by Katie Heaney
If what happened at the beach had happened any differently, I might have been positive Ruby was dressed up for me as much as she was for the party itself. She wore a cool oversized jean jacket over a black T-shirt and a stretchy, short black skirt I blushed to look at. On her feet, Vans high-tops. Her hair was pulled into a high, royal blue–tipped bun. When she opened the door and climbed into my truck the first thing I said was, “You changed your hair. I like it.”
She lightly squeezed her bun as if to remind herself of its color. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s darker than I wanted.”
“It’ll fade.”
“Yeah.”
Ruby settled into her seat, and the safe-seeming silence became immediately stressful. I drove to the end of the street, waiting for her to direct me. But she was absorbed by her phone and didn’t notice that we’d been stopped at the stop sign for a full ten seconds. I stole a glance at her screen but couldn’t read the name of the person she was texting. I had a pretty good guess, though. I cleared my throat, and Ruby flipped the phone facedown in her lap.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I just, um. Don’t know where I’m going.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Turn left.”
As it turned out, the Tovar house was only about a mile uphill from Ruby’s, and even more imposingly palatial; it looked like the kind of house an evil twin from a soap opera would make threatening phone calls from before taking to the balcony with a bottle of Scotch. When Ruby saw me see the house she explained, “His dad’s a plastic surgeon to, like, famous people.”
The street was lined with BMWs and Lexuses (Lexii?) and Mercedes-Benz SUVs, a number of which I recognized from the school parking lot. I did a quick, impressive parallel-parking job (Ruby said so herself) a few houses down, and we made our way up the wide, pitch-black street. There were never any streetlamps or sidewalks in the rich neighborhoods, I’d noticed; everyone wanted to pretend they were neighborless and alone at the edge of the ocean. In the dark, Ruby’s hand brushed past mine, or maybe it was mine that brushed past hers, and I felt the short route of her fingertips across my skin like fire. To keep it from happening again—unless Ruby really, really wanted it to—I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket for the remainder of the walk up the driveway.
Ruby did not ring the doorbell, or knock; she pushed the door open with the familiarity of someone who’d let herself in a hundred times. She’d told me Sweets practiced in an unused bedroom David’s father had lined with soundproof foam. His folks were out of town at the moment, in Las Vegas for a plastic-surgery conference, Ruby explained, and a wave of nerves washed over me, imagining the debauched scene inside before I actually encountered it. All the parties I’d been to had been thrown by soccer girls or water polo guys, and they all blended together in my head, the same forty people drinking out of the same red Solo cups and dancing to the same five songs. As a sophomore and a junior there was nothing I’d looked forward to more, and as a senior I took pride in being one of the seniors laughing at the overeager, quickly intoxicated sophomores and juniors. But now, walking into what I assumed would be a very different sort of party, I felt newly and frighteningly aware of the limitations of my experience. In my own familiar setting I was reasonably cool, and well-liked, a jock among jocks. In this one, I could only hope that arriving with Ruby granted me acceptance by proxy.
Inside the dimmed foyer, Ruby pointed me to a sea of shoes spreading across the white tiled floor, and I reluctantly bent over to untie my laces as she sat on the steps to do the same. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I’d worn normal white athletic socks and not novelty ones, and slid my boots underneath an end table covered in silver-framed pictures of David’s family. David frowned handsomely in every last one.
“I was not expecting a shoes-off vibe,” I yelled over the music.
Ruby grinned. “It’s his mom’s one rule.”
Together we slid down the hallway into the kitchen, where we took in the scene. A spacious granite island countertop was covered in liquor bottles and empty cardboard six-packs and red Solo cups, misplaced or abandoned for new ones. David stood behind it, pouring drinks for Alex Grant and Emily Heidegger, who were laughing so hard their cups shook. Vodka trailed down Alex’s hand and wrist, and Emily licked it off. “EW!” Alex screamed before licking the rest off herself. David noticed Ruby and raised the vodka bottle in triumphant greeting. “RUUUUUBE!” he yelled.
