“Wait! Where are you going?” She tried to tamp the desperation in her voice.
He didn’t answer. He flicked his fingernails against his shoulder, she the speck, the lint.
She followed and watched as he opened the door: there was a circle of kids on her bed, and on the floor, on their knees, Cally Broderick and Jess Steinberg were performing some kind of surgery on Elisabeth’s precalculus textbook: Jess crushed a pill with a butter knife and cut the powder into rows, then Cally shut her eyes and lowered her nose to the book, closed one nostril and inhaled. Opening her eyes, she looked at Elisabeth. Elisabeth stared back, knowing she shouldn’t yet unable to move or look away. Cally’s pupils were wide and black yet impenetrable, and Elisabeth was amazed that someone she had gone to school with all her life could still be such a stranger. Elisabeth had so many questions to ask her—Why had she forced this total change upon herself? And how had she pulled it off?—but she could not fathom where to begin.
Elisabeth retreated. Noises were coming from the Blue Room. There, some freshman on her knees and her face in Nick’s lap and she still had her clothes on and he was gripping her hair in his hands. Elisabeth turned away. Why had she expected more from him?
She went back to the White Room, which now felt, perversely, like the safest place. People there were gathered at the windows smoking blunts and someone had set up a glass bong on the coffee table and people lounged around it, passed it back and forth, and she thought, for a brief, hopeful moment, that things were winding down.
Then Emma Fleed started dancing on the coffee table. She swayed and shimmied to the music, flipping her skirt of tiered chiffon and whipping her dark hair and grinning, her confidence astounding even as the camera phones went up around her, even as she tipped forward and flashed the room. She didn’t seem to be part of this place, as if she were performing for a full house only she could perceive, an invisible, adoring sea.
Damon Flintov peed in the kitchen sink.
Ryan Harbinger found the green glass vase and smashed it, not even angrily, just because.
By now the White Room was soiled and stained and it smelled like weed and cigarettes and spilled beer and B.O. A crack split the glass coffee table like a fault line. Still it wasn’t over. The speakers bumped and buzzed—she didn’t know rap music and every song sounded exactly the same, the beat relentless—and the room hummed with people in every corner, the rain having eased yet not stopped altogether, and outside the Bo-Stin hippies had multiplied to fill the deck. Cally Broderick stumbled out to join them, crawled up onto the railing and started to walk across it, dipping her toes and twirling like a gymnast on the beam, tilting and wavering as her friends cheered loudly, joyously, from below. As she tightroped on the wet and narrow rail, Cally teetered from side to side—on one side, the relative safety of the deck, on the other, the stretch of dark canyon that yawned down to the creek far, far below—in an exquisite tension that Elisabeth felt in the meat of her ribs.
Inside, Emma Fleed’s skirt was twisted up around her thighs and she was drinking from a forty on the White Room couch. Another girl crouched beside her, trying to take the bottle away, but Emma kept shouting, “I do want it! I want it! Don’t tell me what I want!”
Damon Flintov found the watermelon in a cabinet above the stove and hurled it at the White Room wall. Its pink guts exploded across her mother’s perfect linen wallpaper.
Elisabeth froze. Fragments of green rind made a hideous mosaic on the linen, and pink juice descended in long, slow drips. The pink guts were her tightly packaged heart exploding. The people were falling down laughing around her, thrilled, entertained, and behind her she heard one boy dare another to lick it. She fell to her knees on the sullied carpet, raised the roots of her hair with her fingers. What would her mom say? What would her mom do? How would her mom’s face look when she saw it?
The party around her revived itself. Elisabeth went into the kitchen, picked up the first forty she found, and uncapped it. It tasted rancid, but with each sip, she cared a little less. Cared less about the taste and less about everything else. In fact she liked it.