If You, Then Me

by Yvonne Woon

  “Can’t you shake it again?” Mike said.

  “It’s a dare,” Arun said. “You can’t just change it because you don’t like it.”

  Kate locked eyes with me, silently demanding that I decline the dare and take the shot, but I couldn’t. The deck already felt like it was defying the laws of gravity. I looked at Mike, who sighed. “Fine,” he said. “The pantry it is.”

  “Wow,” I whispered upon entering. “This is a closet? If it wasn’t filled with noodles and chips, you could rent this place out.”

  Mike laughed, and I was surprised by how good it made me feel. Why did I care if I’d made Mike smile? He wasn’t ObjectPermanence, that much was clear from tonight. He was just another rich, popular boy whose girlfriend had invited me to his party to humiliate me.

  He dug around a shelf.

  “What are you looking for?”

  He emerged with a cardboard box labeled “plastic utensils” in black marker.

  “We’re supposed to be doing something illicit in here,” Mike said. “Might as well make the people happy.”

  He opened the box to reveal a dozen little jars of caviar.

  “They’re my stepmom’s. She gets them shipped from Europe and doesn’t like to share them because they’re expensive. So she hides them.”

  He turned the lid of the jar until it clicked open.

  “This is what money smells like,” he said and held it up to my nose, his arm brushing against mine.

  It smelled cold and briny, like the ocean. “I didn’t realize money smelled so . . . fishy.”

  Mike smiled, and I was reminded of how incredibly beautiful he was. Even in a dark closet, totally drunk, his face sweaty, his sweatshirt stained with beer, he looked like he’d stepped out of a magazine.

  He opened a bag of tortilla chips and held it out to me.

  “Won’t she notice?”

  “She’ll just think my dad ate them and they’ll get into an argument about why she feels like she needs to hide things from him, and that since he pays for everything, he has a right to eat whatever he wants, and she’ll say fine, if he doesn’t value the work she does at home then she’ll leave, and she’ll storm off to the bedroom and slam the door and my dad will sleep in the guestroom for three nights until they eventually make up.”

  “Wow. So this is a very loaded chip.”

  “Very.”

  “It seems wrong,” I said. “Eating caviar with Tostitos. Don’t you have a fancy cracker or something?”

  Mike grinned. “If we ate it with a cracker it’d be less illicit.”

  It tasted slippery and wet and salty all at once. I swallowed, wanting to like it, but couldn’t help but wince as it went down.

  “Not your favorite,” Mike observed.

  “No, it’s . . . great. It’s really good.”

  “I don’t really like it either. That’s the thing about having nice things. You feel like you’re supposed to like them because everyone says you should, so you say you do until you believe it, and then one day you realize that maybe you don’t like any of the things you told yourself you liked, and you wonder if your entire personality is based off of what other people think you should be instead of what you think you should be.”

  I stared at him. ObjectPermanence had said almost the exact same thing in one of his messages. But Mike had a girlfriend and he hadn’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. It couldn’t be him.

  “Are we still talking about caviar?” I asked.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little drunk. I don’t know where that came from.” He looked up at me, and I felt the power of his attention.

  “You’re easy to talk to,” he said.

  “I’m just sitting here, watching the room spin, trying not to fall over.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t seem judgmental.”

  “Maybe you need to find new friends.”

  Mike let out a laugh. “Maybe I do.” He sighed. “I wonder how far into the ten minutes we are.”

  I took it to mean that he was tired of sitting in the closet with me and felt suddenly miserable. But then he added, “I don’t want to go back out there. A little quiet is nice sometimes.”

  We sat for a moment in silence, neither of us knowing what to say.

  “So what are you about?” Mike said, offering me the chips.

  I took one but skipped the caviar. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, what are you into? What do you like? What do you not like? I know you’re not into caviar.”

  I knew I had interests, but now that I was being asked to produce them, I couldn’t think of a single one. “I like mint chocolate chip ice cream,” I said. “I like taking things apart and putting them back together. I like going to stationery stores and admiring all the fancy pens and pencils, but I never buy them because it seems frivolous. I mean, who uses pencils anymore?”

  Mike laughed.

  “I used to think I hated winter but now that I’m here, I find myself missing it.”

  “What about it?”

  “The first time it snows. The way the frost coats the lawn. How everyone congregates at the grocery store before a big storm to stock up on milk and eggs and you feel like you’re all in it together.”

  I was so certain that I was boring him that I was surprised to find Mike listening with rapt attention. “What are you about?” I asked him.

  “I like coffee ice cream. I like the shock to the chest when you first jump into a pool. I like getting into a hot car when it’s been sitting in the sun all day and seeing how long I can bear it before opening the windows.”

  “Seriously?” I said with a laugh. “So you like punishing yourself.”

  Mike grinned. “It’s like a sauna. Do you think people in spas are punishing themselves?”

  “I’ve never been to a sauna. But if it’s like sitting in a hot car, then yes, that would constitute self-punishment.”

  “I’m thirsty,” he said. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Parched.”

  “Let’s see what we have in here.”

