by Sharpe, Elle
Unfortunately I couldn’t deny that the inner pervert might be on to something. Sparing with Norah was exciting, and not exactly in a platonic way.
I was used to people deferring to me, either to my family name or to my considerable experience and knowledge—though it wasn’t always easy to tell those two types of deference apart. I was not used to people talking back, the way Norah often had during discussion sections. I was not used to someone taking every opportunity to turn a conversation into an argument.
It surprised me. Sometimes it annoyed me. Often it often made me laugh, at least inwardly. And if I was totally honest, sometimes it caused the type of reaction that was pretty inappropriate, given my position as her TA. I couldn’t help but be grateful that we’d both graduated now.
“Well,” I said, “you have to admit, most people pretty much suck.”
“You know,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “I can’t actually argue with that.”
“Not all of them though.”
She gave me a questioning look, blinking up at me through the Christmas-light glow. She may have caught the hint of flirtation that had unintentionally slipped into my voice. But I couldn't tell if she disliked it, or if she was intrigued.
Not for the first time, I wondered if she really hated me as much as she claimed. Maybe she insisted on “not liking me,” in the same way she insisted on “liking parties”—out of stubbornness. But maybe she could be persuaded to change her mind.
I decided to put out a feeler or two. After all, I had the cheesy mood lighting on my side, and the romantic ambiance of drunk college kids who didn’t realize how loud they were shouting. So I gave her a tried and true look, which had pulled quite a few women into my bed in the past.
She froze, in something like disbelief?
I decided I’d take that over a more overtly hostile response. Pressing my luck, I scooted in closer to her.
“I noticed you had some pretty nice moves out there earlier. If you’re done with your ‘fun break’ maybe we can go over there and you could show me how it’s done?”
Her eyebrows shot to the top of her head.
“Dude, what are you talking about? You’re being weird. Why are you looking at me weird? Stop being weird.”
Her words tumbled out a mile a minute, and her facial expression registered pure horror. But then after a second her eyebrows went angular and her smirk returned.
“Oh, I get it. You’re bored and you need something to critique, is that it? Look, I know I’m not the best dancer, you don’t need to point it out.”
Before I could protest that I wasn’t being sarcastic she mumbled, “Let me guess, you’re like an expert at the waltz or some rich person shit like that.”
“The waltz?” I snorted, genuinely amused. “I admit I do a lot of what you’d probably consider ‘rich person shit,’ but I’ve never time traveled back to Victorian England.”
She didn’t reply, just seared into me with a glare.
Judging from her reaction to me just trying to ask her to dance—a thing I would not do with just anyone, by the way—it seemed like the “other kind of poking” was probably not on the cards.
Still, it was entertaining to see her get so worked up. It made her cheeks flush slightly red, and her lips part open, and sent her loose, coppery hair shaking around her face. She was so pretty when she was irritated, it almost made her dislike of me worth it.
Almost.
“Why do you keep staring at me like that Baylor?” she demanded, eying me warily. “Seriously, it’s creepy.”
“Sorry,” I said, smiling. “I was just suddenly mesmerized by that strange little mole above your eye. It starts looking really bizarre if you stare at it for too long.”
She relaxed into an expression of exasperation.
“You do know how to flatter a girl, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t trying to flatter you. Just making an objective observation.”
She rolled her eyes at me. A full 360 degrees.
“Right, I forgot that was your MO. You’re not a dick, you just make incredibly cruel ‘objective observations.’”
“I have strongly held but well-justified opinions.”
“Do you remember when you were a judge for the mock business pitches? I believe you used the word ‘pathetic’ to describe mine. Multiple times.”
I shrugged. True, my choice of words might have been harsh, but I hadn’t been wrong.
“It looked like you’d thrown it together the night before. Which I’m pretty sure you did.”
She jerked back from me, mouth curling in disbelief.
“Seriously? You’re doubling down on your shittiness? That’s the choice you’re making right now?”
“Are you ‘seriously’ trying to claim that you took that assignment ‘seriously’? I mean, Norah, come on. Your grades aren’t great, at least in your business classes. In fact they’re aggressively average.”
“Ouch.”
“These are just facts. You already knew this. And it’s not like it’s that bad, necessarily. You did graduate, that’s the most important thing. Honestly I always figured someone had pressured you into the business program, and music was the thing you actually cared about. Whenever I saw you in a business class you looked miserable.”
“Maybe that’s just because you were there,” she shot back at me. She sounded a lot harsher than our usual snappy back and forth. And her eyes were shining.
She turned away from me. For a second I thought she might be on the verge of crying.
She grabbed a particularly long thread from the couch and pulled hard.
“You might be right,” she muttered, so softly I could barely hear her.
When she turned back, it looked less like her eyes were full of tears, and more like they were glittering with rage. She’d always looked vengeful and affronted when I’d criticized her assignments, but this was ten times worse. It was like she was trying to burn a hole through my forehead with her eyes and eviscerate my brain.
“But then,” she said darkly, “that’s not really any of your business, is it?”
