The party invitations went to Crystal’s actual friends, plus a pity list of neighbors and losers like AJ and Jamie. They were almost too old for this sort of forced mingling. In high school, AJ sensed, there’d be no pity list, which was almost a relief. But Jamie didn’t seem to know that yet. He got an invitation to everybody’s birthday, bar and bat mitzvah, and pool party since the fall. Eileen made sure he went to all of them.
AJ arrives early, in the ugly dress, mystery gift in hand, and fusses with his hair by the chip and dip table, then fusses with the food, fills his discomfort with Tostitos.
The trade-off Crystal had clearly negotiated with her parents was that if randos had to come, then her chosen few got to be co-ed, too. Her boyfriend Derek is there with the rest of his lacrosse team. The atmosphere is relaxed—the “fire drill” had made the Friday especially casual and Crystal herself isn’t a status conscious girl, just eager to please people like Derek, who most certainly is.
AJ blends into the shadows of the evening, melts into the wallpaper and the carpet, lurks by the French doors leading out to the patio of the Sazerac’s back yard which abutts his own. Mrs. Sazerac’s daffodil buds spear out of the garden on the edge of the property line. He watches the deep dark of the suburban night saturate the lawns, the daffodils, the patio.
Jamie arrives just as the conversation turns into a game of truth or dare. He’s gel-spiked his hair, has too much cologne on, carries a distinct turquoise gift box. AJ recognizes it from the window displays of the Tiffany’s shop at the mall. By the size, it has to be the silver heart pendant, easily the most popular piece of jewelry among the rich girls at school since the end of Winter break, when they conspicuously appeared around the delicate necks and wrists of blossoming princessettes. Getting one from a boyfriend, much less a boy at your birthday party, was unheard of.
“Hey, you look pretty,” Jamie says to AJ as he approaches AJ’s spot by the patio doors. AJ squirms.
“Jamie, that’s…” AJ says, pointing an accusatory finger at the gift box. “She’s gonna know you stole it, and Derek is going to beat the shit out of you.”
“How do you know what it is?”
“Jaim, you can’t give her that. It’s like a step below a promise ring.”
Jamie defensively pockets the box.
“Yeah Jaim,” Derek snorts. He slithers over to the boys, but seemingly hasn’t overheard their argument. “You smell like a hooker.”
Derek punches Jamie in the arm, but sniffs him again. Crystal is engrossed in truth or dare across the room, and doesn’t notice either Jamie’s entrance or Derek’s comment.
“Leave him alone, Derek,” AJ says. Derek stares down AJ with sparks of unhinged loathing.
“I don’t need you to fight for me,” Jamie snaps at AJ. Derek is a bully but at least that script is safer than letting a mouthy tomboy stick up for him in the middle of their own argument.
“Look fag,” Derek digs in. “You’re only here because everyone feels bad about your stupid dad dying in Nine Eleven, but everybody fucking hates you and wishes you’d stop coming to the shit our moms make us invite you to. The two of you should stay home and pee in each other, see if it makes an ugly baby to keep you busy.”
Jamie is silent and still. AJ’s eyes well with tears, and he imagines himself gouging out Derek’s eyes, twisting off his balls, anything, but he can barely stop his lip from quivering. He might like to kick Jamie in the shins, too.
“Oh my god, are you going to cry? Freaks.” Derek rolls his eyes and rejoins the main group of the party. Crystal looks up and greets him with a smile, oblivious.
When they were very small, AJ and Crystal used to play Barbies together. They used to have fun. For some reason, this pops into AJ’s mind as he chokes back sobs. With hands shaking, he grapples for the handle of the French doors and lets himself out onto the patio. After a stunned pause, Jamie follows.
AJ stares up at the light in the kitchen window of his own house next door. The light falls in long green stripes from the windows to the lawn, where it dissolves as the world between the houses tears itself apart. A new portal offers itself to the boys. A deeper sort of nothingness. Almost a void. In the dark, dark night outside, only they can see that the fabric of the veil is coming undone entirely.
Jamie steps up beside AJ.
“My mom is on a date tonight,” he says.
“What?” AJ asks, barely able to listen to anything but the whistle of the growing tear in reality.
“I said my mom has a date tonight. She’s out with a guy.” Jamie takes the Tiffany’s box back out of his coat pocket and fidgets with it.
“Oh,” AJ responds, watching the world crumble around them. The portal swallows the daffodil garden and envelops them both, taking them somewhere else, as yet indiscernible, but solid, hot, windy, and hard underfoot.
“You can’t—” AJ argues with the sound of the pendant rattling inside the box. “You can’t just give people really nice things like that. It’s too much.”
AJ waits for a response, and it doesn’t even have to be an apology, but there’s only the knock of the silver against the cardboard, and the howl of the empty hole, now draping heavy around them, mending itself, leaving them alone together at their destination.
THE HEAVY THINGS
I got my period young, and heavy. Heavier than the health class pamphlet said it should be. When it came for the first time, I felt something prickling parts of me I’d never seen, and had been told never to touch.
In the elementary school bathroom, I tried to clean myself up with all of the paper towels I could grab, but I was frightened and clumsy. I cut my finger on something down there, the prickling thing. I was not the most hygienic kid and thought maybe it was a woodchip from the playground, somehow. I pried and found it again, and pulled. Out came a small sewing needle. The eye was barely wide enough for the finest thread, but it was unmistakable.
I suspected there were things we weren’t learning from our health pamphlets, and wondered if this was one of them. By middle school, there were bigger needles, and small keys, and decorative screws, and the tiniest little pair of scissors, like something you’d get for a doll.
I told no one about what was happening with my body, and I certainly didn’t ask if it was happening to theirs. School offered few answers. In biology class, I learned about eggs and sperm like they were tidal creatures outside ourselves, fascinating and mysterious but alien. In gym, the teacher told us about wearing deodorant and eating vegetables. She said it was cool and okay to be a virgin and everybody giggled.
Then the nurse and the guidance counselors took us into a special assembly where my options became more clear. We watched a half-melted old tape of a made-for-TV movie about a girl who wants to fit in at school so she stops eating to be skinny, and all her hair falls out and she feels awful, but along with everything else, her period stops coming. I had no idea such a thing was possible.
When I was older, I got myself to a doctor. I filled out a form that asked me about my cycle. I wrote down the dates of my last three, and noted that they had been a nail clipper, a construction screw, and a hex key. I asked the doctor about inducing amenorrhea. I said it just like that to sound medically informed. She frowned and looked at the clock on the wall.