The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(55)
Elisabeth retreated. Noises were coming from the Blue Room. There, some freshman on her knees and her face in Nick’s lap and she still had her clothes on and he was gripping her hair in his hands. Elisabeth turned away. Why had she expected more from him?
She went back to the White Room, which now felt, perversely, like the safest place. People there were gathered at the windows smoking blunts and someone had set up a glass bong on the coffee table and people lounged around it, passed it back and forth, and she thought, for a brief, hopeful moment, that things were winding down.
Then Emma Fleed started dancing on the coffee table. She swayed and shimmied to the music, flipping her skirt of tiered chiffon and whipping her dark hair and grinning, her confidence astounding even as the camera phones went up around her, even as she tipped forward and flashed the room. She didn’t seem to be part of this place, as if she were performing for a full house only she could perceive, an invisible, adoring sea.
Damon Flintov peed in the kitchen sink.
Ryan Harbinger found the green glass vase and smashed it, not even angrily, just because.
By now the White Room was soiled and stained and it smelled like weed and cigarettes and spilled beer and B.O. A crack split the glass coffee table like a fault line. Still it wasn’t over. The speakers bumped and buzzed—she didn’t know rap music and every song sounded exactly the same, the beat relentless—and the room hummed with people in every corner, the rain having eased yet not stopped altogether, and outside the Bo-Stin hippies had multiplied to fill the deck. Cally Broderick stumbled out to join them, crawled up onto the railing and started to walk across it, dipping her toes and twirling like a gymnast on the beam, tilting and wavering as her friends cheered loudly, joyously, from below. As she tightroped on the wet and narrow rail, Cally teetered from side to side—on one side, the relative safety of the deck, on the other, the stretch of dark canyon that yawned down to the creek far, far below—in an exquisite tension that Elisabeth felt in the meat of her ribs.
Inside, Emma Fleed’s skirt was twisted up around her thighs and she was drinking from a forty on the White Room couch. Another girl crouched beside her, trying to take the bottle away, but Emma kept shouting, “I do want it! I want it! Don’t tell me what I want!”
Damon Flintov found the watermelon in a cabinet above the stove and hurled it at the White Room wall. Its pink guts exploded across her mother’s perfect linen wallpaper.
Elisabeth froze. Fragments of green rind made a hideous mosaic on the linen, and pink juice descended in long, slow drips. The pink guts were her tightly packaged heart exploding. The people were falling down laughing around her, thrilled, entertained, and behind her she heard one boy dare another to lick it. She fell to her knees on the sullied carpet, raised the roots of her hair with her fingers. What would her mom say? What would her mom do? How would her mom’s face look when she saw it?
The party around her revived itself. Elisabeth went into the kitchen, picked up the first forty she found, and uncapped it. It tasted rancid, but with each sip, she cared a little less. Cared less about the taste and less about everything else. In fact she liked it.
She stumbled down the dark hallway, searching for a quiet place to breathe. To her right she found an open door, a wedge of yellow light. She pushed inside.
A familiar scent enveloped her: vanilla, almond, bergamot orange. Her mother’s perfume. A wave of nausea overtook her and she fell to her knees on the cheetah print carpet. For a fleeting yet real moment it seemed plausible that she would die. It was then she realized where she was: the Gold Room. Looking up, she took in the impossible sight of Damon Flintov and Ryan Harbinger scrambling in her mom’s underwear drawer. Terror hurled her heart against her ribs. Even through her haze she understood that she was powerless to stop them. Damon pulled out a lacy fuchsia bra, which he stretched across his fat chest, looping the straps over his shoulders, and in the trifold mirrors he began to dance. Ryan laughed with his whole body, bending over, stumbling around. Elisabeth struggled to process this. They didn’t seem to notice her, or didn’t mind the audience.
Damon danced on the little stool and pushed his forty to his mouth and sucked, the amber liquid sloshing in the glass. He was jerking his big body around on the stool, posing in the mirrors. He pointed to the cheetah carpet. “This shit looks like a strip club, yo!”
“You fag,” Ryan said, laughing.
Damon paused and puffed his chest. “What did you just call me?”
Ryan grinned, the lines deepening at the corners of his mouth. “I said, fuckin’ faggot.”
“Say that over here, bitch-ass motherfucker. Lemme hear you say that one more time.”
Ryan slid his palm over his face to make it serious, like someone doing an impression. He crept to Damon on the stool and raised his chin. The boys’ faces were as close as they could be without kissing.
“Mother. Fuckin’. Faggot,” Ryan said, his face twitching to stay serious.
“You’re dead, asshole.”
But Damon fell into laughing and Ryan too, and then they were at each other like dogs. Damon lunged at Ryan and vised Ryan’s head in his armpit and Ryan, bending over, his jeans sagging to reveal funny tight blue briefs, grabbed Damon around the waist and muscled him off the stool and they spun like they were dancing, grunting, Damon breathing hard, his face baby-pink and glowing, and Elisabeth released a scream as the two boys fell into the mirrors and Damon’s body smashed the glass.