I was starting to worry that I’d actually hurt her feelings, which hadn’t been my intention. I considered saying something apologetic, but she got up before the words could leave my mouth.
“Luckily though, I don’t really care what you think,” she told me. Definitely not true, based on how she was acting, but I decided not to say anything about that.
“I’m going to go enjoy myself. Judge away from the shadows, Ronan Baylor. Judge away.”
She headed in Chris’s and Jen’s direction.
I wondered if I should let her know that I had no problem watching her dance, or do anything, really. But I was sure she would only twist it into an insult. She’d made up her mind that I could only ever think badly of her, and had probably decided to only ever think badly about me, too.
Which meant I should probably let it go. But as I watched her toss her head of wavy hair, I wondered just how easy that would be.
Norah
What would happen, I wondered, if I devoted my time at this party to making Ronan Baylor’s life a living hell?
After mulling it over, I decided that could be pretty fun.
And he claimed I didn’t know how to have fun. Ha!
Hmm, what could I do that would drive him crazy? I went through my mental list of “things Ronan Baylor hates.” Dirt. Incompetence. People being late for things. Poor people. Young people. People in general. (But apparently not all people—what had that been about? And that weird look? Whatever). Pop music. People being happy. Probably puppies and kittens too, but I didn’t think I could get my hands on any on such short notice.
Aha! I had just thought of something that would drive him absolutely mental.
“Hey Jen!” I shouted over a pulsing DJ remix of “I Want it That Way,” “How do you feel about karaoke?”
From his spot on the couch Ronan looked over at our karaoke mic like
it might be the breeding ground for exotic diseases. I patted myself on the back for my excellent instincts. If there was one thing Ronan would hate more than people dancing to cheesy pop music, it was people singing along to cheesy pop music. Badly.
“Okay boys and girls,” Jen called out. “Let me lay down some ground rules. All songs are open to everyone. Singing along is encouraged, even if the mic is not currently in your hands. Do not wrap your lips around the God-damn microphone, that is disgusting. And—this is the most important one—do not get all pretentious and sing me some sophisticated indie shit, or some obscure B-side from your favorite sad-sack 80s band. We’re looking for power jams. We’re looking for ballads. We’re looking for Alanis Morressette screaming about going down on him in a theater. Do I make myself clear?”
Only Jen could be that much fun while she was bossing everyone around.
What followed was song after song of glorious, cringe-worthy madness. People became drunk enough to forget their shame, and some of the worst singers I’ve ever heard belted it out to the high heavens. Ronan looked like he was straining from the effort of not holding his hands up to his ears. Good.
I think he might have straight-up walked out of the room if it hadn’t been for Chris. It turned out Chris was a karaoke fiend. His singing voice was basically like his talking voice but even louder, and his taste in music covered everything obnoxious dude-bros have ever loved between the 90s and today.
Jen was all over it. She adored bad music—maybe ironically, but maybe only fake-ironically. The two of them sang several duets. Jen’s naturally low voice dipped lower as she imitated a man. She was wildly out of tune.
It never failed to amaze me when people were that comfortable being bad at something in public. I was the opposite of comfortable with things like that.
The general atmosphere kept getting wilder, looser, and drunker. I could feel it affecting me. This was why I very rarely drank. I didn’t need to. I was the world’s biggest lightweight when it came to getting contact-drunk. Put me in a room with a bunch of drunk people and I got gradually sillier and talkier, just like them. Imagine if I actually ingested my own intoxicant on top of that. I would turn into a full-fledged maniac.
Right now I was only a half-maniac. I was giggling into Jen’s left shoulder while Chris slumped over her right shoulder and we all sing-shouted to, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Meanwhile Ronan stared at us like he wanted us all to die slow, painful deaths.
Me in particular. Probably because I’d instigated all this craziness. He was glaring at me with knife eyes, like a predator tracking the movements of a foolish wildebeest, or supervillain cooking up an evil plot of revenge.
I met his eyes as a sort of challenge—see, I’m having fun, and you’re not—but he didn’t look away. He just leaned back into his seat on the couch and raised one eyebrow very slightly at me.
“Hey Norah,” Jen shouted, her words slurring. She held her liquor well, but even she was getting increasingly sloshed. “Why don’t you grace us with your dulcet tones!”
She tried to press the microphone into my hands, and the wide grin I’d been wearing fizzled out. I turned into a frozen, wide-eyed statue, afraid to even move in case I might tip over and shatter.
“Jen,” I forced the words out between closed teeth, “You know I can’t do that.”
Jen remembered about my recent debilitating stage fright issue a moment too late, and her face registered her drunken regret. She pulled the microphone back, but the damage was done.
“Why not?” Ronan’s voice asked from behind me. Suddenly he was standing much closer. I could almost feel his shadow pressing down on me.
I turned around, trying to keep my composure.
“I don’t sing...in front of people...anymore.”
He gave me a purse-lipped frown, like he didn’t buy it.
“Haven’t you been singing your whole life?”
“Yes. And now I don’t.”
He looked genuinely puzzled.
“I just don’t...want to. So. Just. Drop it.”
