The Wild One

by Gemma Burgess

  But where’s the party? I can’t go if I don’t know where it is!

  By the time I get back to Rookhaven, I’ve decided.

  I’ll tell Joe I’m sick and can’t work tonight.

  And then I’ll text Topher and ask him about the party tonight. Totally casually. And then, totally casually, ask him to be my date to the Potstill Prom.

  I just need to figure out how to do that without throwing up from nerves.

  I texted Julia to see if she knew where the party was, but she replied: Mel Arnett is a fucking idiot, why would I go to her party?

  So annoying. Julia had very set views in high school on who she liked and who she didn’t like, and the sexier girls who weren’t as smart as her and didn’t join every club like she did were not her favorites.

  Maybe I’ll just text … Hey, Toph, so about that party, can I come?

  Urgh, no.

  It is very hard to nonchalantly get yourself invited somewhere. Even harder than asking someone to prom. I mean, not prom, but, you know, a prom-themed party.

  I pick up my phone, willing Topher to text. Text me Topher, text me, text me …

  My cell beeps.

  Oh, my God. It’s Topher!

  It’s like we have ESP. Or something.

  Thanks again for your help. You’re the best.

  I’ll text back later—after waiting the requisite amount of time so I don’t look too eager, of course—and say, My pleasure. So, about that party …

  I text Joe first: Hey! I’m sick. My throat hurts and I have a fever. I probably shouldn’t come in tonight. So sorry …

  I’m even bad at lying in a text message.

  Screw it, I’ll just send it.

  And as soon as I work up the nerve, I’m texting Topher to find out where this party is.

  I walk downstairs to the kitchen and out to the deck. It’s a gorgeous summer evening, warm, blue-skied, and quiet. Angie’s out here too, smoking a cigarette and tapping on her phone.

  “It’s Sam,” she says, without looking up. “He found WiFi.”

  She smiles at the screen. Taptaptap. Practically levitating with happiness. Her thumbs tap frantically, and she just raises an eyebrow now and again as she reads his responses. They’re so in love.

  I wonder what that feels like, to be genuinely in love with someone who genuinely loves you back.

  Pretty goddamn nice, I bet.

  “You okay?” I say.

  “Fine.” Taptap. “I saw my dad and his girlfriend today. She’s knocked up. It’s weird and I hate it. Sam is calming me down.”

  “Oh,” I say. “So, what would you do if you wanted to get the address of a party you weren’t officially invited to?”

  She doesn’t take her eyes off her phone. “If I wasn’t officially invited, the party probably isn’t worth going to.”

  And there you have it. Cool in one sentence.

  I’m texting Topher in two minutes.

  Maybe three.

  The front door slams and then I hear Madeleine’s voice. She’s with someone. Amy, I guess.

  “Hi, Madeleine!” I call out.

  There’s no response, just the sound of them going up the stairs, and eventually I hear Madeleine’s door slam. Angie’s still taptaptapping away.

  I need to just ask Topher about the address for this party and then go there and ask him to prom and then my life will be perfect. Right? Right.

  I’m so stressed, I should bake.

  But no, I know that won’t make me happy.

  “I don’t bake my feelings anymore,” I say, almost to myself.

  To my surprise, Angie was actually listening.

  “Well, no wonder you’ve lost weight.”

  “What?” I double-take. “Say that again.”

  “You’ve lost weight.” Angie finally puts her cell down to look at me. “Your clothes are loose.”

  I actually laugh out loud. “I have been waiting to hear those words for, like, twenty years.”

  “You didn’t need to lose weight, Coco. Are you eating enough?”

  “I think I am…” My voice trails off. Am I?

  Maybe I’m eating less. My life used to be punctuated by food. It revolved around three square meals a day with three or four (or five) snacks. I just don’t think like that anymore. I eat when I’m hungry, not when I’m bored or lonely or worried. It’s that simple.

