Sam’s face turned purple. “Oh my god,” she said. “Okay. Maybe just forget I asked. I feel like I’m getting a one-on-one health class, and that’s kind of the only thing more awkward than a regular health class.”
The doorbell rang, and Alice began to panic. “I should have canceled.”
Taking her time to climb out of the closet, Sam tiptoed over to the bed, where she dropped the armfuls of clothes. “I’ll get the door. You put something on. And if the party sucks, we kick everybody out and watchPretty in Pink. Whatever you want.”
Everything was already different—it had to be. Could one persondo everything the same way twice, even if they were trying? Alice couldn’t remember what she’d had for lunch the day before; how could she remember everything that happened on her sixteenth birthday? There were two open beers on her nightstand, and Alice drank the first one as quickly as she could, and then the second. The goal was to get back, wasn’t it? Or to figure out what the hell was going on? Was the goal not to vomit, not to let Tommy break her heart, not to exist as she always had? Was the goal to make sure that Leonard took up running instead of pounding cans of Coca-Cola as his favorite exercise? Birthdays were inherently disappointing—they always had been. There wasn’t a birthday she could remember truly enjoying. That was one way that social media had buoyed depression rates across the globe—now it was easy to see how much fun everyone else had on their birthdays, the elaborate gifts they received from their partners, the parties they were thrown, surprise! Alice did not want a surprise party, but still. More than not wanting a giant party, she didn’t want to feel unworthy of one. This was the last big birthday party she’d ever had, the last one with people she hadn’t invited swimming in and out of view.
•••
If there was one thing that Alice felt like she’d done wrong, it was being too passive. She hadn’t quit working at Belvedere like everyone else had, she hadn’t broken up with people when she knew they weren’t right for her, she hadn’t ever moved anywhere or done anything surprising. She was just floating. Like a seahorse.
Seahorses were Leonard’s favorite animal. There was an Eric Carle book about seahorse fathers, who carried their young, and Alice thought that was probably why. Raising children required a lot of conversations about animals, and favorites, and so every parent had to have an answer, and all the better if it was one on display at the museum blocks from their house. There weren’t that many animals in the wildwhose mothers treated them like Alice’s had. There were lots of mothers who abandoned their young straight off the bat—snakes, lizards, cuckoos—but Serena hadn’t done that. She’d stuck around long enough that it hurt, and after that, Leonard had carried Alice. There were good reasons and bad reasons to do anything. Her father had floated on purpose, holding fast, never going too far, and then Alice had done the same thing by accident. It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.
•••
Alice pushed herself up to stand. She wasn’t drunk, but she was certainly en route. She walked to the doorway of her room to survey what was going on in the rest of the house. There were already half a dozen people standing in the living room, each of them holding an enormous bottle of beer. Sarah and Sara, Phoebe, Hannah and Jenn, Jessica and Helen. Except for Sarah, they were all still around in Alice’s adult life, more or less—Alice knew at least the broadest strokes of where they were living and what they were up to. Sara and Hannah were doctors and spent their time on Facebook, posting pictures of their kids on ice skates. Phoebe posted pictures of things she made out of clay, and sunsets. Jessica had moved to California and taken up surfing—all of her photos were old, but she had at least two kids, maybe more, and a hot husband with visible abdominal muscles. Helen lived up the hill from Alice in Park Slope, and had had a string of glamorous, low-paying jobs, but that was fine, because Helen’s great-grandfather had invented some part in a machine that was used to make sneakers and so she could have made pot holders for the rest of her life and sold them for fifty cents apiece and she could still buy expensive clogs. Once or twice a year, Alice and Helen would run into each other on the street and hug and kiss each other’s cheek and swear to make a plan for dinner, which neither of them would follow up on.
“Alice Stern, there are only girls at this party,” Helen said, coming up to Alice and kissing her on the cheek. Her breath smelled like vodka. Maybe that’s why everyone had thrown up—her friends had already been drunk when they arrived. The doorbell rang, and Alice excused herself to answer it.
The boys arrived in a solid mass. A forest of boys, a school of boys. Their bodies took up nearly the whole space in between the two sides of Pomander Walk. The boy in front, Matt B., put a hand to the side of his mouth and said, “We roll mad DEEP,” which was probably supposed to sound tough but instead sounded like he was an effective camp counselor who had ferried his flock from one side of the street to the other. Alice stepped aside and they filed in. There were some she didn’t recognize—boys always seemed to have cousins, or friends from other schools, which was fine, but boys from other schools existed somewhere outside real life, extras in the movie. Every boy kissed Alice on the cheek on his way through the door, even the ones she didn’t know, like it was the price of admission. Tommy was in the middle of the pack, which meant that she had to accept his kiss and then stand there while strangers kissed her and walked into her house. She shut the door behind the last one—Kenji Morris, the tall sophomore who was handsome and quiet enough to hang with the older boys, with one sad eye peering out from behind a curtain of dark hair—and locked it. Alice had known most of the boys since she was in the fifth grade, but even so, only single facts about them came to mind: Matt B. supposedly had a crooked penis, James had barfed on the school bus on the way to a field trip in the seventh grade, Kenji’s father had died, David had made Alice a mixtape with so many songs from musicals that Alice understood that he was gay.
Someone had put on music—her CD booklet was open on the kitchen counter, next to the boom box. It didn’t matter that when she was alone, Alice listened to all different kinds of music: Green Day, LizPhair, Oasis, Mary J. Blige, even Sheryl Crow if she came on the radio and no one was around to make fun. At parties, it was all Biggie and Method Man and the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest. It wasn’t that all the white boys in private school were pretending to be Black, it was that they thought that being from New York City meant they had a claim to Black culture that other white boys didn’t have, even if they lived in a classic six overlooking Central Park. They were playing the Method Man/Mary J. Blige version of “You’re All I Need to Get By” and every single girl was singing along while the boys were just bobbing their heads and pretending not to notice anyone or anything. Phoebe pushed through the crowd and grabbed Sam and Alice by their wrists and pulled them both into the bathroom.
