Ian blushed. “Yeah. Yeah, I go to school with you.”
The guy kept walking. “Shit, man,” I heard him say as he disappeared into the kitchen crowd. “You traded up.”
Ian and I followed Rudy into what I presumed was the living room and we all squeezed onto one open cushion on a crowded leather couch. I drank my second beer much faster, my taste buds slightly numbed, and I took in the activity around us with wide, attentive eyes. In the corner of the room was a grand piano and two girls with straight blonde hair sat pressed against each other on the shiny black bench, all twenty of their fingers dancing sloppily across the ivory keys. A boy stood beside them holding two cups in his hands and waving his arms like a music maestro, spilling beer on the floor, the girls and the piano, though none of them seemed to care much. I couldn’t hear their performance over the music that blared from the ceiling speakers but judging by the faces of those sitting nearest to the piano, it couldn’t have sounded good.
Though it was stifling outside and hot inside the house, someone lit a fire in the fireplace and several boys were throwing their empty red cups into the flames, prodding at the mound of melting, oozing plastic with the end of the fire poker.
The couch shifted as the boy beside us stood up and left. His spot was quickly filled by a couple. The girl leaned her head against the boy’s gingham-clad chest and he leaned his face down to hers. They started kissing, his sloppy lips on her pretty pink mouth. I turned away from them quickly and finished the rest of my beer staring down into my own lap, feeling sticky and claustrophobic and awkward. Ian’s arm was resting across my shoulders on the back of the couch and I could feel his body pushing closer against mine. ‘Not here,’ I wanted to say. ‘Not in front of them!’ I leaned close to Rudy, my hair falling like a curtain across our faces.
“I think I need to go to the bathroom.” I had been holding it since we arrived. Wasn’t there some saying about breaking the seal? Regardless, I feared leaving physical evidence of myself in the house.
“Are you feeling sick? I’ll come with you,” Ian stood and helped me off the couch.
But on the way there we got lost, circling the main floor twice and still unable to find a bathroom.
“Let’s just go upstairs,” Rudy said, finally. “It’s not a big deal.”
She led the way up the stairs, past poster-size portraits of the Warren family. Mrs. Warren was thin and pale and sour looking. Mr. Warren had a thick beard and red cheeks. I wondered what they would think when they came home to stained carpets and plastic mounds in their pretty fireplace.
At the top of the staircase a marble hallway split in two directions. There were five doorways; three were open and led to bedrooms, as neat and tidy as guest rooms in a fancy hotel. The remaining two doors were closed.
“We’ll check this one.” Ian nodded toward the closed door at the far end of the hallway.
Rudy turned in the opposite direction and Ian wove his fingers through mine and led me down the hallway. His other hand reached out; his fingers closed around the gold door knob and he turned it. The room was dark, lit only by a desk lamp in the corner of the room, but right away all of their faces whipped toward where we stood frozen in the open doorway. The non-Ogden boy – the one with the sleazy mustache and buzz cut – was slipping a small plastic baggy into Skyler Warren’s hand. Skyler jerked in surprise at our intrusion, and the bag fell to the ground, spilling half of its powdery white contents onto the plush carpet.
“Fuck.” The mustache guy ripped his arm away. “That was you man, that was all you.”
At the same time, one of his friends, the black friend, pointed at us, eyes narrowed. “Who the fuck’s that?”
I couldn’t speak. All I could do was stare, mortified, as Skyler dove to the floor in a desperate attempt to scoop up the escaped powder as it sifted through the carpet threads. Another Ogden boy dropped to the floor to help him.
“Who the fuck’s these clowns,” the friend repeated, his brown and tan index finger burning a hole in the middle of my chest from ten feet across the room.
Skyler looked up from where he kneeled on the floor, and our stunned eyes met for the briefest second before he turned to Ian. He stood and stepped toward him, their chests a few inches apart. Skyler’s bloodshot brown eyes narrowed.
“What the hell, man.” He shoved the middle of Ian’s chest with an open palm and Ian tripped backwards, his face red and naked with surprise. “I know you’re from the hood but don’t you know what a goddamn closed door means?”
“What the fuck do you know about the hood, rich boy?”
