I scooted around and looked up at her on the bed. “Awesome, thanks.” Gingerly I patted my hair.
“Hey,” she said carefully. “Are you coming over to Leo’s tonight?”
“Oh, yeah. I think I might stop by.” I couldn’t admit that I hadn’t been invited. People didn’t invite in those days; you just heard about it, the news was in the air. To not know was worse than not being invited; it meant that people—boys—didn’t think to talk to me.
From her dresser I picked up a pair of silver hoops. “Can I borrow these?”
“What?” She craned her neck. “Oh, yeah, sure.”
The little victory ran hot through me. Thumbing through her closet, I ticked through her wardrobe: sundresses of burnt yellow and psychedelic green; gray pants with mauve and periwinkle patches; little halter tops printed with leaves and birds, shirts too skimpy to wear to school. I pulled out a turquoise tulle skirt, long and gauzy and flecked with silver sparkles. “And this?”
She shrugged. “For tonight? If you want.”
Gladness warmed my heart. In her clothes I would be safe.
* * *
—
In the soft breeze, a layer of tulle brushed my bare knees. It felt lovely. I felt lovely, standing on Leo’s porch in Lacie’s skirt. For long moments before leaving I had studied myself in the mirror, thinking that in Lacie’s dress I was a hippie princess, a girl who belonged at a party at Leo’s.
But no one was coming. I tried rapping, ineffectively, on the screen door. Music—a bouncy bubbly twist of Phish—bled from the inside. I knocked again, harder, and rang the bell twice, two quick, frustrated shrills. They should be able to hear me, even over the music. I was beginning to feel stupid, standing there on the cement stoop.
I knocked a fourth time. Nothing. Tentatively, I pushed the front door open. From beyond the hall I could just see a shadowy kitchen, with pools of yellow light. The hair on my scalp—already pulled tight into braids—prickled.
“Hello?” I called.
Why wasn’t Lacie waiting for me? Didn’t she care?
In the kitchen there was no one—just a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, some smudged glasses, and a sopping sponge on the counter. I picked it up and smacked it, hard, against the floor. Thwack! it said, a wet, squishy sound. I descended the stairs.
Suburban basement. Dank blue-gray carpet, a ragged brown couch, a single standing lamp draped in a red T-shirt. A circle of maybe fifteen kids. Glass bubblers going around. Phish noodling from a stereo. When I entered, no one looked up.
Lacie sat leaning with one shoulder against the wall, nodding as Leo talked with rhythmic urgency. Sibley and a few other guys were crowded around her, forming their own little circle within the larger one. Grogan was lying on his back, his hands cupping the crown of his head, as if advertising his total calm.
Uneasily I sat down beside the two Steves. Steve T was saying, “First the government pays them to build the prisons, and then they have to fill them up. That’s why they bring the crack in.” I nodded emphatically, but neither Steve looked over.
Lacie was laughing. She looked radiant in her starry-blue halter top. Through the opening in the back, the lovely pale ridge of her spine, flecked here and there with dark moles, flexed as she laughed, the shoulder blades moving under her skin like wings.
“They just keep building them and building them,” Steve B said, and Steve T echoed, “It’s part of their system, part of their plan,” and I keyed into the rhythm of the way he kept saying system and plan. The music circled dizzily, wheeling around the same riff. Everyone but me was stoned. As the two Steves ranted, I zoned out on Leo’s face. He had stubble along his jaw, and spiky black hairs above his lip.
“Jesus, Rose,” whistled Steve B.
I swung around, blinking. Both Steves were staring at me. Steve T dinged me on the ankle. “Don’t you shave your legs?”
Frantically I yanked Lacie’s skirt back over my calf. “Shaving is fake,” I told them, but they ignored me.
“It’s so hairy,” Steve B said to Steve T. “She’s hairier than a boy.”
To prove it, Steve T hiked up his pants. It was undeniable: the skinny toothpick of his leg was lightly dusted with white-blond hairs. Mine was thick like an animal’s.
“You smell funny too,” Steve B added. “And your hair is weird. Do you actually think it looks good like that?”
The room drained. The air shivered like the shush of a dusty bird wing, thick with pot. The boys started talking about something else, I don’t know what; unsteadily, I rose, and pushed toward the stairs, my eyes blurry and burning. I kept waiting for someone—for Lacie—to call my name, but she was lost in conversation with Leo. She was gone.
From then on, she was the kind of girl who always had a boyfriend. Or she had been the kind of girl who always had a boyfriend, but I wasn’t sure whether she still was. In high school there had been Leo, but I hadn’t known her in her twenties. Now there was Ian, but even after eight weeks on Albemarle Road I still hadn’t seen him. There were nights Lacie didn’t come home, but though I assumed she was with him, I didn’t ask.
She had an odd way of talking about him. Right, Ian, she would say, as if he were a grocery store item she had forgotten to pick up. Or, in a tone of showy bewilderment, He says I’m not open enough, as if, emotionally speaking, she were something like Philip Johnson’s Glass House.
A vault would’ve been a better architectural metaphor for how Lacie handled her feelings, but I joined her in cluck-clucking over Ian’s emotional neediness, and mirrored her exasperation over his snuggling and texting.
Her stance of bemused indulgence toward him made it all the more perplexing when she asked, twenty minutes before the guests were due to arrive for Shabbat, whether I thought it was okay that Ian was the only guy coming. “Do you think he’ll mind?” she said, which was funny, because she had never, until then, seemed concerned with his feelings, and because—as I tartly replied—he was her boyfriend. How should I know? I hadn’t even seen him in a year.
She heard my sarcasm, registered my displeasure, and disappeared into the kitchen to stir the tom kha gai. But in truth I was flattered she had asked. Her vulnerability, so flashed, had a tantalizing shine.
* * *
—
Soon the guests began to arrive, cooing hellos and tossing jackets onto Lacie’s bed. Wine was opened and glasses procured. Some girl, even before introductions, cleared off the table; I envied the familiar way she handled Lacie’s things, the way she knew what could be dumped on the floor and what should be carefully tucked into the bookshelves.