The first time Laura had visited his apartment he'd come back from digging up a bottle of wine to find her strumming the remaining strings, the guitar still cradled inside its open case. Do you play? she had asked.
He had frozen, but only for a moment. He took the case, snapped it shut, and put it off to the side. Depends on the game, he had answered.
Now he reached into the sound hole and rummaged around. He considered his sidelight vocation philosophically: Grad school cost a fortune; his tech job at the vet's office barely paid his rent; and selling pot wasn't much different from buying a six-pack for a bunch of teenagers. It wasn't like he went around selling coke or heroin, which could really mess you up. But he still didn't want Laura to know this about him. He could tell you how she felt about politics or affirmative action or being touched along the base of her delicate spine, but he didn't know what she'd say if she discovered that he was dealing.
Seth found the vial he was looking for. “This is powerful shit,” he warned, passing it outside.
“What does it do?”
“It takes you away,” Seth answered. He heard the water stop running in the bathroom. “Do you want it or not?” The kid took the vial and shrank back into the night. Seth shut the door just as Laura walked out of the bathroom, her eyes red and her face swollen. Immediately, she froze. “Who were you talking to?” Although Seth would have gladly crowed to the world that he loved Laura, she had too much at stake to lose - her job, her family. He should have known that someone trying so hard to keep from being noticed would never really be able to see him.
“No one,” Seth said bitterly. “Your little secrets still safe.” He turned away so that he would not have to bear witness as she left him. He heard the door open, felt the gasp of cold air.
“You're not the one I'm ashamed of,” Laura murmured, and she walked out of
his life.
* * *
Zephyr was handing out tubes of lipstickhot pink, Goth black, scarlet, plum. She pressed one into Trixie's hand. It was gold, and Trixie turned it upside down to read the name: All That Glitters. “You know what to do, right?” Zephyr murmured. Trixie did. She'd never played Rainbow before, she'd never had to. She'd always been with Jason instead.
As soon as Trixie had arrived at Zephyr's, her friend had laid out the guidelines for Trixie's surefire success that night. First, look hot. Second, drink whenever, whatever. Third - and most important - do not break the two-and-a- half-hour rule. That much time had to pass at the party before Trixie was allowed to talk to Jason. In the meantime, Trixie had to flirt with everyone but him. According to Zephyr, Jason expected Trixie to still be pining for him. When the opposite happened - when he saw other guys checking Trixie out and telling him he'd blown it - it would shock him into realizing his mistake.
However, Jason hadn't showed up yet. Zephyr told Trixie just to carry on with points one and two of the plan, so that she'd be good and wasted by the time Jason arrived and saw her enjoying herself. To that end, Trixie had spent the night dancing with anyone who wanted to, and by herself when she couldn't find a partner. She drank until the horizon swam. She fell down across the
laps of boys she could not care less about and let them pretend she liked it.
She looked at her reflection in the plate-glass window and applied the gold lipstick. It made her look like a model in an MTV
video.
There were three games that had been making the rounds at parties recently. Daisy-chaining meant having sex like a conga line you'd do it with a guy, who'd do it with some girl, who'd do it with another guy, and so on, until you made your way back to the beginning. During Stoneface, a bunch of guys sat at a table with their pants pulled down and their expressions wiped clean of emotion, while a girl huddled underneath giving one of them a blow joband they all had to try to guess the lucky recipient. Rainbow was a combination of the two. A dozen or so girls were given different colored lipsticks before having oral sex with the guys, and the boy who sported the most colors at the end of the night was the winner.
An upperclassman that Trixie didn't know threaded his fingers through Zephyr's and tugged her forward. Trixie watched him sit on the couch, watched her wilt like a flower at his feet. She turned away, her face flaming.
It doesn't mean anything, Zephyr had said.
It only hurts if you let it.
“Hey.”
Trixie turned around to find a guy staring at her. “Um,” she said. “Hi.”
“You want to ... go sit down?”
He was blond, where Jason had been so dark. He had brown eyes, not blue ones. She found herself studying him not in terms of who he was, but who he wasn't.
She imagined what would happen if Jason walked in the door and saw her going at it with someone. She wondered if he'd recognize her right away. If the stake through his heart would hurt as much as the one Trixie felt every time she saw him with Jessica Ridgeley.
Taking a deep breath, she led this boy - what was his name? did it even matter? - toward a couch. She reached for a beer on the table
beside them and chugged the entire thing. Then she knelt between the boy's legs and kissed him. Their teeth scraped. She reached down and unbuckled his belt, looking down long enough to register that he wore boxers. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if the bass in the music could beat through the pores of her skin.
His hand tangled in her hair, drawing her down, head to a chopping block. She smelled the musk of him and heard the groan of someone across the room and he was in her mouth and she imagined the flecks of gold on her lips ringing him like fairy dust. Gagging, Trixie wrenched herself away and rocked back on her heels. She could still taste him, and she scrambled out of the pulsing living room and out the front door just in time to throw up in Mrs. Santorelli-Weinstein's hydrangea bush.
