“Hey, you,” he says, picking me up and spinning me around. I get that lightning storm in my stomach.
“Hi,” I breathe, then kiss him. He tastes like beer.
“Let her go, Gene,” Hilary says playfully. She’s getting cups while Abigail opens a bottle she brought in her tote bag. Hilary takes on her British accent. “We’re doing shots!”
“Guess that’s my cue,” I say, and he sets me down gently.
“Cheers, mates,” Gene says as he walks away.
“Mates is Australian, not British,” Hilary mutters as Abigail hands us each a shot of something that smells like cinnamon, but worse.
“My brother got us Fireball,” Abigail announces. “We are officially getting drunk for the first time together tonight.”
I sniff the plastic cup, and an anticipatory wave of nausea emerges in my stomach. “I was thinking of something more low-key for the first time I get drunk,” I say. My eyes travel over the swarm of people opening cases of beer and stacks of red cups. “Like beer, or a virtual simulation.”
“Shut up, Cham.” Hilary laughs. “Abigail and I will take good care of you. We remember our first time drinking, don’t we, Abigail?”
I see their universe bloom, and I’m just a bee buzzing around it. I laugh. “It was at Abigail’s parents’ ski condo, right?” I say.
“Yep, spiked hot cocoa,” Hilary says, but she’s only looking at Abigail. “Vomit.”
The harder they laugh, the more I remember that although we came to this party together, for lots of years theirs was just a party of two.
“Come on!” Abigail closes her hand around mine and shouts something about a big booty, because someone just turned the music on and more people have shown up. “We’ve basically made it,” she says, looking me in the eyes with her intense green irises. “It’s time to make some stupid decisions and bloom adventures out our assholes.”
Hilary wrinkles her face. “Can’t we just take a shot and see how we feel?”
“Oh, fine.” Abigail puts the plastic cup to her lips, then pushes my hand to my mouth too. I watch us in the mirror behind all the bottles, but then I feel self-conscious.
“PEER PRESSURE!” I shout as she clamps her hand over my mouth. I laugh. “Just kidding. Go ahead, hit me.” We put our shots to our lips at the same time, the liquid entering my throat and then my esophagus and then my stomach, all the way into my chest. I swallow my spit, which is slightly on fire, and that fire spreads throughout my whole body. “Wow, I guess that did hit me.”
Abigail grins, wiping her mouth and slamming her plastic shot glass next to the still-open bottle. “Let’s do it again.”
So we do. We drink poison and swallow fire. At first I feel a little wobbly, like I might just puke my brains out, but then I start smiling because I don’t want to forget what this feels like, standing in Gene’s basement with my lace-up combat boots on and Hilary and Abigail on either side of me and the music is the song that’s been playing everywhere we’ve been for the last few weeks and we’ve made it. We’re here.
“You guys,” I yell three shots later. “This is it! We are halfway done with senior year. Prom and graduation and Nicaragua are so close I can practically taste them on my tongue!” I turn toward Gene and give him a big sloppy kiss. “Oh, wait, that’s Gene’s tongue,” I say, and dive-bomb his mouth again.
“Cham is drunk!” Gene shouts to the roomful of people: Marquis with two bottles of beer duct-taped to his hands, Lola doing a body shot off Mara’s stomach while she lies on the blue plaid couch, Hilary flirting with Travis against the wall beneath a banner for the Gill School’s cross-country team. They follow Gene in raising their bottles in the air and cheer for me and I toss my hair around. I feel like a pop star. I probably look like a golden retriever.
“I’m not drunk,” I laugh, letting my watery body sink into Gene’s arms. “I’m dreaming in real-life stars.”
Gene kisses me sloppily on the lips, and Abigail comes up to us, dancing. “Just a little preview of what’s coming at Senior Show,” she shouts, then proceeds to break it down, rubbing her butt against the keg like it’s the hottest thing in the room.
Gene and I goofily face each other—he’s about as gifted in the shake-your-ass department as I am, and for a few songs we’re as free as the musical notes released into the air. My head feels like it’s blasted with helium.
“We’re doing it,” I shout. “And we’re doing it together. Just wait until prom—”
The basement door opens, and we all stop rubbing up against each other because one of Gene’s moms already came down once and told us to be quiet. “Not gonna go to jail for providing minors a safe place to do all the underage drinking they’d be doing anyway,” she’d mumbled. But as I squint at the door, I realize the leather-legginged legs are not the legs of fifty-year-old Mrs. Wolf.
“Yay, you’re here!” Abigail calls as three girls on the dance team wave to her and descend the stairs. They have everything on that we’re not allowed to wear in school, mainly crop tops exposing belly button rings that remind me how much I want a belly button ring. The three of them start dancing, and it gets the whole room dancing harder.
“Hey, we should go upstairs,” I whisper in Gene’s ear the next time the song changes. I feel fuzzy and warm and a little sick—not necessarily physically sick, but sick with wanting something sick. Suddenly prom does not seem like the night to do it. Tonight does. “Come on.”
“We’ll have plenty of alone time later,” he whispers. “We don’t want to miss the party. Besides, I gotta keep an eye on things down here.”
“Of course,” I say, and pinch his butt before I make my way over to Abigail, my virginity lodged in place. Likelihood that it will move in this lifetime? You tell me.
“It’s really different in Germany,” the foreign exchange student from the dance team, Helga, is saying to the circle Abigail’s in. “Like last week this guy asked me on a date and we just sat in his car and he was like, Do you want to touch my thingy, and I was like, Um, no.”
I laugh with everyone else. “What’re they talking about?” Gene whispers. I shrug, and he puts his arm around my waist.
“So wait,” Abigail says. “In Germany, guys don’t just assume it’d be like the greatest honor on earth to touch their dick?”
“No, it’s the opposite.” Helga takes a sip of her beer and makes a face. “Americans have the worst beer.”
“Yeah, yeah, but back to the non-douchey-sounding guys.”
Helga shrugs and her short blond bob grazes her chin. She has a heart-shaped face, whereas mine always falls into the category of square. Honestly, I’d be a really hot Lego. “Feminism is sexy there,” Helga continues, “and guys who don’t know how to treat girls don’t get second dates. Like guys hold lessons for each other so they know how to—I don’t know how you say it—like sex on a girl?”
Everyone laughs and someone says, “Eat a girl out.”
“Yes! Like do any of you even know how to eat a girl out?” Helga looks at Gene’s friends from the track team, who are hanging on her every word like she holds the key to their sexual liberation (she probably does).