  “Are you going to become anorexic?” asks Angie seriously. “Because I remember some girls in a little thinspo club at college. They were like ugly little sticks. The hair on their heads fell out but they got this weird fluff on their faces. They stank like nail polish remover.” She pauses. “Do you feel me, Coco? No. Anorexia.”

  “Promise,” I say. “Besides, I’m not that thin.”

  Angie shakes her head. “My God, you’re so hard on yourself. Where did you learn to treat yourself like that?”

  “Uh, have you met my sister and my father?” I say lightly.

  Angie smirks, but then her phone beeps, and boom, her attention is gone.

  I look down at my body. It does look a little different. But I feel like I’m just the right size for me.

  I like having boobs and hips and a waist that goes in and out. Joe told me I was beautiful the other night. My body doesn’t make me unhappy anymore. It just … it doesn’t. The realization is like a huge weight off my shoulders. In fact, I love my body. Just the way it is.

  I make a mental note to cross the first item off my Happy List.

  Now all I have to do is fall in love and figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

  My phone beeps. It’s Joe, replying to my text telling him I was sick.

  Poor baby. Take it easy. Want me to come over later and play doctor?

  “Angie, do you think what I’m doing with Joe is bad?” I say. “You know. Because I’m sleeping with him and I don’t want anything else?”

  “As long as he knows that, and it’s all he wants too, I think it’s fine.”

  “He knows,” I say. “But do you think everyone else thinks I’m … um, you know … a slut?”

  Angie pauses, midtap, and looks at me. “I think ‘slut’ is a stupid word used to hurt women. I think that anyone who believes that a woman’s worth is dictated by her sex life is a Neanderthal. And most of all, I think that what you do with your vagina is your business and nobody else’s.” She stares at me for a second, and I’m almost frightened by her intensity. Then she turns back to her phone. “But hey, I’m a feminist. That’s just my thing.”

  I’m thinking about this, wondering if I’m a feminist too, because that seems like something I should have decided by now, when my phone rings. It’s a strange number. Maybe it’s Topher calling from someone else’s phone to invite me to the party!

  “Hello?”

  “Is that Coco? Coco, it’s Peter. I’m, uh, I’m—I’m your sister’s, uh—”

  “Peter the Mag—er—”

  “Yes. That one. Look, I’m with your sister, I mean, she’s fine, but she’s, uh, she’s—”

  I grab Angie’s arm to get her attention. “Peter! What happened to Julia?!”

  Angie drops her phone and looks at me. “What? What happened to Julia?”

  “Nothing, nothing, she just collapsed, we were at dinner and we had a couple of drinks and she—”

  “She collapsed?”

  “She’s been hitting the Adderall a little hard. I’m with her now. St. Luke’s. They say it’s exhaustion and dehydration, and—”

  “I’m on my way,” I say.

  My brain is spinning so fast, I almost can’t see straight. I’m exploding with thoughts that just tumble down, one after another …

  Julia fainted from working too hard? Can that even happen? What if she actually has a brain tumor and that’s why she fainted? What if she dies? What if she had an epileptic fit and dies from working too hard, like that banker guy a couple of years ago? How much Adderall has she been taking? Why is she even taking Adderall? Where did she g
et it? What if she has an aneurysm? What if she has a heart attack? What if, what if—

  Stop!

  It’s that little voice again. I haven’t heard it in weeks. I gulp, taking a deep breath in and out. I need to stop freaking out.

  “We have to go to Manhattan,” I say to Angie. “Julia’s in the hospital.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Losing a parent when you’re just a kid teaches you that there are no guarantees. More than most people, I know that sometimes everything is not going to be okay.

  My mom will never hug me again. She’ll never kiss the top of my head or hold me tight when I’m sad or scared. And other people I know will die too. It’s inevitable.

  Death is waiting for all of us. One day, you’re here, the next you’re gone. The same sun is in the sky, the same houses are on your street, the same food is being served at your favorite restaurant, the entire world continues perfectly without you in it. But you’re dead. Or you’re still alive. And someone you love is dead instead. Which is another kind of death altogether.

