Then I spot Oak. Even though I’m barely rolling along now, my heart is going so hard in my throat, I feel like it’ll burst out through my mouth if I try and say a word. I’ve avoided thinking about Steve all night, but now, as I get closer, I can’t help it. Maybe he’ll be here tonight. Maybe, maybe, maybe. The idea—the thought of him—cascades into consciousness, into being. There is no repressing it.
As I climb off my bike, I instinctively fumble in my back pocket and feel for the note I’ve been carrying everywhere for the past two weeks, after I found it folded neatly on top of my beach bag.
I like your smile. I want to know you. Study session 2nite—earth sciences. You have Mr. Roebling, right?
—SH
Steve and I had seen each other at some of the underground parties earlier in the summer, and once we almost talked after I bumped into him and splashed some soda on his shoe. And then, during the day, we began to pass each other: in the street, at Eastern Prom. He always lifted his eyes to mine and, just for a second, flashed me a smile. That day—the day of the note—I thought I saw him wink. But I was with Lena, and he was with friends in the boys’ section of the beach. No way for him to come and speak with me. I still don’t know how he managed to sneak the note into my bag; he must have waited until the beach was pretty much empty.
His message, too, was in code. The “study session” was an invitation to a concert; “earth sciences” meant that it would be held on one of the farms—Roebling Farm, to be exact.
That night we ditched the concert and walked out to the middle of an empty field, and lay side by side in the grass with our elbows touching, looking up at the stars. At one point, he traced a dandelion from my forehead to my chin, and I fought the desperate, nervous urge to giggle.
That was the night he kissed me.
My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance—wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.
Since then, I have managed to see him only twice, and both times were in public and we could do no more than nod at each other. It is worse, I think, than not seeing him at all. That, too, is an itch—the desire to see him, to kiss him again, to let him put his fingers in my hair—is a monstrous, constant, crawling feeling in my blood and bones.
It’s worse than a disease. It’s a poison.
And I like it.
If he is here tonight—please let him be here tonight—I’m going to kiss him again.
Angelica is waiting for me on the corner of Washington and Oak, as promised. She is standing in the shadow of a towering maple, and for a second, as she steps out of the darkness—dark hair, dark shadow-eyes—I imagine that she is Lena. But then the moonlight falls differently on her face, and Lena’s image goes skittering away into a corner of my mind. Angelica’s face is all sharp angles, especially her nose, which is just slightly too long and tilted upward. That’s the reason, I think, I disliked her for so long—her nose makes it look as though she’s always smelling something nasty.
But she understands me. She understands what it’s like to feel penned in, and she understands the need to break out.
“You’re late,” Angelica says, but she’s smiling.
Tonight there is no music. As we cross the lawn toward the house, a stifled giggle disturbs the silence, followed by the sudden swell of conversation.
“Careful,” Angie says as we step onto the porch. “Third stair’s rotten.”
I dodge it, like she does. The wood of the porch is old, and it groans under our weight. All the windows are boarded up, and the faint outlines of a large red X are still visible, faded by weather and time: This house was once home to the disease. When we were little, we used to dare one another to walk through the Highlands, dare each other to stand for as long as possible with our hands on the doors of houses that had been condemned. The rumor was that the tortured spirits of people who had died from amor deliria nervosa still walked the streets and would strike you down with disease for trespassing.
“Nervous?” Angie asks, sensing me shiver.
“I’m fine,” I say, and push open the door before she can reach for it. I enter ahead of her.
For a second, as we pass into the hallway, there is a sudden stillness, a moment of tension, as everyone in the house freezes; then they see that it is okay, that we are not regulators or police, and the tension ebbs away again. There is no electricity, and the house is full of candles—set on plates, stuffed into empty Coke cans, placed directly on the ground—which transform the walls into flickering, dissolving patterns of light, and turn people into shadows. And they, the shadow-people, are everywhere: massed in corners and on the few remaining pieces of furniture in the otherwise empty rooms, pressed into hallways, reclining on the stairs. But it is surprisingly quiet.
Almost everyone, I see, has coupled off. Boys and girls, intertwined, holding hands and touching each other’s hair and faces and laughing quietly, doing all the things that are forbidden in the real world.
A mouth of anxiety yawns open inside of me. I have never been to any party like this. I can practically feel the presence of disease: the crawling of the walls, the energy and tension—like the nesting of a thousand insects.