I got to the party around 9:30, which seemed like it might have been too early to arrive at a college party without looking like a high school kid. I hoped I didn’t run into anyone who knew who I was; it wasn’t like my parents introduced me to their students, but I was in and out of their offices enough that someone could probably put it together. I decided what I needed was a fake name. A good, all-purpose alias.
I walked into the townhouse my bathroom friend had given me the address for, which had been strung with Christmas lights around all the windows and was otherwise about three-quarters dark. The living room was full of people sitting around drinking and talking loud, and about half a dozen people were bobbing up and down in the middle of the room, which had been converted into a makeshift dance floor. More Christmas lights were strung on the banister down to the basement, which sounded like it was full of even more people, and through the bay window I could see that the back deck and tiny yard were similarly occupied. Across the upstairs staircase, someone had put a piece of crime scene tape and a sheet of paper that read, Nice try.
Someone jostled me to the left, and I realized I was standing in front of the bar. The person who’d bumped me asked for a beer, and the guy behind the bar poured him one from the keg before turning to me.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?” It was so dark I could barely see what he looked like. My height, or maybe an inch taller. Big eyes, wide mouth, curly hair that hung halfway to his shoulders. I couldn’t tell what color his skin was exactly, but he was neither particularly pale nor particularly dark. I wondered what I looked like in that light. Probably not pretty, I decided. But I might be able to pass for average. Maybe even a little above that, if I carried myself with enough panache, and I was good at that.
“Hi,” I said, finally getting my feet under me. “Hello. You seem to have quite an assortment back there.”
“I do, at that. What can I get you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve always found myself to be partial to the works of Zora Neale Hurston.”
He winked and started mixing things together in a cocktail shaker. “Really,” he said. “What was your favorite?”
“Uh, Their Eyes Were Watching God, I guess.”
He rolled his eyes. “Disappointing.”
“What? Why?”
“Every single person I ask gives me the same answer.” He poured the contents of the shaker into a plastic cup and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“A Zora Neale Hurston,” he replied. “What else?”
I examined the drink. It was blue. I sipped it. It tasted…also blue. “What’s in this?”
“Curaçao, bitters, and ginger ale.”
“This is the top-shelf drink?” I asked, as if I normally drink a lot of expensive liquor. The truth is I’ve been drunk exactly twice. The first time was when Delia and I were younger and found an old bottle of kirsch in the kitchen. We were both home from school with a cold and pretended it was cough syrup, giving each other tablespoonful after tablespoonful until Mom walked in on us and poured the rest of the bottle out, shrieking that we were going to end up just like Great-Aunt Leanne, and to this day we have absolutely no idea who that is. The other time was when Bethany and I found a bottle of cheap champagne in her pantry and decided to have mimosas with our oatmeal one morning, which really does not go, and resulted in Bethany falling down the stairs and losing a toenail.
Nevertheless, I eyed the drink like I was Zelda Fitzgerald, a bon vivant of the highest order. “Hey,” he said, grinning at me. “The curaçao is expensive. I’m Mark, by the way. I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Are you a freshman?”
I took another sip of the Zora. It seemed to be growing on me. “Sophomore, actually.”
“And do you have a name, Sophomore English Major?”
“Um,” I said. “Beth. But I’m actually not an English major. I’m still undeclared.”
“Oh, undeclared. I should take that drink back.”
But I’d already finished it, so I said, “If you wait half an hour and give me an empty cup, I can oblige you.”
He laughed, harder than was probably called for, which likely meant he’d been sampling his own wares. “I’m off bar duty in fifteen minutes,” he said. “Will you still be here then?”
“I just got here,” I said.
“Brilliant,” he said, with a smile that matched the word. I smiled back and let the crowd carry me away from the bar. I wondered what time it was. It was probably late enough that Bethany and Greg would be done with their movie. Maybe they were going home. Maybe they were going out for ice cream. Maybe they were making out in his car.
I made a circuit of the room. Mostly people in twos or threes were talking closely about finals or internships or hookups. I heard strains of a conversation about Infinite Jest and backed up so quickly I bumped into the person standing behind me.
