Boy

by Blake Nelson

  The dance floor got pretty wild. It was way cooler than any high school dance. Two girls appeared beside us who were dressed up like . . . I don’t know what . . . sixties girls? They had thick fake eyelashes and short dresses and different-colored tights. And they were great dancers! Super casual and not moving too much, but totally sexy. They never looked at anyone and kept the same unreadable half smiles on their faces. Then I looked over at Antoinette and realized she was like them, super chill and relaxed and moving just enough and in just the right way to be totally hot. Since when was Antoinette sexy? But she was. She totally was.

  We danced for a long time. People would come and go off the dance floor. You’d get to know the different people by their look, their style, the way they moved. One girl bobbed her head from side to side. One guy in white jeans did slow-motion reptile moves, like a snake. And since we were all stuck inside—you couldn’t leave Agenda once you came in—we settled in with each other.

  After an hour, it got pretty hot and sweaty. We took a break and bought cans of Coke, which cost four dollars each and weren’t even cold. More people came in. The night was just getting started, it seemed. And with everyone dressed to the teeth, with their own carefully honed styles, it was really a spectacle. I would have killed to have my camera.

  • • •

  We left around midnight. Outside, I couldn’t quite believe what I had seen.

  “So what do you think?” asked Antoinette.

  “It was great,” I had to admit. “I didn’t know there were such places.”

  “Yes, dear Gavin. There are.”

  “I want to take pictures in there.”

  “Well, you can’t.”

  “Maybe there’s some way.”

  Antoinette dug a cigarette out of her bag. “Why do you always bring your camera when you do stuff with me?”

  “Because there’s interesting people.”

  “They’re not that interesting.”

  “To me they are.”

  Antoinette leaned against her car and lit her cigarette. “Maybe instead of taking pictures of interesting people, you should try to be one.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you could start by going out with someone interesting for once.”

  “Like who?”

  Antoinette smiled in a funny way. At first I didn’t know what she was smiling about. But then I saw that she was looking past me, down the street.

  “How about Britney Vaughn?” she said.

  26

  Britney Vaughn was coming up behind me, her and another girl. The two of them stopped a few feet away.

  “Hello, Britney,” said Antoinette.

  “Hello, Antoinette,” said Britney. But her attention soon shifted to me. She looked me up and down. “You’re the guy who took my picture.”

  “I am,” I said.

  She was going to say something mean but then thought better of it. I knew why. It was because she had posted my picture of her on Facebook, the one where she was giving us the finger. It had 280 likes. It was so popular she was now using it as her profile picture.

  “My name’s Gavin,” I said.

  Britney didn’t answer.

  “You’re welcome for the picture,” I said. “People seem to like it.”

  “I’m going to delete you,” said Britney. “Now that I see what you look like.”

  I didn’t respond, but I understood what she meant. By Agenda standards, I looked like the most boring suburban prep imaginable.

  “Everyone is still pissed at you,” she said to Antoinette.

  “What for?”

  “Flirting with Ryan,” said Britney.

  “Kai flirted with Ryan. Not me.”

  “Bad things happen when you flirt with other people’s boyfriends,” threatened Britney.

  “Oh yeah?” said Antoinette, taking a long, bored drag of her cigarette. “Like what?”

  Britney Vaughn had to think about that for a while. Then, watching Antoinette, she said, “You got another cigarette?”

  Without answering, Antoinette felt in her pocket. She found her cigarettes and threw the pack to Britney.

  I watched all this. My camera was right behind me in the car, but I didn’t dare reach for it. Britney, who had a plain, lumpy face, opened the pack. She flicked it a certain way and a couple of the cigarettes stuck out of it.

  “Can I have two?” she asked Antoinette.

  “No, Britney, you can have one.”

  Britney then gestured to her friend. “Can she have one?”

  “Yes,” said Antoinette, looking away. Britney handed the other girl a cigarette, then stuck the one she was holding behind her ear, then took a third cigarette out of the pack. She lit it. The other girl lit hers.

  Antoinette said: “You guys do know that Ryan was hitting on every girl he saw that night, right?”

  “He was drunk,” said Britney.

  “So whose fault is that?”

  Britney didn’t answer. She stared at Antoinette’s car. “This your car?”

  “Yes,” said Antoinette.

  “I always knew you were rich.”

  “I’m not rich, Britney. It’s a Toyota.”

  Britney, with her lumpy face, took a while to digest this information. She did not give the impression of great intelligence. Then she stared at me again. “Why are you hanging out with this guy?” she asked Antoinette. “Is he your personal photographer?”

  “He goes to my school,” said Antoinette.

  “Oh,” said Britney, looking at me again.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Antoinette, “Gavin was just telling me he likes you. He wants to ask you out.”

  I turned and gave Antoinette a glare I didn’t know I possessed.

