“Let’s text Silke,” Wren said, pulling out her phone. A few minutes later she was grinning.
“What?”
“You were totally right. He told his friends the party was off. But I told her that Roth was a piece of shit who was cheating on her and that she should come anyway. I told her we could prove it.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“She cursed me out, too.” She raised both her eyebrows. “But if she comes, we give her details.”
I groaned. “Penny will never forgive us—”
Wren cut me off. “If we want Pen to dump Roth, we’re going to have to prove to Pen that he’s a rat. Now we just have to prove it to Silke, too.”
“There’s nothing we can do about the way she feels. We’re her friends. Our job is to roll our eyes and stand by her, right?”
“Well, I have a plan,” Wren said, looking at me like I was a little slow. “I figured we’d get Roth really drunk and confess to being a douchenozzle, and if that didn’t work, I thought we’d trap him in the bathroom until he told the truth.”
I wanted to take the phone out of her hand and see what she’d told Silke and what she’d said back. “That’s a terrible plan. That may be literally the worst plan you’ve ever had.”
Wren shrugged. “I just think he would admit stuff eventually, that’s all. Although I guess eventually someone else would want to pee.”
Wren seemed to just know things about people. Often those things turned out to be true. But I wasn’t so sure about her intuition this time.
“Anyway,” she said, standing up and wobbling in the borrowed heels. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t come. We need a new plan and that plan should be to get Silke and Pen to compare notes so they see he’s been running a game on them.”
In that moment, I wished I could take back the whole party. It had been a ton of work, I was broke, and now I was pretty sure it would be a catastrophe. But all I could do was go home, collapse on my bed, and promise myself that I was never, ever, ever volunteering to throw a party ever again, no matter how much I wished I was the kind of person who ate crudités and canapés.
Dad was right. I needed less imagination.
*
The next day, I crawled out, took a super-hot shower, and got ready for the party. I had borrowed a dress out of Grandma’s closet—a floor-length cocktail number in a shimmery silver-black semi-sheer fabric with billowy sleeves, heavy cuffs, and a peekaboo front.
I put on my Converse underneath it, since I still had a lot to do. I tried to pin up my hair, using a YouTube tutorial, but I rushed my way through, and it came out looking not quite right. My smoky eyes looked awesome, though, and I did that lipstick thing where you layer powder and pigment so the stuff is supposed to never come off.
After that, I told my dad I was spending the night at Penelope’s and headed out to buy ice to stick in the bathtub to cool the Cokes and beer and bottles of champagne, cut-up carrots, and make boozy punch.
“Call if you need a ride. Annie and I will be up until the ball drops,” Dad called after me, putting down a bowl of food for Lady, who was dancing around the kitchen in an eager circle.
Nothing got done on time. Even though Ahmet had plugged his phone into the stereo perfectly the last time, it took him an hour to make it happen on New Year’s—and that was after he was three hours late. Penelope’s cousin showed up without the booze, wanting me to make a list of what we needed all over again after demanding an extra twenty bucks for the errand. Wren came by in sweatpants, ready to work, but then needed to take a super long break to get ready—a break that involved Penny doing her hair in Grandma’s bathroom, so that neither of them helped me for the better part of two hours. After he was done setting up the electronics, Ahmet settled himself on the couch, eating all the crackers and cheese, making me paranoid that we would run out of crackers before the party even started (there was no way that we would ever run out of cheese). By the time the first guests showed up, I was nearly in tears. I greeted Sandy, Jen, and Xavier, pointed to the food, and then walked straight to Grandma’s bedroom in the back, kicking the door closed behind me and throwing myself down on her bed.
It still smelled like her: faded rose perfume, medicine, and dust, as though she’d been drying out and crumbling away instead of dying of cancer. Ahmet’s playlist pounded through the walls, urging me to go back to the party.
I didn’t go anywhere.
A knock sounded on the door. When I didn’t say anything, Penny came in, carrying two glasses of champagne. She was wearing a gold sequin tube dress. Her eyes were magnificent with golden lashes, golden powder, and liquid golden shadow.
“Hey,” I said, shoving myself up so that my head was resting against the headboard. “Just taking a break.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, holding out a coupe glass. “I put vodka in it. It wakes up the champagne.”
I took a deep swig. The bubbles stung my tongue deliciously. The vodka cut through the cheap sweetness of the André. I didn’t know if the champagne had woken up, but it woke me up. For the first time that day, I had a giddy feeling of anticipation. The feeling you were supposed to have when you went to a party. The feeling that as the night went on, reality might grow more malleable, like taffy, until anything could happen and everything might change.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I think our goal should be for you to fall in love tonight,” Penny said, taking a dainty sip from her own glass. “I am going to find someone for you to fall in love with.”
“Shouldn’t I get to pick?” I asked her.
