eyes on me and they aren’t unkind, they seem almost nice, in a little bit of a sad way, and the weird thing is, he seems almost…interested in what my answer might actually be, which is not something I’m used to. And it’s confusing, because of my feelings for Mikey.
Suddenly, I wonder if the mess thinks I’m a mess, too, but it doesn’t bother him in the least.
Which makes me blush, so I duck my head, in case he can tell what I’m thinking by the look on my face. I’m about to try to answer, though, when Mikey shows up, clutching two plastic cups of water, a tall blonde by his side. She’s one of those girls Ellis would call, in a jealous way, willowy: smooth and lean in her tank top and long, flowery hippie skirt, two shiny braids nestled against her chest. She’s wearing not one, but two ankle bracelets.
The blood drains from my face.
She’s exactly the type of person to write in purple pen.
Riley chuckles. The blonde is now kneeling, wiping spilled water from Mikey’s sneakers with the hem of her skirt. Riley whispers in my ear, “That looks like a problem. Did you know Michael had a friend? Watch out for Bunny there. We boys are suckers for ankle bracelets.”
Before he drifts away, Riley says, louder, “Enjoy your evening, Strange Girl. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting one. Can’t wait to hear all about it at Grit on Monday.”
The girl named Bunny stands up, practically towering over me. She’s taller than Mikey. Her skin is flawless, with naturally flushed pink cheeks that look exuberant instead of, say, blotchy and sad, like mine.
She smiles prettily. “Charlie! I’m Bunny! Oh my God, were you talking to Riley West? Isn’t he the best? He’s so funny and my God, such an awesome musician!”
She says, “It’s just so great to finally meet you. How are you feeling? Mike said you had a kind of rough time? You doing okay?” Her face is pursed with concern, but then brightens. “Oh, I bet you can tell me all sorts of stories about Mike’s old girlfriends!” She pinches his arm playfully.
A furious blush creeps up Mikey’s cheeks. When Bunny turns toward the band, Mikey says softly, so low I can barely hear, “I was trying to tell you, before.”
I was breathing Mikey in for two weeks, I was thinking about him saving me, and what it might mean, I had this hope, a tiny hope, some flickering thing—
Stupid. Just fucking stupid. I bite my lips and watch as Bunny turns and leans into him, her back pressed against his chest, her head resting against his.
Mikey says, “Charlie.”
I bolt. There are so many people here, I can get lost. I can always get lost. I know how. I squeeze my way to the back of the crowd, where the kegs are set up. I think about Casper, and her rules, and—
It’s so easy, isn’t it, to grab a cup and pull the spigot and drink it down. To tamp down the fire stoking itself inside me.
I’m just a shit girl in overalls and a dirty jersey shirt. Frankenstein face and Frankenstein body, so who really cares, or notices, what I do? If I drink just one or two? Or three or four? Casper didn’t give me directions for what to do if somebody I used to really like-like, somebody who would be somebody good to love, somebody right, somebody who understood about me, turned out to not have the same ideas about me.
Who forgot me when he moved away, and moved on.
The night is peeling itself back, opening up, the beer flooding through my veins. Through cracks in the crowd, I watch him kiss her, softly, one hand gently stroking a lock of her hair, twining it through his fingers. I drink one, then another, and one more, like water, water, water.
A fissure begins inside me and it’s an ugly thing. For all the people here, I am utterly alone. I let the plastic cup drop from my fingers and run.
I can hear Mikey shouting for me, but I don’t stop. The bars downtown are just starting to close; dismayed, disheveled people are being popped back out onto the street, lurching into me, bouncing away as I push through them.
He shouts my name again and then his hand is pulling on my arm. “Stop! Charlie, just stop.”
“Go back,” I sputter. “To your girlfriend.” I’m weaving a little from the beer. I haven’t drunk anything in so long, my eyes are already starting to blur. I wonder if he can tell that I drank.
He sighs heavily, clenching his jaw. “Bunny and I have been going out for a while now and yeah, I should have told you right away, but honestly, what’s the big deal here?”
