“Thanks,” Alice said. He wouldn’t touch her in front of her father.
“Hey, Tommy,” Leonard said. He nodded his head in greeting.
“Hi, Leonard,” Tommy said. “I read that book you told me about, the one with the monsters. Cthulhu.”
“And? What did you think?” Leonard dropped his cigarette and crushed it under his heel. He pushed himself off the car and took a few steps closer to Tommy, so that they were all standing in a little circle.
“Oh, it was tight,” Tommy said. “So tight.”
Alice laughed. Being at the mercy of one’s teenage slang was humiliating, and it made seeing Tommy in this state easier.
Tommy turned and started up the stairs. “See you later, Alice,” he said. “Tonight?”
It was the night of her party. Alice had forgotten. The picture from Sam, of the two of them, positively drunk on their own immortality. That was tonight.
22
It was ten before ten when a cab pulled up in front of school and Sam hopped out of the back seat, her mother behind her. Sam’s mother, Lorraine, taught in the Africana Studies department at Barnard, and always wore pearl earrings and elaborately tied scarves beneath her close-cropped hair.
“Happy birthday, happy birthday,” Sam was chanting, and before Alice could respond, Sam had wrapped her arms around Alice’s neck, tight. She was playing, like they were kids. Which Alice knew they were, but it certainly hadn’t felt like it at the time. Sam was wearing a giant polo shirt and baggy jeans, her tiny body swimming inside her clothes, and a cowrie shell necklace tight against her skin. Alice kissed Sam’s cheek, and then the other cheek, like they always did, who knows why. There were so many customs, so many codes, so many habits. Teenage girls’ skeletons were half bones and half secrets that only other teenage girls knew. Sam smoked weed out of a blown-glass bowl that she hid in a fake book on her bookshelf, a book that had been part of a magic kit that her parents had bought her for her tenth birthday.
“Hi there, Leonard, Alice—” Lorraine gestured toward the door. “Can you make sure she gets inside? I’m running to a meeting downtown.”
Leonard nodded and tossed his cigarette. Lorraine was a vegetarian and a yogi, a serious woman, but even she was not immune toTime Brothers, and she liked Leonard well enough. Well enough to let Sam sleep over as much as she wanted, even though she knew that he’d never once fed her child a vegetable. “Course.”
Lorraine folded herself back into the taxi and waved as it drove off. Sam jumped up and down, dancing.
“I’ll leave you to it, young scholars,” Leonard said. “Just come home after, okay, Al?”
“Sure, Dad,” Alice said. “I’ll come right back.”
“Lenny! Come on! It’s our girl’s birthday! Finally! I feel like I’ve been sixteen, like, forever.” Sam had turned sixteen five months ago, which had been at the tail end of the previous school year, on the other side of a whole summer, which did feel like forever ago. Leonard nodded and started to walk away. Alice lingered on the sidewalk, not wanting him to go, like in preschool when she had cried and clung to his legs until her teacher had to pry her off with a death grip.
“Come on,” Sam said. They linked their arms and walked into school.
•••
If Alice’d had to guess how much Belvedere had been renovated since she was in high school, she would have said hardly at all—maybe now and then a floor had been redone, or some classroom chairs replaced, but by and large the place had felt exactly the same as it always had. Walking in through the front doors, though, Alice could see immediately that she was wrong. The lobby of the school was painted a very pale peach, with a paisley carpet to match, no doubt a holdoverfrom the 1980s. The receptionist’s office was walled off with square glass bricks. Alice paused to take it in, but Sam reached for her hand and pulled. “Let’s go,” she said. “I have to pee before it starts.”
Sam led them down the hall to the bathroom just before the swinging doors to the gym, where Alice could see the test prep class already assembled. There were several rows of chairs and a large chalkboard that had been wheeled out to half-court.
“Do you think this is to underscore the idea that standardized tests are a game for us to beat, or did they just not want us to go upstairs and be, like, running wild inside the school on a Saturday?” Sam asked. She pushed open the door to the bathroom and Alice followed her in.
It was the biggest bathroom in the school, with three stalls and a shower—the visiting teams used it as a locker room. Sarah T. and Sara N., two juniors who were best friends, were at the mirror, reapplying their lip gloss, and someone was in one of the stalls.
“Hey, Sarah,” Alice said. Sarah was pretty and heavily freckled, with curly hair cut short enough that it bounced out from behind her ears. She always had extra tampons in her bag and she had died of leukemia before she was thirty. They hadn’t been friends except in the way that everyone was friends when you had biology homework to talk about. She was the second person in their grade to die, after Melody Johnson, who died in a skiing accident during spring break of their senior year. God, Melody would be walking around, too. Alice wondered if she could warn her, tell her that she had a premonition, tell her about Sonny Bono, tell her to insist that her family go to the beach instead. But there was nothing that Alice could say to Sarah, who was smiling at her in the bathroom. “Hey, Al. How wack is this shit? I am so tired of talking about college and we haven’t even applied yet. Yesterday my mom went on a ten-minute rant about how women’s colleges weren’t just for lesbians, but guess what? It’s all lesbians.” Sarah was a lesbian, too, as her mother no doubt guessed, as were half a dozenother girls in their grade, but no one would come out until college or years after.
“So, what time is your party tonight?” Sara asked.
“Tonight?” Alice looked at Sam.
“We should be done with dinner by eight thirty?” Sam supplied. “What did we tell people, to come over to chill at nine? That seems good.”
Sarah and Sara tucked their lip glosses back in their bags. “Dope. See you later.”
There was a flush in the occupied stall. Alice pushed Sam into the shower stall and drew the curtain. “Are you going to pee in here?” Sam whispered. Alice shook her head. She didn’t know how to explain, where to start.
Suddenly, a hand pulled the curtain aside. “Thought I heard my ladies.” Phoebe Oldham-O’Neill was wearing jeans so long with bells so big that it looked like she didn’t have any feet. Alice was the tallest of her friends but it was true for her, too; her pants were so long that they dragged on the ground, creating a seismograph of filth along the raw bottom edge. Phoebe kissed them both on the cheeks, her oversized nylon jacket shushing itself every time she moved her arms. Phoebe’s breath smelled like Newports and every other inch of her smelled like the first floor of Macy’s, like an entire bottle of CK One was being sprayed out of her pores. Alice felt drunk on the idea of how many of her friends smoked, how adult they had all seemed and felt. How the cigarettes had been giant flashing signposts, to themselves and each other. You could never trust someone who smoked Marlboro Lights, the Diet Coke of cigarettes—those were for the girls with pale lipstick and overplucked eyebrows, the girls who maybe also played volleyball and had sex with their boyfriends in their beds which were still covered with stuffed animals. Girls who smoked Parliaments were neutral—it was as close as you could get to not smoking, but still, you could flickyour thumb against the recessed filter, and you could bum one to anybody, the type O negative of smoking. Girls who smoked Marlboro Reds were wild—those were for girls who had no fear, and in their whole school, there was only one, a tiny girl with brown, wavy hair to her waist whose parents had been in a cult and then escaped. Newport girls were equally harsh but listened to hip-hop, and those girls, like Phoebe, wore lipstick and nail polish like vampire blood, rich and purple. Newport Lights girls were like that, only virgins. The girls who smoked American Spirits were beyond everyone—they were grown-ups, with keys to their boyfriends’ houses. Alice had to laugh at the secret rooms of her brain, where this information lived and had been sleeping. She had smoked Newport Lights, and yes, she was a virgin.