“Fate picks,” she told me. “Cruel fate. But don’t be like me. Don’t settle for less. Don’t lower your standards.”
“What do you mean?” I levered up off the bed, draining the glass.
“Nothing,” Penny said. “New year, new me. I’m over it. I’m over him.”
“Yeah, right.” I smiled because we’d heard that before. We heard it regularly, in fact.
“New year, new me.” She drained her glass too. “You know you made this place awesome, right? This is the first classy New Year’s party I’ve ever been to. You actually did it. So get up and enjoy.”
I got up. More people had arrived, all dressed to the nines and bringing offerings—homemade Skittles vodka in bright colors, a mysterious chocolate pie baked with hash, peach-flavored champagne, pink champagne, and a half-full bottle of bourbon. Girls wore fancy dresses, guys had on shirts that buttoned, a few even with bow ties. Oscar had his pink mohawk teased up and wore pink shoes to match. Marc had on a leather vest over a crisp white shirt that looked like it might even have been ironed. In the candlelight, everything shimmered.
Wren was sucking face with the guy from the coffee shop in the kitchen area. Apparently he decided to forsake his other plans.
Everyone seemed to be having a good time and, if I squinted my eyes a little, it was all as beautiful as I’d imagined. I went over to the bar table and refilled my glass with more vodka and champagne, a smile pulling up the corners of my face.
A few more people from school came in, laughing. They’d brought prosecco and sparkly party hats. Everything started blurring together and being awesome. Penny told a filthy story about one of her cousins. Marc’s boyfriend told us about going out with a guy who had “insurance salesman” on his online dating profile, but turned out to be a preacher; the preacher tried to make a joke out of it, too, claiming that he sold religion and that was a lot like selling insurance. I told a story about how one Christmas Eve my aunt got so drunk that she peed the bed—my bed, with me in it. Everyone screamed in horror.
We played several rounds of “I Never” and when someone said, “I never wanted to make out with anyone at this party,” lots of people had to take shots.
By the time Silke arrived, I’d decided none of the Mossley kids were coming and felt relieved. Then the door opened and she stepped through, shivering in a short silvery dress, looking completely confused to find herself in a trailer. Behind her was Roth. He had three people with him, two guys and a pissed-off looking girl. Everyone but the girl looked drunk.
“You call this a party?” Roth slurred, eyes bright and hair messy. His cheeks were pinked by the cold and manic cheer.
“Who the hell are you?” Marc demanded, crossing the floor. Marc was a big guy with long hair, the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, and a soft, deep voice. Once, after I’d twisted my ankle at a mutual friend’s house, he’d carried me home in his arms like he was a superhero.
Punching rich kids was a bad idea, but I kind of hoped he’d do it anyway.
“It’s okay,” Penny said, grabbing his arm. “We invited them.”
I looked around for Wren, but she’d snuck off to the back room with her barista. “Have a drink,” I said, but I couldn’t make myself sound like I meant it.
“I don’t think so.” Roth turned toward me, his words slurring a little. “Are you the one who’s been texting lies to my girlfriend?”
“Lies?” I snorted. Penny appeared to be frozen in place, like she already knew how this would go, like she already knew she wasn’t going to be able to pretend anymore. She stumbled back, sitting down hard on one of the arms of Grandma’s sagging couch. She didn’t even seem angry with us, although she must have guessed one of us had sent the texts.
Conversations had stopped around the small room. Outside, a siren howled. Music still thrummed through the speakers of Grandma’s stereo, not loud enough.
“Are you the one he was sleeping with?” Silke asked, and I noticed her eyes were bright and red-rimmed, like she’d been crying. Then she looked past me to Penny. The moment she saw her, I think she knew. “Or was it—”
“What if I was?” I asked, interrupting, because it wasn’t fair for Penny to have to confront Silke seconds after Roth broke her heart. “You know he cheated, even if he says he didn’t. What you don’t know is that you’re the one he cheated with. You’re the other woman.”
Silke turned to Roth, shaking her head. “She was your girlfriend?”
“No! Are you crazy? I told you. I brought you here to see how pathetic they were. To understand that they’re lying. Maybe they want money. I don’t know. They’re trailer trash in a real, actual, literal trailer park. Nailing one of these girls would be worse than slumming. It would be like swimming through a sewer. I’d never get the smell out.”
His friends guffawed at that. A dude-bro Greek chorus.
No one else so much as cracked a smile. Oscar cracked his knuckles instead.
Silke looked uncomfortable.
I took my phone out of my pocket. I wasn’t as good at this as Wren would have been, but with the liquor singing through my veins, I knew I had to do something. “I have a picture of Roth here—”
“No you don’t.” Roth grabbed for the phone. “Give me that.”
I didn’t actually have a picture of him and Penny together, but Roth didn’t know that. He lunged. I turned away from him, tossing my phone toward the couch as Roth twisted my wrist hard enough to make me yell.