“I doubt she’ll notice.”
On the couch, Allie had made some crack about Wyatt and suddenly Zo? was crawling all over her. A Solo cup went flying and landed with a shrill plastic yelp, spilling its fuchsia liquid across the Persian rug like a bloodstain. Unimpeded, Zo? buried her face in Allie’s neck, nuzzling her or pretending to strangle her, it wasn’t clear which, and their streaming blond hair blended together into one shining mass.
“If you do not stop talking right this second I will strangle you and then leave your body in a ditch!” Zo? said. “I will fucking destroy you. I will reveal all of your secrets. Madison and Amanda are here. They know you’ve been warned.”
“Get off me!” Allie was shrieking. And in a second, Zo? had crawled back to her side of the couch, folding her long limbs into place, like a paper doll that had, for a brief flash, become animate, and then collapsed once more to its flattened world.
“Just warning you,” she said, sipping her drink. It was Allie’s cup, of course, that had gone flying.
“I’ll go get something to wipe that up,” Madison said, “but I don’t know, the rug? Should we get that woman, the housekeeper? Her name was Maria or something?”
You remember her name, Amanda thought. Allie stood with Madison, as if to help. Zo? stared at them both.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Someone will get it later. Just don’t say anything in front of Wyatt. Grab that big pillow, the one on the floor. Just, like, drop it on top of the part of the rug that’s wet.”
Allie followed instructions, dutifully. Madison sat down again and avoided Amanda’s eye.
“Anyway,” Zo? said, “when everyone else gets here, we’ll move to the ballroom.”
“They have a ballroom?”
“Oh,” Callan called from the corner—that was his name, Amanda remembered. The football player dressed as a football player. Callan. This was the first time any boy besides Wyatt had even acknowledged that the girls were sitting here. “The baaaaaaaaaaaaallroooooooooom?”
Zo? ignored him. Allie looked in his general direction, her face breaking into a smile, but said nothing.
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Cal. You are such an infant.” Zo? fixed Allie with a disdainful pout. “Why you let that Neanderthal touch you is a mystery to me.”
“Bite me hard,” Allie replied.
Wyatt poked his head into the room again.
“Oh,” he said, “Madison. Hey. Chipster’s on his way, he just called.”
“Oh, did he call?” Zo? cooed. “Did he want to see who was here?”
Wyatt’s eyes darted to the corner, where Callan and company had now succeeded in clearing the credenza of its various decorative objects. A plum-colored vase, shaped like a calla lily, had been relegated to the floor.
“Fuck off, you guys, we can’t play Beirut in here. Come on. The housekeepers are still around. Put that crap back. Yo, Barker. Who else did you invite? How many other girls are showing up at my door?”
“Don’t worry,” Zo? said, furiously mixing vodka into the Crystal Light in her cup, pausing at intervals to lick her index finger. “Plenty of ladies will be showing up.”
“How. Many.”
“Just a few.”
“It had better be just a few. We have to set the security system before we go downstairs. Anyone who isn’t here by then is uninvited. By me. The person who lives here.”
He loped away, back down the corridor that led to the kitchen.
“It’s so fine,” Zo? continued, as if he hadn’t left. “If the housekeepers bother us, we’ll just go out there.”
She shook a thumb over her shoulder, toward the picture window that ran the length of the far wall, and Amanda noticed for the first time that the room looked down over the grottolike pool, its waterfall a steep arrangement of stones lit the same unnatural green as the fountain.
“They won’t tell Suzanne,” Allie said. “I don’t seriously believe Suzanne would care that we’re drinking.”
“She would if she saw the cars out front.” Zo? held her hand up in the air and began to inspect her manicure, nail by nail. “You know how his dad gets, everything is a potential lawsuit to Bill Welsh. He thinks everyone loves to sue as much as he does.”
“Who’s driving home?” Madison asked.
“Zo?,” Allie said, hunching her shoulders toward Madison with a conspiratorial air, “has been driving without insurance.”
“They’re going to get me insurance,” Zo? said. “As soon as I pass my test.”
“Which she can’t even take for another six months!” Allie crowed. “They don’t know she’s been driving the car. Did you see the new car outside, Madison?”
Amanda had seen the car before she knocked at the front door. It was a black Mercedes, a tiny sports car, the kind of small, flippant car her father referred to as death-on-wheels.
“I don’t know what they expected,” Zo? said. “To buy the car early and then, what, let it sit there while I don’t drive it? My dad knows I’ve driven it.”
Amanda downed the remainder of her drink. It was sweet but hollow; there was nothing there but the promise that you’d be drunk soon.
“I have to pee,” she said unceremoniously. She stood up and left the room.
IT TOOK HER A FEW MINUTES to find a bathroom, and on her way back she found herself lingering in hallways. Maybe they’d all decamp for “the ballroom” while she was gone. Maybe she would return to find only the ghostly quiet of recently abandoned furniture. Maybe then she could call her mother to come and rescue her.
But Lori might send Jake, Amanda remembered. There was no place for her, tonight, nowhere she could go without first making some bigger decision.
She wandered into the kitchen and opened the looming Sub-Zero, peering into its various compartments, fogged with condensation. You could learn a lot about people from what they chose to keep on hand, and apparently Suzanne Welsh was someone who bought in anonymous bulk for a household that contained only three people. This was a refrigerator meant to sustain a chaotic, bustling family. Towers of jumbo cartons of Greek yogurt, the tins of whey protein, a pile of frozen steaks in their taut plastic and Styrofoam packages. Rows upon rows of diet soda cans, still shackled to one another in their plastic rings. An entire drawer of complicated-name cheeses from Balducci’s wrapped in their thick white paper. The hunks were of varying sizes and shapes, all of them still sealed and many of them past their expiration dates, purchased for impromptu dinner guests who had apparently failed to materialize.