This is the weekend of Frost Valley—our first co-ed class trip with the boys’ school on the Upper West Side. We’re all on three buses headed to someplace with snow and cabins. Bring warm clothes, the teacher said. Bianca wears two tight sweaters. One is camel colored, one gray. Around her neck is a spit-thin silver necklace with a bean and a longer silver necklace with two charms: a heart and a lock.
My hair won’t lie flat. There is one tight curl at the root in the back of my head that Tony must have missed. I keep feeling around for it the entire bus ride.
This is the trip where three girls in my sister’s grade were suspended for smoking pot. I smoke pot in the woods with three boys. I am trembling from the cold, and from putting my lips around the thin wet paper where their lips have been.
We walk through the woods surrounding the campgrounds. Someone says, “This is where they shot Friday the 13th.” Someone else says, “No way, they shot it at another camp, in another place.” Someone says, “Check this out.” A tree has fallen, ripped from the root. All the wires of its base are in a tangle and there is a hole in the earth where it came unattached. It looks like something you should turn away from. “‘If a tree falls in the forest,’” someone says. “How does the rest go?”
The zip-line plank is too high, so I turn around and walk back down the ladder. One boy plucks me from the last step and carefully sets me down on the snow. The other two clap for me even though I didn’t do anything.
In the bunk we run through the names of the boys who are now our friends. Tim. Jordan. Max.
Then we run through the DJ names the boys gave us. B-side, Sarah Stylze, Phiphedog.
A science teacher leads a nature walk in which he tells us the names of all the trees. The snow comes up to my shins. One of the boys rips a lone hanging leaf off a bare tree and hands it to me. We sit by a campfire cross-legged and watch the flames while our knees touch. He is wearing corduroy. I am wearing boot-cut jeans. This is what it feels like to be normal.
On the bus home, the boy promises to make us all mixtapes, which he does. There’s “Bianca’s Pop Mix,” “Sarah’s Hip-Hop mix,” and “Piper’s Folk Mix.” On it, there’s a song called “Helplessly Hoping,” a song called “I Want You,” a song called “Tears in My Eyes.”
The boys from Frost Valley don’t go to clubs. They have house parties. One of them called Bianca and gave her the address.
In a lobby on Central Park West, one of us says a last name and the doorman nods. Kids have been saying that name all night. Elevators are this way.
Sarah and Bianca are both wearing jeans with clogs. I’m wearing a black minidress with overall suspenders and a white baby tee underneath it. And clogs.
There’s a mirror in the elevator. Sarah makes her mirror face and tucks her hair behind her ear. Bianca tilts her head to see what she looks like tilting her head. Pretty. Her eyes catch mine in the mirror. I look back at my own face. “I’m Danny DeVito,” I say, because in the mirror I’m so much shorter than the two of them and it should be acknowledged. We laugh. We watch ourselves laugh. The elevator door opens and we can hear the party from the hallway.
We debate who should open the door first, and finally Sarah says, “I’ll do it. Let’s just go in already.” The door opens to a foyer, which leads to the living room. Two girls from another school are on the leather sofa. A boy is on an armchair flipping channels on a mute TV. An older-looking boy is sitting at a long dining table rolling a joint. Three others watch him. We don’t recognize anyone.
“Let’s try the kitchen,” says Sarah, and we link fingers walking in a line toward the room with the yellow light. Max is looking in the refrigerator. When he sees Bianca, he smiles and then gives us each a Rolling Rock.
“More people are coming,” he says. Then he interrupts whatever he was about to say to mouth, “One two three and to the fo’,” because the song just came on. The volume of the music suggests there’s more people here than there actually are.
Now here’s Jordan. Hugs for Jordan.
“You guys remember Connor, right?” says Max.
I don’t remember Connor, but I know this is his house. Connor’s hair is sand-colored and almost short enough to be a crew cut. He’s got a compact wrestler’s body and thin pink lips.
“Do your parents know you’re throwing this party?” I ask.
He gives a little smile and shakes his head no. I want him to open his mouth so I can watch his tongue move.
He leans down to speak into my ear. Heat, a light sprinkle in my ear canal that raises the hair on my arms. He smells like sweat and underneath it, soap. More hairs stand at attention.
When I ask him another question, I cover my mouth with my hand in case my breath is bad. I’m dry-mouthed, cotton-tongued. More beer.
“Come with me into the other room,” says Bianca. Something about whether Max is cute or not, and something about a question he asked her and what should she say. I don’t know. The diamond stud in her ear twinkles. Saliva on her front tooth twinkles. The green part of her eye twinkles.
I wander from room to room. The apartment is a maze of off-white walls and doors. This one is a closet, here’s another closet, and the bathroom. This is an office, that’s his parents’ room but don’t open that door.
In Connor’s room, a group is sitting on the floor passing around a blunt. Above them on a shelf are wrestling trophies. No posters in here. Just blue bedsheets with thin yellow lines. A window faces the stone wall of Central Park, and beyond it, the shadowy outlines of trees.
The same song that was playing in the kitchen is playing in this room, too, but from a different stereo. The bright green bars in the display go up and up. It’s like this and like that and like this and uh. Someone taps my shoulder, hands me the blunt. It makes me cough, which makes other people laugh. I can’t control the coughing. I will cough like this forever. Beer. It’s like that and like this and like that and uh.
