by Joe Meno
OK, so the party was in Laura’s basement, Laura, the redhead who had sometimes fooled around with Bobby B. when Kim and Bobby B. had been dating, but all that was over now, and apparently Kim and Laura were now like best friends. Laura was having this party, and she had bought her mom and dad this gift certificate for Sybaris, this couples spa motel with, like, hot tubs in the room, to keep them away for the night, and, well, she had gone all out and had decorated her entire basement which like everyone else’s in the neighborhood was one long rectangle but with fake brown paneling, and she put up orange and black streamers and crepe paper and cut-outs of cats and ghosts and monsters and there were like five carved jack-o’-lanterns, all lit up and everything, and all kinds of spooky food, like a green brain-shaped Jell-O mold and orange and black M&M cupcakes on a table in the corner, and Laura’s dad was a cop and didn’t ever mind kids drinking in the basement as long as they were staying put for the evening, so there were cases and cases of PBR and Old Milwaukee stacked by the back basement door, which were going quickly. Also, Laura had, like, some crap goth music playing, either Bauhaus or Siouxsie and the Banshees, but it was OK because the spooky mumbling and whininess fit, I guess.
There were like thirty or so kids there, mostly seniors, because, well, believe it or not, we really were seniors now. Most of the kids who had come were wearing pretty generic costumes: a ghost, which was just a kid in a white sheet with holes for eyes; a hobo, which was some other dude who wore crummy clothes and blacked out a tooth; and a coach, which was some guy in a football jersey with a whistle around his neck. Then there were kids who were wearing big rubber plastic masks of President Bush and Darth Vader and Frankenstein, and there were like one or two girls who didn’t really have costumes on but had like glitter in their hair and on their faces, then there were like five kids who didn’t have any costumes at all and said they had come as “seniors,” which was kind of dumb after the third or fourth kid said it, and then, of course, there was Tony Degan, in his white “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt with the arrow pointing to some random kid beside him, and I guess, as his costume, Tony was wearing a black patch over one of his eyes. When Gretchen and I walked downstairs, Tony had his arm around this small stoner chick with buck teeth, Jill, a sophomore dressed like a witch, and I watched Gretchen head over to him and, like usual, start yelling and I smiled and went over and grabbed a beer and checked out the rest of the party. There were all kinds of kids, kids I didn’t know or didn’t recognize in vampire makeup or fake mustaches and the like, and, well, like a few kids who had gone all out with their costumes, who must have been planning their costumes for months, seriously. Like of course, there was Laura, whose party it was, who was this really tall, freckled, lovely redhead, dressed as an entire kissing booth. Like I said, she was kind of known for being easy, fooling around with anybody, especially Bobby B., and she was always breaking up with some guy we knew and then going off with someone else the same night, and she had this big brown cardboard box and she was standing inside it and there was a sign along the top that said, “Kisses $1.00,” and guys were going up, handing her money, and she was laughing and making out with them. Then there was like this other guy at the party we knew, Bill, a chubby stoner, who would try to sell you fake acid—little pieces of paper which were just that, only paper—and he was dressed up as Batman, but in a costume he had made himself out of, like, sweatpants and a baby blue blanket, so he was like Fat Batman, and he was like dancing but he really couldn’t dance, and he was a big kid, I mean, fat, because his costume didn’t fit and you could see his big belly hanging over his black sweatpants.
OK, then there was this kind of tall girl dressed as the Tooth Fairy and at first I thought it was this girl Lucy, but Lucy had cut her hair real short and this girl had long flowing brown hair with a lovely gold tiara atop it and this small black mask concealing her identity and all. She had this ornate gold dress on and a gold wand and a necklace full of small white teeth and a golden satchel full of money. She was very gently touching her wand to all the kids present and, goofing around, everyone was acting like they immediately fell asleep.
The Tooth Fairy came right up to me, smiled, and took my hand. Then she dug into her magic satchel and pulled out a funny-looking quarter and put it into my palm. I looked at it and it wasn’t a quarter at all, but some funny kind of foreign coin.
She smiled, blinking at me, and said, “That one is from Greece.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I give out coins to children all over the world,” she said.
“That must get confusing,” I said.
She nodded and said, “It does.”
“Well, thanks,” I said.
“This will be the last gift I give you,” she said.
“What?”
“This will be the last time I come visit you because you’re not a child anymore.”
I laughed and wondered who the hell she really was under the mask.
I put the Greek coin in my pocket and smiled nervously. I kind of walked away, toward the orange and black pyramid of cupcakes, and looked at her and she waved at me, nodding, and I suddenly felt very strange for some reason, like it really was the end of my childhood or something. I sat there for a moment staring at everyone at the party and all of a sudden it hit me, really. It was like the last Halloween party I’d ever go to in high school, and Halloween, well, I guess that was always like my favorite holiday as a kid because, you know, you got to dress up and be someone else, and I looked around and here were all these kids—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old—all in different costumes and everything, and like I said, something right there ended for me.