  He leaned over me to rummage through the lower shelf of the pantry. I tried to stay out of his way, but he smelled so good, like cologne that had been slept in and had grown soft and sweet on the sheets. I didn’t like him, I reminded myself. He was best friends with AJ, and he was dating Kate, and he definitely wasn’t ObjectPermanence. But I could still admire him.

  He emerged with a box of sparkling mineral water. “It’s warm, but it’s better than nothing.”

  It hissed as he turned the cap, and instead of taking a drink, he offered it to me first.

  “Is this imported from France, too?”

  “It is,” Mike admitted, “but no one will get mad if we drink it.”

  “Okay, good. I don’t want to be a home-wrecker.”

  “Don’t worry. It was already wrecked. My dad cheated on my mom when I was ten.”

  I grew quiet. “I’m sorry.”

  I leaned toward him and bopped my leg against his, and we sat like that for a moment when the door burst open. I winced as light from the kitchen flooded the pantry.

  Kate stood in the doorway. “Time’s up.”

  She slipped her hand in Mike’s and led him outside, glancing back at me with a suspicious look as I followed them.

  Kate watched me for the rest of the night. The game was entering its final stage, where most people succumbed to truths and dares because they couldn’t bear to drink any more. Then it was Mike’s turn again.

  “Mike,” she said, looking at him, though this time her expression was more cold than playful. “Truth or Dare?”

  “Truth me,” Mike said.

  “If you could . . .” Kate hesitated as she read the question on her phone, “kiss anyone in the room other than Kate, who would it be?” She gave Mike an icy look, as if daring him to answer.

  “Oh shit,” AJ said.

  Panic flashed across Mike’s face. “Skip.”

  “Skip?” Kate said. “That’s not
a thing.”

  “Well, I can’t drink any more and I can’t answer the question, so I have to skip.”

  “There’s no skipping,” Kate said.

  “AJ, then,” Mike said. “I’d kiss AJ.”

  AJ winced.

  Kate rolled her eyes. “Truth means that you have to give a real answer.”

  Strangely enough, Mike looked at me. It was quick, so quick that I wondered if it had even happened. My head was fuzzy and my vision wasn’t its best; it was possible he hadn’t looked at all.

  “I’ll take the shot,” he said, looking away.

  Had Kate noticed? I didn’t think so, though part of me wished she had.

  The game continued until someone dared Arun to jump into the hot tub with all of his clothes on, and a few others followed: Drew and AJ had taken off their shirts and were chugging beers and laughing. Seema and Micah seemed to be sitting awfully close together, and Kate was leaning against Mike’s chest, his arm wrapped around her waist. But instead of looking at Mike, her eyes were on me.

  She wasn’t glaring at me, exactly, but she wasn’t smiling either, and the steadiness of her gaze made me uneasy. The music was blasting, the base vibrating in my chest. I tried to distract myself with the conversation on the other side of the couch, but I could feel Kate’s attention amplifying, pulsing toward me like someone was turning the volume up.

  When I couldn’t bear it any longer, I slipped inside to the kitchen, where the lights were dimmed and the music from outside was muffled. A relief.

  “Are you okay?”

  I looked up to see AJ standing in front of me in sweatpants, his shirt off, a towel draped over his shoulders, which were even more muscular than they looked beneath his shirt. He was holding two cups of water, one of which he handed to me.

  “Don’t look so surprised. I’m not a total asshole.”

  “Yes you are.”

  He smirked. “Okay, maybe I am.”

  I expected him to leave, but he lingered, like he was waiting for me to say something.

  “Well, thanks for the water,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Strangely, instead of leaving, he seemed to be settling in.

  “There was plenty of room in the hot tub,” AJ said.

  My head throbbed. I wanted to sit down. “It looked pretty crowded. And anyway, I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “I see that.”

  AJ stepped closer to me. “Do you like what you see?”

  “What?” I said.

  Before I knew what was happening, he was pressing his mouth to mine. It was cold and wet and tasted sour like beer. I felt his tongue force itself into my mouth, and I winced and tried to wriggle out of his grasp.

  “Come here,” he said, grabbing my waist, but I pushed him away.

  “Oh, come on,” he said, leaning into me until I was pressed against the cabinets. “You’ve been looking at me all night.”

  “What?” I said. “No I haven’t.”

  He was drunk and slurring and seemed to think I was joking. He grabbed my chest and tried to kiss me again but I squirmed and elbowed him in the side.

  He jumped back, his face suddenly angry. “What the fuck?”

  My chest was heaving. I inched away from him and tried to catch my breath.

  “You tease me all night and when I finally act on it you get all prudish?”

  I couldn’t believe it. He was angry at me? “What are you talking about?”

  “You clearly wanted it. Why else would you sit next to me and ask me all those dumb questions?”

  “Because it was the only seat left and that’s how you make polite conversation, you ask other people about themselves.”

  AJ’s eyes grew cold and narrow. “You think you’re some kind of supermodel or something? You’re only pretty because you look semi-decent in a skirt. You’re lucky I’d even consider you.”

  Though I knew I shouldn’t listen to him, it felt like he’d spit in my face.

  “Fucking girls,” he muttered and stormed off to the deck.

