Still, a tiny part of Laila wondered if she would have been part of this crowd if she were Boricua, too. It was hard not to be, if not envious, hyperaware of how many Puerto Rican kids there were at school. An actual community. Laila knew of exactly two other Ecuadorians at Impact. She’d never had the sensation of blending into something larger, the way Felix did so comfortably.
“So, basically,” Sebastian said to Samuel, “Stacia takes me to that concert at Turntable. It was E.Sides and some terrible opener I can’t remember, but get this: We go with David and Robson and the boys, and Robson’s ticket doesn’t scan, so Natasha says—yeah, she was there, too, the hot one?”
“Blonde?” Samuel said.
“Uh-huh. She’s like, wait, allá, I saw this hand truck around the corner. So we stack this cart off the street with cardboard boxes and Robson wheels it through the loading bay and nobody says shit, man, not a word. He just walks in. So that’s what you do.”
“Nice.”
“It was blue as fuck.”
“Blue?” Laila asked.
“You know,” Samuel said. “Blue.”
“I don’t,” she said. The proximity made looking at him difficult. The booth was so minuscule that making eye contact felt inherently romantic.
Hannah returned, slurping at something neon green and packed with ice. She passed a drink across the table to Hannah that, in the light, could have been a warm golden-brown or blood red. “Mai Tai,” she said, sliding in beside Sebastian.
Laila took a drink, the ice kissed her upper lip, and at the first nip of liquid, she flattened her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Apparently Mai Tais were assembled by dissolving a pint of sugar into a nickel-thick layer of bleach.
“Is it good?” Samuel said.
“Yes,” Laila said.
“Okay, so blue means—it’s like . . . like cool.” Sebastian spoke with the slow frustration of somebody translating a sentence into a language they’d half-forgotten. “But not cool like, ‘oh, chill.’ More, weird cool. Hype cool. I can’t believe this happened cool. Like, ‘I did a backflip off the bleachers and didn’t die—it was so blue.’”
“Jesus,” Hannah said, “this memelord in my bio class keeps saying that. Is it from something?”
“Oh, yeah, you’ve got to watch it,” Sebastian said. “There’s a video of this dude tripping balls on a roof in Missouri. Maybe not tripping, I don’t know, but definitely on some bad shit. So his friend takes this eight-minute video where he asks all these questions, you know, ‘What’s your favorite sex position? Hey Tyler! Say what you did this weekend,’ and this poor asshole is staring up at the sky, so he just keeps answering with descriptions of the word blue.” He let his eyelids droop and put on a feeble wheeze. “‘Dude . . . it was so . . . blue.’”
“Huh,” Hannah said. “Guess I’d better start saying it before Twitter kills it. And old people. And late-night hosts trying to sound hip with America’s youth.”
Samuel laughed. He had a gentle, chuckling laugh that seemed too small for his body. Laila laughed, too, almost proud, because she’d brought Hannah here, and Hannah was successfully interacting with people, and she could still remember Hannah in freshman year, who could hardly manage five minutes’ conversation without saying something so insensitive that the people around her exchanged incredulous glances. Not anymore. She’d changed. They’d both changed.
Laila had forced down half the Mai Tai and was feeling friendlier than usual, stomach hot and uneasy. This was okay. She was okay, staying upright. Hannah was a good set of training wheels. The drink tasted less disgusting now, her eyes had adjusted, and all the mid-twenties-old people who had felt threatening an hour ago had remained blessedly disinterested in her.
Hannah was studying Samuel with her chin perched on the heel of her hand. “So, Laila told me you’re a writer,” she said.
“I didn’t tell her that,” Laila said. “I mean. Not that you’re not. I just.”
“It’s cool,” Samuel said with a smile. Laila buried her nose back in her drink, and Samuel went on, “Yeah, I like doing it, but I wouldn’t call myself ‘a writer,’ though.”
“What do you write?” Hannah asked.
“The story I’m working on now is about a guy who’s been in love with this girl forever, so he ends up cheating on his girlfriend, even though this other girl doesn’t love him.”
