he’s doing, which I think has something to do with computers. On my way back from legitimately going to the bathroom, I break down and stop in a fourth time. I really quickly open the browser and really quickly go to Namespot and log in. This time, an annoying banner ad starts playing this scream-o music. It is loud and dumb and definitely not the sound of me peeing or flushing or getting more Mountain Dew. Eric comes in to see what the deal is.
“Are you on Namespot?”
“What? Yeah. Uhm…”
“Is that you on Namespot?”
“Yeah. Uhm. It’s. Uhm. There’s like, things you can only see… if you have a profile. Things on… other people’s profiles. I thought it would give us, uh. More shit to make fun of.”
“Alright. Don’t get raped. There are an incredible amount of rapists on there.”
“I don’t think it works like that, dude. Some guy is not going to jump out of the USB port and just start raping me.”
“That gives me an idea for a character,” Eric says, and goes back to my room.
I hit REFRESH. A little envelope icon appears below my half-assed self-portrait. I have a message. The subject is “party.” It’s from “christine’s cliche screen name.” There is an accent on the
Drama party. I haven’t been to many parties in high school so I don’t know what to expect but I don’t expect this. I guess I expect like a high-school-movie party, with lots of kids who look like they’re thirty passing around red cups and a big kitchen island stacked with liquor and an Asian kid in a puffy neon jacket wearing inexplicable goggles on his forehead who pretends to be black the entire time. But there aren’t any of those things.
What there is is a DJ, or really, a kid with two laptops and some speakers on a table. There are Claire and those girls I met earlier and Ryan, the guy I met earlier, and they’re all in the living room where some couches have been pushed aside, along with lots of other kids, some kids who I recognize from IHOP, and some who, if they go to our school, have been holed up in the drama department the entire time, and they’re all dancing. Like, really dancing. Guys with girls and girls with girls and occasionally guys with guys. That doesn’t freak me out so much as the sight of people my own age dancing. Not at a school dance, either, which I also have zero experience with. A girl I don’t know lets me in and I stand there gaping for a few minutes as a song I don’t really know but am sure I hate plays. And a roomful of mostly girls and a few guys dance just to dance. I guess they look like idiots.
There is this one kid I notice, way nerdier than me or Eric, and he is dancing his ass off. I mean, not that I look nerdy, I think more than anything I try not to look like anything, to be not there to be noticed, but this kid looks like how I feel like I come off: fat and with a gross teenage beard and an anime T-shirt. Not that I am fat or have a gross beard or an anime T-shirt either. But this kid is just breaking it the fuck down. I am simultaneously grossed out and embarrassed for him and in complete awe. This is nothing I can process. I make for the kitchen.
Like I said, there’s no kitchen island full of booze. Doesn’t seem to be any alcohol anywhere. There’s some snacks laid out, some pizza and sodas. I don’t see Christine anywhere, and the only other people I know are dancing in the living room to what is now a song about butts. And even if the people I sort of know noticed me they’d only know me as the kid from lunch on Thursday with the controversial friend and we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. I eat pizza, trying not to get any on my brother’s button-down shirt. I am the only person in the house not writhing and sweating to the song about butts, besides the DJ who’s playing the song about butts. Suddenly I want this to be a normal Friday night and I want to be in Eric’s bedroom or my bedroom, the two of us swearing and drawing zombies or just fucking around with no one to impress. I regret telling him I couldn’t come over because my dad was taking us to Outback. I would forgive him for not letting us explore more of his secret just to thank him for not being a weird drama person whose friend I want to make out with.
The back door slides open. One of the shorter, fatter girls I met at lunch the other day comes in, followed by Christine. Before I left the house tonight I realized people probably think about what they wear to a party before they leave the house, so I decided not to wear my usual black T-shirt and went up to my brother’s room and took one of his button-down shirts. I am a monkey with a Namespot profile and a button-down shirt, I thought on the bus on the way here.
Christine definitely looks like she thought about what to wear before she left the house.
“He’s an asshole,” Christine says to the girl. “Bottom line.”
The girl nods. “Thanks,” she says, and Christine and the girl hug. I grab for a napkin to make sure my face is clean. The girl heads for the living room. Even having just gotten done crying she is more ready to dance than I am.
“Hey!” Christine says. “You made it!”
“Hey,” I say, “yeah.”
“Thanks for coming,” she says. “These parties are getting really same-y, I thought I’d spice things up.”
“Same-y?”
“Yeah, like, the same thing every time. They can be pretty fun, I guess. They’re not like stupid football parties, with, like, jocks and beer and misogyny.”
I don’t know how she thought I would spice things up. I don’t know where she got that from. It seems like to spice things up you bring a hardcore band to a party full of museum donors, or a hooker to a Vatican function. Bringing a quiet nerd to a party full of loud theater dorks does not seem like spicing things up. But I don’t complain. Or say anything. I should say something.
“How are you?”
“Great! Really great. Sorry if you had to wait around in here. Must’ve been awkward. I had to help Becca… she just broke up with Mike. The DJ. He played Nathan Detroit in
“Yeah, I could see how that could happen.” I don’t see how that could happen. I don’t know who Nathan Detroit is. In the other room, the song about butts reaches its conclusion and cross-fades into a song that was popular when all of us were in middle school. The cross-fade is courtesy of Mike who got a big head when he played Nathan Detroit, which you will agree is inevitable if you know anything about who Nathan Detroit is.
“So, Darren! What’s your story?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what’s your deal? What do you DO?”
I go to school, I want to say. What do any of us do? But I don’t think that’s the answer she’s looking for. And the actual answer, that I am developing what is now a TV series culminating in a movie trilogy interspersed with books and graphic novels with any remaining holes in the epic filled in by a massively multiplayer online game, and my partner in this is my best friend who can’t sleep and never has to—that answer I’m not ready to give yet.
“I, uhm. I read? And draw.” I don’t want “I draw” to read as “I doodle” so I think maybe I should say “I’m an artist” but I don’t want to say “I’m an artist.” I do think of myself as an artist, and I also think of myself as a science-fiction visionary and I also think I’d make a great boyfriend but I don’t want to say any of those things out loud to anybody. “I draw, and—”
“RIGHT!” she says. “I have a confession to make. I like, looked at your profile for a while after I sent you the message about the party. And that profile picture… did you draw that?”
“Uhm. Yeah.”
“Oh my God. It’s. Amazing.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Are you kidding? It’s so good and accurate and I don’t know…. You’re a brilliant artist. If the rest of your stuff is even half that good, I’m jealous, because that means you’re a brilliant artist.”
“Geez. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me! And you like Leonard Cohen? I thought nobody liked Leonard Cohen except for me and my mom.”
Leonard Cohen is one of the artists I put on there to seem eclectic. I know about him because of my brother and my brother doesn’t even really like him, but his ex-girlfriend who was a couple years older than him and broke up with him when she went away to college burned him a Leonard Cohen CD before she graduated. The only time I ever heard Leonard Cohen or saw my brother listen to Leonard Cohen was after she’d left when we were driving to
