When Maddie was done in the bathroom, she came back with wet hair and a green glass bottle of gin.
“What color is your hair now?” I asked.
“Just a little darker red,” she said. “Less Ariel, more Loud-era Rihanna.”
I bunched my curls into a ponytail and looked past her to her mirror. “What music is this? This isn’t Rihanna.”
Maddie laughed. “No, it’s not.” She toweled off her hair and tossed the towel aside. “It’s the Knife.”
I took my hair back out of the ponytail. “How long until they get here?”
She squirted gel into her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe an hour.”
“Do we have a designated driver?”
Maddie spiked her hair. “Dale doesn’t drink, and he can take my car.”
The image of Stuart walking along the road played in my head. I unbuttoned my shirt one button, so you could see the hint of upper chest. Then the thought of sitting next to Stuart, his thigh touching mine, made me paralyzed, and I buttoned back up.
“Sammie.” I looked at Maddie. “Relax.”
“That’s the worst way to relax someone.”
“Your teeth are audibly grinding.”
“I do that when I’m concentrating!” I told her, which is true. “Do you not want me to concentrate on the task at hand?”
“You know what?” She opened a drawer from her bedside table and brought out a deck of cards. “We’re going to play a game.”
I felt my muscles loosen a bit. Games meant winning. I liked winning. “What game?”
Maddie set the deck in front of me on the floor, and handed me the bottle of gin. “It’s called Loosen the Fuck Up.”
“How do you play?”
Maddie pointed. “Pull the first card.”
“It’s a queen of hearts.”
“Take a drink.”
I did. “Now what?”
“Do it again.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the game.”
“This isn’t—”
She held up her hands. “Any more talk of the game will defeat the purpose of the game.”
Maddie is the only person who I would let interrupt me. I don’t know why. Because I always liked listening to her. I rolled my eyes and swigged.
Maddie flexed her abs in the mirror. “She better.”
Stacia is Maddie’s “something.” Maddie told me she doesn’t call Stacia her girlfriend because she doesn’t believe in monogamy, but I also think it’s because Stacia isn’t totally sure she only likes girls. Stacia is tiny with red lips and huge eyes and a breathy voice. She paints the sets for all the plays and, at some point, everyone has been in love with her. Including a teacher, which got him fired.
Maddie, because she’s Maddie, has been the only one to get Stacia to want her back.
She put on a sleeveless black T-shirt over her sports bra. I stood up next to her. I was wearing my dad’s old button-down, black leggings, and Keds. I stared at my pale lips, my ballooning thighs, my butt, my waist invisible under the sack of a shirt. “I wish I had features traditionally considered attractive.”
“According to who?”
“According to…” I laughed a little. She was asking for sources.
Maddie pulled the next card from the deck on the floor. “Three of diamonds! Doesn’t matter.” She tossed it aside and took a drink. We both laughed. You had to give it to her—Loosen the Fuck Up lived up to its name.
“Then again,” I started, still thinking about what sources to give her. The tangibly measured, very nontraditional attractiveness of Maddie fought against what I was saying. So I fished around. “… to the average appearance of people who have had another person express attraction to them. Openly. I mean, you could take a poll at Hanover…”
“You can go on all day about what’s wrong with you or you can just fucking own it and enjoy yourself.”
“Easy for you to say,” I muttered.
“What was that?”
“I said, easy for you to say. You have the confidence of a bull in a china shop,” I said. Maddie furrowed her eyebrows. “But like a really, really well-coordinated bull.”
She cackled and took another swig of the bottle, handing it to me. I drew a card. “Ace of spades.”
“Cool!” Maddie said, shrugging. I threw it across the room. She continued. “Have you ever considered that I might have confidence because you mostly see me in situations that require confidence?”
This was true. Debate practice. Debate rounds. School plays. High school in general. “I see your point,” I said, and lifted the bottle to my lips. I choked down a couple of swigs, feeling the burn.
As I drank, she returned to the mirror to put on eyeliner. “Like, for me, every situation requires a ton of confidence. You know?”
“Sure.”
Maddie had shaved her head when she was fourteen. When I met her, she had just gotten suspended for punching a bro who had called her a dyke, and she had joined debate because her mom said she had to diversify her extracurriculars, she couldn’t just do theater. Within a week, she was first team. Oh! And she eventually made friends with the guy she punched and convinced him to join Queer Union as an ally. She had dated at least two girls at our school, as well as a Dartmouth girl.
After picking up the deck, Maddie drew a card, swigged, and handed the deck and bottle to me. “And you, too, are in a battle with outside forces. So be brave.”
“Nine of clubs. I don’t know, though, Maddie, I think it’s different.” I swigged, and handed both back to her.
“Well, yeah, I mean, we’re up against slightly different forces, that’s true. You’re not gay. But I’m telling you, Sam, you’re down on yourself for no reason.”
I mean, I wasn’t down on myself for just no reason. I thought about my pain medication in my purse, which I hadn’t taken because I knew I would be drinking. I thought of shaking my hands out while she turned her back, trying to get the numbness out of them.
“But…”
She stood up. “I’m done arguing with you. Dale and Stuart and Stacia are on their way, so if you want to leave, you’re gonna have to find your own way home.”
Maddie went to the stereo, took a drink, and started dancing. She lifted her knees and ground her hips into the air and shook her Mohawk from side to side. It was as if I wasn’t even there. My brain started churning. I had avoided these situations for a reason: because it was easy to screw them up. Because there was no right answer, and except for those in stupid romantic teen movies, there were no rules about how they should go, and I had no control over anything that occurred outside of my body.
In fact, I had no control over my body as it is. My body hated me.
Maddie had turned up the music as loud as it could go. My mouth tasted like pine trees.
I started to think of Freud’s theory of the Death Drive, the idea that organisms could oppose the life force intentionally—the idea that evolution could work backward—and instead of loving and living, people could want to destroy themselves. But I happen to know a different kind of way that death can work in people’s lives.
I know this is dark, Future Sam, but there’s something freeing about thinking about death. Like I didn’t think I was going to die right then in Maddie’s room, and I had no desire to die, but when you realize you’re close to death—when it’s that real—being scared of it, or being scared of even smaller things like people and parties and Stuart Shah; all of that seemed silly.
I have a bigger, more formidable opponent.
“Okay,” I said, and Maddie turned around from where she was shimmying across the room. I took the bottle from her and sipped, followed by a chug of seltzer. “I’m doing this. And guess what else?”
Maddie was punching the air. “What?”
I stood up. “We’re going to win Nationals.”
“Yeah! Yeah, we are!”
I started moving from side to side with her, my best attempt at a dance.
Then I got a wave of fondness toward Maddie, Future Sammie. A kind of fondness I had only felt before toward my siblings, toward my parents, toward people I trusted. I wasn’t going to find my own way home. And I wasn’t going to be a deadweight, either. As Maddie had said, we needed each other.
I picked up the cards off the floor and tossed them up in the air. “Do I win?”
Maddie smiled. Her brown eyes lit up underneath her electric hair. “Everybody wins.”