“Voilà!” she said, pulling three pills out of her pocket.
“What is that?” Alice said, though she knew the answer.
Sam looked nervous. “Phoebe said that her brother said that it’s like ecstasy, but it’s not made of chemicals, so it’s like, natural?”
It wasn’t natural. It was pure chemicals. It was a real drug, bought from a real drug dealer, and now it was in her bathroom, in the palm of her friend’s hand.
“We don’t have to do it,” Sam said. “I don’t think we should do it.” She’d said this the first time, too. Sam was smarter than Alice—she always had been.
Alice thought about what she actually remembered from the night, which parts had calcified over time into fact: how big it had felt when Tommy turned his face away from hers and toward Lizzie’s, how she had watched them vanish into her bedroom, Alice’s hope for true love going up in flames, and on her birthday, no less. After that, Alice had been engulfed by rage, like a mobster’s wife in an eighties movie. If she’d had clothing to dump out the window and set on fire, she would have. If Tommy didn’t want her, someone else might. Alice had wanted to kisssomeone,anyone, and so she’d gone up to one boy after anotherand kissed them, each mouth less appealing than the one before it, just wet and jabby and gross. It didn’t matter, Alice kept going. She was going to die a virgin and Tommy had never belonged to her. Outside the bathroom, Kenji, the only sober person at the party, had said to her, “You don’t have to do that, you know,” and that was when Sam started to throw up and needed her help. Eventually everyone else left and it was just them and Helen and Jessica, all four of them asleep in Alice’s room until noon the next day, by which time everyone who was not at the party had heard about Alice’s orgy and Tommy and Lizzie’s romance and from then on, it was Alice’s thing, kissing and kissing and kissing and staying just shy of being called a slut because she didn’t actually have sex with anyone, but she definitely wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, either.
She hadn’t understood it at the time—the difference between her and Sam, the difference between her and Lizzie, the difference between wanting someone to fall in love with her and wanting anyone to fall in love with her. Sam had never had time for the Belvedere boys—they didn’t deserve her, it was obvious, and that was that. She could wait. Lizzie, and all the girls like her, understood that everyone was equally terrified all the time, and that all high school power required was confidence.
“I don’t need it,” Alice said. “I would like to, very much, but not tonight.” Making out with lots of people actually sounded wonderful, but making out with a passel of teenage boys sounded disgusting, like being attacked by very large frogs. They—teenagers, the ones all around her—didn’t look young to her, though, the way the Belvedere students did to her as an adult. They looked beautiful and sophisticated and fully grown, the way they always had. Alice realized that she wasn’t seeing them as a forty-year-old—she was seeing them as she had, or rather, as shewas. Part of her brain was forty, but another part of it was sixteen. Alice was fully in herself and of herself. Thehindsight was there (foresight?), but Alice didn’t feel like a creep, or a narc.
“Okay,” Phoebe said. “Sarah and Sara said they’d do it, if you didn’t want to.” She slipped back out, and once she was gone, Alice leaned against the door, the hanging towels behind her back.
“I’m going to do something wild. I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to, okay?” Alice shut her eyes tight and scrunched up her face, as if that would keep Sam’s good sense from intervening with her plan.
“Like what?” Sam crossed her arms.
“God, you are already a better forty-year-old than I am. Remember that part inPeggy Sue Got Marriedwhen Peggy Sue goes for a motorcycle ride with the poet and they have sex on a picnic blanket and then he dedicates his book to her, which is the only thing that happens in the whole movie that implies that the rest of the movie actually happened and wasn’t just a dream?” Alice was talking fast, but she knew Sam knew what she was talking about.
“Uh-huh,” Sam said.
“I’m going to go have sex with Tommy, if he wants to, and I think it’ll change my life. Not the actual sex, which I am almostpositivewill be terrible, but I think that if I actually take ownership of my feelings, and act on them, instead of being afraid all the time, I think that will change my life.” Alice opened one eye.
“Okay, here are my thoughts. Number one, he’s eighteen, and so even if it’s kind of weird, it’s also not a crime,” Sam said. “But number two, technically, you are sixteen. I don’t know what the rules are for people who are trapped inside their own bodies at an earlier point in their life, but I do think it’s okay. If he thinks it’s okay. And you do. And you use protection.”
Alice hadn’t thought about her ovaries in years. She had an IUD that ruled her body with a copper fist, metering out only tiny periods that were supposed to remind her that her body could produce a child,if one were required. Before that, she’d been on the pill for fifteen years. Alice wanted to make changes in her life, but having a baby as a teenager was not one of them. “Those are all good points.” She paused. “I know where to find condoms.”
Her father’s room was as spartan as Alice’s room was messy—his full-sized bed was always made, and the stack of books on his bedside table was the only thing not put away. There wasn’t so much as a sock on the floor. Alice had seen the package of condoms in his bedside table years ago—when she was in the seventh grade, she had stolen one and put it in her wallet, because she thought it made her seem tough, even though she never showed it to anyone else, not even Sam. She pulled open the drawer. Like hers, it held a pack of cigarettes, some matches, a notebook, a pen, loose change—but unlike hers, in the very back of the drawer, tucked in the corner, was a package of Trojans.
“This grosses me out,” Sam said, watching from the doorway as Alice slid one into her pocket. “Majorly.”