  It’s something I try not to think about, because once I start, I can’t stop. I’ve played out a hundred deaths in my head for everyone I know. I guess that sounds macabre, but it’s true. It’s like my brain thinks I should prepare, just in case. I think about if my dad died suddenly, how Julia and I would survive, or if we wouldn’t, if we’d just disappear, drowning in the sadness, tumbling into a vertigo terror of grief. I think about my friends dying, my cousins, our neighbors from Rochester. How I’ll feel, what I’ll do.

  And sometimes I think about Julia dying. But that’s the one I can’t handle. That’s the one when I always think, If it happens, I’d want to die too.

  “I’m so scared,” I say, my voice a tiny squeak.

  “It’s okay, Coco,” says Angie, grabbing my hand when we finally walk out of the subway near the hospital. “She’ll be fine.”

  I meet her eyes and nod. I hope she’s right.

  As we walk into the hospital, my heart pounds erratically in my chest, and I start getting flashbacks to being in the hospital with my mother.

  At first, Julia and I would go with mom to her appointments after school, and because she didn’t want us to hear what the doctor said, we’d just sit in the waiting room reading ancient issues of American Girl, both of us feeling sick with fear but unable to express it, even to each other. Then, when she started chemo, she scheduled it during our school days, so that in the afternoons she could rest at home while we played or did our homework. I took over making dinner and baked cakes and cookies to try to get her to eat more.

  I didn’t go back into a hospital until much later, when things were so bad that my entire soul was shriveled into a tiny walnut of horror deep inside me.

  Oh, God, that overwhelmed feeling is back, I can’t get any air into my chest, I can’t—

  Breathe.

  Yes. Breathe.

  Focus on this moment. Nothing else matters but this moment.

  When we reach Julia, she is lying in a curtained-off hospital bed, talking animatedly to Peter, who is covered in what looks like blood, but proves, on closer inspection, to be spaghetti sauce.

  Julia is hooked up to an IV drip, oh, my God … She’s pale and waxy-looking, her hair wet with sweat.

  But she’s also very, very, very hyper.

  “Coco! Angie! Hey, you guys! It’s fine, nothing really. We were at dinner, and I was having slight palpitations, and you know, I felt a little shaky. Nothing I haven’t felt before after an all-nighter! It was fine, totally fine, and then suddenly it was like someone switched gears in my heart and my chest was like bangbangbangbang and then it felt like someone was sitting on it and I was, like, holy shitballs, I’m having a heart attack, you know? So funny.”

  Angie nods, frowning. “Right. A twenty-three-year-old girl having a heart attack. Hilarious.”

  Julia nods, continuing to smile and talk like some kind of pepped-up cartoon.

  “And I couldn’t breathe, it was literally like I’d forgotten how to breathe. And actually, you know, that happens to me sometimes at work, it’s like I’m holding my breath for the longest time, and I suddenly think, When was the last time I actually exhaled? Then I tried to speak, but suddenly I felt like I couldn’t say more than a couple of words at once. And then I stood up, but I felt like I couldn’t walk more than like two or three steps. Then the air went all numb, that makes no sense, but—”

  “She fainted,” says Peter. “And because she’s Julia, she fainted in the loudest, most energetic way possible. She knocked over the table we were sitting at. Pasta everywhere. Wine bottle broken.”

  “Thus the tagliatelle stains,” says Julia, smiling at Peter. He smiles back and reaches over to take her hand. What the hell? Is this meant to be some kind of romantic anecdote? “So the moral of the story is, don’t work all night and then drink four espressos before heading out for spaghetti and wine.”

  Oh, my God. Julia doesn’t even think this is bad.

  She’s acting like it is no big deal that her boyfriend had to take her to the hospital.

  She could have had a heart attack. She could have had an epileptic fit. She could have died.

  And why is she talking like that? When did she start monologuing aggressively at warp speed? Is that the Adderall? Or is that just the way she is these days, now that she’s the next big thing in banking?

  “Why were you taking Adderall, anyway?” I say. “I thought you only took Xanax.”

