What made this one special was me. How I felt. I belonged. Weeks or months ago, at the party down by the Dunes, I had felt like an impostor. Now I knew I wasn’t simply equal to these kids—I was superior to them.
Call it another manic energy burst, a spasm of adrenaline, but I felt fantastic, taller than the indoor palm tree, sturdy as the marble columns. I wasn’t slave to my impulses, the way these boys and girls were. I was stronger than my emotions, strong enough to bend and break my body into obedience, strong enough to access powers they could not imagine. I could joke and laugh with them, smile for photographs, but they were not my equals.
An hour in and Tariq and I found ourselves in an upstairs room, massive and purposeless—no bed, no desk, just some comfortable chairs and little tables and a lot of books I’d bet good money had never been touched—just some random room for hanging out with friends, because when you’re that rich you can have all kinds of superfluous rooms. Half the soccer team was there. We sat on the floor, at the edge of the flow of conversation. Bottles were passed. Tariq drank from his, long, gasping gulps, then pressed one into my hand.
“I don’t want any,” I said.
“Come on,” he said, drawing out the second word pleadingly. “Get drunk. You’ll have more fun.”
“I’m having fun now.”
“You drank with me when we went to New York City. Why not now?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t really drinking, I was trying to trick you into getting drunk because I wanted to avenge a horrific crime I erroneously believed you committed. “Maybe the question isn’t why I’m not drinking, it’s why you are.”
Tariq made a sound like a game-show buzzer when you guessed incorrectly. “Nope. That’s not the question at all.”
“I know you want to feel like you’re one of them,” I said.
“I am one of them,” he said.
“No you’re not. You’re going to have to accept it sooner or later.”
“Everybody’s got something that makes them different,” he said softly. “Being gay doesn’t make us a separate species.”
I thought it did, but instead of saying so, I said, “You’re so much better than them.”
“They’re my friends.”
“Your friends are—”
“Stop talking now,” he said, pressing his finger too hard against my lips and reaching out to intercept the bottle on its way to someone else.
I wanted to get up and walk dramatically away, but I sat and watched the party. We both had our walls up, and I could smell them between us, like burned cookies, something sweet turned noxious.
An hour passed like that, us on the floor, saying little to each other and to the people around us, and the walls eroded bit by bit, and were almost gone when Ott walked in and scanned the room and saw me and stopped smiling.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, his voice thick and drunk, “why does this fucking faggot have to be here?”
Conversations stopped, with the record-scratch suddenness of sitcoms. The remark was probably meant to be quiet, a mild complaint to whatever deity waits on dumb drunk kids, but everybody heard it.
I breathed in deep, through my nose, then held my breath. Felt the temperature change in the room. Smelled emotions churning, responses formulating. My skin tingled. How would they respond, these kids, my peers? I felt suspended between two moments, two worlds—the one where everyone thought like Ott and I was subhuman filth, and the one where people like Ott were a backward shrinking minority.
“Not cool, man,” someone grumbled.
“I mean it!” Ott cried, defensive and confused. “Where the hell did he come from? Why’s he always around all of a sudden?”
“He’s my friend,” Tariq said, shocking me. He stood up, and stepped forward, shocking Ott. “So be quiet about him.”
Ott opened his mouth, and I saw what he was wanting to say. I think Tariq saw it, too, so clearly was it written on the boy’s red, sweaty, drunken face. Something impugning Tariq’s manhood, implying that something more than friendship was at the root of his relationship with me.
“Get out of here,” Tariq said, putting his hand on the drunk boy’s shoulder, gently, and then pushing, hard. “Go find another room to bring down.”
Ott huffed and puffed and left.
“And that’s why I don’t drink,” I said when Tariq returned to sit beside me.
“Not everybody turns into a raging asshole,” he said.
“No, but if he pulled that shit and I was drunk, he would not be breathing right now.”
Tariq sniff-laughed, but I didn’t press the point.
I basked. There is no other word for it. I sat beside the boy I loved and watched a party unfold. I let my stomach shout and wail in agony, and with every twist I felt proud. I watched people argue and laugh and joke and gossip. Felt, maybe for the first time, the thing Tariq had been talking about. The bliss of being a pack animal who has found his pack.
A month before, when Tariq took me to our first party, I’d been a prey animal. A sheep with no herd, wandering into a world full of wolves.
Now, thanks to the Art of Starving, I was a wolf.
Herds are for sheep and pigs. Packs are for wolves.
At one point I locked eyes with a girl, looking over at Tariq and me, who smiled apologetically and looked away. She knows, I thought. She sees. What we are. How we feel about each other. How many other people do?
The thought made me giddy-happy. Maybe the world has more decent people in it than I thought. Maybe I’m not truly surrounded by homophobic assholes.
I didn’t fight my hunger. I surrendered to it. Settled into a semi-meditation state. Focused on erasing my sense of self. Thought of Maya, briefly—but I had to set her aside along with every other emotion, every other attachment, every other aspect of myself that stood between me and the raw limitless power of the universe.
I was so close. If I wanted to find Maya, reconnect with her, bring her home, punish our father for taking her away from us, stop the slaughterhouse from shutting down, save my mother’s job, keep our dying town alive a little longer, I had to push myself harder.
A door slammed. Someone hollered. Stomped down the hall in our direction. Ott, I knew, from the dunce-heavy tread, and Bastien close behind, yelling at him to calm down, come back, don’t, stop.
“Hey,” he said, standing in the doorway, whiskey bottle in hand.
“Don’t start more shit, bro,” Tariq said without getting up.
“Not here to start shit. Wanted to apologize. To . . . Matt. Can I? Apologize?”
No one stopped him. He stepped in. He hadn’t come to apologize. He had come to hurt me. So I stood up and held out my hands, a gesture somewhere between Well? and Come at me, bro.
“I’m sorry, Matt.”