Connor’s CD tower is taller than me, which is funny. “What’s so funny?” Jordan is standing beside me. His hair is parted in the middle and two short brown wings frame his forehead. There is a space between his front teeth where you can see his tongue.
There is a line for the bathroom. The party’s filling up with people holding red cups. Sketchy punch. Connor walks by, we toast red cups. I follow the shoulder blades in his back through his white T-shirt. Also wings.
I don’t remember where I put my clogs but it doesn’t matter. It’s like this and like that and like this and uh.
I’m in the doorway of another room with a dollhouse, a wall of ribbons, and a picture of a girl on a horse in a gold frame. I’m deciding whether to go in or not. A boy tries to sit on a miniature chair. A girl on the bed laughs. It is like looking into a big dollhouse room, I want to tell somebody.
In the corner of the room is the boy who made the mixtapes. Tall, curly brown mess of hair, forehead long like the rest of his body. “He’s the smartest in the whole class,” Jordan had said. He is standing by a bookshelf, flipping through a children’s book. Beside him is a girl with blond hair from another school. He is reading to her. Tears in my eyes.
Where is Connor? I want to find Connor. I go into the living room to find Connor, but Jordan waves me over to the couch. It’s not leather, the couch. It’s soft suede, all lived in and cushiony. “You can put your feet on me,” he says, so I do. Jordan’s lap is khaki-colored. One of my feet is in one of his hands. He squeezes it.
“I’m so high, are you high?”
He nods yes like he’s a zombie, and then we both crack up. “Where are Bianca and Sarah?”
He shrugs. I get it. We are playing a game where I ask questions and he answers them without using any words.
“What movie is playing on the TV?” He points to a DVD case of House Party on the coffee table. “Is there more beer?” He points to the kitchen.
I’ve got one he’ll have to explain. “What is that a photograph of?” I point to a framed picture on the window of a bride and groom kissing. He squeezes my foot; his smile straightens a little as he looks at me. My heart thumps.
“Turn off the music,” someone says. “Turn off the music.” It’s Max. He’s standing at the front door. His blue polo shirt is splotched with red paint. His hair is a mess, like he’s been rolling around on a bed with someone. He looks cute, I think.
“The cops are coming,” he yells.
I sit up. Bianca and Sarah are huddled by one window. Other people are crowding around the window next to it. “What are we looking for? Cops?”
“Connor,” someone says. “Connor got stabbed!” Max is saying Connor got stabbed. “Stabbed?”
Red lights are flashing in the window. Red lights on Jordan’s face, in the hollow space between his two front teeth. Red lights on Max, his two pinprick pupils. He needs to tell Jordan what happened. Jordan will know what to do next. “What happened?”
Max and Connor had gone for a beer run. Right in front of the building, a group of kids were fighting, and when Connor tried to break it up, he ended up with a knife in his side. That is one version that surfaces in the chaos of the party. Another faction claims it was a planned mugging turned violent. “These guys were waiting for people to leave the party so they could jump them,” someone said.
“Are there more?”
“Is it safe to leave?”
“Can I call my dad?”
My father pulls up to the building in his winter hat—a cowboy-style Stetson, which usually embarrasses in the company of friends. Tonight, though, all I notice is how handsome he looks under the curve of its brim, like a real cowboy. His car smells of genuine leather. Heat pours through the vents. The radio speaks softly of other events in other places.
We wind through the park, and for a moment it feels like we’re deep in the woods.
Then the world lights up again on Fifth Avenue. The awnings glow, and light rain makes the avenue look like it’s writhing in crystals. Next is Madison with its gilded storefronts and then Park. First we drive south to Sarah’s and then north to Bianca’s. Finally we circle back, around the green mall that runs down the avenue, to our own building. Home.
Mom is upstairs in her nightgown and slippers, two pairs of reading glasses on her head. We eat Mallomars and drink Sleepytime tea in the kitchen, speaking softly of what happened.
“He was just outside the building. These kids he didn’t know were fighting and he tried to break it up. Someone stabbed him. I didn’t see any of it. The ambulance had taken him by the time Dad pulled up in the car.”
She nods along, asking questions, but not too many, enough to keep me talking until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer.
In bed, I hear her feet pattering on wood, roaming the hallway, closing doors, snapping locks. She opens my door, and I pretend to be asleep. She stands there for so long, I actually do fall asleep. In the morning, the door is still as open as she left it.
By Monday, Connor is recuperating in the hospital. At school, I sign a card that says Feel Better! The prognosis comes down the pipeline: He’s lucky.
“I keep telling you the Upper West Side is dangerous,” says my mom in the kitchen, stirring a pot of carrots. “You know why, it’s because they come from the park. Remember the Central Park Jogger.”
“They come from the park? Who are they, Mom?”
She looks at me as if I’m the one who’s ignorant.
Later that night after dinner, when we’re loading the dishwasher, we pick up the conversation again.
“I’m just saying, you have to be careful in that part of town,” she reiterates.
“How is the Upper West Side any different from the Upper East Side?” I ask, because aside from opposite entrances to the park, they are exactly the same.
“It just is,” she says, exhausted, and walks out of the room.
What she means is that we are safer than other people. This is something she needs to believe.