Beige

by Cecil Castellucci

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Like you’d care,” she says.

  I might care if she tried me. I don’t say anything. I have learned that if I wait long enough, eventually she’ll cough up what’s on her mind.

  I lock the door behind me and follow quietly behind Lake. Her body in motion looks like it’s an attack on the air and an assault to the pavement. It’s like she wants to fight with everything.

  “The only reason I’m coming is because those bitches bailed on me for practice tonight.” It’s always about the band. Always how the band is holding her back.

  At the party, Lake doesn’t say hello to anyone until she finds the beer. I stay out of her way. She can just cool off. She brings me a beer but I don’t accept it. I don’t drink.

  “Fine, more for me, then,” she says.

  I go and find a soda and then start scanning the room for Leo. He said he’d be there at eight p.m. By nine-thirty, I’m still standing in the corner with Lake. I’m feeling bored and I’m staring at the door, willing it to open and for Leo to finally step through it. Only when Leo arrives will the party really start.

  I scan the room. People are huddled in corners. Music is blasting. Some kids are making out. There’s black light making everything glow. I notice a girl stumble out of the kitchen. She’s laughing hysterically as she trips over someone’s legs and stumbles.

  This is not my kind of party. I ignore the crazy and concentrate on the door.

  Lake goes on and on, providing me with a nonstop color commentary on how boring and lame everyone at the party is. Everyone is a poseur. Everyone has betrayed her. Everyone has a problem. She’s such a victim. Fuck them all. Blah, blah, blah.

  I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that she’s the one with the social problem.

  I tune her out and think of Leo.

  Time keeps ticking by. He said to meet him here.

  Where is he?

  And then Leo walks in. Everything starts to move in slow motion and everyone around him blurs out. It is only him. Time stops.

  “Oh, look what the cat finally dragged in,” Lake says.

  Leo is with a posse of friends. He stands in the doorway and surveys the room. He looks gorgeous. His hair is perfectly tousled. He’s wearing khakis just like me, and flip-flops and a blue and white button-down shirt. The top two buttons are open, and I can see the hollow at the base of his throat. And his smooth skin.

  Who am I kidding? A guy like Leo isn’t going to notice a girl like me.

  He’s obviously going to pass me by. So many girls go right up to him and say hello. They surround him. He could have his pick of anyone. Maybe he just asked me here to be nice. To be neighborly.

  But it’s me who he walks right up to.

  “Hey, Katy, you made it,” he says. He calls me Katy. Not Beige. Katy.

  He ignores Lake.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Cool,” he says. Then he leans up against me. He puts one arm on the wall behind me, kind of pinning me in, and with the other hand he traces my cheek and then he leans his face into mine and kisses me.

  I am kissing. At a party. I am kissing a god at a party. He’s moving his hands up and down my arms. I feel all shivery.

  “See ya,” I think I hear Lake say next to me. I don’t know. I’m too busy kissing.

  When he breaks away from me, I catch my breath. I notice Lake is gone. I don’t care.

  “You’re a good kisser,” he says, and then kisses me again. And I don’t tell him that I’ve never kissed anyone before. I just go with it.

  He licks my neck. He sucks on my neck. He sticks his tongue in my ear. I do whatever he does right back to him. I even feel up his chest.

  He bites my earlobe and then whispers, “Do you want a beer?”

  Even though I don’t want one, I say, “Yeah.”

  I don’t tell him that I don’t drink beer. I don’t want to seem uncool.

  He disappears into the kitchen to get us beer and brings them back and I just drink it. And then I kiss him some more.

  “Oh, I love this song,” he says, and he puts his mouth next to my ear and begins singing in a whisper to me. And for the first time I really hear the music that is playing, and I feel how it accents the moment. Heightens it. I don’t say I don’t know who the band is or what song it is.

  I just agree.

  I just say, “Me, too.”

  CRASH!

  Sounds of bottles falling and someone thudding and people laughing. And then I hear it.

