by Ariel Kaplan
I heard someone calling my name, and suddenly I was pulled into a dancing circle of the boys’ crew team. I craned my neck. Bethany was still where I’d left her, only Greg had found her and was looking at her like he was having an experience of the divine. I watched him take her by the hand, lead her over to the drinks table, and crack her open a soda, and then she kissed him on the cheek and I decided not to watch anymore, because I was just going to dance.
I danced with the crew team, and with the swim team, and with Sophie and Claire, who had abandoned their posts since we’d already made way more money than we needed. Talia gave me a can of store-brand cola and I drank it, and then I found myself dancing on a table with John O’Malley and his balloon and forgot for a minute that I was mad at him.
After that, my feet really hurt.
When the song changed, I climbed down from the table (John and a bunch of other people actually booed me then) and found a place to lean against the wall for a minute. I scanned the room for Bethany and found her between Sophie and Claire, watching the party and eating chips, looking a little dreamy-eyed but happy. I’d seen her dancing, too, at least a little, and I wished I’d thought to make her dance with me, but she looked like she was having a good time. I’d just decided to make my way back to her when Greg stepped up to me.
“Hi!” he said happily. Whether he was buzzed from Bethany or some secret stash of liquor I couldn’t say, though he didn’t smell boozy. “Uh, so, you have some lipstick on your teeth.”
Damn it. I turned away and rubbed my teeth with a tissue from my pocket. I turned back to him and smiled.
“You’re good now,” he said. “Seriously, I don’t know how you guys don’t have it on your teeth all the time. Like, what makes it stay on your mouth?”
“Sheer force of will,” I said.
He smiled and stood next to me to survey the crowd. “Look how many people came!”
“I know,” I said. “It’s great. We should do this every week.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, it probably wouldn’t be fun every week.”
“No,” he said. “No, I guess not. But nobody even minds the pony decorations. Like, I thought people would say stuff, but nobody did.”
“It’s a party,” I said. “All anyone cares about is the music. And the booze, I guess. Do you know who brought it?”
“I’ll never tell,” he said, with a Mona Lisa smile, then pivoted. “I didn’t know you liked to dance so much. I think I saw a little salsa action out there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, my dad taught me when I was little.”
The song changed to something a little slower, and I thought about taking off my shoes, but with them on I was nearly as tall as Greg, and for some reason I liked that. He said, “I think you danced with every single person here. Did I see you with John?”
“Uh, mostly I was dancing with Pinkie Pie. John just kept getting in the way.”
“Yeah, he does that.”
I laughed. He said, “That tie looks awesome, by the way. You tie it better than I do.”
I said, “Thanks,” and decided I could stand to be a little nicer to Sebastian.
“You look very Marlene Dietrich.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“You don’t know who that is.”
“No, I don’t.”
“My parents watch a lot of old movies,” he explained. “Look her up. She was something else. Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“If you dance with everyone here but me, Bethany’ll think something’s up.”
“What? She won’t think that,” I said, but I’d already given him my hand and then we were dancing. It was the second time I’d touched Greg. No, wait. The third. It felt shockingly familiar and wholly unreal.
Someone turned the lights down, just a little, or so it seemed to me. Greg was very close, and very warm, and very him. His eyes, in the low light, looked black. “You’re very tall,” he said. “In those shoes.”
“I’m very tall in any shoes.”
We swayed a little. “I’m not sure about this song,” he said. It was a Latin pop song that was always on the radio. “Can’t be a salsa.”
I didn’t answer because I was dancing.
“Could work as a tango,” he said.
“I don’t know the tango,” I said.
“I could teach you,” he said. “But we’d have to be closer.”
“Like this?” I asked, and stepped a little closer.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s like this: slow-slow-quick-quick-slow.”
I moved to follow him.
“That’s good,” he said, and we did a little more, a promenade, and then we moved in a square. It was fun, and he was laughing, and I wanted to laugh but I was too busy concentrating on my feet, and then he was looking at me like he’d suddenly become aware that I was a girl, a person, an Aphra, not just an object that occupied space near him, but me, me, me. His hand was holding mine and his eyes were on mine and I felt hot and dizzy and alive.
He twirled me, my hair spinning behind me, and then pulled me back in. My cheek brushed his, and it was smooth, like he’d just shaved. The corner of my mouth grazed the corner of his mouth, just a little. Not a kiss, but maybe a kiss’s distant relation. I felt him swallow next to my ear.
“This is…,” he said, and then he let go of me. I felt a rush of cold air where he’d been standing a second before.
What was I doing?
I looked anywhere but at him. “I was actually on my way to find B,” I said a little too loudly. “We bought her some, some cupcakes.”
“Good,” he said. “Good. Good. She likes those a lot.”
My brain reached for anything, anything, anything. “Well, I guess I can teach John the tango now, so thanks for that.”
He exhaled; I could see it. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re good. As long as you don’t squash his balloon. I mean—”
I was still dizzy from twirling and his eyes on me. “Why, Greg,” I managed to say, putting a hand to my chest. “I never.”