She looked at me. “Let’s get a drink, yeah?”
I nodded urgently.
David scrambled around the island to hug Ruby. He also gave me a wave over her shoulder, which was more than I expected.
“How’s it going,” he said. “What’s up,” I replied. Two questions uninterested in answers.
Ruby extracted herself from David’s drunken death grip and slid two cups off the stack for us, handing me one.
“Always gotta be fashionably late,” David teased, and I realized nine wasn’t when the party started for anyone but Ruby. Which made the drunkenness levels around me more logical. Alex and Emily, for instance, were shiny and squinty-eyed, no longer competing with each other for David’s focus but huddled together, united against their new common enemy: Ruby, who was oblivious.
“What do I want?” she asked herself, touching every bottle.
“May I?” I reached for her cup and she handed it to me. If I’d retained one piece of useful information from the soccer parties I’d been to as an underclassman, it was how to assemble a decent cocktail from the supplies in my rich classmates’ gleaming refrigerators. I found lime juice and lemon juice and honey in various cabinets, and then remembered David was standing right there, and asked him if I could use them.
“Sure, but I want one.”
“Me too,” said Alex and Emily.
As I threw together our drinks, two more drunk girls wandered over, and then Ben and a few other guys, and soon I was bartending for half the party. People were acting insane, like my drink was the most delicious thing they’d ever tasted, when really it was pretty easy to improve upon a flat, watery beer or a mix of cheap flavored rum and Diet Coke. I let them be impressed. Though Ruby found her way to the other end of the island and was talking to David and Ben, she kept looking over to laugh at my hustle. When the crowd finally cleared, she came back over and handed me her empty cup.
“Not to make you make me another one, but…”
I grinned and took a big gulp of my drink, which I had to admit was pretty good. I felt the tequila warmth spread all the way down to my toes. I made Ruby a new one and topped off mine, and before I could get roped into making two more for the newest arrivals, Ruby pulled me away by the sleeve. “You’ve done enough,” she said to me. “Sorry, she’s off duty,” she told the annoyed-looking girls at the counter. They shrugged and filled their cups with whatever.
I followed Ruby out of the kitchen and past a den, where eight or ten boys sat immobilized by the contents of the giant green bong on the coffee table, into a room whose original purpose was unclear (houses like these always had extra) but that was currently serving as a dance floor-slash-mosh pit.
“What is this?” I yelled in Ruby’s ear. I couldn’t help myself. The music blasting through the thousand-dollar speakers was, like, EDM meets…something angry and bad.
Ruby shrugged and yelled something back that sounded like “Peter Rabbit,” or maybe “Peter Abbot” was more likely, but it didn’t matter, because I had no plans to look them up later.
“I miss Ariana Grande!” I yelled.
“What?”
I shook my head, and Ruby laughed. In universal loud-party sign language, she motioned for me to finish my drink with her before wading into the crush of sweaty bodies. I tipped my cup to hers in cheers, and then we drained them. We grimaced and grinned at each other, and Ruby reached her hand across the short di
stance between us and wiped the corner of my lip with her thumb. My whole body felt golden and sparkled where she touched me. I’m possibly a little drunk, I thought. Immediately I forgot everything I’d promised myself about making risky first moves and took Ruby’s hand to lead her into the crowd.
I didn’t know how long we danced. Every song blended into the next, or maybe it was just one very long one. We jumped and swayed and nodded. Ruby pulled her hair out of her bun so she could whip it around, and I had to step back to avoid being hit. Then we got sweaty and she put it back up. Three different people came over to hug Ruby and dance near her. A few times the crowd pushed us apart, and I found myself dancing with no one. But I didn’t care. I felt light and alive and in love with everything. And eventually, Ruby and I danced our way back to each other.
