Everyone looks different but the same. Adam’s face is clearer—Scar was right—and he seems less gangly and boyish, like it’s not as ridiculous a proposition that he could be somebody’s boyfriend. That Scar would choose to hook up with him. I picture Adam lifting weights he ordered from the Internet in his basement, which is exactly like the one in my old house—linoleum-covered and low-ceilinged and the perfect locale for that sort of self-conscious project. Deena seems older too, but maybe it’s just that she’s standing straighter, her scoliosis less pronounced, and she keeps whispering things into Scar’s ear and then laughing. Okay, I get it, I want to say. You guys are besties now.
“What’s LA like?” Adam asks, and then the room turns its collective attention to me, and though just a minute ago I felt stuck on the outside, I suddenly feel too much like the center of attention. Talking about LA might make Scar even angrier at me, especially when the questions come from her—boyfriend? friend with benefits?
“You know,” I say, and swig my beer. “Sunny.”
“Scar says that you, like, live in a palace and shit,” Toby says, and clinks his beer against mine, as if my moving to LA was some sort of personal coup, like getting into my first-choice college.
“Yeah, not really. I mean, it’s a nice house, but it’s not mine. I miss it here.” I try to catch Scar’s eye. She’s not looking at me because she’s too busy snuggling with Adam. I think about Rachel’s house—the walls of windows that beg you to look outward—and then I look around this basement. Remember that we are underground.
“She said that you go to, like, some fancy-ass private school, where all the kids are super-rich and are followed by paparazzi.” Toby’s voice surprises me; it’s deeper than I imagined. I can hear his Chicago accent, which I’ve never thought of as an accent at all until right now. Is this what I sound like to everyone at Wood Valley? All low, growly “da’s” instead of “the’s”?
“I don’t know. The kids are definitely different.” All this time, did Scar think I was humblebragging whenever I described my plush new world? She and I have always spoken the same language. Surely she must have understood that I’d so much rather be here, in this basement, maybe not drinking warm beer with Deena and Adam and this strange crew, but eating popcorn and watching Netflix with her. That the stuff that makes Wood Valley sound interesting and cool is exactly what makes it so lonely. I’m not impressed by tall hedges and Kobe beef.
I picture my new friends hanging in Chicago, wonder whether they could slip into my old life the way I’ve tried to slip into theirs. Despite their excessive coffee-spending money and their after-school SAT tutors and the fact that they’ve never set foot in a Goodwill, Dri and Agnes would happily help themselves to a can of Schlitz and chat about whether Scar should let her hair grow out again. Caleb could hang here too, because he blends. Sort of. They’d all adapt.
Ethan is the only one who I can’t superimpose on this image, but maybe that’s because I have trouble picturing Ethan anywhere but in his hideouts. He’s more like me, I think: burdened with the realization that what goes on in his mind is somehow different from what goes on in everyone else’s. Even those closest to us.
And how you can’t think about that for too long, because that thought—the truth of our own isolation—is too much to bear.
—
I’m drunk, and the warm beer sloshes sour in my stomach. Scar and Adam are in the laundry room, door closed, and it occurs to me, based on the sounds emitting from that general vicinity, that they are likely having sex, and probably not for the first time. Maybe she has told Deena all the details, and her new best friend was able to give her lots of tips, the pertinent information that seems incredibly complicated in the little Internet porn I’ve seen. Not just the condom-on-the-banana talk we got in sex ed, but the hows and the whys and the what-feels-goods that I don’t yet know. Perhaps this is why Scarlett no longer wants to be my friend, because I can’t provide that kind of useful counsel. And because I use expressions like “useful counsel” when I’m drunk.
Come to think of it, I don’t want to be my friend either.
Deena and Toby are kissing in the corner, in the L part of the Schwartzes’ couch, the exact location I fantasized about just a week ago, when moving back and sleeping down here seemed like the answer to all of my problems. Joe, who since I’ve left has had a tattoo of headphones inked around his neck, the stupidest tattoo ever, since technology will progress and pretty soon that will be the equivalent of getting a tat of a rotary phone, keeps trying to talk to me, inching closer with each question. Of course, he asks dumb ones like Have you seen Brad and Angelina? And can you sit on the letters of the Hollywood sign? I guess he assumes that we should get together by process of elimination, that I pick who I make out with via an uncomplicated algorithm of who happens to be left in a room.
I take out my phone, and I can’t help it. I message SN.
Me: You awake?
SN: I’m always at your service. how’s Chicago?
Me: Honestly? Effed up.
SN: ?
Me: I just. First of all, I’m drunk, and there’s this stupid guy who won’t leave me alone.
SN: for real? are you okay? should I call the police?
Me: NO! I didn’t mean. No. He’s fine, just annoying. And Scar is mad at me, but I don’t know why. Deena is her new best friend or something. And I just feel so—
SN: alone.
Me: Alone.
SN: I’m here.
Me: But you’re not. Not really.
SN: I am.