He laughed, looking at the floor, and ruffled the back of his hair.
I made eye contact across the room with Sophie, who was looking at me a little oddly. I mouthed CAKE at her, and she nodded and went to dig something out from under one of the purple tablecloths. Greg and I made our way over to Bethany, who was standing between the wall and a fake potted plant festooned with a purple streamer.
“Hey!” Sophie said, elbowing her way to us. “So the mom of the birthday kid earlier accidentally double-ordered her cake, and she left the second one with us.” She thrust a white bakery box in our direction.
“Cake Baby?” Bethany asked.
I winced a little, because I’d forgotten to tell Sophie not to use them since Bethany worked there now. “Let’s see what they left us,” I said, and opened the box, which was filled with two dozen assorted cupcakes in Bethany’s favorite flavors. “You should have one, B. They’re all the kinds you like.”
She carefully selected a lemon meringue and lifted it out of the box with her fingertips, then looked at the rest of us, who were watching raptly. “Well?” she said. “Aren’t…aren’t you going to have one, too?” I took a spice cake and used my eyeballs to encourage everyone else to do the same.
Greg said, “Happy birthday. To the girl with the extra cupcakes.” He had an almost imperceptible dot of my lipstick right at the corner of his mouth.
“Should we sing?” I asked.
“To…to…to the little girl who’s not here?” Bethany asked.
“It seems polite,” said Greg, who would not look directly at me. “She did leave us her cupcakes.”
“What was her name?” Bethany asked.
Nobody knew. So we decided to just hum the happy birthday song, and at the
end, Claire stuck a candle in Bethany’s cupcake and we all blew it out together.
* * *
—
I drove Bethany home after, taking the long way, because I’d convinced Greg that I should be the one to execute the last step of the Bethany’s Birthday Project.
“I’m soooo tired,” she said as I pulled up in front of her house. “Like, I could sleep all of tomorrow and I think I’d still be tired.”
“You had fun, though, right?”
“Yeah! It was great. Especially that cupcake part. I mean, it was almost like someone knew it was my birthday.” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“What?” I said. “No, of course not. I told no one.”
“Come on,” she said. “I know you were behind the cupcakes.”
“I may have been slightly behind the cupcakes.”
“Well, thanks for that, anyway.”
“You liked it, right? You can have another one; I brought home the leftovers.”
“There were leftovers?”
I took the box out of the trunk. “Et voilà,” I said.
“Ooh,” she said, and took a second cupcake and started to work on the frosting. At her urging, I grabbed one, too, and then found out, upon biting into it, that it was coconut and had to spit it out on the lawn.
“Really?” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
We went into the house, stopping in the kitchen so I could wash my mouth out, and up the stairs, past the sounds of Colin playing some shoot-’em-up game in the basement and her mom listening to a podcast in her bedroom with the door closed. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “happy birthday.” And then I opened her bedroom door.
Inside were enough pink and purple balloons to fill the room, plus one big balloon of Fluttershy the pony in the middle, and then, on her bed, were eight wrapped presents, from me and the rest of our boat, plus one from Greg. Her hand flew over her mouth and her eyes went sideways to mine. I bounced on my toes a little, because I was so very proud of myself.
“The fund-raiser—”
“Oh, it was a real fund-raiser. We made $425, by the way.”
She lowered her hand. “Does Greg know?”
“That it’s your birthday? Please, the whole thing was his idea.” She looked at me skeptically. “It was!” I said. I had to bat some of the balloons out into the hallway so we could sit down. “Mostly. Here, open mine first.”
She hesitated just a second before setting the rest of her cupcake down and enthusiastically ripping the paper off my gift. “It’s perfect,” she said, sliding the bracelet on over her hand. “And you even remembered the selenium.”
“How could I ever forget the selenium?”
She pulled me into a hug and I patted her back. “Aphra,” she said into my shoulder, “this is the best birthday I’ve ever had. Including the one where I was actually born.”
She slid the rest of the presents out of the way and sat down on the bed. I said, “Since that one involved having your head squeezed through a vagina, I’m not surprised.”
She slugged me on the shoulder. “I was a C-section. And you know that.”
“I’m not sure that’s better.”
“Mm-mmm,” she said. “Mom said the doctor cut her open like a salmon.”
“You know, I’m not sure that analogy works. If she was a salmon, what were you?”
“Uh. I don’t know. Salmon guts, I guess.”
“Ah,” I said. “I know. If we make it a sturgeon instead of a salmon, then you are caviar.”
She smiled and ducked her head. “Caviar.”
“Cavi-ar,” I said, rolling the r.
She picked up Greg’s present. “Should I open this one?”
“Of course you should!”
“Do you know what’s in it?”
“Nope,” I said. “But I told him absolutely no dick pics, so you should be safe there.”