  Julia flinches.

  I’ve just broken the unspoken promise between us to never mention her Xanax in front of anyone else. I know—in the way that you just know things about your family even when you’ve never talked about them—that she wants everyone to think she’s too smart and tough to possibly need medication, but fuck it, I don’t care. None of the girls ever asked how I got the Xanax that time at the dinner party, but whatever. I stole it from Julia, obviously.

  “The Xanax was left over from years ago!” Julia glances quickly at Peter. “Coco, you know that.”

  “But you don’t need Adderall, you don’t have ADHD.” I’m aware of how naïve I sound, but I don’t care.

  “It helps me concentrate. My work day is really long, and sometimes I need to pull all-nighters, you know, the usual stuff. Everyone does it.”

  “That’s crazy! That’s completely crazy!”

  I glance at Peter, who looks away guiltily. He must have taken Adderall too, I suddenly think. Back before he got fired. Then I look at Angie, but she doesn’t seem fazed either. Maybe she takes Adderall. Maybe everyone takes it. Everyone except me.

  “It just helps me concentrate, Coco,” says Julia. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “So how long till you’re out of here?” asks Angie, changing the subject.

  Is everyone just taking drugs to help them achieve their dreams now? That’s the new norm? Fine.

  What about my dreams?

  I want to fall in love. Joe will never love me. And I don’t care, I don’t want him.

  I want to fall in love with Topher.

  Suddenly, almost without thinking about it, I turn around and walk toward the exit of the ER.

  “Where are you going?” shouts Julia after me.

  But I don’t reply.

  She doesn’t need to know.

  I’m going to Mel Arnett’s party. I’m going to see Topher.

  And I’m going to kiss him.

  CHAPTER 25

  The party is at Mel’s apartment in Murray Hill. I texted Topher as soon as I left the hospital. It was so easy.

  What’s Mel’s address again?

  So perfect, right? Low-key, totally indicates I used to know Mel’s address because of course we’re in touch all the time, even though she was in Julia’s year in school and we never spoke and I haven’t seen her since I was fifteen and she wouldn’t even remember me.

  Topher texted me the address a second later. Which is practically like being invited.

  As
I’m waiting in the lobby of her building for the elevator, I apply red lipstick. My armor.

  Just as the elevator arrives, two guys I know from high school walk into the building. Zack Ober and Jay Mitchell. They were in the year above me and below Julia and Topher and Mel, firmly in the cool group, the guys that messed around in class and played the most practical jokes. They’re living in New York too? Did everyone move here after college, or what?

  I hold the elevator door open for them.

  “Thanks,” says Zack.

  I smile at him slightly, feeling too nervous to respond. He never spoke to me in high school.

  “What floor is it?” says Jay.

  “Um.” I clear my throat. “Eleven.”

  Oh, my God. I’m actually going to a party with the most popular people in school. The same people who always made me feel invisible, deficient, and self-conscious just walking the hallways. I remember constantly wondering: did they all get handed a “how to be cool” handbook when they turned twelve? Everyone seemed to know rules that I didn’t. Everyone seemed to know what to say and when to say it. I was just … I was so clueless. Sad and clueless.

  When the elevator stops, Jay holds the doors open and indicates I should exit first.

  “No, no, you go ahead,” I say quickly. He held the doors open for me! So nice.

  Jay and Zack leave the elevator and walk down the hallway toward an open door. The music is so loud that I can feel it in my teeth. Then we walk in.

  Everyone from high school is here.

  They look over at us, greets Jay and Zack, totally ignoring me. Wait, do they just not remember me? Seriously? I was in the same school as them for years.

  I’ll find Topher. And take it from there.

  I walk though the hallway into a small living area. The tiny kitchen counter is covered in open bottles of booze and Coca-Cola and red plastic cups. It’s crowded with people dancing and drinking. Mostly drinking.

  A scream catches my attention, and I look up to see a couple of girls I remember as football groupies, drinking tequila straight from the bottle and falling against each other.

  This is fine! This is totally fine.