“Wow,” Hannah said. “Sounds like a role model.”
Heat cramped into Laila’s cheeks. “Hannah.”
Angry cries from the back of the bar interrupted, alerting them to DJ Saint Lightning’s sudden abandonment of the tiny stage. Laila craned her neck to watch the crowd shuffle through several chants of protest before settling on the somewhat lackluster “WE WANT MUSIC. WE WANT MUSIC.”
The door at the back reopened to cheering, but instead of DJ Saint Lightning, two figures emerged. One scurried to the equipment. The other, holding a microphone, had the type of tension built into his impossibly tall body that keeps skyscrapers upright. The cheering faltered, switched registers.
“Oh, shit,” Sebastian said. He was half out of the booth. “Is that Knight Gard?”
It was. Laila knew this because the crowd had mutated into a thirty-armed monster, every arm Snapping or photographing or recording the stage, and the remaining cheers had dissolved into voices yelling over one another. Knight Gard was a twenty-three-year-old rapper, actual name unknown. After his two-part mix-tape had become popular enough to be inescapable, he’d started a series of renegade pop-up shows in Brooklyn. So far, this had seemed like an exercise in how strange a place he could draw interest. A playground in Park Slope at midnight. The frozen foods aisle of a Crown Heights deli/grocery. The least successful show so far had taken place in the Jay Street–Metrotech subway station. Several thousand people had drifted past, assuming he was a louder-than-average busker with better-than-average production. Social commentators gleefully noted in the following weeks that if anybody had stopped to look at his face—if anybody had just looked up from their phones, counter to the trends of this heartlessly disconnected society, and afforded some attention to the human beings around them—they might have realized that they were in the presence of a Grammy nominee. Then again, that day, some people had been dashing down the platform to squeeze through the closing doors of the A train so they wouldn’t be late to work for the third day that week, and others were discussing Swiss politics with friends they hadn’t seen in four months, and others were in fact on their phones: They were commenting “so pretty!!” on an aunt’s profile picture, or responding to a panicked email from their intern, or texting an ex-girlfriend a painful message about which possessions went to which person, so that day their participation in the universe had been elsewhere, geographically.
“Go,” Hannah said, leaping out of the booth. “Go. We have to get up front before this explodes.”
They made it up to the speakers with assistance from Hannah’s elbows. Knight Gard started his set with the screech of car tires. A jagged beat thumped down over sly, persistent bass, and then came his distinctive shout.
The mostly white crowd—they were in that part of Williamsburg—didn’t seem to know what to do with the track, which was unfriendly for dancing in everything from subject matter to the clattering, arrhythmic bass. They knew the words, because over the last year, most of America had internalized the lyrics to “Up and Downers,” but the crowd couldn’t say the vast majority of them, due to 1) the charged history of reclaimed language and 2) being terrible at rapping. Instead they stood in place, nodding as if in agreement, holding up their phones. Laila wondered whether to record the performance herself, but she was close enough to be mesmerized by the silver grid of the mic head pressed to Knight Gard’s lips, and someone else would put a better-quality version on YouTube, anyway, and she remembered Nazarenko telling her, “be there with them,” and she let herself stand, swaying, hands folded beneath her biceps, watching. The pressure and noise built until Laila fe
lt a hot stone on her chest and had to escape down a long set of stairs toward the bathroom. She collected herself in the stairwell.
Over the course of a quarter hour, she waved a half dozen girls past her toward the bathroom. The seventh person she waved past slowed at the motion instead. She looked up. Sebastian had stopped on the step beneath her.
“Hey,” he said. “Samuel wants to know if you’re doing okay.”
“Oh, I’m fine, it’s just loud.”
“Okay. I told him to come down here himself, but that’s Samuel,” Sebastian said. “Such a guy’s guy. You know? He’s not into the asking everybody about their feelings.” He leaned against the wall. “Me, I’m more sensitive.”
