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 kiss someone, anyone, and so she’d gone up to one boy after another and 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 she was. Part of her brain was forty, but another part of it was sixteen. Alice was fully in herself and of herself. The hindsight 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 in Peggy Sue Got Married when 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 almost positive will 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.”
* * *
? ? ?
Tommy was on the couch, just the way Alice remembered. In the time that they’d been in the bathroom, more people had shown up, and now the counter was covered with beer bottles and makeshift ashtrays and CDs that had been pulled out of rotation, now stacked on top of each other like the leaning tower of Pisa. Lizzie was in the corner talking to some other girls, but she was eyeing him. She was wearing a skimpy tank top, and the end of her high ponytail swept her bare shoulders. Alice swooped in, collapsing next to Tommy on the couch.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hey,” Tommy said. He smiled and curled toward her.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” She put her hand on his chest. He had slept in her bed so many times. He had kissed the back of her neck. Alice had always thought that Tommy was playing hard to get, or just playing with her, period, but now she understood. He was a teenager, just like she was, waiting for someone else to tell him what to do.