Adolescence came on slowly for me, and late. That July, I was still a child, soft skin and shiny hair, so my mother allowed me into a private orbit from which puberty would soon exclude me. I stood beside her as she got ready at her bedroom vanity in a slip and bra, brushing powders across the bow of her cheeks. I was wearing the outfit she’d bought new for the occasion: a cardinal blue tie cinched uncomfortably around my neck, a short-sleeved button-down, my sticks of arms swinging from it with no sense of where to go. Shesprayed a cloud of perfume above her head and it settled around her. I dashed out a hand to catch some of the wet dust on my fingertips. I carried the faint and purloined scent around with me the rest of the day.
My parents had decided the event would be adults-only and Cassie felt this meant she and I should be pardoned from attending. “Don’t be absurd,” my mother said.Absurdwas a new favorite word, lobbed at Cassie in regard to everything from her clothing choices to her proposal to put off college for a year and join her new friend Meg, who planned to backpack across Australia working on farms. While I wouldn’t admit this to Cassie, I felt relieved that no other kids would be at the party. Whenever children gathered, a ranking quickly emerged. Navigating these hierarchies, with their unspoken yet cruelly enforced rules, was an exhausting enterprise: the constant calculations of how to hold my body, of what topics I should feign ignorance about (the daytime soaps I watched on sick days; what girls various teen heartthrobs were rumored to be dating) and in which ones I needed to mimic interest (mostly just sports and cars)—though not so much interest as to elicit questions, only enough to keep the conversation moving past me. My efforts to remain undetected often failed, and some boy sniffed me out, targeting me for ridicule, if not worse. If the girls took any notice of me—it was a saccharine attention, the same cloying affections they directed at kittens and babies—this only inflamed the boys’ annoyance, escalating their attacks.
In the company of grown-ups, however, I felt at ease. There, I found the invisibility I desired. I spent the afternoon of the party floating among the guests, weaving between their suits and dresses, the just-laundered fabrics holding the cool of the air-conditioned house when they stepped outside. I ate mouthfuls of unrecognizablefoods as they zigged by on trays and eavesdropped on the conversations around me, searching out some window into the opaque lives of my parents. I was looking for a clue, an indication that in the universe of adults, awaiting across an interminable chasm of time, I might find escape from the lonely terror of childhood.
I wandered from the backyard tent to the side of the house. Cassie was there, out of view of the party, talking with one of the caterers. They stood close together, backs to the wall, leaning at a shared angle. I’d seen him earlier. He had muddy brown hair pulled into a ponytail at the nape of his neck and a small, dark patch cut into a neat rectangle below his lower lip. He’d been setting up wineglasses with another caterer, and she’d said something about it, asking why he shaved his face like that. He grabbed at her backside, saying, “You don’t like my flavor saver?” I didn’t know what that meant, but I could hear in the lilt of his voice it was something teasing and private. She called him gross and swatted him away. I stood still in the clipped grass, watching Cassie with him now. He said something and she laughed in this weird loud way that didn’t sound like her. The guy waved his hand in front of her face and I saw the spark of a lit cigarette.
Cassie noticed me then and called over. “What’s up, Marky?” I shrugged. “Come here. This is Dave.”
Dave was tall and as I looked up at him, I could see dints in a line around his ear, where he’d taken out earrings. He cleared his throat and spit, a fat yellow hock into a shrub. “Enjoying the party, Marky?”
“My name’s Mark.”
“Okay, Mark,” he repeated, my name a taunt in his mouth.
“Where’s Mom and Dad at?” Cassie asked. I shrugged again. “Well, what have you been up to?”
“Nothing, really. I accidentally ate caviar. And I think raw tuna.”
“You liked it?” Dave asked.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Tastes just like pussy, right?”
Cassie shoved at him, not hard. “He’s twelve. Don’t be nasty.” But she laughed again, a sharp snort. Dave grinned and the hair under his lip spread itself out like a dirty stain and I understood the crudeness of his joke before.
“Relax, he thinks it’s funny.” Dave smashed his cigarette out against the wall, leaving a charcoal smear behind. He dropped it and it landed on a broad leaf, waxy and yellow. “I should get back inside.”
“Find me later?” Cassie said it like a question, a hesitation in her voice I didn’t recognize.
Dave didn’t respond but put a hand on my shoulder and dug his thumb in, sharp. “Don’t rat me out, Mark.”
Cassie sat and I joined her. I pulled on a long blade of grass missed by the mower and the ground released it, thick and fibrous between my finger and thumb. Cassie and our mother had battled about her outfit. When she’d found a dress laid across her bed, Cassie burst into shouts. Things escalated like that those days, from spark to conflagration in an instant. I was in the hallway outside her room and a girl from the catering team who’d been using the bathroom came out. She turned her head toward the sound of my sister’s yelling, then looked at me, guilty, and scurried away. Cassie was outraged that our mother had gone through her things. When our mother said that, God forbid, Cassie try to look nice for once, Cassie snarled back, “You mean like a painted clown, like you?” My father said,Watch yourself, the words even and slow, the warning so soft I could almost not hear it. Cassie won the right to choose her outfit but compromised on a dress. It was black andfit tight in the middle, its stretch pulling across her. She reached into the front and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She smiled. “He forgot these. Want one?”
I had smoked a cigarette with this weird kid Wayne on the last day of school. Wayne was crazy, everyone said so, and there was a rumor his dad was in prison. Wayne didn’t care, though. He didn’t have friends but he wasn’t picked on, either. He lived in some other world, outside the pecking order of junior high. I guess that’s why I said yes even though I was worried about getting caught. I detested our school, but, unlike Wayne, still longed to fit in. I wanted to learn his secret. As his cigarette burned down to the stub, Wayne bent and extinguished it against himself, pushing the cherry into the skin of his scrawny ankle. The sour smell of singed hair surged at me. I retched and Wayne giggled. The inside of his leg, the entire length of it, was dotted in small circles, smooth, shiny rounds of pink and white.
Cassie pointed the pack at me and I pulled out a cigarette, placing it at the very edge of my lips like Wayne had done. Cassie lit one for herself. Smoke ribboned around her face. She leaned forward, pushing the lit end to my own.
“Suck in.”
I did and a rash of smoke swelled into me. I coughed so hard the cigarette flew from my mouth. Cassie laughed, her true laugh, gauzy and bright. My coughs turned to laughs as well and I picked up the cigarette.
“You’ll figure it out.” The skirt of Cassie’s dress fanned across her folded legs. As her hand looped through the space between us, flakes of gray ash dotted the skirt and disappeared. “What time it is?”
“I don’t know. Almost four, I think?”
Cassie growled. “This day is never going to end.”
“It’s not so bad.” I twirled the cigarette in my fingers, hoping it would burn down so I didn’t have to smoke it.
“Dave said there’s some party tonight. A bunch of his friends are going.”
I had never been to a party without grown-ups but, based on what I gleaned from the young adult novels I was secretly checking out from the library, I didn’t want Cassie at one. Especially not with Dave. I didn’t understand why she would want to hang out with him.
“Are you going?”
“I don’t know,” Cassie said, and flicked a stray flake from the tip of her tongue. “It could be fun.”