“Thank God for you, Aphra.” She tore open the wrapping of the tiny box, which I’d assumed held earrings or some other kind of jewelry, but inside was a key. She picked it up and looked at it, like it might turn into something else on closer inspection. “Huh,” she said.
I took the box from her and ran my fingers inside. Stuck in the bottom was a little card, and I handed it over. It said, You’ll find out what this opens tomorrow. Happy birthday to the most beautiful girl in the world.
“Well, that’s adorable,” I said.
She flopped sideways, landing her head in my lap. “I think I might be falling in love with him,” she said. “Maybe I should tell him. Do you think I should tell him?”
I tried to laugh. “Don’t you want to see what the key opens first?”
“Today was perfect. The whole key thing is perfect.” She yawned. “He’s perfect.”
I started to think of a comeback to that, but honestly? He kind of was.
I hope you had a great birthday, Greg messaged that night.
For some reason, this seemed to be crossing a bigger line than usual—like if I answered, I was pretending to be Bethany in a way I had somehow convinced myself I wouldn’t. I was stuck, though, again, because if I didn’t answer, he’d want to know why. I said, Thanks, I did, because I knew she had.
Then, because I couldn’t help it, I typed, What is the key for?
Tsk. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
What happens tomorrow?
Brunch, remember, after you get done at Cake Baby? Or did you forget?
Bethany hadn’t mentioned she was having brunch with Greg. I wondered if that was deliberate or not. Probably not. Why wouldn’t she tell me?
Right, I said. I meant, what happens with the key?
Well, you’ll be presented with the lock, obviously.
Obviously. I hope it doesn’t open something horrible. Like a big box of spiders.
Would a small box of spiders be better?
No, you’re right. The size of the box is irrelevant. Like a nonrestrictive clause.
…
What did you say?
Sorry, I typed quickly. Antiquated grammarian terms are kind of my jam.
I thought you hated English.
This was not good. Ha, I said. See, I have a very specific sense of humor. You need to work on your sarcasm meter.
I guess so. You weren’t being sarcastic about loving pancakes, were you?
No, no, I said. That was all sincerity.
Good. I’ll see you tomorrow, mое истинное сердце.
Are you really going to leave me hanging with that?
Indeed I am.
And he disconnected. I ran it through Google Translate. He’d written my truest heart.
* * *
—
This was becoming less than ideal, which is a very nice way of saying things were heading south, which is a slightly less nice way of saying things were becoming a shitshow. While I was trying to pretend to be Bethany without acting like I was trying to pretend to be Bethany, I was getting increasingly bad at pretending to be Bethany, and that train of logic was so twisted even I couldn’t follow it. I needed to delete the app. But I couldn’t delete the app. It was a classic catch-22. I know this because we read that book in English last fall. I wrote a paper on it and got an A. I am very good at English papers.
I needed a way to get rid of the app that wouldn’t result in Greg’s asking Bethany about it. I suppose I could just preemptively tell him I was going to do it. I could tell him I needed the space on my phone. Or I could tell him the app got corrupted and he should just text me like a normal person, and that whatever silly sentimental attachment he had to the app as our personal meet-cute needed to be thrown by the wayside because I never, ever wanted to talk about it again. Ever.
Things were simpler
, I think, before people had cell phones.
* * *
—
I got up early the next morning because I’d promised to take Kit for mini-golfing and lunch. Of course, mini-golfing with an uncoordinated nine-year-old takes twice as long as mini-golfing with a normal person, so by the time we were done we only had time for a dollar hamburger at the drive-through. When we got home, Mom was in the kitchen on the phone, talking very fast. When we kicked off our shoes, she said, “He’s here now,” and then hung up.
“Kit,” she said. “Go to your room for a minute.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“No, I just need to talk to Aphra.”
“Is she in trouble?”
“Just go,” she said.
Looking a little uncertain, he went upstairs.
“Where were you?”
I was kind of surprised she was mad. Why was she mad? All I’d done was have fun with my little brother, and I hadn’t even asked her to pay for the round of mini-golf. “What’s the problem? I told Kit I’d take him to play mini-golf since he got a four on his Mali project.”
“I’ve been calling you for two hours.”
I pulled out my phone. “My battery’s dead,” I said. “I guess I didn’t notice. Sorry. Why were you calling?”
“Because I didn’t know where my nine-year-old was? I called all his friends! You never told me you were taking him out.”
“I thought he told you.”
“He’s nine. You can’t count on him to tell anybody anything.”
“Well, I’m sorry. Next time I’ll tell you myself. Look, he’s fine, I’m fine, we’re both fine, except it took him ten shots to get through the windmill and I had to threaten the people behind us with my club because they kept doing that loud sighing thing.”
Mom did her own loud sigh. She said, “I like how invested you are in Kit. I think it’s wonderful. But you do realize that in a year, you’re going to be gone? Just like Delia?”
“I’m not going to be anything just like Delia,” I said hotly.
“Aphra, my point is you’re creating a very confusing situation for him.”