Mustache guy shoved Skyler in the back and I watched in horror as Skyler toppled forward, knocking Ian over onto the carpet and landing on top of him with a thud. Ian struggled beneath Skyler’s weight, his legs flailing as he tried to stand.
Before I could think about it, before anything more mortifying could happen, I was stumbling backwards out the doorway and slamming the door shut behind me. I ran down the hall, my fallen curls whipping against my back. I ran straight into Rudy as she stepped into the hallway, colliding against her side. Her elbow jabbed into my bladder.
“I found the bathroom.” She gestured behind us.
“We have to leave.”
She cocked her head to the side, her eyebrows drawn together. “What about Ian?”
Before she could say another word I had grabbed her wrist and started dragging her down the stairs.
“Jillian?” Her voice was muffled by blood pounding in my ears. At the bottom of the staircase I pushed through the crowd, clearing a path to the front door and out onto the porch. I didn’t turn around until I had pulled her all the way out onto the sidewalk in front of Skyler Warren’s house. I dropped her hand. Mine was clammy and warm.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
I nodded. My throat was dry. “Will you call the cab?”
“Okay.”
She punched in a phone number, shooting worried glances in my direction while she repeated the Warrens’ address into the speaker. I glanced back toward the house, half expecting to find all five of them chasing after me, but of course they weren’t. A rush of relief washed over me, followed immediately by a smothering blanket of embarrassment. How could I have left Ian in there? Why had I brought him here in the first place? Why had I acted so stupid?
When I glanced back again, Ian was walking out the front door. I was shaking, my heart in my throat as he walked across the lawn toward us. I couldn’t look up to meet his gaze – what if he had a black eye or a bloody nose or some other physical representation of my horrendous mistake? He stopped just in front of me. His black Converse sneakers were wet with dew or maybe with spilled beer.
“Can I talk to you?”
I nodded. I still couldn’t manage to look up from the ground as I followed him toward his car.
He unlocked the passenger door and the interior lights flipped on as he held it open for me. I ducked my head and climbed in. It smelled like peppermint and men’s body spray; a half empty bottle of Mountain Dew sat in one of the cup holders while the other was occupied by a handful of loose change. He walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side and I glanced up for the first time while his face was turned away from me. It was dark and I could see him only in profile, but he didn’t appear to be gravely injured.
He opened the driver’s side door, and I stared at my hands as he got into his seat. This was the first time I had been in his car. He had come to my house several times that summer, but he had never driven me anywhere, and now it seemed clear he never would. I could feel him looking at me but I couldn’t speak, and I picked idly at a chip in my thumbnail polish until the lights finally went off after an agonizingly long period of time. I waited patiently for him to yell at me, to acknowledge how badly I’d treated him, to deliver my first post-party break up speech on a platter laced with spilled cocaine. He had been a good first boyfriend, a boy to have my first kiss with, but we should have known it would nev
er work.
“Hey,” he said finally. He wanted me to look up at him, and I did. “I’m really sorry about what happened in there.”
I was taken aback. “But I’m the one who left you in there. Aren’t you mad?”
“Well yeah, that wasn’t great, but you were scared.” He reached across the console and took my hand. “I get it. I’m sorry I got you into that mess.”
“It’s okay,” I found myself accepting his apology, bewildered.
“So you’re okay? We’re okay?”
“It’s okay,” I repeated, and he leaned over and pressed his mouth against mine. It seemed the subject was closed. All was forgiven; all would go on. That was a good thing, right?
I didn’t realize my hand was still limp in his until he squeezed my fingers, and I remembered I should hold his hand in return.
While Rudy and I waited for the taxi, I told her the whole excruciating story. My face was bright red; I could feel it as it smoldered. At the end of my recounting, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me into a bear hug.
“Don’t worry about it too much. Skyler’s a nice guy – I’ve known him since we were kids. He’ll forget about it.”
“But I won’t forget.” I looked down at my lap. “This was the first party I’ve ever been to, and I embarrassed myself in front of everyone.”
“Can I tell you something?” Her voice got softer and she gave me an extra squeeze before she pulled away. “This is my first real party, too.”
