Tonight we are going to an Upper East Side club. I’m wearing a pair of silk bloomers with lace trimming that Sarah brought home from Hilton Head. Weeks ago, when she laid out the delicate blouses, lingerie, and floor-length dresses on her bed, she let Bianca and me each pick out one item. I imagined the rest she would resell with a Manhattan markup—to whom, I didn’t ask.
Ever since middle school, Sarah detected a profit in fads. Back then it was oily stickers. Now it’s designer clothing. Same difference.
She has a hustle I admire, the kind that comes with an innate confidence, a faith in her own moral code, a belief that one can be scrappily resilient and a good person at the same time. And in Sarah’s case, this is true.
It was particularly true when she laid out those satin black shorts, which were technically lingerie. I snatched them up before Bianca could get her hands on them. When I tried them on over a pair of sheer black tights and we all gathered around the full-length mirror in Sarah’s bathroom, we marveled at my legs as if they weren’t my own. They were narrow, delicate at the calf with tiny muscles blooming around the thigh.
We took photographs with my disposable camera, glamour shots, sucking in our cheeks, parting our mouths, doing our best impression of a dead-eyed Kate Moss in those Calvin Klein ads. I stood while Sarah and Bianca crouched so I wouldn’t look so small. I bent a black nylon knee as if captured in a sultry walk to my boudoir.
That was the test shoot. Tonight I am wearing those shorts for real. Sarah and Bianca have agreed to meet at my house to get dressed. Because my parents are out for the night, there will be no approval of our outfits before we leave the apartment. I have paired my shorts with my favorite top—Bianca’s gray ribbed sweater with a deep V-neck. Underneath is a black push-up bra. On my feet are platform foam sandals that lift me up off the floor by three feet—the influence of rave culture has helped correct one, but not all, of my physical imperfections.
My hair has been blow-dried by a man named Tony. My mother sends me to him every Thursday night to straighten my curls for the week. She demands the bottom be curled under, rather than blown straight, though the moment I step out of the salon, the under curl flips out, Annette Funicello style.
I don’t fight her on it. My hair has belonged to my mother since I chopped it off at age five for a game of make-believe in which I played a boy. That night, after my mother calmed down, I sat on the toilet as she folded what was left of my hair into hot curlers, and made it clear, with each pin she fastened into place, that she was the boss of my hair, and would be for as long as I lived in her house.
Tony, who I must request when booking an appointment at European Hair Design, is Serbian. This is all I know of him, apart from what I’ve observed. He handles his blow-dryer like a power tool. I watch him in the mirror, his forehead scrunched, as he tugs my knotty bird’s nest into smooth strands with a round brush, hot air, and muscle. At times he looks like he’s untangling himself from the grip of an octopus.
In the mirror, I watch him and wonder if he pulls as hard on my mother’s hair when she comes in for her own weekly appointment. I wonder if he kisses women, and if, when he does, he kisses them with the same forceful, intense expression, never looking into their eyes but down at their lips, poised to unravel the next tangled thing.
I am sorry, I want to tell him when he switches the blow-dryer to cool air and waves it at his face like it’s a gun.
I’m sorrier still when he is done and I look up at my own reflection, disappointed that my hair will never be, no matter how many men pull on it, the texture of really straight hair. “Can you get it any straighter?” I’ll sometimes ask, because if I go home with tight little knots of frizz at my temples, my mother will send me back. “This is just, you know, your hair,” he will say, inspecting the roots. And then, seeing my eyes welling up, he’ll say, “I’ll try, I’ll try,” because he is a patient man and I am a child monster.
When he is done, I hand him the sweaty piece of green paper my mother has given me. The entire time in the chair, I keep the bill crumpled in my fist, nervously anticipating the moment my hand touches his. The slick act of sliding a tip to someone else is so out of my league, small, breast-budded me presenting a secret gift to a full-bodied man, something he needs that I have. I am sorry for it all.
When Sarah and Bianca arrive at my house, they immediately empty their knapsacks filled with going-out clothes onto my bed. The dog jumps back onto the floor and curls up outside the room with her back to us. We are too much for her.
I pull a dress from my closet for Bianca to wear—a thigh-length black apron that wraps around your backside for slightly more coverage than a standard waitress’s apron. She wears a white tank underneath it—a wife-beater, it’s called, which means ribbed tank top.
Sarah pulls on an outfit I assume she borrowed from her mother’s closet: a strapless black jumpsuit that flares at the legs and shows off her tanned, bony shoulders.