It was like I saw all these kids, but like how they looked every other day, the different kinds of kids, you know, like the stoners like Bill or Mike Madden, who I had seen just the other day and who was now mostly high all the time, or at least every time I saw him, always sitting in his stone-washed jean jacket in the backseat of an El Camino he was trying to rebuild, getting stoned in the parking lot after school, and I’d wonder where he’d be in a year; or the punk kids and goths like Kim or Laura or Gretchen, dyeing their hair or wearing their spiked bracelets or Clash T-shirts, still very concerned with keeping up their weirdo punk appearance; or the jocks, the sport-o’s, the athletes in their varsity jackets, backwards baseball hats, and professional sports team jerseys; or the nerds, the geeks, the pussies, kids like Rod, wherever he was at that moment, in their Star Trek T-shirts, dressed in dorky, plain clothes their overprotective mothers had picked out for them; or the gangster wanna-bes in baggy pants, gold chains, and oversized shirts; or the rich prude girls in very tight Esprit sweaters, who stuck their noses up so high and drove around in their brand-new convertibles; or the sluts in low-cut bodysuits and skirts so short you could see how hard they were trying to be noticed by somebody, anybody; or the oldest teenagers in the world, those kids who weren’t kids anymore but wouldn’t ever let go of high school, dudes like Tony Degan, who would never really age, in his ironic “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, constantly looking wise and amused but now looking a lot less cool; or the ghosts—the ones who had, for whatever reason, disappeared and stopped hanging out with us before they could finish growing up, like Bobby B. in his military fatigues because he had joined the Army after being expelled a few months back. All these kids, all these people were trying to pretend they were the people they wanted to be by how they dressed, just to fit in, just to be accepted and to belong to something, and, well, I got it all suddenly.
It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn’t ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween every day, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren’t alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe. Maybe everyone else might go on thinking that people were just what you saw—the clothes, the haircuts, the cars
—but not me, even though it seemed the whole world kind of worked that way: a put-on, only interested in the appearance of things like your class, your race, whether you were a girl or a boy, all the stuff you couldn’t really change anyway. It seemed really hard to grow out of that; maybe all you could do was try your best, try not to judge people from the way they appeared to be, I guess. I decided I might try to do that, try not to make decisions about everyone by what I saw because of how small and wrong that was, but it seemed that was just the way my brain worked, that all I could do was keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. I thought maybe that’s what growing up might do for me maybe, which was kind of scary.
I guess I started feeling kind of strange, and then I saw Gretchen in the corner of the basement still arguing with Tony Degan who, like I said, wasn’t wearing a costume but had on a black eye patch; I maybe felt like I didn’t want to be myself suddenly, I didn’t want to be a senior and at the end of it all anymore, I just wanted to keep being a kid and keep being stupid, because not being a kid was weird. That’s all I had ever been, really, and now someone was asking me to be someone else suddenly, and I pounded a PBR quick, then another, the cold foam charging down my throat, then smashed the can against my forehead, and a sophomore, Lenny, someone’s little brother, saw me do it and clapped his hands and said, “Bad-ass!” and I nodded toward him and walked past Gretchen, who looked like she was crying, her black zombie eye makeup running down her soft cheeks, still shouting at Tony. I walked right past her and up to the Kissing Booth girl, Laura, and dug into my back pocket, opened my wallet, and said, “How much do I get for twenty bucks?” and she laughed and took my hand and I ended up making out with her fiercely in her own kitchen upstairs.
After ten minutes of serious groping, during one point I was biting her wrist, Laura blinked at me and said, “Brian Oswald. Wow,” and I didn’t have an answer to that, but I said, real cool, “Do you want to show me your room?” and she nodded and we were just about to head upstairs when I saw Gretchen, whose face looked like black spiderwebs, lines and crisscrosses of mascara. I let go of Laura’s hand and watched Gretchen walk out back and sit on the small cement porch.
It was over between her and Tony, finally, and it had been coming for some time, months maybe, and I could tell because she had not gone back downstairs to kick that other girl’s ass, which was like kind of amazing to me, considering, like, she had finally just given up on him, and also she was really, really crying, shaking her head, and now she was sitting on Laura’s back porch, her knees pulled to her chest, smoking, and really, really crying, and, well, right there I decided I would go out and sit beside her and tell her I was sorry—for her, for everything—and then be ready for whatever might happen after that.
Joe Meno is a fiction writer
from Chicago. He is the author
of two novels, Tender As Hellfire
(St. Martin’s 1999) and How the
Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins
2001), and the winner of the
2003 Nelson Algren Award for
short fiction. He is a professor
of creative writing at Columbia
College, Chicago, the cofounder
of Sleepwalk magazine, coeditor
of Bail magazine, and a columnist
for Punk Planet magazine.