The traditional illicit beverage of adolescent gatherings is an effective cure to self-consciousness, but one must be careful of it.
I found myself walking, zombie-trancelike, over to where the plastic cups were being filled with warm beer. Dan Bleeker, the football player filling cups, was already wasted to the point of friendliness. He handed me a cup and smiled, sloshing my shirt a little.
FACT:
I had never so much as tasted an alcoholic beverage. Not even Margo knew this. Of course, I’d also, prior to this moment, never been to a true high school party. If some English class acquaintance ever asked me why I hadn’t shown up to whatever big party, I’d try to play all this off like, Oh, another party? Booooooring! and Beer — disgusting! Over it! It somehow seemed much less dorky to have tried something and decided you weren’t into it rather than to be babyishly consequence-averse and good-girl-ish. Similarly, whenever sex came up, I tried to imply that it was old news — that I’d had sex so many times already that I was simply bored with it by now. Sex = Yawn Factory! Boredomsville! I believed in hiding my hopeless innocence behind scorn whenever possible. (This, when I stopped to think about it, was essentially my life philosophy.)
I took the beer and sipped. Ahh! my Margaret Mead–self would have said to the native partygoer, Your ritual beverage! Thank you, how marvelous! But it was disgusting — I’d been right all along. Still, in the name of field research, I could endure this. I took another sip.
I thought about my personal mission, the one I’d researched: Mission Speak to Jimmy Denton at the Party Tonight. I’d just have to find him and then … tell him I liked his blog? Discuss Tennessee Williams? Call him Boo Bear? It was a plan in progress.
In the meantime, I had no one to talk to without Margo at my side. There were a few lawn chairs scattered about, so I found a seat from which to watch everybody, a darkened spot of lawn with a good view of the bonfire. Missy Wheeler was there. She’d found another one of the junior class officers, an At School Friend of sorts. They were talking intensely about some graduation-related matter. Missy, of course, had carefully strategized by bringing a little box of apple juice that she’d then furtively poured into a plastic cup to make it look like beer. I knew because she’d explained this strategy to me once. She brandished the cup like a secret pass, proudly showing it off. Watching Missy, I took another gulp from my cup. It was warm and gross, but I didn’t mind the new tingly feeling coming over my body.
I watched Traci Oliver laugh nervously with some basketball player. Seeing her butt cleavage showing, I wondered if this was intentional. Did guys find butt cracks peeking over low-rise jeans seductive? Becky Stevenson started running around, loud and giddy by the fire. There seemed to be this weird pride in showing off how drunk you were becoming, I noted.
“I’m sooooo tipsy!” Becky yelped on cue, and then collapsed into giggles against Trevor Jones. I watched them laugh and grab each other playfully, the undercurrent of adolescent hormones obvious. I took a sip. I took another, and another. Soon my cup was empty, and I was impressed with myself. I hadn’t passed out, I hadn’t gone crazy — I just felt peaceful and relaxed now. Since it was in the name of research, I figured I might as well get another cup.
This time the beer went down faster. I was used to it, the fermented taste, the not-quite-coldness of it. I was a highly skilled observer, the Jane Goodall of the teen species. I put my glasses back on to better observe. Missy had now found a small cluster of High Achievers who were still semicool enough to go to parties. She was laughing with them, forcing it. I could tell by the way they gestured that they were thinking, This girl’s trying too hard. I felt sorry for Missy, but not as sorry as I felt for myself.
Soon I started to feel sleepily content, ready to chat with someone. I thought about walking over and inserting myself into Caroline Henderson’s conversation, maybe say hi to Kip Stevens, but I didn’t want to look desperate like Missy. Instead, I sat on my Jane Goodall chair, documenting the things I’d seen so far in my little notebook:
RESEARCH NOTES FOR CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
1. Four couples openly making out. The attractive one made it look really romantic, like in French cinema, but the other three couples, slobbery and ugly, made me want to turn into a robot so I’d never feel human emotion again.
2. Two breakups (both times, the girl was the one crying, mascara running thick and heavy down her blubbering face).
3. Two girls and one guy vomiting in the bushes where they thought no one could see.
4. One guy getting his pants pulled down by the older members of the soccer team. He looked like he was fighting tears before he punched one of them.
5. One joint.
6. Twenty-three cigarettes being smoked (at least it was good for the North Carolina economy?).
7. Five girls bursting into tears for indeterminate reasons before running into the house, flanked by their girl posses. (Most of the girls seemed to move in clusters, like pack animals.)
