SHE’D LOST TRACK of her drinks; she didn’t know why they hadn’t moved downstairs yet.
“My dad was so pissed I didn’t move up into honors track for math this year,” Zo? was saying. She kept sipping at her drink and curled her legs more tightly beneath her, like a cat preparing to jump.
“I’m sure you have nothing to worry about,” Madison said. Zo?’s father hosted several Harvard alumni events every year. It was, she knew, one of the things her father truly despised. Zo?’s father had never had any real money of his own, had basically used his wife’s money to keep afloat in the early days, but he had an old name. He’d gone to Harvard, and her own father hated this. The idea that Zo? might have a better shot somewhere than Madison, that an established history, however undistinguished, was better than no history at all. It was the same thing he’d hated about having to spend time with Grandpop and Gran.
“Madison, why aren’t you drinking your drink?” Allie said. “The Crystal Light is terrible, I know. But if we used soda, that’s like, thousands of calories. And obviously it’s not like we’re going to drink beer.”
The boys were all still in their corner. It had taken only minutes for the party to separate efficiently and completely into two gendered groups, as if the presence of girls wasn’t the only reason any of those guys had shown up in the first place. No one was allowed to look directly at the things they wanted, not until they were drunk.
“Right, Zo??” Allie continued. “We never drink beer.”
“Like drinking a loaf of bread,” Zo? confirmed. She’d retrieved her phone from the coffee table and was scrolling through her text messages, but after only moments she dropped the phone and lurched forward, grabbing Madison’s arm. It was the clumsiness of the motion, the way she almost fell across the table, that made Madison see that Zo? had been drinking, must have been, long before the rest of them had arrived.
She let her arm be jerked about in the air, let Zo? crow over its smallness. And then Madison’s skin felt different, somehow, and Chip was standing there in the room with her.
Her eyes locked to him, his shoulders, the place on the back of his neck where the tendons met his close-cropped hair. She had to stop drinking, she’d already had two and the stickiness was making her nauseous.
He asked about her wrists, Zo? had said something about her wrists.
“Haven’t you noticed?” she said to him.
She hadn’t touched him since that day in his car, not at all. Everything about that afternoon had the sheen of imagined memory, leaving her so desperate for the slightest sign from him that she was certain her longing had begun to radiate from her body in some tangible, dangerous form. That he must be able to feel it, the charged air between their bodies, and must be ignoring it for some cruel purpose.
He made a joke, and walked over to greet the boys.
Just a pro tip for you ladies, Madison thought, repeating the words silently. She had never been more convinced of the dubious possibility that Chip’s mind worked in exactly the same way that hers did. That he had known just what he was saying, just how she would hear it. Guys weren’t looking at your wrists. Everything that has passed between us, Madison, is flirting, is real interaction. Our conversations belong in that same limitless catalog of things boys do to get the attentions of girls.
Except, of course he paid attention to her wrists, her hand on his wrist in the car. There were actual patterns forming, things that would one day be cemented as inside jokes. Things that had happened, would happen, each time they spoke. Those were the patterns that led you into actual intimacy, probably. It had to be casual patterns at the root of the web that seemed to drape itself around her parents, when they were getting along, that enclosed them in a quiet library of their own shared history.
Zo? was suddenly bored, was talking to Allie about Jared Rodrick, a senior. Was he coming? Amanda kept looking at Madison, but Madison wouldn’t look back.
“Madison,” Zo? said. “You’re going to love this. This is going to be dynamite.”
“I thought it was American Psycho,” someone said. They were talking about Wyatt.
Zo? raised her eyebrows and grinned. “What’s the difference? Right, Madison?”
TEN MINUTES AFTER she noticed Amanda was gone, they were crowded into a bathroom just off the kitchen. It had in fact been Jared Rodrick at the door. He was apparently dressed as one of the characters from Miami Vice, a show Madison had never seen. She’d be willing to bet he’d never seen it, either. It seemed chosen primarily as an excuse to rub copious amounts of gel through his hair and wear sunglasses indoors.
“D’Amico,” Jared said, his voice rolling and dipping with approval, with a swallowed chuckle that she understood to be warm, not mocking. “Didn’t know you were into this sort of thing.”
She hadn’t understood what Allie was going to buy until Jared took the two tiny Ziploc bags from his jacket pocket. She hadn’t known you could find plastic bags so tiny. That’s when she felt the burn, behind her eyes, when it was clear that Amanda had known exactly what was happening.
Jared looked around the bathroom, the ostentatious vanity beneath a mirror that ran the length of one wall.
“My question is,” he said, “who is this shit here for?” He picked up a gold-plated hairbrush from a mirrored tray. “I mean no one uses this bathroom. This is a bathroom in a hallway next to a kitchen, right? Who’s brushing her hair in here?”
Madison watched his face, his eyes narrowed with genuine curiosity. This was kind of amazing, she thought. This was kind of an amazing observation to come from a boy. That was a real, true thing he’d noticed, a little nugget of bizarre masquerade, one thing in a house that was surely full of such things. She herself was seeing these things, seeing the traces of Suzanne’s insecurity everywhere in the house like fingerprints, but good for Jared, noticing them too. She felt the marvel of it rising in her chest, expanding like a balloon. No wonder people love this, she thought. No wonder so many people were always getting drunk. Everything around her seemed imbued with the potential to stun, as if every piece of furniture were animate, alive, and had just been keeping its own quiet counsel all this time.
She felt, for an impossible-to-capture moment, very close to her father. She felt the way the world must sigh and soften for him, after those first sharp sips of bourbon, the ice cubes knocking amiably against one another like spare change discovered in a pants pocket. No wonder he wanted her to be the one bringing him the glass.
“It’s weird, dude,” Jared was still saying. “Fucking gold hairbrush in this bathroom.”
“Oh, come on,” Zo? said. She picked the hairbrush up with two fingers, then dropped it to the tray with a hollow clatter. Madison let out a cry of delight.