  I watched him leave, my head spinning, my stomach churning. I wanted to beam myself home, to take a shower and scrub him off of me, to go back in time and erase the entire night. What would I do if ObjectPermanence was him?

  Twenty-Five

  The morning arrived too quickly. I didn’t want to face the day even though it was beautiful out, the California vista appearing in my window like a stock background image: bright, unblemished, and impersonal. By then, I was used to being hungover, and though I thought I was comfortable being alone, this was a new kind of solitude: Mast and Amina were gone, Wiser was a smarmy ad-machine, and ObjectPermanence was the only person in the world I didn’t want him to be.

  I reached for my phone and rolled over in bed. It had been vibrating on and off all morning, infiltrating my sleep until my dreams all featured an uncanny valley version of AJ, pressing me into a cabinet that grew deeper and deeper, engulfing me until I found a switchboard on his back and frantically pressed all the buttons, making him twitch and vibrate as he short-circuited.

  I rubbed my wrist. I could still feel his hand on my skin, could still smell the alcohol on his breath as he jammed his tongue into my mouth. How was I going to face him in class? I didn’t want to think about it, and instead opened my notifications.

  I’d posted a picture of the hot tub when I’d first gotten to the party, and assumed that all of the notifications I’d been getting had been from that, but when I looked at my screen, I saw that I had a dozen new messages. Strange.

  The first four were from Gina.

  >UM YOU DIDN’T TELL ME YOU WERE DATING AN UNDERWEAR MODEL

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  >What? I’m not

  >That’s not what it looks like . . .

  I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  >Looks like where?

  >In the picture

  >What picture?????

  >Check Façade

  I opened the Façade app to discover that I’d been tagged in another post by ValleyBrag. I clicked through and felt my stomach lurch as I was hurled back into my nightmare.

  It was a photo of me and AJ at the party. He was pinning me against the cabinets, his hand on my chest, his lips pressing against mine. I studied myself. My hand was on his arm, trying to push him away, but from the angle, you couldn’t tell. It wasn’t obvious that I was trying to extricate myself at all. If I hadn’t been there, I might have assumed that I was enjoying it.

  The caption read: Once upon a time in Portola Valley, a boy and girl got drunk at a party and then . . .

  Hundreds of people had already liked it, and dozens more had commented.

  >Hand up the shirt, the unofficial Silicon Valley handshake

  >So professional. *eye roll*

  >And these are supposed to be our future tech leaders. Smh

  >So this is how she got into the Foundry

  >Great role models all around. And drinking too. I guess you can do whatever you want when you’re coronated by the Foundry

  I felt like I was going to be sick. I studied the photo again, wondering who had taken it. Had it been Kate? I thought back to the way she’d been staring at me from the hot tub. She was the only person other than AJ who seemed out to get me.

  I opened my texts and typed back to Gina.

  >It’s not what it looks like. I told him to stop but he wouldn’t until I elbowed him in the ribs

  There was a long pause.

  >Seriously? I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have made a joke about it if I’d known. Are you okay?

  >Yes and no. You’ll never guess who this guy is

  > . . .

  >Drone guy

  >Are you kidding???

  >That’s not even the worst of it

  >??

  >I’m pretty sure he’s ObjectPermanence

  >WHAT? That can’t be possible. Are you sure?
/>   >He’s the only one left on the list.

  >Maybe you made a mistake. Is there some way to be certain? Can you just ask him what his name is? You don’t have to tell him who you are or anything. What do you have to lose?

  Gina was right, in a way. What’s the worst that could happen if I just asked him if his name was AJ? That he would say yes and we would never speak again? The idea of writing to him now seemed impossible, so the end result would be the same either way.

  >I’ll think about it

  I was about to cover my face with my pillow and go back to sleep when a text came in from Mitzy.

  >Who’s the new joystick?

  >He’s not my joystick

  >Doesn’t look that way from the picture. Look I’m all for playing a few video games but you can’t let pictures like this get out.

  >You think I’m happy about this? I didn’t even want him to kiss me.

  >Ah, the classic male Control + Alt + Insert. It happens to the best of us. Best not to put yourself in that situation in the future.

  Her response irritated me. Was she implying that it was my fault?

  >What am I supposed to do, not go to parties anymore? I didn’t know anyone was taking photos.

  >Not getting totally wasted would be a good start. Also good to assume that everyone is taking photos all the time. You’re a public figure now. Act like one.

  I couldn’t believe that the person who had given me acid at a VC meet and greet was telling me to behave more professionally.

  >Are you kidding? What about the night we met, when you puked in the bathroom? What about the Karlsson Barrow party?

  >I’ve worked on my image for almost a decade to be able to drink at a party like that. Have you noticed that no one ever posts any damaging photos of me? Because they know they’d never get my help again, and everyone needs help in this business.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but she was right. Though there’d been plenty of unflattering pictures posted of me and other people at the parties, the worst photos I’d seen of Mitzy were of her drinking champagne and looking glamorous.

  >You’re not Mitzy Erst, you’re Xia Chan. People are only just starting to figure out how to pronounce your name. You don’t have any power. You only have potential, which everyone is going to try to chip away at because that’s the business we’re in.