“She didn’t,” I say, assuming she means “wonderful” sarcastically. “I mean, she told me I shouldn’t audition for Mr…. Hendershaw’s? Piece.”
“Oh. Do you want to?”
“I’m not sure I even know what it is. And also… not really.”
“Well, it’s going to be amazing. But you’re already amazing at your own thing. You probably don’t feel the need to excel in multiple things.”
“I guess I never thought about it.”
“Anyway, sorry for leaving you. I’m a terrible host. Come sit down! Unless you really do have to leave.”
I don’t have to do anything unless it’s not watch kids my own age play-fight to swing music. I have to not watch that. I go sit down next to Christine on the pool chair, wondering if everybody who sits there gets their back rubbed.
“I’m a terrible host,” Christine says. “Well, I guess I’m not really the HOST. I’m a guest. But, I’m like, the host in charge of making sure you have a good time, since I dragged you out.”
“You’re the host of our mini-party,” I say.
“Right. Exactly. I promise we won’t play any trance music at the mini-party.”
“Oh, man! But if you don’t play trance music, nothing at the party will suck!”
Christine laughs. She throws her head back and there is so much of her neck, all white in the moonlight. The moonlight is also glinting off the pool, which is probably freezing.
“Do you guys always eat where I saw you the other day?”
“Yeah,” I say.
It is the last question I have to answer because it turns out if I keep asking her questions I don’t have to talk. She doesn’t mind talking and I don’t mind listening, and it feels like we’re out there a long time and not that much time at all at the same time, and we occasionally break from one of her answers to identify a song playing inside by its bass line pumping through the stucco of the house, and then rag on that song. She unapologetically mentions books. It turns out she has two classes with Tony DiAvalo and thinks he’s a thoroughgoing d-bag. Her words, “thoroughgoing d-bag,” not mine, but I agree. I realize with no small amount of shock that this is a conversation with a non-Eric person that I in no way want to get out of, that I am just enjoying rather than trying to minimize its awkwardness and length. I am interested on a level I imagine Eric is interested on in the things he gets interested in and learns everything about, learning and remembering with zero effort because I actually give a damn.
Pretty soon she has laid her head in my lap. This comes as a surprise to me. I start to get that standing-in- front-of-your-locker-telling-you-I-like-you thing, complete with unmanly trembling I pray she can’t detect. She says something about when it was cool to tie flannel shirts around your waist and I lean down and kiss her.
I don’t think I ever actively imagined what my first kiss would be like. But here’s why I’m at least as big a nerd as the bad-teenage-beard anime guy: I’m pretty sure that whenever I thought about it in passing, it looked like a video game cutscene. In my head it was never at a real time in a real place. What I’m trying to say is I think I always figured it would happen on the deck of a flaming airship after I vanquished a multilimbed squid-god. This is not that. But this is great. It’s real, and my neck really hurts.
“Is your neck awkward like that?” Christine says.
It is, so we reposition. Pretty soon we’re making out and we don’t stop to guess the songs based on their bass lines and after a while Becca comes out with some other crisis and Christine has to go inside and I say goodnight and take the bus home before I can screw anything up, Christine’s phone number saved in the cell phone my dad pays the bills on.
I get off the bus and walk back to my house, jackrabbits scattering across people’s lawns. My brother is sitting in front of my house underneath the porch light in a lawn chair. He is wearing oversized sunglasses and no shirt, drinking beer from a can with an open case at his feet.
“Hey,” I say on my way into the house.
“Beach party,” he says, “Alan and them left, though,” as though I’d asked him “What’d you do tonight?” He says: “What’d you do tonight?”
“Nothing.”
“You go over to that kid’s house?” He means Eric.
“No. Party.”
“You went to a party? Oi, ja hear that?” he says in his obnoxious Cockney thing, addressing no one in particular. “Ee went to a fook-in’ partee!”
“Yup.”
“You want a beer?”
“Uhm… sure.” I made out with a girl. I am drinking a beer with my brother on the front porch of my house. The old world I knew is dead.
He takes one out of the box and hands it to me. I open it and sit on the concrete. It’s cold. I keep forgetting to be happy about what happened earlier, but then I remember.
“Is Dad coming back tonight?”
“I dunno. He left money. You can order something if you’re hungry.”
“I ate at the thing.”
“Whose thing was it? I didn’t hear about anything.”
“Some drama kid party.”
“Oh, a fag party.”
“Fuck you. I made out with a girl.”
“Ferreals?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice! JA FUCK HER?” my brother says, and launches forward in his seat. His beer foams over and it’s awkward and I think he senses it’s not a good idea to be so completely himself in all situations. “Seriously, though. Nice. I’m through here. Top me off.”
We drink the rest of the beers. There are eight left. It’s the third time I’ve ever been drunk; the first time was a couple years ago when my brother had a Pimps and Hos party when my dad was gone and the second time was at my mom’s wedding.
“I don’t see that kid here much anymore. That kid.”
“Eric?”
“Whatever. Big fuckin’ eyes. Nerd. Yeah.”
“Yeah, mostly I go over to his house.”
“Good. You guys fuck with… Alan again, like that time? He’ll kill you. I don’t care as much.”
“Okay.”
“That’s a weird fuckin’ kid. He wanted roofies? Fuck is his deal?”
“He’s like, I dunno, an honors student and stuff.”
“That does not even begin to explain the roofies.”
“You had them.”
“You WANTED ’em.”
“It was for an experiment.”
“Fucked kind of experiment.”
“No girls involved.”
“Story of your life.”
“I kissed a girl tonight!”
“Good. Me and yer pa were startin’ ta worry.”
Crickets chirp. I kill my beer and open another one.
“What fuckin’ experiment?”
“Okay, get this: Eric can’t sleep.”
“Insomnia? Like
“No, like, he can’t sleep AT ALL.” I think about trying to explain it further. Then it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t have said anything.
“The fuck?”
“Or… that’s what he tells me. I don’t know. It’s weird.”
