I would enjoy this while I could. His eyes had wandered. But he had remembered me. I hadn’t asked him the right questions, the flirting questions. But he remembered me. What Stuart said about New York kept bouncing around in my head: the train, sandwiched between lights and buildings and a huge world full of stories.
At the last stoplight out of Hanover, on the way to Norwich, Dale turned down the music to get directions from Maddie.
Stuart scooted forward to look out the window and asked, “So, where do you live?”
I snapped to attention, like a bunny in a garden, hearing a noise. Danger. But this was a good kind of danger.
“Strafford,” I said, and noticed I couldn’t turn my head without getting unbearably close to his head.
“And?” he asked as the car eased forward.
“And?” I repeated, hoping he couldn’t see the huge grin on my face in the dark.
“What part of Strafford do you love?”
“Ha!” I let out immediately. “Not much.”
“Not one thing?”
I suppose I hadn’t been asked a question like this in a long time, either. I thought about it, feeling my adrenaline spike, and rolled down the window to catch the air coming off the mountains. It smelled like pine and clouds and like someone nearby was having a fire in their backyard. I loved the scent, but it was more than that, like what the scent was saying—the idea it had smelled like this since the mountains were formed and could still be so fresh. The sensation was hard to communicate, not just to Stuart, but to anyone. I took a deep breath. “This,” I said, and gestured toward the night.
“Mm,” Stuart answered, closing his eyes as the wind moved through the backseat. The look on his face said he knew exactly what I meant, and the pleasure of being recognized was like fingers tracing my back. “Yes. This is nice,” he said.
As we wound our way up Ross Nervig’s driveway, we could already hear the bass thumping from the house, past the trees. We parked behind a line of cars and slogged the rest of the way, Dale lighting up a cigarette, Stacia and Maddie linking arms. The house became visible, people perched on the porch railing, in clumps on the lawn, streaming in and out of the giant Colonial on the side of a green slope just like mine. Except ten times bigger. And full of people I didn’t know.
I started to get nervous again, and tried to make my breathing steady. “Here we go,” I muttered.
Beside me, Stuart heard. “Parties, right?”
“Parties,” I echoed, shaking my head, as if I had been to a million parties to the point of shaking my head bemusedly about them.
He put his hand on my back, just for a moment, and I twitched with surprise. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fun.”
Was he flirting? Was this flirting? Or was this just regular human interaction? I was dying to ask Maddie, but she was already jogging up the yard, followed by Stacia, leaping onto the back of a friend of hers, laughing as he twirled her around.
“Stu-ey, Stu-ey, Stu-ey,” the legendary Ross Nervig greeted us from the center of the porch, a mountain man with a full orange beard, holding a Solo cup. “How’s the city, fucker?”
Stuart joined him. I found a corner and listened, vaguely shaking people’s hands as Dale introduced me.
From what I could gather as they talked, Ross was in Stuart’s class at Hanover, where he had played rugby until he injured himself senior year. Now he worked for his dad’s contracting business, steadily growing a fan base for his drone music popular among Dartmouth hipsters. An Upper Valley resident for life.
Stuart, I found out, was here to finish a collection of short stories, and to occupy his parents’ house in Hanover for the summer while they visited family in India.
“Are you seeing someone?” Ross asked Stuart. “Are you still with that playwright with the hairy legs?”
My ears almost physically extended across the porch.
“Not really,” he said.
Not really does not mean no. It means yes, in a way. Of course he had a girlfriend.
I shook it off. I scanned the crowd for other people I recognized who I could stare at awkwardly. I had done what I came to do, what Maddie had challenged me to do. I had talked to him.
But it still didn’t feel like I had won.
I followed Dale inside, glancing back at Stuart briefly, who caught my eye, but I turned back around. Oh well, oh well, I kept repeating to myself, and looked around the gigantic wooden living room filled with skinny girls taking photos of themselves and baseball players taking photos of themselves. Is that what people do at parties? Stand around and take photos of themselves to prove that they were at a party? I had my laptop with me in my bag, and briefly considered asking Ross for the Wi-Fi password.
A chair opened up by a bookshelf, but before I could sit, I heard my name through the shrieks and bass.
“SAMMIE MCCOY!”
Coop, good ol’ Coop, was pummeling through the bodies with a Solo cup of his own, his dirty blond hair tied up in a sweaty bun.
“SAMMIE MCCOY!” he shouted again, and now people were following his eyes in my direction. “THE WOMAN OF MY DREAMS.”