by Laura Ruby
Once More, with Feeling
The first time was Ash’s party, a back-to-school barbecue without any of the actual barbecuing. There must have been a shortage of parties that weekend, because the entire senior class showed up to mourn the end of the summer. Ash’s parents had taken her little brother out of town, stupidly trusting Ash not to do anything stupid (like, say, throw a party for the entire senior class). But there we were, in Ash’s house, with everyone packed inside and spilling outside, a blur of cutoffs and halter tops and precancerous brown skin, all of us hugging our friends and hugging total strangers and loving the world. Even Chilly seemed less Chilly somehow—less obnoxious, less angry—maybe because there were chicks there who’d never met him before and were willing to give him a shot. I remember looking out the open window to the backyard and seeing a girl run by wearing only her underwear, but moving too fast for me to see her face. I could hear her, though. She was giggling like a maniac.
Once in a while, Ash would announce that the drunk and otherwise hammered would have their keys and maybe even their cars confiscated to guard against possible injuries and subsequent lawsuits (her dad is a lawyer), but as these things go, the party was tame. Something was in the air, some late-August-evening magic-fairy nice dust that made us all mostly friendly and sort of giddy and not too destructive. It seemed that we all understood that this was our last summer together, that next year at this time most of us would already be gone—off to start the rest of our lives.
Even I wasn’t exactly me. School hadn’t started yet, and I had nothing in particular to hyperventilate over. I’d already taken all my entrance exams, and my college applications weren’t due for months. I felt so strange—untethered from myself, like I was watching myself from a distance. Like I was my own shadow.
It felt kind of good. A relief.
Being me is tiring.
The only problem was the late arrival of Jimmy and his ho girlfriend. I guess he figured that since he and Ash had broken up six months before and there wasn’t another party in the whole town, he could show up and blend in without getting Ash too crazy. Right. Like Jimmy could blend in anywhere with a chick named Cherry, the very same chick that he dumped Ash for. Since they’d broken up, Ash had serious radar for Jimmy. I think she could spot him a mile away. She could sense him. She could smell him.
So when he showed up with Cherry on his arm and tried to mingle, Ash cornered them in the kitchen, screamed at him, told him what a loser he was, how much she hated him and how he needed to take his slut out of her house. A normal person would have gotten all embarrassed, but not Jimmy.
“Listen, Ashley,” he said, drawing out the “sh” sound as if he were singing a lullaby.
“Ash!” said Ash. “The name’s Ash.”
“Ash,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry about everything. I never meant to hurt you. Never.” He brushed his long rocker hair out of his enormous brown eyes. Jimmy has cocker-spaniel eyes, eyes that could get you to believe almost anything he says. “I’m really, really sorry. How many times can I say it?”
“You can say it again, you Arsch! And then you can get out of my house!”
Jimmy nodded, tipping his head as if digesting her words. “I hear you. But it’s been a long time now. Don’t you think we all need to move on?”
Cherry slid her arms around Jimmy’s waist and looked at Ash. “I hope that we can be friends.” Then she reached up and yanked at her bra strap, maximizing all visible cleavage.
Ash spat a vast array of truly inventive swearwords in several languages. I thought she was going to gut Jimmy with a steak knife or rip out Cherry’s throat with her teeth, so I tried to drag her from the room while giving Jimmy my fiercest best-friend evil eye.
I was still trying to convince Ash to come with me and cool off when I saw Luke DeSalvio peek into the room and then double back. “Whoa! Rumble!” he said, but nobody listened; Ash was too busy screaming, Jimmy too busy looking sad and soulful. Luke’s eyes went from Jimmy to Cherry to Ash to me to Jimmy again, until he pulled Jimmy and Cherry into the dining room. We couldn’t hear what else Luke said, but we could see them through the doorway: Jimmy nodding, glancing at Ash, looking at the floor, nodding again. Finally, Jimmy came back and mumbled something like, “Sorry never meant to hurt you we’re leaving bye.” Then he grabbed Cherry by the elbow and steered her out the door and out of the house.
Ash gaped at Luke. “What did you say to him?”
Luke shrugged. “I told him he was being a tool.”
“That’s all?” Ash said.
Luke’s mouth turned up at the corners. “I might have said a few other things. Like, this is your house and if you didn’t want him here he had to get out. He was being a tool, right?”
“Among other things,” said Ash.
“And this is your house, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay,” Ash said, bewildered by this show of gallantry from the Jock King, someone we had admired from afar but never had much reason to talk to. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Luke said. He paused. “You’re not going to be all depressed now, are you?”
Ash said, “Excuse me?”
“You’re not going to throw us all out so that you can drown yourself in your bathtub, right?”
“Don’t worry. The party must go on.” Ash tossed her curly hair. “I might fling myself out the second-floor window, but I’ll wait till everyone’s gone home.”
“Great to hear it,” he said.
“And not because I’m depressed; because I’m really really really pissed off.”
“Even better. You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”
Ash raised her eyebrow, the one that she had just gotten pierced a few days before. “I’m beautiful all the time.”
Luke laughed. “Is that the only piercing you have?”
“Maybe.”
