“I’m not gonna fuck you just because you helped me carry some blankets,” she said.
“Whoa,” I said. “What the hell? Come on, Avani. That’s not what I want.”
Avani’s response to my trying to be friends was to pretend she had ended things with me. “Sure, whatever.”
I put up my hands and circled back to Henry, who was trying to pull Mari into a conversation. Hen had a fluid grace and languid voice that made everything seem so simple. I got drunker and drunker, laughing and shouting with the rest. Avani came back and slapped me in the face for some reason. Dave and Mari stayed in the background, no matter how many times I tried to draw them out, but I kept an eye on the two of them even as they hovered around the edges of the crowd.
Then, between one moment and the next, Mari disappeared.
3
MY FOGGY BRAIN WAS SLOW to grasp that Mari was gone.
“But where is she?” I said.
“Her mom got her,” Dave said.
At our backs, I heard shouting and a brief flash of light. Then more pops. Roman candles had sprouted from everybody’s hands, and my friends ran around shooting them at each other like guns. Pothan shot a full round of flares at Avani, and I put a hand to my mouth, wondering if her hair would catch fire, but they all glanced off her sweatshirt.
Carrie ran toward us, her mouth wide open. “Here,” she said. “Here! I got them online.” Her backpack was full of the flame sticks. She jangled the bag at us. I took one, and fire snapped from a metal lighter in her hand. The end of my Roman candle was alight.
“Shit!” I pointed it at Pothan, but Dave tipped my hand, and I shot the flares into the sand.
“Dude,” he said. “You could hurt someone.”
I shook my head. “Uhh, huh?” In a few seconds the firework was spent, and Carrie’s backpack was empty, and everybody stood still, shrieking and laughing.
“That was so epic.” Pothan grabbed Carrie and lifted her up. “Carrie, you are a monster!”
Now more beers were popped. Avani sat on a concrete divider, staring blankly at the ground. I knew she hated how people like Carrie and Pothan needed to disrupt perfectly good parties with their crazy, attention-getting stunts. Normally, at this point I’d go to her and she’d cry, and, with alcohol and loneliness to blunt her normal resentment, we might manage for a few hours to be friends again. But today I had Dave by my side, still looking a little shell-shocked.
“Why’d Mari leave?”
Dave shook his head. “Hey, dude,” he said. “I think I’m gonna go. Do you need a ride?”
“What?”
“Umm . . . are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
My brain wasn’t working. I held on to his forearm and blinked a few times. Then I drunkenly teleported into his car. Dave’s face was lit up by the brightness of his phone.
“What’s happening?” I said. “It’s only . . .” I looked at my phone. “It’s only ten o’clock.”
“I’m gonna head out,” he said. “I have a class tomorrow.”
“But it’s summer. . . .”
“It’s an SAT class.”
“Right . . . coo . . .”
“But you should get back. You’re right, it’s only ten.”
“No, uhh, du-dude. Dude.” My finger at this point might’ve been jabbing him in the chest. “We need to debrief. You know—post—postgame analysis of, uhh, she was cute. I liked her! So cute!”
“Mmm-hmmm. I don’t know. She and I are probably not gonna happen.”
“Why not?! She liked you.”
“I couldn’t make the move.”
He started the car. And in the dim light from the dashboard panels, his face stood out cold and serious, with a little shock of hair askew over his forehead. He was small and dejected and dirty, and even his bow tie was crooked.
“Last chance to get out and go back to the party,” he said.
“No, no way. You’re my bro, and a bro has to bro with his bros.”
“Okay, fine.”
Then we were on Highway 1, and I watched the dark ocean tumble against the cliffs below.
We lived in Grenadine, on the other side of the hills, and the drive was a long one. I looked at my phone, expecting a text from one of my friends asking where I’d gone, and when it didn’t come I gathered a bouquet of sadness and bitterness and clutched it to my chest.
Then I remembered Hen, reaching out to me through the darkness and silence. I admired him. He had burst onto the scene during our freshperson year—we’d gone to the same middle school, but before coming out he’d been nobody. Maybe it isn’t politically correct to say, but being gay was pretty cool—it was a specialness, a separateness, that couldn’t be challenged.
Carrie was the same. Though for her it’d been harder. When she’d told people she was bisexual, they’d thought she only wanted attention, but ever since getting with Gabriela, the Holy Redeemer girl, she’d slowly formed her own unique reputation.
Sometimes I wondered if maybe I was a little bit gay. The idea of being with a dude didn’t make me sick, like it seemed to make some guys. Sometimes I thought it’d be fun. Different. Easier.
Yet at the same time the idea of coming out felt shameful. It’d be so needy. So dishonest. I’d mentioned once to Pothan that I liked Hen’s social role—his position at the intersection of every group—and Pothan had been like, “You drama queen, you’d just love being gay, wouldn’t you?” And I’d flushed very red. Pothan had this way of seeing directly into my lightless core.
Right now the darkness of the passenger seat felt very safe. I fiddled around with the stations, changing all of Dave’s presets.
“I’d tell you to stop, but I know you won’t.”
“No classical music. You’re a young person, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s definitely a true statement,” he said.
“Hey, dude, what happened with you and Mari? You two were doing so good.”
“The thing is, I know, on some crazy abstract level, that it’s possible for a person to be into me,” he said. “And I have friends, right? So what do I want? Just a friend to have sex with. That seems pretty doable.” Now he grimaced. “But then I look at myself in the mirror, and it seems impossible to believe anyone could ever like me.”
“That’s bullshit.” My eyes swept across his face in profile: his dark hair brushed sideways across his forehead, his adorable glasses, and his strong neck disappearing into that collared shirt. “You’re hot. You’re smart. You’re funny. Most guys are complete dicks. Girls would kill for somebody like you.”
“Yeah, that’s what people say. . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know. If I keep talking like this, I’ll come off like a self-pitying monster. It’s okay—nobody owes me anything.”
“Dude, dude, dude, somewhere out there a girl is drawing hearts around your name.” That was a line Pothan had used on me, earlier this summer, and I still wondered if it was actually true, but, whatever, it sounded good.
Then we were in front of my little apartment block, which was right off El Camino, across from a gas station and a Starbucks.