“I don’t drink,” he said, and I took it back, a little embarrassed. Brianna’s head whipped around.
“Come on, Boy Genius. It’s a party,” she said.
Tristan shrugged, looking a little irritated with her, but he accepted the bottle from me and took a swig.
The drink itself was flat, but it felt as though it had carbonated my insides the second it hit my stomach, an effervescence that fizzed throughout my body, making my limbs feel light and loose, as though they might float away from me and rise up, up, up into the sky. I looked over at Tristan, who was taking another sip of the drink and who seemed more cheerful than he had moments before. He looked perfect, shiny, almost as if a corona of light surrounded him. Then he glanced over at me, and it was as if all the effervescent bubbles in me popped at once. It was the strangest feeling, like an internal tickle, and I couldn’t help but start laughing, and Tristan started laughing, too. I’d only gotten tipsy a few times before, but whatever Brianna had put in this drink, I felt as if I could guzzle it and guzzle it. And Tristan, incandescent, laughing—I almost threw the whole plan out the window to grab him and kiss him right that second.
But that’s when Marcus turned around and started walking backward so he could see us, so I stuffed my tingly hands deep in my pockets and commanded them to stay there. “What are you two giggling about back here?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Tristan said, but for some reason that only made us laugh harder.
“How are you feeling?” Brianna said, and there was a note of real curiosity in her voice, so I gave the question the contemplation that I believed it was due.
“I feel,” I said, “like a puppy with wings.” And that made everyone laugh, and I linked arms with Marcus and Tristan like we were in The Wizard of Oz and skipped a little. If you had tried to tell me that we didn’t all genuinely like each other, I wouldn’t have believed you. Hull’s words of caution had been released (hurled, maybe) to the evening breeze. I was in love, and the world was beautiful.
“You’re crazy, girl,” Marcus said, but he was laughing, too, and the laughter carried us all the way to the party, as swiftly and surely as if it were a magic carpet.
By the time we arrived, the party was in full swing. The house, a small split-level with peach siding, looked a little run-down, like most of the houses on the block, but maybe that was only because the front yard was already littered with beer cans. Kids from school, a few of whom I vaguely recognized, were scattered all over the concrete slab that served as a porch. Almost all of them said hey to Marcus, and he acknowledged them with a single nod before shouldering his way inside the front door.
The theme of the party was space, and someone had decorated the walls of the living room with hundreds of those little glow-in-the-dark star stickers, and the original Star Wars movie was playing soundlessly on the television. A song I didn’t recognize made the walls buzz and vibrate. A girl a few feet to our left shrieked so loudly that everything stopped for a second, but then she went straight back to her conversation and everyone else did, too. We waded in, a snake of four bodies making its way through the crowd. Marcus in the lead, of course, and then Tristan, who reached behind and took my hand when he saw that Brianna and I were getting caught in the melee. Even though it was only a brief span of seconds, it was as if a circuit had been closed. A jolt of desire and a need for the plan to work shot through me.
A folding table had been set up against one wall, and a giant bowl of purple mystery punch sat atop it, tiny tremulous waves created by the music rolling across the surface of the liquid. A tented sheet of construction paper labeled the drink with the rather unfortunate moniker “Black Hole Juice.” It didn’t stop me from accepting a paper cupful when Marcus offered it. Brianna’s drink had been ambrosia, but this tasted more like grape Kool-Aid.
A wiry, dark-skinned kid with short braids sticking out all over his head came over, clasped hands with Marcus and bumped shoulders with him. His lips were forming the word welcome over and over. So this was R. J., master of ceremonies. He was in my Government class, and I hadn’t even realized he was the notorious party-thrower.
“You know T and Brianna,” Marcus said, and his voice was so loud and commanding that I could hear it even in the middle of the party’s cacophony. “And this is my date, Isabelle.” So strange to be claimed, possessed by someone, and have that same person get your name wrong, all in the span of six words. I glanced at Tristan. He was leaning against the wall, staring down into a cup of the awful punch. He looked amazing.