  “Him?” said Britney, looking me up and down. “But he’s so white bread. He is sorta cute though. Hey, could you guys lend me twenty bucks?”

  “No, we can’t lend you twenty bucks,” said Antoinette.

  “Ten?”

  “Britney, you came over here to threaten me. You were going to beat me up last week. You can’t ask me for money.”

  Britney smoked her cigarette. Antoinette smoked hers. Britney became bored and turned to her friend. They made some sort of nonverbal decision.

  “We have to go,” Britney said to Antoinette.

  “You sure you don’t want to go out with Gavin here?” Antoinette said.

  Britney turned and looked at me one last time. “No thanks,” she said.

  • • •

  We left Agenda and drove around for a while. I got my Canon out. It felt good to hold it in my hands again. I tried to take a close-up picture of the dashboard in the dark car interior. Then I took some pictures of Antoinette while she drove. She didn’t do the usual things people do, like act shy or put up her hand. She just drove. After a while I started pointing the camera at things outside: signs, buildings, people walking on the sidewalk.

  When she dropped me back at my parents’, I wanted to say something, thank her for taking me around. But I thought that might sound stupid. Better to say nothing.

  Upstairs, in my room, I downloaded my pictures onto my big computer. I knew they were going to be too dark and they were. Still, the ones of Antoinette driving her car were interesting. I’d caught something, some hidden part of her. It was there in the murky image. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t actually make it out.

  Unfortunately, in photography, if you can’t see it, you failed. Seeing it is kind of the whole point.

  JUNIOR YEAR

  (PART TWO)

  A thing you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.

  —Annie Leibovitz

  The best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, and always will be.

  —Bill Cunningham

  27

  At Evergreen everyone was in a good mood after the holidays. People had
gotten phones, cars, video games for Christmas; they’d gone on vacation. Some people had suntans, most noticeably Claude and Hanna, who had gone to Hawaii together with Claude’s parents. Going on vacation as a couple was an impressive step in a high school relationship. No other couple had done that, not that I had heard of. But I guess Claude and Hanna were so beautiful and mature and perfectly matched that nobody minded that they slept together, not even their parents.

  Something was off between Claude and Hanna though. I sensed it immediately when they got back. Hanna, instead of luxuriating in the attention she would inevitably receive, being tanned and even more gorgeous than usual, was suddenly uninterested in it. She seemed bored with people and annoyed with school life in general. She didn’t tell funny stories about Hawaii at lunch, like she normally would have. Nor did she make fun of Claude in some sexual way, which she loved to do: how he fell off the bed during sex, or had a condom stuck to his jeans during dinner. And then a week later she and Claude had an actual fight in the cafeteria, right in front of everyone. I couldn’t tell what it was about, but Hanna became so angry, I thought she might throw something. And this wasn’t Hanna’s usual dramatic play acting. This was actual anger. I’d never seen her like that. I’d never seen either of them like that.

  That moment was also significant because Krista Hoffman was sitting next to me at the time. As the group of us sat there, stunned and embarrassed, it was she and I who exchanged looks of did that just happen? It was also at that moment that I realized that whenever Krista sat with us, she always took that same spot at the table, right next to me.

  Krista had also returned from winter vacation with a tan. It looked especially good on her, with her freckles and her bouncy blond hair. She was having a great year. She always looked fantastic and she seemed to be everywhere, at all the parties, always with the cutest sophomore girls or the best-looking guys. She had begun to hang around us, too, sitting with us at lunch sometimes, saying hi at parties. Not that she talked much. She tended to shut up when Hanna or Petra were around. She understood they were her social superiors. But she still liked to be around them. And apparently she liked to be around me, too.

  I realized this one day when I came back to my locker and Krista was hovering a few feet away. She didn’t see me at first. I came up behind her and surprised her and she immediately turned red and started waving air at herself. I made a dumb joke about sophomores not being allowed in the junior/senior wing. She blushed, which was extremely cute.

  • • •

  Nothing happened that day at my locker, but within a week, Logan, Olivia, and I ended up at Krista’s McMansion. It wasn’t a party; it was more just Krista and some of her friends hanging out.

  People were mostly downstairs or outside in the hot tub, which was extra steamy on a cold night in January. At one point Krista and I were in the hot tub with some other people. Krista kept smiling at me like she does. Eventually, some of the other people left the tub and went inside. Krista stayed. I did too. It seemed like something was going to happen, but I wasn’t sure what. More people left. And then the last person left. And then it was just us, alone in the green glowing water.

  “Kind of a quiet night,” I said to her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “People always want me to have big parties. But sometimes I’d rather just have my friends.”

  “Less damage to the house,” I said.

  “It gives you a chance to talk to people.”

  “Yeah, that’s nice.”