“Beth,” Mark said in my ear, and I really wished I hadn’t gone with that name, but it’d been the first one that popped into my head. I felt the phantom impulse to check my phone for a text but resisted it. I didn’t need to know how Bethany’s date was going. I didn’t want to know; it had nothing to do with me. Nothing at all. It was completely none of my business.
“Hey,” I said, and Mark passed another Zora into my hand.
“I thought you’d decided I didn’t deserve this.”
“Mmm. I realized I may have judged you too harshly.”
“And why was that?”
“When I asked the next three people their favorite ZNH, they gave me an Alice Walker title.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, no indeed.” He brushed a stray lock of hair off my forehead. I hadn’t realized we were at the hair-touching stage, but okay. “Hey, come meet some people.” He took my hand and led me to the back deck, which smelled faintly of pot and strongly of Axe body spray. On the wraparound bench, two boys sat drinking while a girl sat sideways next to them, her legs draped over their laps, her bare feet dangling off one of their knees.
“Mark!” one of the boys said. “Is off bar duty!”
“I am,” he said. “Guys, this is Beth. She’s a sophomore.”
I stood up straight and did my best to look nineteen. No, wait. Twenty. I’d be twenty, probably. “Hey,” I said.
“You’ve got a Zora,” the guy who’d just spoken said. “You know, I invented that.”
“You must be Tim,” I said. “Congrats on the honors thesis.” I held up my cup, which was about half empty, since it turns out I’m a fan of the Zora. Big, big fan. “Why blue, though?”
He laughed. “No particular reason. My paper was on the evolution of the American novel.”
“See, though, if you wanted a blue drink with the name of an American author, you should have called it the Toni Morrison.”
“For The Bluest Eye? It’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?”
“But that’s what makes it perfect,” I said. “It’s so unironic it loops back around.” That made no sense. None. But everyone around me was either half or three-quarters drunk, which made me sound like some kind of genius. Everyone nodded.
“That is so true,” Tim said. “I think I’m renaming it.”
“Too late,” Mark said. “We’re out of curaçao.”
“Damn it. Well, next time.”
The girl across Mark’s lap said, “Did you read Bluest Eye in Eliza Brown’s class?”
I perked up at my mom’s name. I’d read the book last year in English, and I’d rarely identified with a book so strongly. The scene where Claudia talks about her hatred for Shirley Temple and the sickening reaction she provokes in the adults around her was one of the most cathartic things I’d ever read. “Uh, no,” I said. “In high school, actually.”
“Oh, good. I hated that class.” She turned to the boy next to her. “She’s so bourgeois, I just wanted to strangle her.”
I felt my eyebrows inch up my forehead. For a minute, I wanted to hand Mark my earrings and throw down with this girl, but that would have looked really suspicious, since I just said I hadn’t taken the class. “Really,” I said.
“I mean, she gave me a C on my paper on the male gaze’s encroachment into the feminine novel. A freaking C!”
“How,” I said, “is that bourgeois?”
She rolled her eyes. “If I have to explain it to you, you wouldn’t understand.”
“You mean why you got a C, or the fact that you don’t know what bourgeois means?”
She squawked a little. Well, good. Call my mommy bourgeois. My mom. I mean, my mom. Sheesh.
I wondered how much liquor had been in the Zora. I mean, it hadn’t tasted particularly alcoholic. Does curaçao taste boozy? I don’t even know what it is, except that it’s blue.
“Beth,” Mark said. “Come dance with me.”
“I’m not done with my drink,” I said, because I really wanted to trounce this girl a little more. Little poser probably didn’t even know what the male gaze was. But Mark took the cup from me and downed the last half inch of Zora and said, “Now you are. Come on, I’ll get you another one.”
“I thought you were out of the blue stuff?”
But we didn’t make it back to the bar. In the living room, the lights seemed to have gotten lower, and the music had dropped, too, probably to keep the neighbors from complaining.
Mark set his hands on my waist and pulled me into a swaying rhythm. “Don’t listen to Amanda,” he said. “She gets bitter when she’s drunk.”
“Is that what that was?”