I turned back to R. J. and leaned in. “Cool shirt!” I shouted. He was wearing a Neil deGrasse Tyson T-shirt, possibly homemade, with an image of the astrophysicist and the quote “Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself” emblazoned across the front.
“NDT is my man!” R. J. yelled, and then the music changed, and someone across the room screamed his name and he bounded happily away.
Marcus took my elbow and we walked toward the glow of the kitchen, Tristan and Brianna following behind. “You’re so nice, Izzy,” Marcus said, and he sounded surprised, as if he’d anticipated that he’d invited a world-class bitch to be his date to this party.
The kitchen was better lit and farther from the thumping speakers, but no less crowded. People were thronged around a table of snacks, bags of Cheetos and Fritos piled on top of each other and mostly ransacked. Should have brought something to eat, I thought; I’d been too distracted to behave like a polite guest. But people seemed thrilled to see Marcus, chips or no chips. Two of his friends, K-Dawg and Tyrone, whom Brianna had pointed out to me at school, hugged Marcus like a long-lost brother when we found them in the kitchen.
“Now the party’s here,” Tyrone said. He was lean and awkwardly put together, ears too low on his head, dry skin. He smirked in my general direction but didn’t bother to introduce himself.
K-Dawg (whose real name was Kevin, Brianna had told me, but he had long ceased to respond even when teachers called him that) lifted a can of beer to his lips in a slow-motion arc. He had a baby face and heavy eyelids and a big Afro, which together made him look like a stuffed animal, maybe a sleepy lion. The beer can halted midway to his lips, which were dusted finely with snack food crumbs. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, looking at me from below his long eyelashes. “Is this Izzy? She doesn’t look anything like—”
He didn’t finish his sentence, though, because Marcus reached out and shoved him a little and said, “Yeah, dumbass, this is Izzy.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Lots of people think it’s weird that I don’t look like my brother. We are twins, after all. But we’re fraternal, so we can look as different as any other pair of siblings.”
There aren’t too many times in one’s life when you get to bring a conversation to a screeching, record-stopping halt, and I would be lying to say I wasn’t reveling in it. It was my chance to say, “Look, I know everything about your beef with my brother. And I’m so cool that it’s all beneath me to care.” I looked around at their faces. K-Dawg had forgotten to lower his beer can. Tyrone looked irritated, almost angry. Tristan looked nervous. And Marcus… if I had to guess, I’d say that he was looking at me with a little bit of admiration, like I had something in me that he hadn’t anticipated. Anyway, even though the party kept swirling around us, there was nothing but cricket-filled silence in that one corner of the kitchen.
But then a pretty girl with a bright red scarf came over, kissed Tyrone on the jaw, leaped into the middle of our circle, and started to shimmy to the Drake song that had shuffled up on the speakers. The loaded silence broke the dam and time flowed forward again.
“Are you guys stoned?” the girl said. “Why are y’all so quiet?” Then she squealed and threw herself at Brianna. “Those earrings are so pretty that I could cut you for them, bitch.”
Brianna laughed. “Roxanne, this is my friend Izzy!” she shouted over the clamor that had swept in once again.
“Enchantée,” Roxanne shouted. If t
here was any discussion among the boys of my drop-the-mic moment I missed it, because I was busy talking with Brianna and Roxanne. What she was doing with Tyrone was a mystery, because she really was pretty cool, in that spotlight-hungry theater kid kind of way. Tristan greeted her with a fist bump and the four of us stood around for a few minutes, talking about movies, eating the dregs of a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips. Roxanne insisted that the best old-school Disney movie was Cinderella, but Tristan argued for Beauty and the Beast, which had always been my favorite, too.
“The Beast is so emotionally complicated. He walks the line between self-sacrificing and self-defeating,” Tristan said, and I got a little echo of that bubbly feeling I had before.
“But if complicated is what you want, why not The Lion King?” Roxanne asked. “Simba as Hamlet, and all that.”