Laila wanted to laugh, but she settled for a smile with too much motion around the edges. She loved people who were blatantly self-descriptive. “I’m easygoing.” “I’m so high-energy.” “I’m the biggest introvert.” “I always hunt down what I want.” Like they were sketching out a cheat-sheet in case others forgot their personalities.
Courtesy of the alcohol, a break in conversation didn’t feel like an urgent problem anymore, but Laila decided to speak. “The whole world’s up there. It’s so hot. I needed some room.”
“Having room is great,” Sebastian said, and to demonstrate the freeing properties of having room, he stretched out his arms. He moved onto her step. His sudden tallness startled her out of her examination. She wasn’t removed anymore, was aware of her own body again in a way that reminded her of looking in a mirror. He pressed his hand to the red-painted cinder block beside her head, a gentle punch that stuck. The beer bottle looked thick in the vise of his knuckles, and its neck brushed her ear. The glass was warm, as if he had just breathed onto its surface. The light spread over his forearm like margarine and caught on the moles dotted up to his elbow.
For a moment she wondered why this was happening, and then she remembered Felix mentioning after a sloppy night out that Sebastian tried to kiss anything with a mouth after half a dozen beers. She had a mouth, and apparently the beer in his hand was the half-dozenth. Clockwork.
“You’re not with Felix, are you?” he asked.
“What? Felix?”
“All right, just asking.” At a foot’s distance, Sebastian’s features were exaggerated, large nose like a scythe, round eyes like new moons, full mouth like a child’s pout. She wouldn’t have been able to pick his face out of a crowd ninety minutes ago.
But wasn’t there something relaxing in that? She’d arrived hoping that something would develop out of a conversation with Samuel, but kissing Samuel would come with four years’ expectation. Kissing Samuel came with the possibility of making Felix furious, and—Laila was certain of this, somehow—Hannah, too. Sebastian was hot, actually, and more importantly, he was there, and this was an isolated unit, just a kiss, nothing else. For a second she wondered if she was only considering this because she was drunk, but so what if she was? Wasn’t she going to have hundreds more kisses in her lifetime, wasn’t it an inexhaustible resource, why did she need to be precious about it when there was somebody cute right here who wanted her?
When she considered all the variables—the first bar, the underground show, the company of her friends, the nice clothes she’d bothered to wear, the otherworldly orange light that made her feel like she’d walked into a Darsinnian transfer point—she identified this as being a story she wouldn’t mind telling and retelling when people asked her, in college, forever into the future, how her first real night out had gone. A wild night in neon orange and electric blue, utterly temporary.
“I like smart girls,” Sebastian told her, and he clearly had more to say, but she just said, “Good,” and pressed her mouth up against his until she could taste everything he’d had.
12
The veneer of tipsiness had dulled by the time Laila crept back into her room, but a bed of heat still lay low in her torso. As she tried to sleep, it hummed. She remembered the tang of beer hovering over her lips, the gentle but eager way Sebastian had touched her breast. How he’d reached up under her T-shirt and explored with clumsy, grasping motions. The air had suddenly been warmer than the air trapped in the crowd upstairs. Beneath her stomach had grown a sensation like strangulation, but without the easy fix of releasing the force and breathing in. Tension had gathered in the backs of her thighs and in the divots of her collarbones and at the arches of her feet and between her legs, and none of it had dissipated on the way home. She was still built out of frustration.
Laila drew a corner of her comforter between her legs to press away the palpable pulse. She tried not to think too hard, pushing away the words as they arrived—turned on—but guilt awoke at the back of her mind like an itch. She forced it all back—the sensation, the awareness, everything. She’d learned to ignore her body. She did what she’d been told, and she still felt ashamed.
The next day, as she ground through a stack of homework, her thoughts came back and back again to the night before. Not to the kiss, the bitterness of liquor, or the discomfort of her spine pressed against the cinder block, but to the ache between her thighs, the way a hard touch at her neck had shot heat down past her navel.
Finally, she reached the bottom of the stack, and the only assignment that mattered. She opened her laptop, summoned up the notes she’d jotted from her last meeting with Nazarenko, and created a new document.
