She left the house looking very sexy, very rock ’n’ roll, in preripped skinny jeans, a low- cut T-shirt showing her angel tattoo, knee- high black leather boots, chunky tribal wood earrings, and dark, gothicky lipstick, which contrasted nicely with her pale skin. She met her friends for drinks, and then a few people wanted to eat, so they went up the block to some cheap Vietnamese place and then over to Kenny’s. Marissa had a nice buzz and didn’t want to lose it, so she suggested doing shots of schnapps to celebrate.
“Celebrate what?” Hillary asked.
“Me moving to Prague,” Marissa said like it was obvious.
Sarah and Beth wouldn’t do the shots, but Marissa and Hillary did. Now
Marissa had a really good buzz going; she was even close to being drunk. An annoying retro punk band called I’m Bernadette was finishing their set, and the place was filling up for Tone Def, who had a big cult following. Marissa made her way through the crowd toward the stage, wanting to say hi to Lucas. Naturally there were a lot of Vassar people in the crowd- there was just no escaping them- and she stopped and had a short conversation with Megan, Caitlin, and Alison. Then she spotted Darren, sitting with Zach Harrison at a table off to the right. She couldn’t believe Darren was actually here, what a total asshole. She knew he only came because he’d heard she’d be here; he didn’t even like Tone Def. What was it going to take for him to get the freaking point?
She went past Darren’s table toward the stage, where Tone Def had started setting up. She wanted Darren to see her with Lucas and get jealous as hell.
“Hey, where’s Lucas?” Marissa asked Julien, Tone Def ’s drummer. “Hey, how you doin’?” Julien said. “Dunno, he’s around somewhere.”
“I think I saw him going into the bathroom,” a guy plugging in an amp said distractedly.
Marissa went to the area outside the men’s room and waited. A few guys went in and out, but there was no sign of Lucas. Meanwhile, there was a line forming outside the women’s room. Marissa didn’t want to go back to the area in front of the stage, knowing Darren would come up to her, so she remained outside the bathroom.
A girl banged on the women’s room door, saying, “Come on already.”
Another couple of minutes went by then Lucas came out of the bathroom with his arm around this drugged- out girl with long, messy red hair. His jeans were partially unzipped and her lipstick was all smeared, as if there was any doubt what had gone on in there.
Marissa would’ve walked away if she had the chance, but Lucas and the girl were walking right past her. Lucas’s eyes widened when he saw her, then he said, “Hey,” and he and the girl continued toward the stage.
Marissa suddenly felt lightheaded, like she might pass out, a combination of shock and the schnapps hitting her system. She had to actually lean against the wall for a few seconds with her eyes closed to stop the room from spinning. Then she opened her eyes and saw Darren coming toward her.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked, smiling stupidly. Did he expect her to be, what, excited?
She tried to get past him, and he grabbed her arm like he had last night.
“Hey,” he said, “where’re you going?”
“Just leave me alone,” she said, yanking her arm free.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You’re what’s wrong,” she said, but he probably couldn’t hear her because she was walking away and Tone Def ’s set had started. Her friends, standing in front of the stage, waved her over, and she had to stand there, watching Lucas play bass. It was hard not to notice how relaxed he looked post- blow- job. As soon as she got home she was so deleting all of the Tone Def tracks from her Mac and iPhone.
She was sick of looking at Lucas. She looked over to her left, but Darren was there, so she turned quickly to the right and saw this incredibly good- looking guy standing a few feet away from her watching the show. She thought she’d seen him somewhere before, and then she knew why- he looked so much like Johnny Depp. In fact, for a few seconds she thought he actually was Johnny
Depp, but then she thought, Would Johnny Depp really be watching some lame band in the West Village with a bunch of people from Vassar? She was checking him out more closely- he actually looked a lot younger than Johnny Depp- and then he looked in her direction and smiled. She thought he might be smiling at somebody next to her, but, nope, he was smiling at her. She smiled back at him and then looked quickly away toward the stage, where Lucas was doing a bass solo, making a face like he was having another orgasm. Did it really take that much energy to create such shitty music? She felt a tap on her shoulder, and the Johnny Depp guy was next to her saying something, which of course she couldn’t understand because (a) she was nervous as hell and (b) the music was so damn loud. Then he made a drinking motion with his hand, and she nodded and then walked ahead of him through the crowd toward the bar. She hoped Darren was jealous, watching them leave. She also hoped Lucas was noticing but doubted he could with the spotlights on him and the way he was busy fucking his bass.
When they got closer to the bar area, where the music was lower, the Johnny Depp guy leaned closer to her and said, “Hey, I’m Xan.”
He pronounced it “Zan,” but she didn’t think she’d heard him correctly and said, “I’m sorry?”
“Xan,” he said. “My real name’s Alexander, but people call me Xan.”
He had bright blue eyes, long sideburns, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and strings of greasy hair hung coolly over his face- very cool. His scruffiness and darkish skin somehow made his blue eyes seem bluer.
“I had a friend Scott in college and he called himself Scuh,” Marissa said. “I thought that was stupid, but Xan, that’s really cool.”
He smiled, looking into her eyes, and asked, “So what’s your name?”
“Oh,” she said, feeling like an idiot for not telling him on her own. “Marissa.”
“Marissa or Rissa?” he asked.
She laughed and said, “Rissa, I like that.”
“Then there you go,” he said. “From now on I’m gonna call you Rissa.”
From now on. She liked that. And he was looking into her eyes again- when was the last time a guy had paid so much attention to her? Especially a cool, hot guy like Xan? She loved his lips, too- she could tell they were really soft. She was dying to kiss him, not just to make Darren and Lucas jealous but because she really wanted to.
Finally she was able to clear her mind enough to think of a good question. “So are you a big Tone Def fan?”
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a good question, but at least there wasn’t dead air. “I’ve seen them a couple times,” Xan said. “What about you?”
Picturing Lucas coming out of the bathroom with the blow- job queen of the West Village, she said, “Actually, I think they suck. My friends wanted to come, so I kind of got roped into it. Are you in a band?”
“Do I look like I am?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Actually I’m a painter.”
“You’re kidding me.” She was excited. “What do you paint?”
“Different stuff. Portraits, street scenes. Stuff out of real life.”
“Wow,” she said, “that sounds amazing. I majored in art history.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, at Vassar. I also worked at the Met for a while over the summer.” She left out that she’d rented headsets and had lasted barely a month. Let him think she’d been some important curator.
“Really?” he said, still smiling. “That’s amazing.”
God, She was dying to kiss him. He was so hot- and also she’d finally met someone in New York she had something in common with.
“So who are some of your favorite artists?” she asked, realizing too late how stupid this question sounded.
“Oh, man, there are so many,” he said. “I like a lot of different types of art, you know? I really like the Impressionists, like van Gogh, um, Monet, Cйzanne, Degas, yeah, Degas’s stuff is really great… but I like other stuff, too, like, um, Edward Hopper-”
“Oh my God, I love Hopper. His work is so simple, yet so deep. I love twentieth- century urban Americana.”
“I also like Picasso, Warhol, um, Jackson Pollock-”