“Are my arms disgustingly skinny?” Bianca asks, straightening them out and walking her hands, palms down, across my vanity. “Look, they’re like Ethiopian legs.”
I laugh because that is part of the pact between best friends. You’re allowed to make offensive comments, as long as you’re putting yourself down in the process.
“My hair is right out of a 1950s senior class photo,” I lob back at her, though I’m not sure if the reference lands.
“My nose is like André the Giant,” she returns. I don’t talk about my nose.
“Shut up, everyone,” Sarah says. “You’re both lucky. We’re all lucky.”
Sarah struggles with her hair in my mirror, forcing two strands behind her ears, moving a shorter piece over her forehead, and then brushing it all out with her fingers. I imagine she hates something about herself, too, but can’t say it out loud now.
“Come here,” I say and they follow me into the library—the dog, too—to the closet where my parents keep their liquor. The room is lamplit with dark wood shelves that rise to the ceiling. There is a green Turkish rug that covers most of the floor. The dog resumes her nap on it. My father’s mahogany desk is stacked with envelopes. The stereo system behind a cabinet door is full of buttons and green waves of light. We need going-out music, so I put on Z100. Snow rattles off “Informer,” and we approximate the lyrics we don’t understand. A-lay-key-boom-boom-now.
We sit on the floor facing a lit closet full of wine bottles. There are handles of vodka and gin, a blue bottle of Bombay Sapphire, a bottle of my father’s Crown Royal preserved in its velvet bag. Forget those. We go for a dusty brown jug of peach schnapps. I first discovered it years ago, when my mother rubbed a schnapps-soaked Q-tip on a sore on my tongue. The taste—syrupy, pungent, buzzy—was everything ice cream had been missing.
This is my bottle, the one my parents have forgotten about, and we swig from it before returning to my room to stash a mess of clothes in my closet. We take one last look in the mirror, first at ourselves, then at one another.
We wear our coats open down Park Avenue, miniature backpacks strapped to our shoulders and stuffed with allowance, Marlboro Lights, coffee-bean Revlon lipstick, and concealer. My backpack is black suede with a high zipper count. Bianca’s is an Agnès b. Lolita and I want it. It’s nothing much—a small black fabric satchel with two black ties to put your arms through—but written across the back in white script is the name Lolita. All the pretty girls have one. When I ask to try it on, just to see how it feels, it’s like strapping on an internal organ I’ve been missing.
We’re in the taxi headed toward the club, which is actually a rented event space, formerly known as a den of debauchery for another generation. Surf Club, Tropicana, Country Club, one of them. Who has the flyer? Sarah has the flyer. She says “sir” when she gives the driver the address, and then asks him to turn on the radio. We roll down the windows. “Can we smoke in here?” But we’re already lighting up. Sarah is reading off names on the flyer. When the Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By” comes on, we have to scream the lyrics without taking a breath until the chorus.
As we stream down Park Avenue, the taxi windows wide open, the breeze blow-dries our foundation and scatters wild sparks of hope, setting off an electric charge that runs between the three of us. This is my favorite part, when we are so close to the destination, but not there yet, when there are still a few minutes left to believe that this night will be the one that changes everything.
Sarah knows the thing to do is walk past the line standing behind the red rope and head straight for the promoter.
“It’s just three of us,” Sarah says, negotiating our entrance. We air-kiss the boy who tells the bouncer to let us in and walk up a narrow set of stairs. There is always a narrow passageway and there is always a cool older-looking girl sitting at the top of the stairs with a box of money and a stamp. We each hand over our ten-dollar bill, half the amount our parents gave us for the night. It is just enough to get us in, split a cab both ways to one of our houses, and walk home from there.
Inside, the club is lit with neon streaks underneath banquettes, roped around the dance floor. The room is nearly empty. It’s early still.
In other clubs around the city—Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA—men wear angel’s wings and shimmer with glittered lips under strobe lights. Marky Mark and Deee-Lite huddle in VIP booths, while Julia Roberts tousles her red curls on the dance floor. I’ve seen them all pressed into newsprint and the back pages of Paper magazine.
But those clubs are different from our clubs. Here, only girls wear glitter, and only just a light dusting on their eyelids. The famous faces are familiar from tennis lessons and walking up and down Park Avenue. The boys wear baggy khakis that dig below their Calvin Klein elastic underpants bands. They sidle into booths, shoving backpacks stuffed with graffiti canisters underneath their legs.
