So you can imagine how uncomfortable I felt in this huge house, in The Oaks, of course, and really just about five blocks from Laura’s place, and you can probably believe, when I looked through the crowd—and the whole house was incredibly crowded with about a zillion kids, just swarming with them—that I felt totally out of place and uncomfortable, and when I say uncomfortable, I mean like triple-root-canal-dentist’s-office uncomfortable.
All I could say to Carol, when I wasn’t just trying to steady myself and not be knocked over by the crowd, was, “Hey, Carol, why don’t we just get out of here?”
He looked at me with a screwed-up face like I was nuts, and yelled, “C’mon, we just showed up!” He had to yell because the crowd was so loud.
I didn’t even know how to answer him. I just wanted to vanish.
“Ease up, bro!” Carol said. “This party’s epic! Stop flipping out and get into it!”
“Yeah, right,” I muttered.
All around me were hundreds of kids I had nothing in common with. First of all, they all dressed better than me, with super expensive stuff, especially this certain sort of flannel coat they all wore back then but wouldn’t be caught dead in now that sort of felt like a comforter. It wasn’t even very cold then. I mean, it was already March and things were starting to warm up, but they were wearing these coats anyways just for show, and I will say that the whole party had this sort of serious B.O. problem almost like a mist in the air, but nobody seemed to mind.
I just stood there like a pillar.
I didn’t talk.
There was no point in my even trying to talk to anybody, because just from what I overheard about sports and travel and driving their new cars, I knew in advance I didn’t have much to add to what was being said, except to, like, display myself as the most unimpressive person at the party, because I wasn’t much involved with any of that sort of stuff and never had been. Anyways, just hearing was tough, because Biff had hired this DJ and the music was crazy loud. He was stamping around, I mean Biff, either holding court over all his jock friends in a corner of the room or jumping up and yelling because somebody had knocked over a glass cabinet or something, and so he would come bolting forward to rectify the problem in this really loud, bossy, super authoritative way, as if the person who knocked it over had made the biggest error in the world. Which I thought was kind of stupid, because really when you got down to it, any damage would have been Biff’s own stupid fault for throwing the party in the first place.
To be honest, I felt like I’d landed in a nest of alien beings, and even though Carol was keeping up the patter with about a hundred people he knew because he had gone to school with them, I was just standing there, almost pretending I was like some sort of astronaut who’d landed on a planet inhabited by bizarre alien beings I had nothing in common with whatsoever.
And that’s when I saw her through the crowd.
She was looking at me.
She was talking to somebody else—a big guy in one of those coats I told you about—but her eyes were turned to me.
When I looked, she looked away.
But I kept looking, and she looked back.
Then Carol, who as you’ve probably gathered never misses anything because he’s been, like, primed by his mom to catch all the little details, said, “That girl likes you.”
I said the great and famous “No, she doesn’t.”
He talked from the corner of his mouth and looked askance at her from the corner of his eye so she couldn’t tell he was watching her. I was impressed by that.
“Uhh, yes she does,” he sort of muttered right in my ear. “And, uh—here she comes!”
He looked past me and grinned when he said that, and made this little laugh in his throat he always did when he knew he was completely right about something and had another reason to believe he was totally clever.
I just stood there.
Because he was right.
She was coming over.
She was moving through the crowd, and when she passed people, she’d look at me.
How was this possible? With my nonspeaking pillar routine I was supposed to be utterly unnoticeable.
But not to her.
She came walking up, and when she was right in front of me, I was really surprised at how short she was, because I swear she’d looked like a giant coming through the crowd.
“Hi there,” she said. “I’m Laura. I think I’ve seen you around before, maybe at the grocery store.”
Now, something weird happened.
It’s kind of hard to say just what it was.
We actually got along with each other.
I don’t mean to say that our first conversation went smoothly. It didn’t. There were plenty of gaps. But Carol always made up for that. He could toss in talk to keep things going about subjects I knew nothing about.
I told her my name, and she asked where I went to school, and I told her, even though I knew it would wreck everything, but it didn’t wreck anything—she just nodded like she’d heard a fact. And like I said earlier, she had this bottle of lotion, and she was putting it on her nose, so I asked her what it was for. “Dry skin,” she said. Her eyes were, like, studying me. I saw how deep and dark they were, like pools. My breath caught for a second. She said, “Sunburn. It peels, you know? I spent too much time in the sun in the Bahamas over spring break.”
I had nothing to say to that, but Carol did. It turned out he already knew her
