Perfect Little World(50)
Along with Ben, Alyssa, and Ellen, there were also Jeremy, Callie, Asean, and David. Asean and David were intently watching a mixed martial arts event on the TV, but the other parents were restless, laughing at the slightest provocation, trying to think up party games but too inebriated to remember the rules correctly. So, excited at being up so late when the rest of the complex was fast asleep, they just kept drinking. And Izzy did her level best to keep up. She thought that if she drank enough, she would forget about the party tomorrow and, when she woke up the next morning, it would be a grand surprise. She finished her second whiskey smash and Benjamin was already shaking up another batch. Callie and Ellen went to the kitchen to get the rest of the birthday cake. The fight on the TV now over, even Asean and David turned their focus to this impromptu party. Izzy watched Asean play a few hands of poker with Jeremy and Alyssa, smiling, taunting the others when he laid down a straight flush, sweeping a load of imaginary chips to his side of the table and miming stacking all of them up.
Izzy realized the interesting fact that perhaps the three most reserved people in the project, by far the shyest in the group, herself, Asean, and Callie, were all here. And yet the party seemed not to suffer from it. She turned to watch Callie eating a slice of cake with her hands, her teeth black with chocolate crumbs. Benjamin offered to top off her drink, but she shook her head. She had no practice. She was already drunk.
It was now three thirty in the morning, and the party was losing momentum. They had spent the last thirty minutes watching an infomercial for a hand-cranking vacuum cleaner that, through some minor adjustments, could turn into a leaf blower. “Can we get Dr. Grind to buy us one of these?” Ellen asked. All of them were sunk deep in the cushions of the couch, so drunk that they kept leaning against each other. When the infomercial gave way to a religious program, Asean turned off the TV and they all started to pull themselves together to return to their own beds.
“This was nice,” Alyssa said. “I feel like this has helped me feel closer to you guys than anything we’ve done since we’ve been here.”
“I love all of you now,” Ellen said.
“It’s weird,” Benjamin said. “I understand how our relationship works with the kids. We are all their parents. Each one of them is our child. It takes some getting used to, but I get it now. But it’s never been super clear on how it works with all of us, the adults. What are we to each other?”
“Brothers and sisters?” David offered.
“Maybe more like second cousins,” Benjamin said.
“I think it’s more like the cast of Gilligan’s Island,” Alyssa said. “We’re these random people who ended up stranded on an island together.”
“And once we get off the island?” Izzy asked, trying so hard to keep up.
Alyssa shrugged. “Who knows?”
Jeremy then said, “There was a lot of sexual tension on that show.”
“What?” Ellen said, laughing. “No, there wasn’t.”
“It was there,” Jeremy said. “You just had to know where to look.”
“That makes sense,” David said. “If you’re stuck on an island, it’s bound to turn sexual.”
This made everyone go quiet for a moment.
“What does that mean for us?” Alyssa said.
“That’s not what I meant,” David replied, blushing.
“But it’s true,” Ellen said, starting to perk up. The logical end of the party had come and gone, and now they were stuck in a kind of riptide. It was pulling them . . . somewhere, and Izzy was too tired to fight it.
“There’s no doubt that there’s sexual tension at the complex,” Ellen continued. “But we can’t act on it, right? That would be awful. It would ruin everything. But it seems crazy not to acknowledge it.”
“Okay, so we acknowledge it,” Benjamin said. “And that’s that.”
“Everything here is so calculated,” Ellen said. “Emotions don’t matter. It’s what’s best for the kids, for the family. Everything is an experiment; whether Dr. Grind admits it or not, he’s kind of making it up as he goes along, right? So why can’t we experiment, too?”
“It’s late,” Callie said, but Ellen kept going, not leaving enough time for anyone to agree and then disband.
“We should interact with those desires, but in a controlled way.”
“How?” Benjamin asked, leaning forward.
“Spin the bottle?” Ellen offered, and the statement clattered so loudly to the ground that Izzy swore she could hear the sound.
David, who Izzy now realized was drunker than he had originally seemed, said, “But that’s not really fair, right? Depending on the unknown variables of the bottle spinning, someone might never get kissed while someone else might be constantly kissing other people.”
“And women might have to kiss another woman, and vice versa,” Alyssa said.
Izzy couldn’t decide if she was the least or most drunk person in the room. It was too difficult to parse.
“A lottery!” Ellen shouted. She took a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down some numbers. Then she tore them into separate pieces, placed them in two distinct piles, facedown, and pointed to her work. “Guys draw from here. Girls from here.”
No one moved, not even Ellen. Izzy looked around the room. If one person stood up, said they had to go, Izzy knew that the whole thing would fall apart. She waited, but no one moved. She looked at Asean, at Callie. They could not possibly want to participate. But, still, no one moved. Izzy realized, with shock, that she could be the one to break this up, to save everyone from their poor decisions, but she could not do it. And she could not determine, in her inebriated state, if it was because she was too shy to call attention to herself, or if she really wanted to see what it would be like to kiss someone else in the project.