  “You bitches blew off practice!”

  I turn around, breaking away from Leo, to see Lake is shouting at the girls from her band. They look together and collected, like they just stepped out of a magazine photo shoot. Lake looks like a mess.

  They are laughing at her.

  “We have to stick together!” Lake is yelling at them with her high-pitched baby voice.

  “Why?” one of the girls — I think her name is Zoe — says.

  “Because we’re a band. A band is like blood. We’re a team,” Lake yells, pushing the hair back that keeps falling in her face. I have a ponytail holder in my bag she could borrow, but I just stand back and watch the fireworks. I don’t want to get my head cut off when I am trying to help.

  “The point is,” Lake says, “if we’re going to make it, we have to practice.”

  “But, why do we have to practice so much?” Zoe asks.

  “Because, duh, that’s the only way to get better,” Lake says. “I practice every single day.”

  “Which is why you’re not really socialized,” one of the girls — Kim, I think — says.

  “Look, we don’t have to be best friends,” Lake says. “We just have to be great together.”

  She kind of stumbles as she leans forward to make her point, and the keg cup goes flying out of her hand and rolls across the floor, spilling all its beer.

  A bunch of people laugh, and for a second, I kind of feel bad for her.

  “That bitch needs to be housebroken,” one of the girls says, and then high-fives one of the other girls.

  Then Lake’s fist comes flying out, but before it connects, one of the boys has pinned her arms behind her back.

  “Fuck off!” she shouts, trying to shake the boy off her. The Skooby’s flyers she brought flutter to the floor.

  There’s more laughing.

  I should really do something, but Leo pulls my face back toward him.

  “Forget about her,” he says. Then he sticks his tongue in my mouth. I have no choice; I can’t say anything. I just keep kissing.

  Later on, one of Leo’s friends comes over and interrupts us.

  “Yo, Marco,” Leo says. “What’s up?”

  Marco looks at me. “You’re Lake’s friend, right?”

  “Not really,” I say. I don’t know why I say that except that I know Leo doesn’t think Lake is cool.

  “Well, you came here with her, right?”

  I nod.

  “She’s puking her guts up in my bathroom. Can you get her out of here?”

  At first I don’t move. But Leo and Marco are just kind of looking at me.

  “It’s OK,” Leo says. “You should probably go help her.”

  So, even though I don’t want to, I follow Marco down the hallway to the bathroom.

  Lake is lying on the floor, her arms draped around the toilet bowl, her hair covering her face. Her dirty black sweatshirt is covered with Grown-Ups patches, meticulously hand sewn. This is no Hot Topic outfit. Lake even looks like she’s keeping it real when hugging a toilet.

  She retches again. I try to hold her hair back, but there’s too much of it. I take the ponytail holder out of my hair and wrap it around hers.

  Lake looks up at me. One eye open, trying to focus. I bet she’s seeing double.

  “Can you just get me out of here?” she slurs. “Beige, please just get me out of here!”

  There is a little piece of vomit in the corner of her mouth. I take a piece of
toilet paper and wipe it off. I can’t leave Lake. I don’t want to take her home. But I pick her up off the floor and lead her out of the house. I want to say good-bye to Leo, but I don’t see him.

  What should I do? Think, Katy, think. Whatever you do, just don’t make a beige choice. Get it right. It wouldn’t be good for her grandmother to see her all messed up.

  I know. I’ll take her to her jam space. It’s not so far from here. I can think about what to do there.

  I go through all of Lake’s keys and try to find the one that opens the door.

  Lake, knowing where she is, stumbles out of my arms and gropes for the angel, producing a spare key from behind its wing.

  “There,” she says, holding up the key. She stumbles to the door and tries to put it in the lock, but gives up and so I do it.

  When the door finally opens, she pushes past me and flops down onto the couch.

  I pop open the fridge and get her a Coke.

  “Drink this,” I say.

