The party spilled into the White Room. Elisabeth saw them coming, a rolling tide, and knelt to straighten the trail of towels. To save the white carpet was a hopeless effort; she knew this even as she tried. Abigail Cress and Emma Fleed ran in first, apologizing as they stumbled over Elisabeth but laughing too, so it was clear they didn’t mean it. Then Damon Flintov and Ryan Harbinger were yelling and knocking people out of the way to claim the white couch and love seat in the middle of the room. After them came everyone, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, a mass of kids and yet somehow divided, the familiar groups and cliques of school asserting themselves as Ryan, Damon, and Nick dominated the couches in the living room, Abigail and Emma corralled the junior girls around the kitchen counter, and freshman girls circled on the carpet to share a bottle of vodka, drinking and passing with dizzying speed. Dave Chu stepped in from the deck, lingered near the windows as if looking for his assigned seat. The soccer team was playing flip cup at the dinner table, but he didn’t join them; instead, seeing Elisabeth, he began to trace the room, collecting abandoned red cups and carrying them one by one into the kitchen.
Nick Brickston yanked Elisabeth’s mother’s iPod from the speakers on the sideboard and plugged in his phone; a rap song pounded out like a train that would run them all over. The beat vibrated the coasters on the glass coffee table and the lampshades on the lamps, and Elisabeth—who had given up on the carpet and stood backed against the far wall—felt the bass line humming in her teeth. Timidly she went and turned the volume down, strained to hear through the hum of fifty concurrent conversations angry neighbors who might be approaching the house, dreaded police officers’ pounding at the door. None came—instead just more and more kids spilling through as the music grew louder and louder again, as if of its own accord. The rain was growing louder too, a rhythmic pounding on the roof. The branches of redwood trees nodded and thrashed at the windows, water streaking down the glass, and beyond them the hippie kids twirling and spinning. Inside, some sophomores opened a window and curled against it smoking cigarettes, exhaling into wind that blew the smoke back inside.
On the love seat Ryan Harbinger stretched, grinned and dimpled his cheeks, splayed his giant feet on the armrest where her mom usually placed her elbow or her half glass of white wine. He wore basketball shoes with red slashes and black soles, and they would ruin the white couch but it was too late to say anything. He set his forty on the coffee table—not, as Elisabeth’s mother had taught her, toward the center on a coaster, but directly on glass at the edge. He lay back and giggling girls tucked into the spaces around his body or sat at his feet and hugged their knees. Freshman girls perched on the edge, arranging their smiles. Ryan draped an arm around one girl’s waist but gazed away, as if the gesture were an accident.
Damon Flintov dropped his beer on the side table and sprawled on the couch, grinning and nuzzling a white chenille throw blanket to his cheek. He had a big head with buzzed, light brown hair, watery blue eyes, eyebrows pierced with silver studs. A wide, fleshy nose, chubby fingers. His belly bulged under an oversized purple T-shirt. He had this overgrown-infant look about him, yet he terrified her. He and Ryan both. She remembered, even if no one else did, what they had done to Tristan Bloch.
—
Elisabeth kept drinking and the front door kept opening and more kids kept cramming into her house. Kids she didn’t recognize. Kids who didn’t live in Mill Valley. Kids who didn’t live in Marin. She sensed the night was splintering. It was no longer a linear series of hours leading to their natural conclusion but a grotesque collage of impossible events that had started nowhere and were leading nowhere clear; it seemed to Elisabeth that the party might simply go on forever like a movie on a loop, refreshing itself over and over, until something snapped.
Emma Fleed set up beer pong on the whitewashed kitchen table, arranging red cups like bowling pins and pouring beer into each one. She was a waitress, a hostess. How did she know how to do this?
Elisabeth knelt and scrubbed a beer stain on the White Room rug. From the love seat behind her, Ryan Harbinger yelled, “I see you, Dave Chu! I see you looking at this girl like you’re gonna get some ass tonight. Man, this is Elisabeth Avarine—I wouldn’t fuckin’ hold your breath!” She turned and Ryan was grinning and Dave Chu walking away and Damon Flintov prying the battery cover off the remote control and doing this kind of choke-laugh, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe he was friends with such an asshole, but loved him anyway.
Girls were sitting in circles on the floor sharing handles of vodka—passing and giggling and swilling into oblivion. Then they were up and dancing with one another, grinding hips and swinging hair, pouting at cell phone cameras and setting off flashes, collapsing in laughter together. They were laughing about nothing, as far as she could tell.
On the couches and chairs were couples making out, older guys with younger girls cradled, strange creatures sharing breath.
A girl was crying in the designated bathroom. Her friends rushed into the room with her, flanked her, locked the door. When Elisabeth knocked, a girl she didn’t know stuck her head out; her charcoaled eyes were streaked with tears. “Give us some fucking privacy!” she yelled, and slammed the door in Elisabeth’s face.
From then on, Elisabeth couldn’t stop people from wandering through the house, looking for another place to pee. They disappeared in the maze of dark hallways. Where was Nick? Strangers kept going to the Purple Room—hers—and locking the door.
One guy—six feet tall, basketball-jersied, San Rafael High—she followed.
“Excuse me!” she called after him. “People aren’t allowed down there!”
But the guy just laughed and kept walking. “Who are you, the fuckin’ security guard?”