I start walking away quickly, but he follows me, muttering, “I’m not going to let you walk home alone, Charlie.” I don’t look back, but I can hear him following me, the slight squeak of his sneakers on the pavement.
Three men are slumped on the steps of my building, bare chests shining in the heat. They pass a paper bag back and forth. They squint up at us, nod politely.
I stumble going up the sixteen steps to the second floor and almost knock out a tooth. Swearing, I push myself back up. Mikey says, “Jesus, you okay, Charlie?” But I don’t stop. The stairwell light is out and I jam the key around the lock in my door, finally hitting the slot. I try to shut the door on Mikey, but he pushes at it gently and steps inside.
“Charlie, come on,” he says finally. I ignore him. I’m afraid if I say anything, I’ll cry. After unlacing my boots, I put them as neatly as possible in the corner of the room. I turn on the standing lamp. I make a practice, just like I used to when my mother was in one of her rages, of making things as orderly as possible. I straighten my sketchbooks on the card table. I put my pens and pencils in the glass jar. The plaid blanket flares out before me as I settle it softly on the futon. It was bad, really bad, to drink that beer, because now I’ve loosened something inside. I’ve chinked away at a wall I didn’t know would be so important and now I want my tender kit. I want him to leave. I need my tender kit.
Roar of ocean, swirl of tornado. I’m being swallowed.
Mikey sighs. “Is this going to be like it was with Ellis and that guy all over again? Come on, Charlie. You’re older than that now.”
I whirl around, blood in my ears.
When Ellis took up with that boy, he stepped into my place beside her, easy as a chess move, and I was nudged to the edge. I was so angry, and hurt.
I didn’t think I’d be on Mikey’s edge.
“What’s the problem here, Charlie?” His voice is tired and blurry. “Talk to me. You’re acting all weird, all jeal—”
He stops suddenly, his mouth dropping open. He’s still standing in front of the door. I turn my head away, flushes of shame threading my skin.
“Just get out,” I whisper. I can feel waves of tears behind my eyes.
“Oh my God. Did you…you thought we…that I…” He lets out an enormous breath all at once and covers his face. Behind his hands comes a muffled “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Just get out, please. It’s fine. It’s nothing. I’m cool, just go.” Blathering, staring at the wall, anywhere but at him. Gritting my teeth so hard my jaw hurts. I’m mortified.
But he doesn’t. What he does is even worse, because he’s Mikey, because he’s nice.
He comes over to me and puts his arms around me. “I’m sorry, Charlie. If I did anything to lead you on, I didn’t mean to. The last thing I’d want is to hurt you.”
But it makes it even worse, being held by him, being warm inside the cocoon of his arms, because when he angles his head to look down at me, and his breath is warm on my face, and his eyes are so sad and he is just so near to me, I kiss him.
And for a second, just a blip of a white-hot second, he kisses me back.
And then he pushes me away.
And wipes his mouth.
Because of course he would wipe his mouth.
“No, Charlie,” he says. “No, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that.”
I shut my eyes so hard I see red clouds pulsing inside my eyelids.
“Please just get the fuck out, okay?”
When I open them, he’s gone, and the door’s closed. I turn off the lamp, because I need the dark right now.
I can still feel the press of his mouth on mine, the nanosecond of warmth it gave me. But it doesn’t stop the flood of shame I feel: how stupid am I, echoing through my whole body. Like Louisa said, “Nobody normal will love us.”
I’ve already broken one of Casper’s rules: I drank. And I want to break another, but I don’t want to, Idon’tIdon’tIdon’tIdon’t, and so I get my tender kit from under a pile of clothes, and cover it with the plaid blanket, and then cover it with a bunch of shirts, and then my boots, and then I shove it into Louisa’s suitcase and wedge the whole thing way back under the claw-foot tub, where I can’t see it.
I practice those fucking stupid breath balloons for as long as I can, until I’m practically wheezing, and then I find my sketchbook, because drawing is my words, it’s the things I can’t say, and I let loose in the pages with a story about a girl who thought a boy liked her, and maybe could save her from herself, but in the end she was just stupid, stupid, because she’s a fucking freak, but if she could just make it through the night, there was going to be another chance, another day.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
