by Jennifer Yu
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Kevin says.
“I know I don’t need to,” I say. “But I do.”
Kevin looks at me, and it’s almost a glare, almost like he wants to argue with me for caring about him. But then he sighs, shrugs and goes back to reading.
“Kevin,” I say. “Does your mom even know that something is wrong? Did you say anything to her?”
“I said that I wanted to go to Columbia,” he says. “We’ve been talking about this all week, Stella. I gave her a fucking printout. She knows.”
“Yeah, but...”
I think of his mom, standing in the doorway, puzzled that he wasn’t at dinner. The calmness of her voice. How ordinary everything seemed.
“But does she really know?” I say. “Because your mom answered the door when I rang, and she seemed—”
I don’t finish the rest of my sentence, because Kevin has lifted his arm and thrown his book across the room. It lands on the floor next to his desk with a dull thud, and I’m so shocked that it takes me a second to realize that my heart is racing and my palms are starting to sweat.
That wasn’t fear, I tell myself. You are not afraid of him, you were just caught off guard. It’s just Kevin, it’s still Kevin, Stella, get yourself under control.
“Yes,” Kevin is saying. “She seemed fine. Because she is fine. Because that’s how she always is. Fine. Everything is always fine with her, okay? She’s fine with it when you stay over and she’s fine with it when I get high with Yago and she’s fine with it when their son has to go to a fucking state school instead of Columbia because of money. SHE’S SO ZEN THAT I COULD PROBABLY DIE AND SHE’D JUST DO A PORTRAIT OF ME IN MEMORIAM OR SOMETHING—HAVEN’T WE TALKED ABOUT THIS?”
This is the point at which I should just cut my losses and give up. I should say, Okay. Okay, Kevin, I’m sorry, and I should get into the bed and kiss him and hope that tomorrow will be better. But what can I say? I’m just as stubborn as he is, and today is the day it blows up in my face.
“But maybe if you just showed HER, you know, how much this actually means to you, and how upset you actually are, maybe then—”
“STELLA,” Kevin says. “STOP TALKING.”
I stop talking.
Kevin closes his eyes. Takes three deep breaths.
“I feel like you don’t understand,” Kevin says. “And I’m tired, Stella. Of trying to make you understand.”
My feet are at the edge of the water. There is shouting that sounds far, far away. But I cannot find my hands.
“I’m worried about you,” I whisper.
Kevin stares at me.
“That’s very sweet,” he says.
I walk across the floor and pick up the book he was reading. Penguin Modern Classics, the cover says. Albert Camus. The Outsider.
I walk over to the bed, book in hand, and sit down next to him.
“Do you want me to stay?” I say, and when I look him in the eye, it hurts in a way that screams, How can something that feels like this not be worth saving?
Please, I think.
Kevin drops his gaze.
I put the book on the bed between us and leave.
55.
What kind of person, I think to myself, lets this happen to someone she loves?
56.
On Thursday, Kevin is cutting in the bathroom.
On Friday, we fight over Jeremy for the fiftieth time.
And Saturday, I decide, fuck it. I’m going to get drunk.
61.
In hindsight, taking six shots of tequila over the span of one hour probably does not qualify as one of my better decision-making moments.
I don’t even have a very good explanation for why I do it. I’m just tired, I guess. I’m tired of feeling sad. I’m tired of feeling angry at myself. I’m tired of feeling frustrated and helpless and desperate. I’m tired of feeling, period, and so when Jeremy texts me on Saturday night to tell me that he’s throwing a party to celebrate the end of our Childhood and Home Ec unit—or, as I prefer to call it, the Health Unit from Hell—I approach getting fucked up with the manic determination of someone who may never see another drop of alcohol ever again. I know it won’t make me happy, and I know it won’t fix things with Kevin. But it’ll do something. It’ll get me out of my head. It’ll make me forget, or maybe it’ll just make me stop caring. Whatever it’ll do, I’ll take it.
“Listen,” I say to Katie as we walk from her house to Jeremy’s that night. It’s one of the first remotely warm days that we’ve had this year—not true warm, mind you, we’re still barely in the fifties—but the snow has melted and it’s starting to feel like it might not be winter in Connecticut forever. “Do me a favor?”
“What’s up, Stella?”
“Could you just...”
I trail off, trying to think of the best way to word a request that, if I’m honest with myself, is pretty unreasonable. Just ask her, I think to myself. Just spit it out.
“CouldyounottellKevinaboutthisparty?” I say.
I remember this moment perfectly, because Katie is in the middle of using selfie mode on her phone as a mirror. She’s making all of those ridiculous faces that people make when they’re checking themselves out, like raising her eyebrows to make sure her eye shadow is even, and opening her mouth to check the corners of her lips for lipstick, and then all of a sudden, her face just...freezes. Midpout. A split second where her face might as well be made of marble. And then she lowers her phone and slips it into her pocket.
“Stella,” she says uncertainly.
“Katie?”
“Are you sure that everything is okay?”
If there is a moment for me to say something to someone, it is now. Katie is looking at me with the expression of someone who cares—who really, really cares—and I trust her more than I trust anyone else in the world. There’s a part of me that’s dying to say something. To tell her what I can’t tell Karen, and I can’t tell my parents, and I certainly can’t tell Kevin.
