“Just drink it,” Nick said. “You’ll like it eventually.”
She sipped. More and more people pushed into her house. She hid in the kitchen and watched as they paraded through the White Room, followed the trail of celery-colored towels she’d laid across the white carpet to the kitchen and the deck.
Dave Chu came in with some guys from the soccer team and picked carefully over the towels toward the deck. He was tall, like her. He wore a red polo shirt with a little embroidered horse logo and chinos and clean white sneakers. As he walked, he flicked his shining black hair out of his eyes. She was surprised to see Dave. He seemed too anxiously well behaved to have any fun at parties. On the other hand, he had paid Nick Brickston to take the SAT for him, so he must be more than the compulsive front-row note-taker she saw every day in class. As she shook out a garbage bag and began to fill it with used cups, she felt him watching her.
Abigail Cress came in with her best friend, Emma Fleed. Emma was short and baby-faced in a ballerina skirt of tiered chiffon, and Abigail was skinny and stylish, with a black silk top and tight dark jeans and a black quilted purse over her shoulder. They paused in the doorway and it was strange to see Abigail so quiet, so still. Wary. Everyone had been talking about her and Mr. Ellison, who’d disappeared the month before. Elisabeth herself had always felt funny around Mr. Ellison—there was something strange about the way he lingered by the girls’ desks in SAT class, reaching down to mark answers on their test sheets, cresting his arm over theirs. And Elisabeth had seen him with Abigail once, she thought, while eating her avocado sandwich in the courtyard—squinting up at the clock tower and spying through the narrow, arched windows the figures of a man and girl embracing. Elisabeth herself hadn’t even kissed a boy since Ryan Harbinger in eighth grade—when, in an empty classroom one afternoon, Ryan had out of nowhere grabbed Elisabeth and kissed her, a kiss quick and alien and wet, an anxious tongue darting around her teeth as if probing for something hidden there. Then, just as suddenly, Ryan had pulled away. Burning with embarrassment, Elisabeth had seen, gaping in the doorway with a Slurpee in his hand, Tristan Bloch. From then on, the rumor had circulated that Elisabeth had “stolen” Ryan from Cally Broderick; no matter the fact that Elisabeth and Ryan never again kissed or spoke, this rumor refused to die. Was it Tristan who’d started it? She’d never know.
She wondered if Abigail Cress had really gone all the way with Mr. Ellison. Had she seen him naked, and allowed him to see her? No wonder, she thought, that Nick Brickston had turned the affair into a joke. If you took it seriously, it would make you sick.
As Abigail and Emma followed the trail of towels to the deck, the Bo-Stin beach kids crowded in behind them, laughing and reeking of weed. They paid no attention to the towels. Cally, who she knew had always hated her because of Ryan, padded her pink and dirty feet across the carpet.
—
The storm surprised them, pushed everyone inside. The rain was fierce, drilling the rail of the redwood deck. The guys cursed, crushed cigarettes under their heels and sheltered plastic cups beneath their arms; the girls screamed and palmed the sky above their heads, ducking to save their hair. Only Cally Broderick and the beach kids welcomed the storm; they laughed and arched their faces to the sky, danced and tried to catch the raindrops on their tongues, embraced the falling water until their shirts sheered through, clung to their bellies and breasts.