Afterparty(82)

An unexpected doorman with a giant umbrella, the same green as the derelict awnings that extend from the sidewalk to the front door and arch over the ground-floor windows, helps me up to the lobby—grand and too dark to show cobwebs and dust, filled with kids I know, kids I’ve partied and gone to class with, but who are transformed by the grandeur of the decadence.

I am trying to figure out if the distinct odor of mold and the way it constricts my throat as I step into the lobby is a sign.

The compass says, Fucking A, it’s a sign. Get back in the taxi.

I don’t grace this with a response.

Everyone is slightly off. Without shoes, or with their hair messed up, or with eye makeup bleeding into raccoon eyes, or with a whole lot of bra showing, or with the entirely wrong guy, or with nipples more than shadowed through the near-transparency of tissue-paper-thin tops.

Maybe half the guys hanging on the edges of the lobby look like severely stoned members of the overgrown ten-year-old-boys club, ready to slide across the slick, polished paver floor in their sock feet, ready to slither down banisters and play catch with girls’ underwear. But the rest of them look to be slouching through in between doing whatever kinds of drugs have got to be here somewhere and instigating acts of extreme perversion.

Charlene comes through in a semi-formal dress with a senior guy I don’t know, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder. She nods to me.

Charlene says, “It’s all going on upstairs. Just a bunch of dancing down here.”

The boyfriend says, “Except the bar.”

“I’m not going in there,” Charlene says. And to me, “Don’t go in there.”

I am so going in there.

There are kids heading in every direction, including toward walls and circling pillars and falling into dark corners, in slightly impaired party entropy. Up on the landing of the staircase, there are shadowed bodies undulating, a leg draping down the stairs, an occasional arm emerging from the huddle, rotating like the blade of an off-kilter windmill. People are sweeping up and down the stairs, wandering past the front desk and down the rank, mildewy hall toward the ballroom, where there is a truly terrible loud band of undeniably cool but musically backward senior guys.

I hand over my ticket, and the back of my hand is stamped with something visible only under the bouncer’s ultraviolet light beam. The room is black with intermittent pops of faint light that makes people’s faces take on a momentary beyond-the-grave pallor. And everywhere dancing of the too-cool-to-move-much, already-dead-and-no-muscle-tone variety.

There are water misters lodged somewhere overhead, tiny droplets of water drizzling out of the darkness, making everything slick and clammy. There are actors with shredded clothes and makeup suggesting that they would be unspeakably gruesome were the lights to be turned up. They wander through, muttering softly, the living dead, staring out with big, blank eyes. They are the pathetic, pleading kind of living dead, only when they reach out their hands and clamp onto your shoulder, there is a second of terror.

Not fun terror.

Just terror.

And it doesn’t feel like Halloween, it feels like a sick ball in a teenage world where living-dead wraiths get their hands stamped with invisible ink.

Declan Hart, who was supposed to be with Kimmy (evidence of her tendency to choose mean players), takes my hand when I’m too distracted by the living-dead hand on my upper arm to resist. Declan starts to dance with me, a riff on stiff seventh-grade cotillion ballroom dancing. Either I’m paranoid or he’s sneering at me. Or sneering at the world at large, and I happen to be the one he’s feeling up.

I say, “Declan, do you have moves besides the box step?”

Declan calls me a bitch and walks off, leaving me standing there on the edge of the dance floor, where there is some all-girl dancing, in a loose circle with a bunch of juniors I recognize and a living-dead girl I don’t. Mara is in the middle of it, in costume, and we’re not talking a pretty, glam costume; we’re talking layers and layers of cheesecloth that are supposed to represent a shroud in a state of postmortem disintegration.

I am in the circle. I am right there. I am sparkly silver Afterparty girl.

Then Declan walks by and says, “No wonder. Bitch likes girls,” and I return to my quest for the bar. Edging along the outer wall and trying not to bump into people, steering away from anywhere that has anything close to the familiar party aroma of barf, or a paid zombie.

Already, someone is being carried out. I say, “Is he all right? Did somebody call 911?”

A guy in a tuxedo T-shirt says, “Ambulance number two. Not to worry.” He sounds sober and reasonably credible, so I don’t worry.

The bar is in an almost pitch-black room off the ballroom. I hand the bartender my money, and I get a screwdriver. I have developed a taste for screwdrivers.

Behind me, there is a tight circle of kids smoking. Strick, in fact.

He says, “Cocoa puff?”

I start to say I’ll pass, but I don’t pass. I take it and I take a hit, or a drag, or a puff, or whatever it is when it’s a cigarette with cocaine frosting, and I wait for something to happen. Nothing discernible does.

I keep trying. I try and try.

I say, “Are you sure?”

And he says, “Maybe. I’m too wasted to tell. I should lie down. I have a joint, though.”

He starts it and hands it to me, and I smoke it until my throat is burning and I’m pretty sure I’m feeling it. I turn to hand it back, but there’s nothing left of it.