I looked at her then, in case she was joking.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
Rudy shrugged and smiled a small smile. “I just wanted you to think I was cool.”
“You could have told me,” I said.
We were both quiet. The house thumped behind us, and someone deep inside let out a girly squeal.
“At least Ian forgave you. He’s a really cool guy, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s ten past midnight,” Rudy looked at her watch as a yellow car pulled up to the curb. “My parents will probably be up waiting. That’s what they always used to do with Kent and Marta.”
Inside the taxi I wallowed in all sorts of self-indulgent guilt. I remembered the baggy falling over and over again, Skyler’s face as he looked at Ian with disdain and Ian’s soft-voiced apology as we sat together in his car. And now the dread of Mrs. Golden’s disappointment was compounding my guilt. I could see her, her gold-bangled arms crossed over her ample chest, worry lines creasing her forehead, watching out the front window for our safe return. I could see Mr. Golden, silent and serious, his mouth an angry straight line. I imagined being grounded to their house (which, truthfully, would be no punishment at all, especially considering the new discovery that I couldn’t handle myself in public). Mostly I hoped they wouldn’t see me as a bad influence on their daughter.
But when the taxi driver pulled up in front of the Goldens’, all of the windows on the face of the house were black. Mr. and Mrs. Golden had gone to bed without waiting up for us.
I learned so many things about Rudy that summer, and about how to live in a world of privilege, but the thing that struck me the hardest was that Rudy lived only in extremes. I saw her either fresh-faced and damp-haired from the shower or the pool, sauntering around the house in her pajamas bottoms or a pair of jean shorts, or she was styled like a magazine spread, pink gloss on her lips and eye shadow sweeping over the crease of her eyelids, hair cascading in beautiful curls down her back. There were mornings she would sleep past noon, when I couldn’t wake her no matter how hard I prodded, and I ate breakfast alone in their quiet kitchen, listening to the sounds of Imelda’s heavy breathing as she lumbered around the house with her dustpan and broom, and other mornings Rudy would be awake as soon as the sun popped up above the horizon. She would jump on top of me, straddling my waist, and dig her fingers into my sides, tickling me until I screamed for mercy. Some days she loved every tiny thing about her life, from the extra marshmallows gracing her bowl of Lucky Charms to the name her parents had given her to the way a white-haired angel had stumbled into her life (she once called me this, in those exact words). It was those days I cherished the most, hoarding them in a secret place in my heart until the time I knew I would need to retrieve them, when I had to move back into my own home upon my parents’ return from Europe (they called me once every week, and we spoke for fifteen or twenty minutes, mostly about the castles they had seen, or the spectacular food and wine they had eaten and drunk, and I indulged my mother’s need for approval, for envy from her own daughter even, by ooh-ing and ah-ing at all the appropriate moments). The Goldens were so sweet; the loving, caring family of my dreams, leaving one another sweet notes on the whiteboard of the refrigerator, sharing a leisurely family dinner at least once per week, the three of them (plus me) seated around one end of the eight person table, bumping elbows while they all reached for the same bowl of pasta. I received hugs from Mrs. Golden every time I saw her – despite how greasy I was with suntan lotion or sweat – and kisses on my cheeks before we went out, leaving the faint hint of her orangey-red lipstick on my face so that I had to scrub it away before we could leave. It was these casual displays of affection that impressed me the most – the ability to love your family, to physically show them love, even while no one important was watching.
