Never Have I Ever(8)

I couldn’t look away from Tate, who was now aiming her eyes anywhere but at me. She told Lavonda and Panda, “He got the wrong idea. They shunt’ve named that place Quickie Lube,” and Lavonda snorted and laughed, reassured. I didn’t. I wasn’t. It was Phillip. She had done something with my best friend’s husband. I knew it even before Tate peeped at me to see if I’d been taken in by her weak lies and her joke.

I said, “This game? It doesn’t seem all that fun to me,” to Roux, but I held my gaze level and serious on Tate. She flushed and looked away fast.

Roux sidestepped between us, blocking my view. “It’s a blast. You should play. It’s like Never Have I Ever, but for grown-ups. We skip the coy denials and go right to confession. You start by telling everyone the worst thing you did today.”

That last sentence made me feel as if Roux were running one overly cool, lacquered nail tip down my naked spine. It straightened me into Good Girl posture, shoulders back and down, eyes widened into instant innocence.

“Sure. I’ll play,” I said quietly, to Roux alone. “The worst thing I did today was let you get this pack of harpies drunk in my house.”

Roux laughed and waved away my entry. “We’re past that round now.”

Over at the coffee table, Tate said, “Let’s keep going! Lavonda, what’s the very worst thing you did last month?”

I felt Roux watching my reaction. I asked her, sharp, “Last month?”

Roux shrugged.

“No, but wait, were you flirting with the car-place guy? If it was all him, why is it your worst?” Panda asked with dogged, drunken logic.

Tate said, “I must have been putting out a signal, is why it’s my worst. But, like, for real, unconsciously.”

“Women blame themselves,” Lavonda said, trying to smooth it over. “But it’s the man. It’s the penis. It’s the man penis that causes all the troubles.”

“Last month?” I repeated, gaze fixed on Roux. “You said it was a game about today.”

Roux said, “Round one was today. I won it. This was round two, where we all told the worst thing we did last week.”

Last week meant the beer-soaked Back-to-School party Tate had hosted around her pool, I remembered, trying to do infidelity math inside my head. Davis and I had made a brief appearance with Oliver, while Maddy stayed the whole time, basking and splashing with the small pack of neighborhood teens. Char had been there, plopped miserably in a deck chair, sipping ginger ale and eating saltines. Her husband had been pounding down the Rolling Rocks, and Tate’s husband had been micromanaging the brats on the Big Green Egg. With Phillip drunk and Tate unsupervised, I hoped for Char’s sake it had stopped at just a kiss. But I couldn’t worry only about Char right now. Right now I could barely breathe.

“And then round three is . . .” I heard myself saying in an airless voice.

“You say the worst thing you did last month, and if yours is the most awful, then everyone else has to drink,” Roux said, eyes on mine, unblinking. “Then we tell the worst things we did last year. And so on.”

The three drunken furies at the coffee table were bickering now, locked in their own tension. It rendered them oblivious to ours, but I felt it. Our tension was a long, lithe ribbon winding around us. It squeezed in, cold-blooded and well muscled, binding the two of us together.

“Ish the penis that starts it, but sometimes the vagina can send a signal,” Lavonda pontificated.

“What kind of signal?” Panda said. No doubt wondering if Tate’s vagina was signaling her own very tasty husband. But no, Tate had it aimed at Charlotte’s.

But all I could manage right now was asking Roux, “How many rounds? How far does it go?”

“Oh, come on, Amy. A good game has to go all the way,” Roux said, and her pink tongue came out for just a moment to touch her pale upper lip. “Think back. What’s the worst thing you ever did?”

Somehow that rocks glass was in my hand. She’d put it in there, or I’d taken it. I felt the rim at my mouth. From a distance I observed One-Drink Whey slamming down a shot of room-temp gin. But I needed the heat. My whole body had gone corpse cold.

I couldn’t make sense of the angry words the others were saying now. It sounded like cats hissing and growling around my near-empty bottle of Hendrick’s. Their sound faded as Roux leaned in, close. Intimate. Like she had a secret to share, and I was leaning as well. As if I wanted to hear it.

“You don’t want to play? That makes no sense,” she said, and her spirit animal was a more sinister version of the Cat in the Hat. Hers was feral, invading to unpack trouble in a house where no mother would ever come home. In this house I was the only mother, and I had let trouble in. I’d swung the door wide for it, hoped it had the right house, even. “Because, Amy? C’mon. You would win this. I’m thinking you got these low-stakes bitches on lockdown.”

“Get out,” I said, soft, a thousand underwater yards beneath the drunken, sniping women on my floor around my coffee table.

Roux heard me, though. She was down here with me, standing exactly as she had when I first saw her on my porch, head tilted, hip cocked. She spread her hands palms up, and I was shot through with a painful feeling that was akin to pleasure. Her hands were not empty after all. They were holding my history, invisible but so very heavy. I could almost see it in her hands.