At some point the glow started to fade, and I realized my throat was dry and I needed to pee like never before. I transmitted this information to Ruby as best I could, and tried not to be too disappointed when she didn’t follow me. After I went to the bathroom, I found my cup on the sideboard and carried it into the kitchen, where I filled it with water from the Tovars’ fancy built-in filter. Forget my punch—that water was the best thing I’d ever tasted in my life. I gulped it down standing by the sink and refilled it. Since I’d been in there last, the scene in the kitchen had deteriorated considerably. Empty bottles had spread over every surface like a virus. A small pile of radioactive-looking Cheez Balls sat at the edge of the counter, overlooking a few fallen compatriots on the floor. And then there were the people: slumped, splayed, splotchy. Yelling for no reason. I wasn’t drunk enough to not find them annoying, so I poured some of the nearest warm vodka and warm Diet Coke in a cup and grimaced through it with my eyes on the doorway to the dance room. Any second now, I thought.
Ten hours later, Ruby appeared, rosy and glowing. I smiled until I saw her expression, which was certifiably Pissed Off. A second later, the reason why staggered through the doorway after her: Mikey. I hadn’t seen him in there, but then again, I hadn’t been looking for anyone else.
Ruby saw me, and our eyes locked. My adrenaline kicked into high gear. I flew across the kitchen to Ruby’s side, inserting myself between her and Mikey.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Ruby nodded, but her eyes were on Mikey, who didn’t seem to notice I was there. He was the kind of drunk you could see, and smell. He propped himself up against a cabinet, glowering.
“We’re having a private conversation,” he said, and finally he looked at me. I hated him so intensely in that moment I wanted to hit him. I imagined him trying to pull Ruby closer by the wrist, and her resisting, then me knocking him flat with a single, well-placed punch. I imagined Ruby thanking me, throwing her arms around my shoulders. My hero, she’d say. It wasn’t that I wanted him to hurt her, but I thought that maybe if I saved her before he could make her cry she’d realize how much she wanted me.
But he didn’t grab her, and Ruby didn’t say anything, so instead of the savior, I was only a creep, still standing between two people who didn’t want me there.
“Sorry,” I muttered. I walked out of the kitchen so it looked like I had somewhere else to be anyway, when of course I didn’t. In the house’s dark and empty entryway I sat on the steps presiding over the sea of shoes and held a hand to my mouth so no one would hear me cry. I felt so stupid for so much: my unrealistic imagination, the gap between the way I wanted to be seen and the way these people actually saw me. For drinking too much, past the point at which I knew I became angrier than I wanted to be. Two drinks was safe. Any more and I ran the risk of reminding myself of my dad. Ugh, my dad. He still hadn’t told me when, or if, he was moving back, and I hadn’t asked for more information in weeks, not wanting to remind him to ask me about college again. I hoped that by Monday, when the tournament was over and the club season with it, I’d have something good to tell him. But I didn’t want to think about that now.
I heard a couple of people coming around the corner, maybe to get their shoes and leave, so I leapt up and took the stairs two at a time. The second floor was dark, and most of the doors were closed. I turned my phone’s flashlight on and then plugged my ears as I ran by every bedroom, searching for an unoccupied bathroom. I found one at the end of the hall. When I flicked on the light I gasped; it was bigger than my bedroom, and maybe my mom’s as well: tan granite and dark tile everywhere, and a glass-enclosed shower so cavernous it creeped me out a little. I closed the door behind me and stepped closer to the giant gilded mirror to examine the damage. I was puffy, but not terribly so, and the little bit of eyeliner I’d put on had mostly remained in place. It took me a minute to figure out how to work the sink, but when I did I ran my hands under cold water and pressed them to my face. I looked at the curved metal faucet and had an idea I knew, as I had it, was a drunk one. I leaned forward to press my puffy eyes against it, figuring this was basically the same technique I’d seen my mother use with spoons she kept in the freezer. Anyway, it felt good, and grounding somehow, and I stayed hunched over like that for longer than I planned to, until someone knocked on the door, and in my hurry to get my face off the faucet I somehow poked myself in the eye with it.