But then I think, We’re on our way to a party, for God’s sake. Wasn’t the point of tonight to think about something else for once?
“Everything is okay,” I say. I start walking again and keep my gaze pointed firmly in front of me until I hear Katie’s footsteps coming up behind me.
“Are you sure?” Katie says. “Stella, I’m not trying to interrogate you or make you talk about something that you don’t want to talk about.”
She pauses for a second.
“Actually, that’s kind of exactly what I’m trying to do. Because even though you clearly don’t want to talk about this, I really think we should.”
She stops again, and this time grabs on to my arm so I can’t keep walking.
“I’m serious, Stella. You never respond to my texts. And every time I see you at school, you look like you’re on the verge of an emotional meltdown. And now you’re keeping secrets from Kevin?”
“It’s not like that,” I say, tugging on Katie’s arm. It’s no use. She’s planted firmly where she is, so that’s where the two of us stay: halfway between Juniper and Oak Street on Bristol Lane, directly under a streetlight so orange that everything feels vaguely surreal.
“Okay,” I say. “It’s kind of like that. But I’ll tell you about it later, okay?” I add, when Katie makes a satisfied noise, “Not now. Seriously, I want to have fun tonight. And this isn’t the way to do it.”
“But—”
“Please?” I say. And I must look pretty damn pathetic, because Katie sighs. Gives into my pulling. And starts moving again.
“Promise you’ll hang out with me after school on Monday and tell me what the hell is going on,” Katie says.
“I promise,” I say.
“Okay,” she says.
When I look back on this moment, I can’t help but t
hink that maybe if I had told Katie, things would have ended differently. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to Jeremy’s at all. Maybe we would’ve gone back to her house and changed out of the ridiculous outfits that we’re wearing and spent the rest of the night talking. Like we used to do.
And maybe, after a couple of hours of talking, I would’ve mustered up the courage to tell Katie that it often feels like the only good thing in my life is falling apart. That even though I can remember a time when I had other good things—when the two of us texted every day, when Lin and I weren’t complete strangers to each other—it’s been so long that I don’t know how to get to back to that place. That I don’t know how to be that person again.
And maybe I would’ve told her that underneath all of my anger and sadness and frustration is fear. I’m afraid because I was the one who forgot about Lin’s Brown application, and I was the one who stopped texting Katie back, and I was the one who got swept up in the moment and threw all of the good things in my life away for a relationship that is going down in flames, and now it feels like it’s too late to go back. Maybe I’m just getting what I deserve.
But we don’t go back to Katie’s house, and I don’t tell her any of those things. Instead, I thread my arm through hers, linking them at the elbows like we’re fourth graders headed toward the playground at recess. And I walk toward Jeremy’s.
* * *
By the time we get there, it’s 9:45 p.m. and the party is in full swing. I look around and feel a rising sense of panic as I realize that I could add up the number of conversations I have had with every single person at this party other than Katie and fit the total on one hand.
“Oh, God,” I say. “I don’t know anyone here.”
“Huh?” Katie says. She moves us through the crowd and toward the kitchen table, where a stack of red Solo cups a foot high declares that yes, this is going to be that kind of high school party. “Sure you do,” she says. She takes two cups off the top and starts pouring. “That’s Melissa Brochton and her boyfriend, Ben, and there’s Ashley, and that’s Jennie and Victoria...”
“Those are people that you know, Katie!” I say. “I wanted to come to this party so badly that I forgot to think about the actual party. Like the fact that it’s being hosted by Jeremy Cox... So it’s full of Jeremy Cox’s friends...none of whom I have ever talked to in my life!”
Katie puts one cup down in front of me. “Stella,” she says.
“Please, Katie. Take me home before I embarrass myself further than I already have simply by breathing in the general vicinity of the Bridgemont aristocracy.”
I take a breath and look at the drink that Katie’s made, which is a very interesting shade of orange.
“But first,” I say, “what’s in this drink?”
“Drink it and find out,” she says with a wink. And then she grabs my arm and pulls me into the crowd.
62. A Brief Interlude
Now, I wish I could tell you that I spend the rest of the night meeting new people, and having interesting conversations with those people, and playing beer pong on the living room table that Jeremy has covered entirely in Saran Wrap. You know, having fun, like normal people do when they go to parties like this.
But I can’t say any of that. And the reason I can’t say any of that is not, in fact, because it didn’t happen—not necessarily, anyway. The reason why I can’t say any of that is because I down the drink that Katie pours me (a sex on the beach, she tells me the next day, her voice rueful) in about ten minutes, and then another one, because it’s the best thing I’ve ever tasted, and then Jeremy and I do a shot of God-knows-what to commemorate the successful disposal of our child, and then I’m doing a shot with one of Jeremy’s friends from the football team for reasons that I never really understand, and then...well, I don’t know what happens then. Maybe I do spend the rest of the night meeting new people, and having interesting conversations with them, and playing beer pong on the living room table. I wouldn’t know, because I don’t remember anything that happens between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.