8. One weird old man, definitely not in high school, yet who apparently crashes high school parties. He had a long, scraggly beard, sunglasses, and little suspender-shorts like Swiss hikers wear. Compared to him, I felt very normal, noncreepy, and age-appropriate.
I thought I saw Paul on the other side of the fire. So he’d decided to come after all. I thought of the list, the word “hypercritical.” I thought he might have noticed me, even raising his hand a little as if to wave, but I looked away. And then I was startled by a familiar, deep voice behind me.
“Hey, Janice, you made it!”
I felt myself turning in slo-mo. My head was heavy, like I was underwater. In the dimness, I saw the dark eyes, the thick dark hair, the unreadable face.
“Jimmy,” I said, “Jimmy Denton.” My tongue was thicker and slower. It was like a furry rodent living in the hollow of my mouth, utterly disconnected from my own bodily control.
“Where’s Margo? Wasn’t she coming with you?”
“Sick,” I meant to say, but it came out more like “thick,” as if Margo were a really generous cut of steak.
“Thick? Oh, sick. She’s not coming?”
I shook my head. I wished I’d worn all black and brought my paperback copy of A Streetcar Named Desire. I wished I owned a pushup bra and took black-and-white photographs. I wished I were cooler. Still, I wanted Jimmy to sit down and talk to me. We would bond. He would prove to have a deep, artistic soul. He would fall in love with me. We would live in a loft in Brooklyn and have writer-friends and theatre-friends and anthropologist-friends —
Chip Hunter knocked into Jimmy in the midst of imitating some scene from an action movie for a bunch of guys by the bonfire. “Hey, sorry, man,” he said, before backing away.
“Hey, Janice, so what’s the anthropological term for ‘asshole'?” Jimmy asked.
“Hmmm. I believe the anthropological term for asshole is ‘Chip Hunter,’ “ I said.
Jimmy cackled appreciatively. I was hilarious. He thought I was hilarious! Something warm pooled inside of my lungs, filling up my entire chest. Love, I thought, this is what love feels like.
“What’s the anthropological term for ‘stupid bitch'?” Jimmy asked.
This jarred me. Maybe it was the term, maybe it was the way he said it — maybe it was the fact he hadn’t immediately indicated anyone in particular. I gazed at him, unsure of myself. Slowly he lifted his arm and gestured toward Missy Wheeler. Missy was giggling hideously in a way that I guessed she thought was alluring. She kept touching the shoulder of some guy. I could feel her desperation even from a distance.
“Oh, the term we anthropologists use is ‘Missy Wheeler,’ “ I said, but there was a hard pit in my stomach as I said it. I looked at Jimmy again, gauging whether he was pleased. He smiled.
“You’re great, Janice. Can I get you another beer?”
I nodded. My mouth was sticky-thirsty, like mayonnaise. Mayonnaise mouth. I remembered how much Jimmy hated mayonnaise, and my slow brain came up with a genius joke.
“Maybe something else,” I said. “My mouth feels like mayonnaise. Ugh! Reminds me of bodily fluid.”
He looked at me strangely. In addition to making a terrible nonjoke, my tipsy brain realized too late that it relied on information I’d read on Jimmy’s blog. I wondered if this connection was immediately obvious.
“Not that anyone would ever drink mayonnaise. Or eat it,” I said, my tongue still slow and uncooperative. Shut up, Janice, shut up, my mind hissed.
He studied me for a few seconds like he was Dian Fossey and I was one of the gorillas in the mist. I realized then that in the ideal Mission Jimmy Denton plan he would not associate my mouth with mayonnaise, but rather something he loved … like lime Popsicles, I remembered from the blog. Should I mention lime Popsicles? Was that too weird? Would that seem desperate? Was I desperate? Or was desperation the basic state of any mammal that has ever tried to attract a mate?
“Yeah, I’d love a drink,” I elaborated. My voice sounded strange and tinny — like an old tape recording of me that had been played and played and was now warped. “I may not be able to endure the tribal rituals of all these assholes and stupid bitches otherwise. Please, bring me the beverage of the natives.”
Jimmy laughed again and turned to head toward the keg. I watched him walk back toward the house. Maybe I’d scared him away, I thought. Maybe he was pretending to get a drink but really he’d just needed an excuse to escape me. Mayonnaise-mouth? God. What was I thinking?
Some other guys dumped more wood on the fire, and the blaze crackled. I smelled beer and smoke and a breeze off the lake. I coughed. Then Jimmy was back, holding two cups. He handed me one and sat down cross-legged on the grass beside me.
“So,” he said, putting a hand on my knee. “I wanna hear more of your thoughts on Melva. Wait. It’s too loud down here. Wanna come up to my room?”