“And do you have a tattoo to go with it?”
“Maybe.”
“Where?”
“Like I’d tell you.”
I thought I was witnessing this amazing thing. He wasn’t her usual type—she normally went for the tall, dark, and smoldering, and not the medium-sized, sunny, and golden—but he was hot by anybody’s standards. If anyone could take Jimmy off her mind, it would be Luke. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, not after he got Jimmy to leave. Plus, he had the most incredible hands I’d ever seen. Man hands. Big, long-fingered.
He turned to me. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said.
“You’re Audrey.”
“You’re Luke.”
“You know, one of my friends thinks that your hair is fake.”
“Her hair isn’t fake!” said Ash.
“I didn’t say it was what I thought, I said it was what one of my friends thought. He doesn’t think hair could grow that long. That you must be wearing those extension things.”
“Your friend’s a bonehead,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Ash.
I was so busy getting my head around the fact that Luke DeSalvio and one of his friends had discussed my hair that it took me a second to notice that Luke had lifted a lock and was rubbing the ends between his fingers. He looked directly into my eyes, so that I could see his had rings of dark blue around rings of light. “Feels real enough,” he said. He dropped the lock, smoothing it back over my shoulder. “I’ll have to go tell my friend.”
“So go,” Ash told him.
But he didn’t. He hung out with me and Ash in the kitchen, making stupid jokes about googly-eyed guitar guys, about Big Boobs Barbie, and about hair extensions till he got Ash to laugh out loud. After a while, his friend Nardo ambled in, wondering where Luke had disappeared to and who with. Nardo was a jock, too, an odd one, one who played sax for the school jazz band. He was also on the track team, where he got a lot of attention for jumping as far as he possibly could.
The four of us ended up sitting at the kitchen table, playing blackjack wit
h a deck of cards Ash scrounged up. Luke foraged for alcohol and found beer for himself and Nardo and some kind of hard lemonade stuff for me and Ash from God knows where. I hate cards and I don’t like my lemonade spiked with anything but sugar, but I don’t remember any of it being that much fun before, with the drinks fuzzing my vision around the edges and Luke’s hand brushing my hair and my arm. I thought Ash would be mad that he’d sat next to me instead of her, but she didn’t seem to mind it at all. Nardo was really cute, all long arms and legs, with a smile that opened up his whole face.
At some point the game got so stupid we weren’t really playing, and Nardo got busy inspecting Ash’s eyebrow ring up close, so I grabbed up the cards and started to build a house with them. Watching Nardo prod Ash’s still-raw eyebrow with his pinky made me nervous—it seemed so personal, digging around in someone’s fresh, if self-inflicted, wound. I tried to concentrate on the card house, but Luke was watching me. That made me nervous, too.
“Was it him?” I blurted, pointing at Nardo. When I was nervous, I blurted.
“Him what?” Luke said.
“Yeah, me what?” Nardo said. He had one hand on Ash’s forehead, as if he were checking if she had a fever.
“Luke said that one of his friends thought my hair was fake. Was it you?” I said.
“Oh, that,” said Nardo. “He must not have heard me right. I was telling him that my hair was fake.” He dipped his head toward Ash. “Feel it.”
Ash ran her hand through Nardo’s short, dark hair. “Totally fake. What is that? Nylon?”
“Polyester,” said Nardo.
“What happened to your real hair?” Ash said.
“Lost in a bizarre weed-whacking incident,” Nardo said. Then he leaned in and kissed Ash. She stared at him cross-eyed for a split second, then kissed back.
“Don’t watch the mating animals,” said Luke. “They could get violent.” He handed me another card and gave me a drumroll on the seat of his chair while I balanced the card on top of the others.
But Ash and Nardo kept kissing, not caring that me and Luke were sitting right there. When Nardo pulled Ash onto his lap, Luke said, “I think that’s our cue.”
We left Ash and Nardo making out in the kitchen. It was late, really late, because most of the people had gone home and the few that were left were crashing all over the place. Underwear girl turned out to be Joelle, who was sleeping on one of the couches in her hot-pink bra and red shorts. I should have known. Joelle has a killer body that her personal trainer works very hard to achieve, and she’s never afraid to show it off. She says that an actor has to be ready to use every asset at her disposal.
Luke whistled at her, but she didn’t wake up. “Impressive,” he said. “You guys are pretty good friends, right?”
“Yeah.” Normally, I would have been self-conscious about my own non-personal-trainer–enhanced body. My own assets include boobs that could be bigger, a butt that could be smaller, and abs that could be flatter. But then, at that party, I had a weird and totally uncharacteristic thought: Oh, well, nothing you can do about it now. The breeze whipping through the open windows smelled a little like flowers, a little like grass, a little like rain. Everything that usually worried me seemed far away and not very important.
“Joelle and I met doing the plays. I’m not in the plays, though. I design the sets and stuff.”
Luke smiled. “You act like I don’t know who you are. I know who you are.”
For some reason that made me blush.
“You want to go outside for a while?” he said.
Some tiny part of me—the shadow part, the part that watched—shouted, Outside? Luke Freaking DeSalvio is asking you OUTSIDE? Is this a joke? What does it MEAN? What’s he DOING? What will you SAY?
