“Oh?” Charlie poked his head out of the fridge. “Feel free to help me out, if you feel so inclined.” I moved toward him and eyed the open refrigerator. It was full of moldy stuff.
“This is disgusting.” I plucked a jar of fuzzy pesto sauce from the top shelf and dropped it into the open garbage bag that Charlie had dragged over. It was already half full with old ratty towels and crumpled bags of chips.
“Yeah, toss it. Toss it all.”
“This?”
“No, I want that.” Charlie grabbed the still-sealed brick of cheddar cheese from my hand and rummaged in a drawer next to him. “Want some? I forgot to eat.” I shook my head, and he ripped open the package and dug in.
“It’s fun seeing the inside of your fridge,” I inform him. “I’ve never known a guy our age who eats pickled herring.”
“Roommate’s,” he told me. “This, however, is mine.” He wrested a jar of hot peppers from my grasp.
“When do you guys move?”
“We have to be out by tomorrow morning. Wanna come to our packing party?”
“Is that code for a getting-rid-of-leftover-booze party?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then yes. Just don’t expect me to work at all. Why aren’t you taking the vinyls?”
Charlie paused, straightening. “That’s not about moving,” he said. “That’s about karma. Plus I knew I’d meet someone interesting if I listed them. Only certain types of people collect vinyls.”
“I’m definitely interesting,” I said, halfway out the door. “I’ll tell you about it when I come back.”
“Tell me now,” he said. “Help me finish the fridge.”
“Didn’t I say I’m not here to work? Will you still be partying after midnight, or is that when you vanish?” (I actually said that. How could I have known?)
“We’ll be partying all night, up on the roof. Come by whenever. Text me.”
“I’ll do better,” I told him. I didn’t know what I meant; I just said it, and it sounded good. Then I left. Most of what I said and did with Charlie was for dramatic impact, to play the game. Charlie was a guy who needed to be kept on his toes.
“Don’t you want help?” he called after me. But I didn’t answer.
Part of me didn’t want to go back. It took a long time to take the records back to my dorm room. Then I had to have dinner with the program, and then there was the simple matter of sneaking out after our eleven p.m. curfew. I was only sixteen then, but I’d already had ample practice with sneaking out. That was the easy part. The hard part was, I was tired. I had class super early and Alice Choi had had a change of heart and wanted to bond all of a sudden. But I also knew that my fate hinged on going. So I pretended like I had to call my mom outside in the hallway, and I went. It took me thirty minutes to walk from my place in Islington back to Charlie’s place in Knightsbridge. I didn’t know how old Charlie was. He could have been anywhere from seventeen to twenty-two. At that point, I didn’t know his last name. I just had a phone number and an anonymous Craigslist email address. All I knew was, if I went back, my life would change.
I got there and Charlie was carrying a shelving unit downstairs with one of his friends, a guy I’d find out later was named Peter. He was a short, skinny Asian guy who was too small to carry shelving units by himself. I walked right past them and upstairs to the roof. “Aren’t you going to help us out?” Charlie asked. “I’m here for the party,” I called back. I could feel his eyes on me the whole way, even after I was out of sight.
Here’s a little secret: I effing hate showing up at parties alone. This was worse than usual because I didn’t know anyone and it took Charlie forever to make his way up there. For an hour I talked to random people. But the good thing was, they’d all been there for, like, two or three hours and were drinking their faces off that whole time, so no one cared who I was or would remember anyway. The rooftop was beautiful. London spread out all around us, its lights ablaze. From a certain angle, it could have been any city, on any night. But it was London, and it was that particular night. It all meant something. I was only sixteen but with my new red hair I could pass for eighteen, and I was hovering on the precipice of something big.
Two vodka OJs later he was at my shoulder.
“Oh, hey,” he said, breaking off mid-conversation with someone else, like he hadn’t expected to see me there.
“Hi,” I said.