“‘We have no sense of how other people impact her,’” read her notes. “‘Why? Because human impulses would distract from the goal?’”
The blank page seemed dangerous today. The surge of want from last night still had dark spots dancing in her eyes. This desire for something more than superficial touching, something next, a need squirming through her memory that made her feel excited and wrong. “Attraction isn’t an embarrassment,” she told herself, and yet the idea of putting any of this into words wasn’t just embarrassing but frightening. If she wrote a character’s physical attraction, wasn’t that laying her own sensations bare? Admitting all this to anyone who came across the page?
She shifted in her chair, heat budding again in her cheeks and legs. She placed two fingers between her legs, pressing against her jeans, but the tension multiplied instead of dissipating. She pulled her hand away and closed her eyes, breathing in for seven, out for six. Your hang-ups, she thought. Your walls. And suddenly the embarrassment wasn’t with her lingering arousal anymore, but with her reluctance to acknowledge it. When she couldn’t touch herself, could hardly think about her own body as something sexual, of course she couldn’t imagine someone else touching her without a sense of airlessness, of asphyxiation.
Laila found herself chewing on her hair, and that was, for some reason, the tipping point, the bit of anxiety that made her so impatient with herself that she made up her mind. She went to the door and locked it. Even if the lock came loose, which happened occasionally, the delay would give her enough time to grab the towel stationed on her bedside table, and she would stammer out some excuse about showering. Genius. Foolproof.
She lay back on her bed and stared at the moisture mark on the ceiling where she’d once sticky-tacked a poster of a favorite character from The Rest, before the showrunners had massacred his personality in season eight. She lifted herself back onto her shoulder blades and maneuvered her underwear around her thighs, off her legs. She left her T-shirt on, because she already felt weirdly exposed. Blinds were shut, right? Yes. She’d shut them. And already checked twice. Why was she nervous? There was literally nobody to impress. God, how could Felix do this all the time without a sheer boner-killing terror of somebody walking in on him? She hated that she knew anything about Felix’s “habits,” but he discussed them so freely.
Laila was almost impressed by the tectonic shift that had occurred from middle school to freshman year when it came to talking about anything sexual. In sixth grade, her class had watched a mortifying series of sex-ed videos that they all instantly vowed to strike from memory. But maybe the teachers had actual
ly timed that pretty well, because not long afterward, rumors floated up behind hands about the couple who had “visited the kitchen,” a euphemism confined to the halls of William Henry Harrison Middle School that meant they’d kissed, with tongue.
In seventh and eighth grades, it became normal to hear about other kids kissing, and kissing with tongue, and even second base (!). At the same time, a slow collective awareness grew around the fact that masturbating was a thing that existed. Nobody knew what to do with that—was it normal to try it? To like it? To talk about it? So the activity inherited all the shame that had been shed from kissing, and kissing with tongue, and second base (!), which was why Laila felt so blindsided when jokes about jacking off became widespread. For boys. Laila was sure that the phrase “jacking off” was the thing that gave them leeway on this. Purely on a phonetic level, masturbate sounded like some hideous medieval practice that had to be confined to deep night with the lights off, possibly while incense burned to purify the air. The word sounded like a cross between masticate and disturb, for Christ’s sake. If a less-appealing conglomeration of syllables existed, Laila couldn’t name it.
But “jacking off” was another action entirely. So cavalier! So silly! Everyone had a story about somebody almost walking in on them while they were in the act. Except, said an uncertain countercurrent, only losers who couldn’t get laid jacked off, right? Except, no—“Of course I do it, all guys do it.” Also: “Ms. Wallace called me up to the board the other day and I had the hugest boner and I can’t believe everybody didn’t see.” Also: “That guy’s such a dickhead, a ballsack, a dick.” The terminology circulated and percolated until it had no impact, meant nothing, might as well have been a recorded announcement about delayed subway service on the 1-2-3 lines. But Laila hadn’t ever heard a girl joke about masturbating. Even Hannah was unlikely to joke about vaginas in general.
Final Draft Page 11