“Ow!” I yelled.
“Quinn?”
“Ruby?”
With one hand cupped over my presumably empty eye socket I opened the door slowly until I confirmed that it really was Ruby on the other side.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said, knowing this was a ridiculous answer as long as my hand was covering my eye.
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“It might be really gory. I hit it really hard.”
Ruby tried not to laugh. “Okay, well, I’ll steel myself.” She lifted her hand to mine and pulled it gently away. I wanted to be mad at her, for having the nerve to come here and touch me like that just minutes after her freaking lovers’ rendezvous in the kitchen, but I also didn’t want her to ever stop touching me. When she saw my eye she gasped, which made me gasp, and I whirled to face the mirror to find my injured eye…mostly identical to my uninjured one, save for slightly smudged eyeliner.
“You scared me!”
Ruby shook with silent laughter.
“It really hurt. It really felt like I broke something.”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing weird. It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re drunker than I thought.”
“Yeah, well.” I had to cope somehow, I thought.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I felt the rest of my face redden to match my eye wound. I didn’t really mean to get into this, but I could already sense my feelings threatening to spill from my mouth. I knew they weren’t all fair, but it felt like if I did not say them, I would die.
“You didn’t come with me. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Ruby smirked, but not meanly. “There are, like, a lot of other people here to talk to.”
“Yeah, but nobody else I want to talk to.” She looked at her feet, watching them take a tiny step closer to me. I stayed where I was. I’d been this person so many times before, even before I understood what it meant: waiting for a girl to choose me the way I’d chosen her. My entire middle school experience was defined by girls I was crazy about abandoning me the moment they got boyfriends. None of them understood why it hurt me so much. I knew why, but couldn’t put it into words. Boyfriends, even ex-boyfriends, remained a somewhat special presence in my life. I envied them, and I was afraid of them, and when I’d had a little to drink, I hated them. “You have…people here.”
“Like Mikey, you mean.”
“Among others.” I shrugged, as if that weren’t exactly what I’d meant.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“What?” I said. But then she kisse
d me. Really kissed me. Pushed me into the wall behind me kissed me. Her hand on the back of my neck and both of mine on her shoulders, her back, her hips and waist, the top of her butt. I felt her blindly wave her unoccupied arm at the door until it was closed, and the lock clicked. There was no going back after a kiss like that.
* * *
—
I woke up in Ruby’s bedroom not believing where I was. I saw her in bed, above me, from where I slept in the nicest sleeping bag I had ever encountered, and still it seemed fake. I felt around for my phone to look for evidence that I wasn’t losing my mind. It was 6:32. I had texted my mom at 12:17, during a make-out break, to let her know I’d drunk too much to drive home and would be sleeping at a friend’s house. She’d sent me a thumbs-up emoji and a drop of water, meaning: drink some. If she knew friend referred to Ruby, she didn’t say so, and I loved her for it.
Sometime after that we half ran, half walked from David’s house to Ruby’s, holding hands up and down the tar-paved hills in the dark.
Ruby’s parents were long asleep by then, and she made us tiptoe in the side door, across the entire first floor, and up the stairs that curved around their grand octagonal foyer. Twice on the stairs the wood creaked loudly beneath my unpracticed feet, and each time, Ruby reached out to grab my arm and hold me firm in place, freezing us both until she was sure her parents hadn’t woken. Instead of getting off at the second floor as expected, Ruby pulled me toward another set of stairs, which I climbed with one hand in hers and the other clinging to the banister. I was afraid of heights, particularly those witnessed from staircases, but I made myself look over the edge at the foyer growing farther below us. I tried to think if I’d ever been in a house with three stories before but could only come up with some historic miner’s mansion my fifth-grade class had toured on a field trip we took during our Gold Rush unit. And even that might have been more like two and a half.