“She also hates any prof who gives her less than an A. But I read that paper, and it sucked.” He ran a finger across my cheek. “You’re pretty defensive about Dr. Brown, though, for someone who’s never taken one of her classes.”
“She, ah. She was my academic advisor. Freshman year.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
In the low light, everything looked kind of dreamy. I leaned into junior English major Mark a little, and he leaned a little back. He was warm, and I liked that. I liked dancing with a boy, a nice boy who read books and smiled when I talked to him. But really, more than anything, I wished he was someone else.
I shouldn’t be here.
“Beth,” he said, and I tried not to cringe. “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
He leaned in and I realized he intended to kiss me, and I thought, Huh, well, okay, I guess this is a thing that’s happening and I’m fine with it. Because why not? Greg wasn’t going to kiss me, not ever, and this guy wanted to, so I figured I might as well make the best of it. I let my eyes drift shut and leaned in so he would know I found this turn of events to be acceptable.
Mouths are weird. I mean, you’re supposed to feel all kinds of things when somebody kisses you, but you use the same organ for eating and drinking, and nobody thinks you’re supposed to have some kind of cosmic experience putting on lip balm or eating a fried egg or—and I really wish this hadn’t occurred to me—throwing up your blue-colored cocktail. But I might as well have been kissing the back of my hand, for all I felt.
I mean, it wasn’t unpleasant. He was warm and alive and real, which was more than I could say for my fantasies of Greg D’Agostino. But I waited for something to happen to me inwardly speaking, and it didn’t. He broke the kiss and leaned back, a little glassy-eyed. He was drunk, I realized; more than halfway. He was drunk and it was dark and this was stupid. In the harsh light of day, he’d never give me a second glance.
“Mind if I cut in?”
I looked and saw that the voice belonged to Delia. “Oh, God,” I said.
Mark looked a little confused. “Uh,” he said.
Delia put her hands on my shoulders. “Shoo,” she told him. “We’re dancing.”
“Beth?” he said.
Delia’s eyes widened. “Holy crap,” she said.
“You should probably go,” I told Mark. “I’m…I’m sorry.”
“Is this your girlfriend or something?”
“Mm,” Delia said. “Sure, let’s just go with that.”
Mark hesitated another second, and then he went back out to the yard.
“Ugh,” I said. “Are you stalking me? How did you even know I was here?”
She pointed to a spot over my left shoulder. I glanced and saw, in the corner, a girl who looked familiar. Very familiar. Oh, shoot, that was right. Delia’s friend Meg Freedman was a freshman at Mason. I hadn’t realized she was an English major. Meg waved at me awkwardly. I winced in response.
“She texted me half an hour ago,” she said. “She thought I might be here, too.”
“So you came to bust me?”
“If I wanted to bust you, I would have told that guy you’re seventeen. You told him you’re a freshman?”
“Sophomore. Actually.”
“Oooh,” she said, poking a finger into my cheek. “Your mouth was writing checks that baby face can’t cash. I always hoped I’d be around to see it. You’re lucky it’s dark in here.”
“I don’t have a baby face. And it wasn’t a check I couldn’t cash; he totally bought it.”
“You can’t pass for twenty, even in the dark. Either he’s drunker than he looks or he’s a total creeper. Anyway, Meg said you were here by yourself. Do you have any idea how fucking stupid that is?”
I shrugged.
“This is basic stuff, Aphra. You never go to a party alone. And you never get drunk unless you have someone with you who has your back. Ever.”
“Afraid I’m going to end up like Great-Aunt Leanne?”
She rolled her eyes. “And everyone thinks you’re the smart one,” she said.
“Nobody thinks that,” I said, although really, everyone did. “Can we just go?”
“God, yes,” she said.
In the car, I leaned my head against the seat while Delia muttered to herself and played with the radio buttons, landing first on the piña colada song.
“Turn it off,” I said, feeling the Zora creep up my throat. “Turn it off, turn it off.”
“Sheesh,” she said, flicking the radio to some Top 40 station. I sighed and slumped against the door.
“Where’s Sebastian?” I asked, once I no longer smelled coconut inside my brain.
“Out with some friends.”