“Yeah, but Hamlet doesn’t get it on with Ophelia and live happily ever after in the original. They totally punked on the ending.”
“I’d love to play Hamlet someday,” Roxanne said. “The first black female Hamlet.”
But before anyone had time to offer any thoughts on those aspirations, Marcus was pressing another cup of punch into my hand and asking if we wanted to check out the upstairs. “R. J. said the party continues all over the house,” he said. “He said you’ve really got to check out all the rooms to appreciate the theme.”
“Oh, sure,” Roxanne said, rolling her eyes. “I’m sure the theme is really what you have on your mind, Marcus.”
The riskiest moment of the plan was rushing toward us, so we had to look sharp. The four of us drifted out of the kitchen. Brianna and I linked arms on the staircase, but I was afraid to look her in the face in case my anxiety was contagious. We stayed that way, hips bumping, eyes determinedly forward, past R. J.’s bedroom, where a telescope was positioned next to the window (completely ignored while people sat cross-legged on the floor and passed a joint around). Past the bathroom, which had a big and remarkably detailed drawing of a space shuttle taped to the door, upon which someone had scrawled in Sharpie, “How do astronauts piss in space?” And finally, on toward another bedroom, R. J.’s sisters’ or maybe his parents’ room, a closed door with colorful signs posted all over it. THE FINAL FRONTIER, the signs read. PLEASE NO CELL PHONES OR ANY OTHER KIND OF LIGHT. ENTER QUIETLY AND AT YOUR OWN RISK.
The make-out room, of course. Brianna had told me that every one of R. J.’s parties had one. In fact, she’d said, she had let R. J. himself feel her up, bra off, at his baseball-themed party two years ago, in a room labeled UNDER THE BLEACHERS. I didn’t tell Brianna that, two years on, I still hadn’t allowed anyone to do that.
My chain of thoughts ran something like this: 1) Please let this work. 2) This will never work. 3) Please let this work.
Marcus reached toward the doorknob of the room and started to turn it. Brianna reached out and put her hand on his arm, making him pause.
“Wait,” she said. “Ladies first.”
THE ROOK
“WAIT,” I SAY. “LADIES FIRST.”
Marcus nods, performs a little bow, and gestures toward the door like a gentleman. I look over at T and give him a glance that I hope is smoldering and come-hither enough for Marcus to notice. Like I can’t wait to get my hands on T inside that room. As if. T looks completely terrified, like he might bolt down the stairs at any moment. I’m not sure what Izzy sees in him, really. Ever since last weekend, when I saw him staring at her, I’ve been pretty sure that their feelings are mutual, but he’s such an odd one, such a cold fish, that I took the added precaution of mixing up a love potion for the two of them to drink tonight. Mugwort and cinnamon bark and pomegranate seeds and a few other things, mashed together and allowed to marinate in the moonlight for two full nights, then mixed with a little whiskey for good measure and decanted carefully into a Coke bottle. Is it working? I think so, but the whole world feels tilted tonight so I can’t be sure.
“Ladies first,” Marcus repeats after me.
Izzy and I slip inside the room, almost drawing the door shut behind us, and move quickly away from the doorway into the pitch black. I’m worried that we’ll bump into someone or something in the dark, feel or hear something that we’d rather not, but the room is quiet. The night is still young, after all. I can hear Izzy’s nervous breathing beside me, and I almost whisper something reassuring to her, because I’m as calm as a runner before a race, but then the door pushes open, and there’s no time, because even in this blackness, I can tell from the height and movements of the silhouette that it’s Marcus. I reach out and wordlessly draw him toward me, pull him farther into the room, and I feel his strong hands, his strong arms, reaching back for me. Marcus is holding me, I can feel the hard metal of the necklace through the thin fabric of his shirt, and everything, Izzy and T and the entire world of the party, dissolves away.
