This Time Tomorrow(39)
“Alice Stern, there are only girls at this party,” Helen said, coming up to Alice and kissing her on the cheek. Her breath smelled like vodka. Maybe that’s why everyone had thrown up—her friends had already been drunk when they arrived. The doorbell rang, and Alice excused herself to answer it.
The boys arrived in a solid mass. A forest of boys, a school of boys. Their bodies took up nearly the whole space in between the two sides of Pomander Walk. The boy in front, Matt B., put a hand to the side of his mouth and said, “We roll mad DEEP,” which was probably supposed to sound tough but instead sounded like he was an effective camp counselor who had ferried his flock from one side of the street to the other. Alice stepped aside and they filed in. There were some she didn’t recognize—boys always seemed to have cousins, or friends from other schools, which was fine, but boys from other schools existed somewhere outside real life, extras in the movie. Every boy kissed Alice on the cheek on his way through the door, even the ones she didn’t know, like it was the price of admission. Tommy was in the middle of the pack, which meant that she had to accept his kiss and then stand there while strangers kissed her and walked into her house. She shut the door behind the last one—Kenji Morris, the tall sophomore who was handsome and quiet enough to hang with the older boys, with one sad eye peering out from behind a curtain of dark hair—and locked it. Alice had known most of the boys since she was in the fifth grade, but even so, only single facts about them came to mind: Matt B. supposedly had a crooked penis, James had barfed on the school bus on the way to a field trip in the seventh grade, Kenji’s father had died, David had made Alice a mixtape with so many songs from musicals that Alice understood that he was gay.
Someone had put on music—her CD booklet was open on the kitchen counter, next to the boom box. It didn’t matter that when she was alone, Alice listened to all different kinds of music: Green Day, Liz Phair, Oasis, Mary J. Blige, even Sheryl Crow if she came on the radio and no one was around to make fun. At parties, it was all Biggie and Method Man and the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest. It wasn’t that all the white boys in private school were pretending to be Black, it was that they thought that being from New York City meant they had a claim to Black culture that other white boys didn’t have, even if they lived in a classic six overlooking Central Park. They were playing the Method Man/Mary J. Blige version of “You’re All I Need to Get By” and every single girl was singing along while the boys were just bobbing their heads and pretending not to notice anyone or anything. Phoebe pushed through the crowd and grabbed Sam and Alice by their wrists and pulled them both into the bathroom.
“Voilà!” she said, pulling three pills out of her pocket.
“What is that?” Alice said, though she knew the answer.
Sam looked nervous. “Phoebe said that her brother said that it’s like ecstasy, but it’s not made of chemicals, so it’s like, natural?”
It wasn’t natural. It was pure chemicals. It was a real drug, bought from a real drug dealer, and now it was in her bathroom, in the palm of her friend’s hand.
“We don’t have to do it,” Sam said. “I don’t think we should do it.” She’d said this the first time, too. Sam was smarter than Alice—she always had been.
Alice thought about what she actually remembered from the night, which parts had calcified over time into fact: how big it had felt when Tommy turned his face away from hers and toward Lizzie’s, how she had watched them vanish into her bedroom, Alice’s hope for true love going up in flames, and on her birthday, no less. After that, Alice had been engulfed by rage, like a mobster’s wife in an eighties movie. If she’d had clothing to dump out the window and set on fire, she would have. If Tommy didn’t want her, someone else might. Alice had wanted to kiss someone, anyone, and so she’d gone up to one boy after another and kissed them, each mouth less appealing than the one before it, just wet and jabby and gross. It didn’t matter, Alice kept going. She was going to die a virgin and Tommy had never belonged to her. Outside the bathroom, Kenji, the only sober person at the party, had said to her, “You don’t have to do that, you know,” and that was when Sam started to throw up and needed her help. Eventually everyone else left and it was just them and Helen and Jessica, all four of them asleep in Alice’s room until noon the next day, by which time everyone who was not at the party had heard about Alice’s orgy and Tommy and Lizzie’s romance and from then on, it was Alice’s thing, kissing and kissing and kissing and staying just shy of being called a slut because she didn’t actually have sex with anyone, but she definitely wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, either.
She hadn’t understood it at the time—the difference between her and Sam, the difference between her and Lizzie, the difference between wanting someone to fall in love with her and wanting anyone to fall in love with her. Sam had never had time for the Belvedere boys—they didn’t deserve her, it was obvious, and that was that. She could wait. Lizzie, and all the girls like her, understood that everyone was equally terrified all the time, and that all high school power required was confidence.
“I don’t need it,” Alice said. “I would like to, very much, but not tonight.” Making out with lots of people actually sounded wonderful, but making out with a passel of teenage boys sounded disgusting, like being attacked by very large frogs. They—teenagers, the ones all around her—didn’t look young to her, though, the way the Belvedere students did to her as an adult. They looked beautiful and sophisticated and fully grown, the way they always had. Alice realized that she wasn’t seeing them as a forty-year-old—she was seeing them as she had, or rather, as she was. Part of her brain was forty, but another part of it was sixteen. Alice was fully in herself and of herself. The hindsight was there (foresight?), but Alice didn’t feel like a creep, or a narc.