Two iPods plug into two separate speaker systems; if you stand on the staircase between the rooms you can hear the discord. But enter the downstairs bedroom, and behold the theater of femininity: Viola unzips a sacred and mysterious bag bursting with powders and creams. Over the years they have been donated mostly by her father’s estranged sister who lives in the Catskills, apologetically, as though no amount of lip liner could compensate for her maternal lacuna. Viola has never used them. Tonight, though, seems like as good a time as any. She pulls out a plastic case with a sea of shimmering blues, a small foam-tipped applicator. Molly was saying something recently about how your makeup should be different depending on your face shape.What’s my face shape?she wonders.How do I do this?
She traces a tentative pencil around the rim of her eye.
My God, she would love to be loved.
Sebastian steeps himself in spray from a can that reads Dark Temptation. He puts on a shirt.
“Lola, let’s go!”
They descend. Together they look good, almost as if they do this often. She’s dressed almost identically, in jeans and one of his flannels. Her natural stride hits a cadence just faster than his, trained, muscular legs gliding, gliding ahead, shimmying into the peeling passenger seat. She seems nervous but excited, looks at him, big-eyed and trusting.
“Let’s go, Sugar Baby,” she says. He grins, turns up the radio loud.
Aldwych goes blue, a lazuline deepening into the Atlantic horizon, where it is already night. Together now, they listen to Arcade Fire, windows down, screaming the words into the almost-summer night, transcendent. At a stoplight he looks over at her.
“Glad you’re coming,” he says.
Would he could freeze her now, just here, in the momentum before their grand entrance, his alone.
The mansion is packed with Coors Light, certainly more than Viola expected, and even as the twins arrive, some kids are pulling more out of the back of Toby’s Jeep.Who bought all of this?T-Pain blares through the home speaker system. There are no neighbors close enough to hear.
Inside, people weave around Viola like an impediment, all of them losing control, heaving with the possibility of sex, the knife’s edge of a good time. Party paraphernalia enters her sphere of gravity and rockets away—plastic cups, the occasional shot glass. Around her, she can feel the questioning eyes, the Aldwych contingent surprised to see her at an event like this.
Sebastian is already smoking a joint; how easily he blends with the music and the lights and the colors on the walls. Everywhere are familyphotos of a flawless foursome, blond and white-teethed in crisp linens and boat shoes. She never thought to ask about where the parents are. How could she frame the question?Nothing cool about paranoia.But then again: Lisa’s party got busted last month and the kids who didn’t get away were taken to the police station. She screens the room, cataloguing escape routes: sliding doors to the garden, low kitchen window. If the sirens came, would she take Sebastian? Her hand twitches toward her brother.
“Lola! Want a beer?”
Sebastian flinches at the sound of her pet name in Zach’s voice. Even to Viola it sounds wrong, too intimate.Smile, she thinks,act normal. And yet her heart is pounding blood, her rib cage fluttering with the impulse to run. She is passed a cup of liquid that she does not want.
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah you are.”
Zach glances over at her with alarming shyness, and she understands with sudden terror that he is trying to create an intimacy between them, a connection that does not include her brother. She clutches at the beer, everything slipping dangerously away.
“Come on,” he says. “One won’t kill you.”
The party plunges deep into the heart of the house. Dread freezes her: this isLife and Times! Cellars are for kidnapping, dirty cloths shoved into mouths, subterranean abandonment, life worse than death, skeletons, rats, stale waters, your mother’s nudes. This one is dimly lit, and waves of electronica reverberate from the deep.
“Go,” her brother says at her side. His breath stinks. She descends into a vast, cold space.
This basement is an ode to competition. Wood-paneled walls and trophies and tables: billiards, foosball, air hockey, Ping-Pong. The room is trying to prove something: superiority, or masculinity.
“Jesus,” she says under her breath to Sebastian.
“I know, right? Filthy.” Filthy. He meant it in the cool way. Already, he is exhibiting the blur of a lost boy.
Behind them, heavy, sneakered feet drum down the stairs, boyspushing past crash on couches, making a show of hugging the girls, of play fighting. She notices now, in this condensed space, how few girls there are, how very many boys. The beer is sliding down her untethered. The music batters a repetitive monotone. Where to stand? What to do with her hands, her body? She lingers on the edge of a conversation that PJ McPherson is having with some of the prep school boys she doesn’t know, talking about a TV series that she hasn’t watched, about a group of people who are stranded on an island that is trying to kill them, and she smiles and laughs even as they make references that she doesn’t understand, says small meaningless things likeI’ve heard about it, just to remain on the lip of the group, to try to connect in the way her brother connects.
Behind her, a voice is singing. Zach Papadopoulos is swaying on his feet, swinging a bottle of tequila, a reckless smile on his face. He puts his arms around the twins’ shoulders.
“So, your dad’s getting laid, huh?” he says.
“Don’t be gross.”
Somewhere outside of reality, someone is explaining a game,focus nowon the rules of engagement.You have to sit every other. Or, like, as close to that as possible.A ripple of titters and strategic glances as people jostle to get close to the objects of their hidden agendas.
What am I doing here?