What is there to say, really, about what happens in the dark emptiness of infinite space? There are moments like honey. There are moments like dancing. There are moments like we are both rushing toward something. Have you ever been running a great distance, and you see a landmark on the horizon, and at first it seems completely unchanging, as though you will never make it there? But as you get closer, near the end, it is speeding toward you so fast, and you realize you have been moving this quickly all along, hurtling toward this one determined point, sucked into the heart of a black hole. That is what it is like. It’s like that.
THE KNIGHT
I WAIT FOR A FEW MOMENTS IN THE HALLWAY. I CANNOT bear the thought of entering the room, because my heart will stop if I am in the same space where Marcus is running his hands over Izzy, tasting her skin. No, my heart will not simply stop; it will explode, and they will find my dead body on the second floor of R. J.’s house tomorrow morning, my chest cavity blown out.
And yet.
I am not so self-absorbed that I cannot imagine how it would feel to be Brianna, waiting in the dark for someone who never comes. I remember her stopping in the park that day, pulling me to my feet so that I could run from the cops. She has always been decent to me, if not exactly my friend, and God only knows why she wants to make out with me, but maybe it’s as simple as loneliness, and because that’s a topic I understand intimately, I can’t abandon her to it. I will kiss her a few times and then we will get the hell out of here and go downstairs and, even though I can’t stand hangovers because they give me migraines, we will drink beer until we are a little bit, blessedly, numbed. With this strategy clear in my mind, I go through the door.
She is there, immediately, one arm circling my neck, the other reaching around my waist, and I can’t help it, I reflexively wince. But then her lips are next to my ear, so close that I can feel them brushing against the peach fuzz on my earlobe. It’s me. The words are so soft, closer to a breath than a whisper, even, and I think that I’ve imagined them until they come again. It’s me. I know, somehow, that it’s Izzy, even though I can’t really hear her voice and none of this makes any sense. But there it is, there she is, the truest thing in the world. Izzy. And as long as her body is pressed against mine, my brain doesn’t care about explanations. I would float here for minutes, for hours, forever, in the limbo of the darkness, her arm around my neck the only certainty that matters.
She threads her fingers through mine, though, and we slip back out into the hallway. I can see her now, her eyes nervous and questioning, one finger over her lips. Downstairs, the party rages, but the upper level of the house has hit a moment of relative quiet. A few people waiting for the bathroom, a few going down the stairs. The pot smokers have vacated R. J.’s room and that’s where I follow her. She glances quickly over her shoulder and pulls the door shut behind her.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have explained earlier, but I didn’t know how. Marcus is your cousin, and I thought that maybe you thought that he thought…” She trails off.
I think again of that gallery of regretted moments, moments when I didn’t know the right thing to
do, a chain of them that form the story of my life. But even a fool can see when the universe is giving you a hint this big. I put my hand on her cheek and I lean toward her and I kiss her.
I’m not an expert or anything, but I’d be pretty comfortable betting that this is one of the top ten most perfect kisses in the history of human existence. Our lips fit together like they were made to do so, and the constant motion and noise in my head stops for a minute, and then I can taste the sweet warmth of her, and then our tongues are touching, not gross and slug-like as I’ve sometimes experienced, but a slice of soft quickness, perfectly timed to meet in the middle. I am filled with fizzing bubbles, and I can’t feel where I end and she begins. It is so perfect that I’m afraid that my knees might give out under me, and I put my arm around her waist, ostensibly to embrace her, but really to steady myself. And that’s wonderful, too, the warm, reassuring pressure of another body, two people holding each other up. The kiss ends, but she doesn’t move her face away from mine. We are almost the same height. I notice a small freckle on the outer corner of her left eye, and the gentle curve of the bridge of her nose: the gift of tiny details.
“What are we going to do?” she says. “What are we going to do?”
“This,” I say. “More of this.”
Her worried expression relaxes, a silent laugh, and because I know she doesn’t laugh easily, this, too, feels like a gift. The movement propels her into me again, a more forceful kiss this time, less gentle but more joyful. You can laugh and kiss at the same time, I think. How amazing.
Izzy + Tristan Page 10