  I want to go back to the party. I don’t want to be here. Maybe I can leave her now. Maybe I’ve done enough. I will still win my nice-girl points.

  “Get me a blanket,” Lake demands.

  I look around. I shrug.

  Can’t I just go?

  Lake starts waving madly, so I turn and I notice a wardrobe. I open it up and find a bunch of jackets, and at the bottom, there is a sleeping bag. I pull it out. Underneath it, I notice a knit blanket. I know that knit.

  I cover Lake with the sleeping bag and sit at her feet, and I wrap myself in the knit blanket. My mom’s knit blanket. It’s probably the one she sent to Sam Suck, or to Yana.

  Lake starts monologuing, but it makes no sense at all. I can only understand, like, every fifth word, and the thread of her thoughts is all over the place. She’s mixing up school, band, the world, unfairness, Leo, me, Sam Suck, people, making out, sex, love, and rock and roll.

  She’s just messed up. She’s just drunk. She’s not in control of herself. I don’t like it. It scares me.

  I’m a little buzzed, but I don’t know if it’s from the half beer I drank or from kissing Leo.

  “Lake, are you ever afraid?” I say, pulling the blanket tighter around me. She probably won’t answer me. She probably can’t focus on what I’m saying. But it feels good to ask her something from my heart right out loud.

  “Afraid of what?” Lake mumbles after a minute, surprising me.

  “That we’ll become addicts,” I’m whispering. “That we’ll lose control?”

  “No,” Lake says. “I’m not going down that road. No way.”

  “I’m afraid of it,” I say.

  I don’t say anything after that.

  I am quiet for a while. I’m not going to go back to the party.

  “Your hair looks really good like that,” Lake says. “You should wear it down more often.”

  The next sound I hear is her snoring.

  I flip open my cell phone and call The Rat.

  While I’m waiting for him to get there, I walk around the jam space. I’m feeling too hopped-up on endorphins or adrenaline or kissing or beer or truth to sit still. And the space, walking this jam space, is soothing. That’s when I see it, handwritten words on the wall. I thought it was graffiti or something, but it’s not. It’s something more than that. It’s hard to see from anywhere but up close that the handwritten words are sentences. I move some of the instruments aside so I can get close and read what’s written.

  The Rat knocks on the jam space door and it makes me jump. Like I’ve been caught with my thoughts hanging out. Caught agreeing. He knocks again. I forgot I locked the door behind me because I was scared. I let him in.

  “Whoa,” he says. “This is twice as big as mine.”

  He looks around, nodding in approval. I wonder if it feels as good to him in here as it does to me.

  “Is she OK?” he asks.

  “I think so. She got drunk. She fought with her friends.”

  “OK, we’ll call Mrs. Hassock and let her know that Lake is all right.”

  “It’s not too late?”

  “Mrs. Hassock’s rules. When we were growing up, as long as Sam and I called his mom to tell her where we were sleeping, no matter what time, she didn’t care where we were.”

  “What about you?” I ask. “What about your parents?”

  The Rat shakes his head.

  “They didn’t care,” The Rat says. “I pretty much lived at the Hassocks’.”

  The Rat came out in the middle of the night and picked me up.

  He didn’t mind at all. He was fine about it. He was glad I called.

  No questions asked.

  Lake leans too long on the doorbell. I know it’s her, and I don’t want to answer. She doesn’t give up, and I know she won’t go away.

  I don’t want to talk to her.

  But then she starts screaming my name up at the window, so I break down and I let her in.

  She blows into my room like nothing happened last night and shoves a shirt into my hand.

  “This is for you,” she says. “I don’t wear it anymore.”

  It’s a faded black T-shirt with a maple leaf on it. It says CANADUH.

  I take it as her way of saying thank you. Or I’m sorry. She should be sorry! She’s supposed to say it. I deserve an apology. I don’t even know why I took care of her.

