The look on Sam’s face was somewhere between awe and horror, worse than when Alice had said she would move to New Jersey, but she collected herself quickly. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me. What do I need to know that I don’t know?” Sam and Alice were both virgins, and would stay that way until they were in college. Sam would have two boyfriends before Josh. Three people, total, as far as Alice knew—that was Sam’s list. Alice remembered what it had felt like, their shared belief that they would never, ever have sex with another human, that they would stay virgins until they were old and gray. Alice had forgotten that worry, that she didn’t know what to do with her body, that she didn’t know how to produce pleasure in herself or someone else, but she could feel it right now, the panic and fear and desire all swirling together in her guts.
“Oh god,” Alice said. “Probably a lot? Starting with understanding the clitoris?” It was easier to imagine a teenage boy at Belvedere solving world hunger than it was to imagine a teenage boy at Belvedere able to locate or stimulate the clitoris in 1996.
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 watch Pretty in Pink. Whatever you want.”
Everything was already different—it had to be. Could one person do 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 wild whose 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, Liz Phair, 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.