In fact, the next thing that I’m really aware of after my buddy-buddy moment with Carter the Offensive Lineman is linoleum. Specifically, how oddly, intensely cold linoleum feels when your skin is pressed up against it.
And the reason I’m thinking about the thermodynamic properties of linoleum is because I’m on my knees in Jeremy’s bathroom, trying not to throw up.
63.
“What is happening?” I’m moaning. The entire bathroom is spinning around me and I feel like I have the flu, a stomach virus and really terrible vertigo all at once. “Am I dead?”
I become vaguely aware of the fact that all of my words are spilling out of my mouth at once no matter how slowly I try to say them, so that “Am I dead?” sounds more like, “Ehm-eye-dehhh?”
“You’re not dead,” Jeremy Cox says behind me, and it hits me, really hits me, that I’m ON MY KNEES IN JEREMY COX’S BATHROOM AFTER GETTING DRUNK AT HIS PARTY, TRYING NOT TO THROW UP.
If Kevin was here to see this, he’d laugh. Then he’d probably never talk to me again.
“Where is Katie?” I manage to say. “I need Katie. Have you ever looked at Katie’s hair? Katie has amazing hair. Remember when it was purple?”
Then I make retching noises that I’m too ashamed to describe further.
“Katie had to leave an hour ago,” Jeremy says patiently. I get the feeling that he’s told me this multiple times already.
“Why?” I say. In my current state, the idea that Katie would leave me—well, in my current state—is deeply devastating. Like, I don’t know that I have ever needed Katie more than I do in this moment, right now, right here, and the fact that she is at her house three miles away instead seems like it should go down as one of the great tragedies of the twenty-first century, up there with the baffling popularity of the Kardashians and the number of Michael Bay films that Hollywood has put out.
“She told her parents that she would be home at one,” Jeremy says. “She wanted to stay, but then she’d have to give her parents a good reason, and she didn’t want to tell them that you got super-fucked-up, because then her parents would tell everyone else’s parents at—”
“I fucking hate the book club!” I say, and it’s not until I hear my own voice echoing back at me off the bathroom walls that I realize that I’ve shouted.
Then I throw up into the toilet.
“How’d you know it was the book club?” Jeremy says, as if he hasn’t just watched me vomit in his bathroom.
The nausea has subsided, but everything is still spinning, and when I try to turn around and look at Jeremy, I fall over.
“There’s water next to you,” Jeremy says as I claw my way back up to my knees.
“Did you pour me this?” I say, staring at the glass of water next to me. I don’t know why I sound so angry. I think it’s because I’ve spent the last three years thinking that Jeremy was this huge asshole football player type, and I was so pissed when this health project forced me to interact with him, and now I’m the one throwing up in his bathroom, and he’s the one pouring me water.
“Yeah,” Jeremy says. “You should drink it.”
I take a couple of sips of water.
It is very, very bright in this bathroom.
I’m starting to feel nauseous again.
Everything is terrible.
Then, out of nowhere, a brilliant idea strikes me. Probably the most brilliant idea that I’ve ever had; certainly more brilliant than that shot with Carter the Offensive Lineman.
The idea goes like this: maybe if I just close my eyes and lie down on the bathroom floor, all of this will go away, and I’ll wake up in Katie’s room, and Katie will be saying, “Wow, we sure had a wild night. You really met a lot of new people, and had a lot of interesting conversations, and you didn’t even embarrass yourself when you
tried to play beer pong on the Saran-Wrapped living room table,” and I’ll remember everything she’s referring to with photographic clarity, and I won’t be lying on the floor of Jeremy Cox’s bathroom at two in the morning.
I collapse onto the floor with a truly inspiring lack of coordination. “Why are you lying down?” Jeremy asks.
“Ughhhhhhh,” I say. “I want to die.”
“Yeah, getting too drunk always sucks,” Jeremy says, in a tone so agreeable that I can’t help but resent him more. “Do you want some Advil?”
“I don’t want to die because my head hurts,” I say. “I want to die because this is mortifying, and my head hurts so much that I can’t even properly appreciate how mortifying it is.”
“Stella, it happens to everyone!” Jeremy says. “Okay, don’t tell Jennie that I told you this, but after we beat Lexington last season, I got so drunk that I threw up while we were—well, never mind.”
He pauses.
“The point is, this is totally normal, and you shouldn’t feel bad!”
He pauses again.
“Okay, it is a little weird that you sound so pissed off and miserable. But it’s cool. You’re cool, Stella.”
“I don’t want to be cool,” I say. “I want to be somewhere that’s not your bathroom floor, doing something other than watching the ceiling fan spin around and around and around and around and around even though it’s not even on.”
“Well, Kevin will be here in a few minutes,” Jeremy says. “And then you can go lie on his bathroom floor instead.”
And all of a sudden I feel totally, totally sober.
“Kevin is going to be here?” I say, sitting up to look at Jeremy in disbelief. My stomach and head both lurch in protest, but it’s amazing how distracting sheer panic can be.
“Yeah, in like fifteen minutes. I texted him,” Jeremy says. A part of my brain that should have been wiped out by natural selection generations ago chooses this moment to think, Oh, my God, has Jeremy Cox always been this hot?