  Krista moved into the middle of the tub and hovered in the deeper water in front of me. She lowered her head into the water, until just her face was in the air. Then she popped back up and gave me her biggest, brightest, most scrunched-faced grin.

  “You have the best smile,” I said to her.

  “Really? What does it look like?”

  “Like pure happiness and fun.”

  “That’s me,” she said. “Pure happiness. And lots of fun.”

  “What do you think is the funnest thing to do?” I asked her.

  She thought about it. “I like kissing,” she said.

  “Yeah, kissing’s pretty good,” I agreed.

  “And other things.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Other things are good too.”

  We both went silent then. But it was a good silence. The best kind. The very best kind.

  • • •

  We ended up in her room. It was not like with Rachel Lehman, where it was all about a single kiss. With Krista—since we were in our bathing suits and practically naked already—it moved from kissing to “other things” pretty quickly. It was like both of us were waiting for the other to slow things down. But neither of us did.

  Finally, sensing my hesitation, Krista pulled away. “Are we going too fast?” she said.

  “No, no,” I said. But we were. To me we were.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wrapping a towel around herself. “I get carried away sometimes.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It was me. It was my fault.”

  “I’m only a sophomore,” she said.

  “No. Really. It’s okay.”

  “Is this too weird?” she said seriously. “Do you want to say this never happened?”

  “What? No. Of course not. Do you?”

  “No?” she said.

  She still looked worried though. So I moved toward her. I put my arms around her. I hugged her and rocked her and kissed the top of her head.

  Eventually she turned her face up and kissed me on the lips. And then it started all over again.

  • • •

  So then Krista and I were together. We were a couple. Maybe it was good that it happened so fast. I didn’t have a chance to screw it up.

  It was odd timing too, because two days later the news swept through school that Hanna and Claude had broken up. This was huge news. By this time, Hanna and Claude were the most respected, envied, and admired couple not just in our class, but in our whole school. And at other schools too.

  Nobody knew what happened. I couldn’t find Claude at lunch, and his car was gone from the parking lot after sixth period. Hanna supposedly ran out of her history class in tears. And then the next day neither of them came to school.

  So then the rumors started, rumors about Claude and Petra. Claude had been seen walking with Petra. Petra and Claude were talking after school. Petra’s car was parked at Claude’s house. People speculated: Petra had never stopped loving Claude. She had been pining away for him since freshman year. Things had possibly happened, physical things, sexual things. And of course with Hanna and Claude having their mysterious problems, this was her chance. All this time she had been waiting and biding her time and now Petra had returned, to claim what was hers.

  28

  Meanwhile, I was with Krista Hoffman. I wasn’t sure how exactly that was going to work. It wasn’t like with Grace, where we could just follow our friends around and always be together. Most of Krista’s high school life took place in the freshman/sophomore wing at school. It was possible to not see her at all during the day. And though she was accepted by the older kids, most of her close friends were in her own grade. Unlike Grace, she wasn’t the kind of person who dropped her old friends because she got a new boyfriend. From our first couple conversations, I learned that Krista had pretty much always had a boyfriend. Needless to say, she wasn’t a virgin.

  On Saturday we played tennis. Krista knew I was a tennis player and she wanted to try out for the girls varsity that spring, so it made sense. She’d never played competitive tennis before, so when we met up at her parents’ athletic club, I was surprised how good she was. She had a small, compact body and was fast on the court. She had a reputation as this party girl, but she could clearly focus when she wanted to. She was competitive and a natural athlete.

  It was a good first date, playing tennis. It gave me a chance to be confident and good at something in front of her. It gave her a chance to run around and get out her aggressions. Also she was
super hot in her tennis outfit. A lot of the guys at the club were totally watching her, I noticed.

  After tennis I drove Krista home. She invited me in to take a hot tub, which would be good for our muscles, she said. Her mom seemed fine with this, so we went up to her room and changed into bathing suits, during which Krista seemed even more gushy and smiley than usual.

  I followed her out to the hot tub with my towel. She got in first, and I followed. The green foam and bubbles gurgled around us. Krista did her thing where she went in the middle, into the deepest part, and lowered her head all the way down into the water until only her face was still in the air.

  “Remember the other night when we were in the hot tub together?” she said.

  I nodded that I did.

  “You said I was super fun,” said Krista, grinning.

  “And you are,” I said, grinning myself. We are totally going to have sex, I suddenly realized. Like soon. Like when we get back up to her room.

  “I like it when you say nice things to me,” said Krista.

  “You’re an easy person to say nice things to.”

  She lay back again. I moved into the center too and put my head back and looked up. There was a light drizzle falling. The light of the hot tub illuminated the tiny drops of moisture as they fell, so they looked like a million tiny beings flying down at you, attacking you, but then swerving away, just at the last minute.

  • • •

  Upstairs, I could see that Krista had things planned out a certain way. First, she wanted to take a shower. Together.