“You didn’t want to go with him?”
“Not really. I was tired, and they were going downtown.” On the radio, some guy was singing about being in love with someone’s shape, like the object of his affection was a really hot piece of trapezoid. It’s one of those songs that every station plays at least once an hour. I don’t know why they do that; even if you like the song to begin with, by the end it’s just painful. Delia flipped off the radio. “I feel personally violated by that song,” she said.
“Just imagine he’s singing to a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s,” I said. “That’s what I do.”
Delia laughed.
“Don’t make fun,” I said. “I’m sure Mrs. Butterworth is a lot of people’s dream woman.”
“She’s sweet,” she said. “She’s curvy.”
“She doesn’t talk back, and she’s recyclable in most municipal locations.”
“You want to tell me why that guy was calling you Beth?”
“There’s a segue.”
“I never really believed in those. So why was he?”
I shrugged.
“Where is Bethany, anyway?”
I said, “On a date.”
“A date?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t think Bethany went on dates.”
“This is actually the first one,” I said.
“Ah,” she said. “And everything makes sense again.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Who’s the guy?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said bitterly. I turned my phone back on, just to see if I’d missed anything important and crew-related.
“Ha,” she said. “Nice tone. I’m surprised she didn’t make you go over there and help her get dressed.”
“Shut up, Delia,” I said.
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “Are you mad because she did ask you, or because she didn’t?”
“Can we not do this right now?” I asked. My phone took that opportunity to start pinging with missed texts. There were a good dozen of them, all from Bethany, and I stuck my phone back in my purse without reading them because I didn’t want to do it sitting next to Delia.
“Lot of messages,” she said.
“I did tell you to shut up, right? That did happen?”
She scoffed. “Must be tough being Aphra Brown, patron saint of the codependent.”
“What?”
“Oh, please.”
“You might as well finish that thought now. You’re going to anyway.”
She was silent. Finally, she said, “You have a whole lot of relationships that are based on other people needing you. That’s all.”
“Really. Do I.”
She sighed. “Bethany needs you because she can’t talk or whatever. Mom and Dad need you to take care of Kit. Kit needs you to act like a grown-up because Mom and Dad keep forgetting he exists. And according to Mom, now some guy needs you to teach him to row a goddamn boat, like it’s so hard.”
“Those are called relationships, Delia. They’re what people have with each other.”
“Mmm, no. A relationship implies something two-sided. That’s not what you do. You don’t want the give-and-take. You want someone who needs you. You’re desperate for people to need you, because you can’t believe they could ever possibly want you.”
I gripped my seat belt very hard with both hands.
“Yeah,” I said, “well, I’d rather make myself useful than mutilate my face to make people like me. And by the way, do you think Sebastian’s going to keep hanging around once he finds out what you really look like?”
In the headlights of the oncoming traffic, I could see her face go tense and very, very red. “My face,” she said. “Looks like this. And fuck you.”
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You would know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Bethany has a boyfriend now. She’s gorgeous. What the hell does she need you for? Nothing. Not anymore.”
“I’m her friend.”
“Are you? Are you really?”
“You were always jealous of her.”
“There’s only one jealous person in this car. And it’s not me.”
By then, we were home. I stormed into the house with Delia on my heels; she blew past my parents and down to the basement. I stomped up the stairs.
“What was that?” my mom called from in front of the TV.
“Oh, nothing,” I shouted. “I’m great.”
“I thought you were at Bethany’s?”
“Change of plans!”
I got ready to slam my door a good one, when I remembered Kit was asleep and that was too bratty even for me; plus, Delia was in the basement and wouldn’t hear it anyway. So I just collapsed onto my bed and mashed my face into my pillow, quickly becoming aware of the sickly sweet smell of my own breath.
From downstairs, I heard my father say, “Remind me why we’ve been farming her out to therapy every week for the past ten months?”
“What else are we going to do?”
I couldn’t hear what my dad said, but my mom replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know! It’s going to take time—”
“How much time? How much time is it going to take?” There was silence. “Maybe we need to try something else.”
“And what would that be?”
But then their voices dropped, and I never did hear what it was.