They say, “Come sit on my dick.” What they mean is “Want to sit on my lap?” Their laps are hammocks spread over mysterious pocket bulges—the hard edges of beepers and resin-scraped bowls. A secret language of pokes shared between two bodies, but only for a few seconds, before a hand is pressed to your back, pushing you off, bored in the aftermath of a dare accepted, disgusted by the intimacy of what it entailed.
Sarah plucks drink tickets from her purse courtesy of one of the promoters and heads to the bar for three sex on the beach cocktails.
Bianca and I eyeball the entrance, sizing up the miniskirts, the sheer black legs underneath them. When she turns back to me with pertinent information, she makes a wall with her hand, so that my ear and her lips are in a private room. She went to Nightingale, but now she goes to Riverdale. He’s dating so-and-so, but he used to hook up with so-and-so.
The flutter of air tickles my ear canal.
“Is my breath bad?” she asks, pulling away, crinkling her face.
“No.” It is sweet, like a cherry Life Saver. “Is mine?” I exhaust in her face.
She shakes her head, but I’m not sure I believe her. She’ll never shame someone else unless she herself is shamed first. The bond between two girls surrounded by boys is so fragile, always threatened by embarrassment, especially if that embarrassment isn’t shared.
“There’s—” whispers Bianca.
“I know,” I say.
We are both looking at the girl standing near the entrance. She wears a thigh-high flapper number that fits tightly around her hips and chest but dangles loose, shimmying fringes in all directions. She glistens in the dark club, like her thick black hair glistens when she gathers it to one side.
She opens her arms to a girl with a slicked-back ponytail. They hug like it’s a camp reunion, rocking back and forth, touching each other’s hair, until another girl comes along to receive a hug.
As the room fills, the music gets faster—a mix of hip-hop and seventies disco. “I Will Survive” comes on, and we join the rest of the girls in the club on the dance floor in a collective moment of solidarity, our feminist credo against the boys who otherwise dominate the room, apelike and intimidating. We are mouthing the lyrics to each other, not so much dancing as facing our respective female friends, holding each other’s hands, talking through the song.
Our hands are broken apart. A boy has entered our three-person dance circle. His name is Matt. I know that he was kicked out of a good prep school and enrolled in a bad one. I know he has carrot-colored hair under his baseball cap, and that he is facing me, but he is so tall, I can only see Hilfiger emblazoned across his chest. He grabs ahold of my backpack straps and pulls me toward him, spreading his legs wide apart so he sinks down to my face. His lips are on my lips, and his tongue is jabbing around inside my mouth.
I’m thinking of those wriggling, bloated creatures that graze the ocean floor—the ones with prehistoric names. A glow-in-the-dark slithering living muscle with a wide unblinking eye, always searching in the darkness for a smaller creature who will fit inside of him.
When the boy lets go, he slaps his friend’s hand and laughs—they both laugh. They are two tall, laughing boys. I need Sarah or Bianca. I need them to cover me up, but I can’t see where they went. I push past the bodies and bodies. Gloria Gaynor’s lyrics give way to the part of the song that disco-ball swirls in circles, like my head is swirling. I elbow my way into the bathroom and into a stall, where I sit on the toilet with my head between my knees, because it happened. I had my first kiss. And he was popular.
I am full-body trembling. Micro-shivers radiating from a core, pumping an organ in the thick of my chest, deep below the two small mounds that pressed against the boy’s hands. I’m afraid of the boy. I’m afraid he’ll want more. I’m afraid of how tall and forceful he was, and how he laughed like he knew it was my first time. I’m afraid of what he might do to me next. I’m afraid he’ll leave without getting my number. I’m afraid he’s already left.
It’s nearing curfew. I’ve got to find Sarah and Bianca, to tell them what happened, and with whom. They’ll recognize his name, of course they will. They’ll want to know if he got my number. I shouldn’t have run away. But he was laughing. It wasn’t that he liked me. He kissed me as a joke. A dare. I dare you to kiss the shortest girl in the room. That was it. She gives blow jobs standing up. I won’t talk about it with the girls unless they bring it up. And if they do, I’ll laugh, too.
I scan the room for them, but stop when I see the older girl in the fringed dress again. She is still receiving adoration, this time from a boy who looks like a man. He wears a suit. A goatee frames his mouth. She is holding his hand as his lips tell her ear a story. She breaks away to laugh, flipping her head down so her hair swings like the fringes on her dress. When she pulls her head back up, I picture a thin line of blood running from her nostril into her mouth.
She is the one I hit with my tennis racket. It was an accident.