I had been invited to the party by Steph, a local girl I knew from tennis. She was a few years older, with a driver’s license and a little cabriolet I coveted, and because our parents were friends she was the perfect person in the perfect vehicle to take me to what was essentially the first teenage party I ever attended. My sense of such events was largely formed by the canon of John Hughes, which, even if it hadn’t enchanted me—and it did; I was nine when Sixteen Candles came out and ten when The Breakfast Club appeared—was visited upon me by peers who could not see an academically capable but naive redhead and not invoke Molly Ringwald. (I was also haunted by some eponymous doppelgänger named Lacey Underall, from Caddyshack, but Caddyshack was rated R so my parents hadn’t let me see it.) I tried to learn from Molly Ringwald to feel stymied but not hopeless, to pout my lips and wait to be discovered for the perfection of my quirkiness and the dignity with which I bore my awkward self. In particular, other kids always asked if I could apply lipstick by securing the tube between my breasts. This was not an option that summer, but I didn’t mind the question. I’d gamely try, with a borrowed lipstick, and drop the thing down the bottom of my shirt to the ground.
At the party there were newly graduated seniors from St. Paul’s. There was beer. The former offered me the latter. I was astonished at the ease of it.
Also, oddly, I was infuriated. I felt apart from the other kids, as though they were in the coming-of-age movie and I was stuck in this real world where your father’s best friend grabs you in your own home, and then the waters close over the event and nothing is there. I did not understand what I had come up against in Jed Lane—was that desire, or drunkenness, or some sort of insanity? I had started to feel ashamed of the way I must have looked. Of my light blue nightgown. Though I knew it was crazy, I worried that the kids at this party would see me that way too—compromised, caught out barefoot on the floor. As though he’d seen something in me before I could discover and contain it. I had new experience, but I felt newly skinless. Did these things happen to anyone else? Did they happen to everyone else? How could I ask these other kids without revealing something I’d been forbidden to share?
Worse, I was now worried about someday realizing that I wanted to have sex. I was frightened that if that desire appeared in me, it would confirm Jed Lane’s ugly wager and make him right about me. Back in the springtime at school, when I had kissed Shep, my torso would begin a kind of humming that I liked to return to in memory. Was that what Jed Lane knew? Now I wanted to want nothing, ever, from a man.
I chatted away, drinking beer. Steph was a responsible soul, and I could trust her not to get too drunk to take me home.
Once I was tipsy I was seated on a card table, legs swinging, and at some point the recently graduated roommate of our host appeared in front of me. They had both started at St. Paul’s as third formers, so by the time they were eighteen they had lived together for four years, and couldn’t seem to quit each other even after graduation. The boy before me was visiting from the South and he would return there for college. We’d never had a conversation before, but observing him, I’d always found him charming and a bit goofy. The conceit was that he was unaware of his classic good looks and his pedigree. Given the list of his names, you’d never have guessed in which order they might appear, much less what to call him. (The truth was a nickname fit for a dog.) He was funny—I had known this—but I had not known that he thought I was funny, too.
I gave him a hard time about the girlfriend he’d dated at school. I still cannot picture one without the other: leggy young people in matched stride down a paneled hall, him smiling at her feathered wall of blond hair.
“That’s over now,” he said. “She’s cool with it. Long distance is no good.”
I nodded as though I had some knowledge of this.
“I always thought you were cute,” he added, and I was dumb enough, or surprised enough, to consider it a non sequitur.
“You did?”
“Oh, totally. We all did.”
I thought, Then why everything (the fart with a face)? Then why nothing? My mind was sodden with beer and hope.
“But then you were with Shep,” he said.
Almost a year when nobody even talked to me. “I wasn’t, really.”
He shrugged, and drank his beer. “You excited to go back?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on. SPS is great. SPS is terrific. You have to be excited to be a fifth former. You’re an upperformer now.” He sounded wistful.
“Are you sad to be leaving?”
He finished his beer. “Aw, yeah. You’ll see. You’re going to go back and totally love it now.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.”
I’d have liked to hear more. I would gather details about precisely which good things awaited me back at school, as though his voice could deliver them to me. But I was aware that my longing for safety was the wrong note to sound beneath the banter of our exchange. This was a party, I told myself. Be cool. Stop caring. God, I was so tired of caring. I wanted the chatter and the froth. I wanted this tall boy to keep talking. I wanted to just drift a bit, and have it be fine.
He
