His face went slack, and he turned away from her, toward the lake.
“Oh, that’s right. Keep on hiding, Pres. Nobody’ll ever guess your little secret. Ssshhhh, don’t say a word. But please, keep lecturing me about how I shouldn’t knot myself up trying to fit in. Meanwhile, you can’t seem to admit that you’re gay when the entire world knows it. Like, come on out, Preston Hacking! Come on out!”
Her last word hung in the silent air, especially because Preston still wasn’t moving. His thin silhouette was black against the blue sky, black as the trees and mountains and the lake. She felt like there was a cyclone in her head, whizzing around in a circle and about to pick her off the ground and take her with it.
“I never expected this from you,” he said, in a voice low and clogged with anger. Then he ran. He clattered down the Typee steps and she heard his hard-soled shoes hit the packed ground of the path.
“Preston!” She ran down the stairs after him, and then her feet hit the hard dirt and caught on a root and she took a big, smacking fall, landing hard on her hands and getting the breath knocked out of her for a moment. She looked up; she couldn’t see or hear Preston. She took two shaky, clattering breaths and hit the ground with her palms once, twice, again.
Then she stood up, dusted off her knees and hands, and went back upstairs to the party.
“To youth,” Jaime was saying slurringly, sloshing a square bottle of something anise smelling into everyone’s glasses. Evelyn downed one, then downed the one that Jaime had poured for Preston. Phoebe was stretched out in front of the fire, and Camilla and Nick were playing speed-Scrabble, and there was Preston’s jacket that he’d left behind, and Evelyn drank another tumbler of Scotch so she didn’t have to feel anything when she looked at it. Now Evelyn was sitting next to Jaime at last, her head bent with his over an old book about Adirondack guideboats.
Evelyn staggered to the bathroom, and saw her reflection looked ruddy, so she slapped her face to try to get the color evenly distributed on it. Returning, she looked blearily around the group in the living room. The beauty and perfect finish of the girls had given way to oily noses and puffing hair and red welts on their feet from their shoes. The boys, earlier fresh and shaved and smelling of soap, were now smelling of hormones and alcohol, their beards starting to push through their coarse skin, their mouths dry and hot with old Scotch. Where were her shoes? The gloss on her toes was like shiny blood. Preston had left, and Evelyn knew he was mad at her and knew it was important to remember why but she couldn’t. Nick was saying something to her in the hallway, and then Nick and Camilla and Phoebe went running down the hill and Phoebe fell, laughing in the dark, and it reminded Evelyn of something but she couldn’t concentrate on what. Just one lamp was on now, and Evelyn was sucking on Jaime’s ear, and time mixed itself up. She couldn’t taste the alcohol anymore, and added some Scotch to her Scotch because someone had given her nonalcoholic Scotch. Here was Jaime, grinning and singing, and now the lights were off, and everything was fine, spinning, fine.
*
Gray, swirls. Cold. She was cold. Her head, then her body, cold body. Quaking, naked, Evelyn came to on the Yale-blue couch, trying to warm herself under someone’s scarf. She had the cloud of something bad having transpired around her, but woke and, even as she felt the chilled air and located herself in the strange room, did not know for maybe three seconds, four, what it was that had happened. She felt fine, was barely hungover. Then the coldness of her toes and fingers was replaced by another feeling, an awareness of stickiness between her legs. She sat up, her body heavy. Her stomach cramped.