  But she’d never say the words. She’s not that kind of person. It bugs me. No one is that kind of person. Except me. I could be. I am. I say it. I say the words.

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” I say.

  “That’s cool,” Lake says. “No problem.”

  She doesn’t get it. I wasn’t asking for her forgiveness. I was saying it as a hint, for her to follow my lead for once. I was saying it like, I’m sorry you were drunk, that sucks for you. You must be so embarrassed. I would be.

  Now I’m mad. I want to explode.

  I am standing in the middle of my room trembling as I watch Lake sit on my bed as per usual with my guitar. She looks up at me.

  “Fuck it. I said I’m over it,” she says, leaning toward me. As though she’s being earnest.

  Doesn’t she know I wiped puke off her face? Held her hair back? Gave her a soda? Let her lean on me because she could hardly walk?

  “I’m totally hungover,” she says. “But I’ve got to jam. Wanna come?”

  “No,” I say. I start swallowing a lot. I’m burning up.

  “What’s up?” she says. “You look weird.”

  Great. She’s finally noticing something besides herself.

  If she were my real friend, then she would have known. Or seen. Or remembered.

  I just wanted to be with Leo. I didn’t want to take care of her.

  If she were a real friend, I could tell her. Tell her about Leo and me. It would be nice to talk with someone, because I feel confused. If she were a real friend like Leticia, I could talk to her about it.

  If she were a real friend, I could ask her, what does it mean when you make out with a guy all night at a party? Does it mean something?

  “Speak,” Lake says.

  But I don’t want to share this feeling with her. She’ll drown it.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t want to cry.

  “Beige. What is up?” she asks.

  I don’t say anything.

  “OK! OK! I know! I’m a dick. I got drunk. I made a scene! I’m sorry,” Lake says.

  She means it. She is sorry. She said it.

  It doesn’t make me feel better.

  “Did I do something? Did I puke on you?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Well then, what?” she says. “I didn’t fight with you, right? I fought with the Grown-Ups.”

  “I was hanging out with Leo,” I say finally. “But then I had to stop and take care of you.”

  “This is about Leo?” Lake asks.

  “No,” I say.

  Yes, it is. It is about Leo. And how I’m not your frien
d. I want to say it. I could say it. But I don’t. Because she is like my not-friend. Like Los Angeles is my not-home. And the nice girl inside of me can’t be too mean.

  “You didn’t have to do that. Take care of me,” Lake says. “I can handle myself. I’m housebroken.”

  I count to ten before I speak. I try to calm myself down.

  “Who else was going to do it, Lake? You had your head down a toilet. You hate your band. You’re a bitch to everyone. You have no friends. Everybody needs friends.”

  My voice is getting louder and higher. I hear the pitch changing as I get more breathless. I sound crazy to my own ears.

  I can’t believe I said it, but it’s true, I think. Even I need a friend, which is why I’ve tolerated Lake all summer.

  “I have friends. They’re just not in high school. They’re musicians. Real ones,” Lake says. “And I have you. You’re my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend for real. We’re temporary,” I say. “And now Leo thinks I’m lame because he thinks I’m your friend.”

  “Oh,” Lake says. “I see.”

  “Oh?”

  Lake just sits on the bed. She kind of looks at the black nail polish on her fingers. She kind of looks off out the window.

  “Let me tell you something about Leo, as your temporary friend. He’s a player. He’s a jerk. And he’s an asshole.”

  “How would you know?” I ask.

  But I know how she knows. I saw them by the pool, through the lorgnettes, fighting like they were more than friends.

  “You have something going on with Leo, don’t you?” I ask.

  “I did,” Lake says. “It’s ancient history.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I don’t like him,” she says. “I needed to get material for my songs. I can’t write about nothing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I just needed him for the angst,” she says. She seems flustered.

  “You used him?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. It was fun. But he’s not, like, ever going to be the love of my life. He’s not a kindred spirit or anything. He’s not even my type.”

  “You’re a user,” I say. “You use people.”