Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(34)

LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS

Your name is Kinky Chinky, they say to me, these girls, as they drag on their Parliament Lights. Harley and Nelle—all ass and stomach and lip gloss and tongue rings—they don’t belong here at this party, though all of us want them.

This is the first time I’ve been invited, and I came here alone. This is the beginning of a story, a new one. This is me without a father or a mother or a best friend, a boat parade bash in a mansion overlooking the Intracoastal, 2003. I’m a sophomore, fifteen years old, my knees cratered and red from sucking off a boy named Brandon in somebody else’s closet.

Kinky Chinky, it suits you.

Another sophomore named Craig hosts this party every year around Christmas, where the richest kids in our class watch America’s finest yachts split black water like a zipper. Nobody misses Craig’s parties because they have the best drugs and shelves full of blue-colored booze. At least a handful of our class always ends up fucking in a closet, or in Craig’s hot tub, or on the floor of a bedroom, but usually I only hear about it.

Harley and Nelle corner me in the billiard room of Craig’s house. The lights are dim, Ginuwine’s “In Those Jeans” playing from somewhere downstairs. This is where they stand, smoking, staring at my knees.

Brandon Friedman? Really? He’s got the body of a fridge.

Harley Pelletier and Nelle Roman don’t go to our school. They’re childhood friends of Craig’s—their parents have done business with his parents. I knew Harley once before; she went to our middle school for one year before moving south to Davie. She was sweet then, with hair like fondue chocolate down to her waist, light oval eyes—just like Adriana Lima—clear braces that somehow never yellowed. She and I spilled chemicals into the mouths of beakers in our sixth-grade science class. I’ve never met a Chink before, she said to me once, lovingly, holding a scalpel in her gloved hand, a formaldehyde-softened frog between us.

Harley and Nelle don’t look like any other girls at our school, and the boys at this party can tell. Harley has a short, bob haircut now, body of a blade, with nose freckles and a silver tongue stud that glints when she speaks to you. Everybody calls her “Lips,” and she seems embarrassed by the nickname—These fish lips? Gross!—but we can all tell that she knows their DSL appeal. It’s the way she puckers them when she’s thinking, the way she wraps them around a bottle between every sip.

Nelle is more understated. She barely wears makeup—she doesn’t need it—and her tan skin glows as if lit up from the inside. She has deep auburn hair, hips and breasts, a tongue ring with prickly neon strings sprouting out of it like a sea creature. She calls this her Kushy-ball. Better blowies with this, she says. Drives men crazy. Tonight, she wears a neon-green Von Dutch trucker hat, which she turns backward and forward depending on which boy is flirting with her and how much she likes it.

You’re so cute, Nelle tells me. Is your hair really that thick or do you have extensions?

No, she’s really Chinese, says Harley. It was the same in middle school.

You don’t even look that Asian, says Nelle.

You’re actually really pretty, says Harley.

The two of them have a way of picking up each other’s sentences in quick succession.

You look, like, really sad though, says Nelle. Why Brandon? You’re hotter than that.

Because he asked me to, I shrug.

The truth: Clarissa recently spent the night with the first boy I ever thought could be a real boyfriend, the first boy I thought I loved. Eric was his name. He had big, friendly ears that he pinned back with cosmetic surgery a couple of years ago for his thirteenth birthday—bar and bat mitzvah year—the same year everybody but me gets their face and body fixed. I met him at Jewish summer camp, and he wrote me a love ballad called “Jazzy Girl,” which he sang as he dipped me across a keyboard for a kiss in the camp computer lab. Next thing I heard, Clarissa lost her V-card to Eric. The two of them tell me they only dry humped, but still I cry into my mattress, I cry on the phone to my father, I cry to Ashanti, I cry off fifteen pounds. I swear I will never speak to Eric or Clarissa again—I hope you two get AIDS—but many years later, when Eric takes his life in a motel room in upstate New York, Clarissa will be the first person I call.

I correct myself: I’m on the rebound. My best friend fucked my boyfriend. Once a fat bitch, always a fat bitch I guess.

BURN! They both scream. Let’s get you shwasted!

Harley and Nelle bring me a large glass of Red Bull and vodka. It’s weird to swish the vodka in my mouth, something as familiar to me as water, but somehow new, like this, when it’s mine. The three of us drink this combination all night, their fingers clinking the ice around in the glass. We cuddle up in Craig’s bed as the boats drag by. The later it gets, the more I feel understood by these girls. They both stroke my hair, my thighs. They move their hands up my shirt and slowly tickle my stomach—Such a sick bod! / Thanks, it’s the mono—and I don’t mind this. For the first time in years, I don’t mind being touched. The caffeine from the Red Bull has my heart feeling huge and my lips are numb and wet and I’m biting them and pinching them to feel more like Harley and I have never been drunk before, I have never seen yacht lights flashing through windows, I have never seen girls’ faces this close up to mine, talking.

Craig takes out a disposable camera and tells the three of us to pose. He flashes the camera while we smile together in bed, on the floor, in the baby crib of his guestroom. Our faces are flushed, and we’re holding hands in every picture. Nelle’s green hat—we all took turns wearing it. I find the photos twelve years later, each photo scissored out in the shape of a heart. On the back of one are words, though I cannot remember who wrote them, or when. They read, Best Friends Forever.