I said, “Sure. Let’s go outside.”
He opened the screen door and we stepped out onto the grass. Ash has a huge yard with a fence all around it, plus an enormous wooden swing set for her little brother, Bo.
“Sweet,” Luke said. “How about I swing you?”
“No, thanks.”
“You think I’m not strong enough?”
Before I had a second to swallow it back, I said, “Show me what you got, big man.”
He pulled back the sleeve of his T-shirt and made a muscle for me. Not too big, not too small. I squeezed it, feeling like the teenage Goldilocks. The skin on the underside of his arm was surprisingly soft, smooth as my own cheek. I asked him to show me the other arm. Just to make sure he was up for the task, I added.
“Oh, I’m up for a lot of things,” Luke said, which made me giggle idiotically.
We went over to the swing set and I sat down on one of the swings. While I launched with my feet, he gave me a small push.
“Come on, then,” I said, my fake English accent making it safer to tease. “You can do better than that.”
He grabbed ahold of both ends of the seat, but instead of pushing, he walked backwards until I was nearly facing the ground, nearly slipping off. Then he let go. When I swung back again, I felt the heat of his palms on the small of my back, where my shirt rode up. I leaned into them and thrust my legs straight into the sky, and then fell down through the air into his hands, catch and release, catch and release. Everything—the party, Luke, the whole night—seemed impossible and ridiculous, and most likely a lemonade-induced hallucination. I got to thinking I could do anything: sing, dance, fly. I decided to jump the way I used to when I was a kid. I felt Luke’s palms on my back and then the swift climb through the air. At the last minute, I shot off the swing. For one wonderful second I soared like a crazy bird, but then I dropped, landing funny and falling over sideways. I wasn’t hurt, but I wondered how stupid it must have looked.
It was not the kind of night for dwelling, though. I was too giddy for that. Instead of getting to my feet, I rolled over to look up at the stars.
“Are you all right?” Luke asked, sinking to his knees beside me.
“I’m fine.”
“What are you doing?”
I heard myself say, “I felt like being horizontal.”
Luke plopped down next to me, our shoulders touching. I felt my skin scorching the grass beneath me.
“Do you know the names of any of the stars?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You don’t? I thought you were some kind of genius.”
“Do you know any of the names?”
“Let me see,” he said, pointing up at the sky. “Okay. Right there. That’s the South Star.”
“You mean the North Star?”
“No, I mean the South Star. And that’s the Big Dogpile. And that’s the Little Dipshit.”
It was dumb, but I laughed anyway. As I laughed, he grabbed one of my hands, twining his fingers in mine. He raised himself up on one elbow to look at me. I could almost feel the muscles in my eyes working to make my pupils bigger, so that I could take him all in.
His fingers tightened. “You’re a good card player.”
Out popped “I’m good at a lot of things.”
“And that’s good to know.” Suddenly he was kissing me. He was soft and slow at first, nibbling and searching to the point where I wanted to grab him by the ears and make him kiss me like he meant it, already. And then he did, all hungry, as if the inside of my mouth and the whole of my tongue were made of strawberries or ice cream or something equally sweet and delicious. My head swam and I was grateful that I was already lying down. If I’d been standing, I’d have swooned like a character from a Victorian novel.
After a while, he pulled away and touched my lips with his fingers. “What are you smiling at?”
“I’m smiling?” I said.
“You’re smiling.”
The late-August-evening magic-fairy nice dust made it easy to be honest. “I like kissing with the Little Dipshit shining down on us. Twinkle, twinkle.”
He laughed, a short bark of surprise. “You’re sort of a weird girl, aren’t you?”
“So?�
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“So,” he said. He gathered a handful of my hair and brought it to his nose. “Princess hair,” he murmured. “Smells like honey.” He combed through it with his fingers, twirling and twisting the strands. Then he pressed his lips to my ear. “You like the whole kissing thing, huh?”
I dared to slide my hand up the underside of his arm, to feel that soft skin. “Yes.”
“What’s that saying that actors have when they rehearse a scene? Something about doing it again with emotion, or whatever?”
I thought a minute. “‘Once more, with feeling’?”
“That’s it,” he said. In one smooth motion he was on top of me, settling in like a puzzle piece. He kissed me again with so much feeling it would have brought a dead girl back to life.
I Am Hamlet
It’s Wednesday after school at the Drama Club. I am trying to keep my mind blank by repeating the word “black” over and over again in my head. It doesn’t work. People are surprised to see me sitting in the auditorium like it was any other day. I get some smirks from some of the freshmen and sophomores who don’t really know me, but my friends say things like “Um!” “Oh!” “Hey!” or “Hi!” “Umohheyhi”: Native American for “How the hell can you show your face in public????”
To me, the auditorium isn’t public, it’s like home. A huge, echoey home with squeaky old seats that are about as comfortable as lava rock and a moth-eaten blue velvet curtain pulled back to expose the naked, strangely sad-looking stage. There’s a small stack of papers sitting right at the edge. People point to the stack of papers and whisper to one another, but no one moves to take a peek.