“It’s not gonna make a difference,” Liv said, sounding almost annoyed, as I packed my uneaten lunch back into my bag. But even though I knew she wanted me to stay as her buffer, I tried to tune her out; she knew she was getting the lead in Ethan’s magnum opus whether she made out with him or not, the same way she knew she would always get away with throwing blowout parties in her thin-walled apartment building. Liv never seemed to feel the threat of true failure. It was her most glaring character flaw.
“I’ll go with you,” you said, swinging your backpack up over one shoulder, and I tried to hide my disappointment. I’d had dreams all night long about seeing the cast list, weird, surrealistic walks through a hallway stretched like taffy, where I’d come upon the sheet of paper, my eyes struggling to focus enough to read the fine print. In some of the dreams I’d find my name in a cluster near the bottom, one more body in an anonymous mass. In others, I couldn’t find it at all. And while I was pretty sure (99 percent?) that I’d be somewhere on the list in real life, I didn’t want you to be there to see my face when I found out. The only bright spot of the dreams had been that I was alone.
But as we walked back to school from the fountain, it seemed like you were mostly following me to gossip.
“Was that vibe weird to you?” you asked, trudging up the steps to campus, one bare brown knee poking through a rip in your jeans. “Like, is it just me or does Roth seem like he doesn’t even want to be there but has no other choice?”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said, watching the rubber toes of my boots hit the marble, studying the sparkling gray stone for slippery patches. “People were kind of weird to him at the party. Maybe we seem comparatively normal.”
“Sucker,” you laughed. “That party was crazy, though. You were smart to leave when you did. It was all downhill from there.”
“Why, what happened?” I feel guilty thinking back on it now; I wasn’t really listening, and the Liv/Dave/Dante layers of angst had eroded momentarily. I was just going through the motions, holding that cast list in my mind’s eye. It was like I was on autopilot, counting the steps until we reached the heavy green door that led into the basement offices, walked past the gym teachers’ lounge, climbed the back staircase to the first floor, and walked down my dream-taffy hallway to the bulletin board around the corner from the auditorium entrance. This walk was all about the destination, not the journey, and for one of the first and only times in our friendship, I wished you would stop talking.
“People just got wasted and started doing stupid stuff,” you said. “Someone put a cigarette out on the couch. There was definitely puke in the tub.”
My insides shuddered again. “Did she come down OK?” I asked.
“Uh—” We were almost at the green door, but our favorite security guard, a lively middle-aged Liberian man we all called “Coach,” was standing just outside, talking on his cell phone, so you stopped short a few yards away and lowered your voice. “Nothing too bad,” you said, “but at a certain point she was barely standing and I had to kick people out so she could lie down in her room.” Your face tensed; I could see the muscles harden under the skin. “Ethan wanted to go with her, but that seemed like an obviously bad idea, so me and Roth kept him out in the living room, talking about The Crucible or some shit, until he passed out.”
He stayed the whole time? I was ashamed that that was my first thought, but it was. I’d assumed he’d left right after the Liv and Ethan Show. I certainly would have. Or, I guess, I did.
“Do you know what she took?” I asked. You broke eye contact and shook your head, looking down at the fountain, where Liv was now sandwiched between Dave and Ethan.
“I asked her why she called Dante,” you said. “But she was so far gone, she kept swearing that her friend from middle school brought him and she had no idea he was coming.”
“Right.” The only person from middle school I’d seen at the party was Chitra Nagaraj, who had shown up at least an hour before Dante and had spent most of her time hand in hand with her girlfriend. Besides, he’d flat-out told us that someone had “called in an order.” You’d been there. You knew. “She’s lying,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t gonna call her on it. Not in the middle of everything.”
“Come on,” I sighed. “Can you at least tell Dante not to sell to her?”
“We’re not exactly close,” you said, shifting uncomfortably.
“He’s always at your house.” I crossed my arms, trying to ignore Coach, who was off the phone and shooting me an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He was always trying to play matchmaker, asking us when we were going to get married.
“Yeah, well.” You squinted and tensed your jaw. “He shows up a lot of places uninvited.”
“Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. I thought you didn’t care. I didn’t know you already blamed yourself—that you would always blame yourself.
“See this patch?” you asked, pulling your backpack off your shoulder and pointing to a big, rectangular swath of fabric. “It’s there because at the end of eighth grade, someone wrote ‘faggot’ on it in permanent marker, and then hung it from the basketball hoop down the street from my house.” You laughed bitterly. “Guess who it was.”