Hoped I sounded threatening.
“Come on,” he said. “You don’t need to be modest...or maybe you don’t think this party is worthy of your lovely voice. Is that it?”
Asshole! He was trying to turn my distaste for his snobbery against me.
“Come on Norah,” he said, with a deceptively friendly smile. “Let’s hear what was so worth slacking off on your other major for.”
That did it. All the panicked, edgy feelings that I’d tried to keep at bay during this entire graduation week came flooding through my body.
I was a bad business student. I couldn’t sing anymore. I was nothing. I had no skills, and my future was fucked. I had screwed everything up, like the careless idiot I was. “Pathetic” was right.
I felt warm, way too warm. Like my skin might crack open and let red-hot panic seep out.
And Ronan just stood there, with this horrible sparkle in his dark eyes. He could sense my discomfort. He was enjoying it.
God, why did he have to be the worst? What kind of person took so much pleasure in someone else’s potential embarrassment?
It was then that all of my crazed, nervous energy found a focus: my hatred for Ronan Baylor. It congealed together into one long laser beam that burned through the center of my body.
I knew exactly which song I was going to sing.
“Okay friends,” I said, addressing the room full of people who, for the most part, were not my friends. “Who here is a fan of Taylor Swift?”
Ronan groaned. I grinned, and started cuing up the song.
“Actually,” I said, “Who doesn’t love T-Swift? That’s right, only lame, no-fun people who take themselves waaaaay too seriously. So, this one goes out to you.”
I shot a pointed look in Ronan’s direction, and launched into the first verse of Taylor Swift’s 2010 classic, “Mean.”
Yup. That’s right. I had a thirteen-year-old girl’s instincts for revenge. I felt stupid as soon as I started, but by then it was too late to stop. So I just doubled down on my commitment, and put as much heart as I could into every lyric.
Hey, at least my voice was actually coming out of my mouth. Probably because karaoke didn’t count as really “performing.” Even so, I should make the most of it while I could.
Ronan did not look the way the antagonist of the song is supposed to look while he’s being dressed down by Taylor. My inner pre-teen wanted his face to fall into a cartoon frown, and maybe for him to shed a few tears.
But in real life this song did not do that to people. It was a bop. It was sort of playful and joyful, and Ronan was actually smiling at me, and shaking his head. I was pretty sure the smile was derisive, but weirdly I was not one-hundred-percent sure. And was he tapping his feet a little to the music? Was he indulging me, or mocking me?
My face must have shown my confusion as I looked at him, because his grin turned devilish. Definitely mocking me then.
I started stretching the word “mean” out really long when I sang it.
The karaoke crowd was getting into it with me. A dream karaoke session if ever there was one: a whole room of people singing along to the words “pathetic” and “alone in life” as I looked straight at Ronan Baylor’s smug face.
They all shouted along to the chorus with me, their voices full of silly, intoxicated happiness. And I couldn’t help but smile while I sang too.
I actually forgot all about Ronan and got lost in the energy of the room. I threw in some dance moves. I held the final note for an unnecessarily long time, and everyone clapped. It was deeply cathartic. I felt genuinely good, for the first time in weeks.
That is, until the song ended and noticed the way Ronan was looking at me. Arms folded. Smiling. Devious. Eager. He looked a little bit like he had when he’d judged my stupid business pitch in class. Like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just seen, and he couldn’t wait to rip me to pieces.
Someone grabbed the m
ic out of my hand. The crowd moved on to “Fergalicious.” Ronan loomed over me. Damn him for being so tall.
“You are adorable,” he said, his voice rough with sarcasm. “How are you so comfortable doing something like that?”
“I guess it’s just a gift.”
“Hmm. Lucky you, to be so gifted.”
“What is it with you Ronan? You keep smirking.”
“Nothing,” his voice was flat, but the smirk was still there. “You have a good voice.”
“Thanks.” I made my voice as flat as his.
“And those cute little dance moves you started doing...”
He chuckled, like he was reliving it in his mind’s eye.
“Shut up.”
“And the accent-”
“Yeah, yeah I get it.”
“But the most interesting thing-”
“What?” I snapped.
“Well, if I were you, and I possessed talents like yours, I probably wouldn’t waste them on me.”
Was he going to manage to be flattered by this? And here I’d thought his ego couldn’t get any bigger. I should have done Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” He definitely would have thought that song was about him.
“Hey, I was just singing a song about people who are mean. If it struck a nerve that says more about you than it does me.”
“Well, it was certainly a difficult thing for me to endure.”
Despite myself, I winced.
I knew I didn’t have a future as a singer. Not anymore, anyway. But it still hurt to have a performance—even an intentionally silly little karaoke performance—summed up like that. Something “difficult to endure.” I hoped it didn’t show.
“You should just be grateful that I didn’t pick the other song about mean people that I know. It’s this NOFX song, ‘Mean People Suck.’ It’s really loud, and the only lyrics are ‘Mean people suck,” over and over again.”
He gave a hearty laugh out loud.
“Sounds worthy of your skills.”
Ouch. He just didn’t stop, did he?