But on rare occasions, often when I least saw it coming, Rudy would wake up filled with a displeasure that I now assume simmered continually far beneath her surface. She would shrug off all the activities of our daily routine, refuse to consume anything but coffee for breakfast and brood until the afternoon when she would finally concoct some insane plan for our day, and her mood would brighten in a way that wasn’t quite normal but sparked with some flavor of sinister beauty. Once, she decided we would hitchhike across the state to Kansas City and I went along with it because Rudy was her most convincing in this mood and because I was still afraid that to disagree with her, to deny her what she wanted, would be to lose her as my best friend. So we left her house on foot and walked until we were near enough to the highway, and we stood at an empty intersection (thank God we at least had the presence of mind to avoid impeding on a corner already occupied by a homeless man with a crumpled cardboard sign) and waited, with our thumbs jutting out toward the street (we were undecided on whether or not this was still necessary, but ultimately concluded that if we were hitchhiking, then we were playing it by the rules). After half an hour in the bright sun with the heat of car engines and the smell of exhaust permeating into our skin, a half hour of receiving concerned or predatory or unsure glances from each person who drove past, a man in his late twenties or early thirties stopped and let us into his truck. We rode the entire four hours with him, Rudy in the front seat and me in the back, my heart beat pounding within my chest the whole time. Each time he moved, to turn up the radio or to redirect the airflow from the vents on the dashboard, my heart would seize up and I would be sure, with every fiber of my being, that this was the moment he was going to pull out a knife and kill us. But he didn’t and Rudy talked to him the whole long ride – about his hobbies, his girlfriend, the small town where he grew up – until we arrived on the opposite side of the state, in a neighborhood foreign to us both. We got out of the car in front of a Starbucks and my legs felt like jelly holding up the weight of my body. We both ordered cold drinks, used the bathroom, then returned to the I-70 on ramp to hitch a ride back. For our second trip we traveled with an older woman, her grey hair in a long, thin braid that stretched down her back, and she didn’t speak much. By the time we arrived home the sky was a deep black, scattered all over with the pinpricks of gleaming white stars. Mrs. Golden asked us what we had been up to all day, and we told her we had gone to my house to watch movies, and she believed us, or at the very least, she pretended that she did.
Throughout the rest of the summer I went out with Ian a few more times but it didn’t last, and I think, in my gut, I knew the whole time it woul
dn’t. He was nice, kinder than my idea of a typical high school boy, and he made it easy to talk to him about things, like my family and my life in Boston. And he never, ever compared me to Rudy, which is one of the characteristics I now most deeply appreciate about him, and that I wish I had recognized at the time.
Physically, things never got past the stage of making out, sprawled awkwardly on the couch in my basement, both of us lying on our sides, our knees and arms jabbing each other in the side or shin while we kissed. Once he had placed a clumsy hand on the zipper of my shorts but before I could stop myself I had recoiled back, and he must have noticed because he never tried again.
One night at the beginning of August, as we were standing on my porch, surrounded by the deep, warm quiet of a late summer evening, I told him I thought it would be better if we just remained friends. He looked at me inquisitively, his thick, straight eyebrows scrunched together. In the dark it was hard to read his face. When he asked me why, I told him we were going to different high schools in a couple of weeks. It would be hard to stay together. And plus, I had added, weren’t there girls at his school he’d probably fit better with?
It took a few moments, the two of us standing awkwardly a few feet apart, my arms crossed over my chest and his dangling at his sides, before a look of comprehension dawned in his eyes. He nodded once and I could see, in the firm line of his mouth, that though he may not have agreed, he understood – he got it. I had a lump in my throat as I watched him walk out to his car and drive away without saying anything else.
His phone number remained in my phone until I finally had the strength to delete it during my junior year of high school, but we never spoke again.
On August 20th the hours of our last summer afternoon ticked by as Rudy and I lay next to the pool, soaking in the last drops of sun, our bodies swollen with heat and our skin browned and greasy like rolls fresh out of the oven. We had resolved to lay out as long as we could, our last time before school began and brought with it the chill of fall, but the day was so blazing hot I couldn’t imagine it ever being cold again. By three in the afternoon we were sweat-soaked and couldn’t stand the heat any longer, and we dragged ourselves into the house and stumbled into the formal foyer where we sprawled out on our backs underneath the huge chandelier, possibly my favorite feature in the Golden house, an intricate mass of gold and crystal that hung high from the ceiling three stories above us. The cold granite floor pressed into my pores like ice and I could hear blood thumping at my temples as air-conditioned air rushed into my lungs, filling my chest as it expanded and contracted. The glittering pieces of the chandelier overhead blacked in and out of view. I glanced over at Rudy lying beside me. Her eyes were closed and her lips slightly parted; the tendons in her neck lay slack, and though she was only a foot away from me, I was confident Rudy belonged to a world vastly different than my own. More than anything else, I wanted to be in that place too.
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