Althea and Oliver exchange a glance.
“Yes,” they say.
The basement is low-ceilinged and devoid of windows. A haze of beer-sweat stink and cigarette smoke hangs in the air, haloing the heads of all the miscreants. A table is set up for beer pong, red plastic cups stacked neatly on either side; in one corner a group Oliver vaguely recognizes from Hoddard, the local public high school, is playing a rousing game of Asshole.
There’s no stage, just a misshapen rectangle of rust-colored shag carpet marked off with masking tape and filled with fourth-hand instruments and miles of uncoiling black cables. Oliver’s friend Howard stands inside the box, nervously tuning his guitar. Oliver lifts his hand in a reassuring wave. Howard responds with a weak smile, gingerly testing the state of his blue Mohawk. His fine hair is too thin to stand erect on its own, so he thickens it daily with toothpaste and Elmer’s Glue in order to spike it properly. The pervasive peppermint odor has earned him, of late, the unfortunate nickname “Minty Fresh.”
“What are they called again?” Althea asks Oliver.
“I don’t remember.”
“He changed it,” Valerie says. “They used to be the Great Expectations. Now they’re the Freddy Knuckles.”
They drink their beers and wait. The drummer picks anxiously at a fissure in his crash cymbal, and the bass player practices the same three notes over and over. Finally Howard gives Valerie one of those imperceptible best-friend signals—it could be a raised eyebrow or a subtle hand gesture. Oliver doesn’t see it, but he knows it’s happened because of the speed with which Valerie rushes to the back of the basement, turning off the stereo, dimming the lights, and hissing at the Asshole-playing contingent to shut the fuck up. When the basement is sufficiently hushed, Valerie returns to the area by the makeshift stage and cues Howard, and this time Oliver sees the signal, a small, decisive nod that visibly bolsters Howard’s courage. Rubbing a guitar pick between his fingertips, he steps up to the mic and rushes through his introduction, then attacks his guitar with all the finesse of a raccoon pawing through the contents of a particularly redolent trash can. His bandmates are no better versed in their own instruments, but all three of them are unusually spirited performers, and there is at least a whiff of melody beneath the noise. Howard is also the lead vocalist, and there is something strange about his singing voice that Oliver can’t identify until Althea leans over and screams in his ear, “Why the fuck is he singing with a British accent?”
Oliver shrugs. The music fills the basement as completely as air fills a balloon, and behind him the entire party is crushed into the space, a hundred teenagers thrashing about while watery beer spills over the sides of their Solo cups. Valerie is beaming proudly at Howard, her stumpy brown pigtails bouncing as she dances. Althea, despite her reluctance to leave the house earlier, seems to be relishing this now, getting shoved by the crowd and shoving back. He can’t tell if it’s actually the music she enjoys or the volume or the shoving, but either way he’s relieved. She arches her long neck to finish her beer, her throat quivering as she takes the last pull. Letting the can fall to the ground, Althea opens her eyes and catches Oliver motionless and staring, just as he is nearly toppled by a swell in the throng. She grabs his wrists, keeping him upright as a handful of eager kids jockeying to get closer to the front move around them, until Althea and Oliver are so thoroughly fenced in by the heaving sweaty mess of drunk people that they can barely see the band. Overwhelmed, he turns toward the stairs, but Althea tugs again on his arm, more gently now.
“Stay and dance,” she shouts over the music. “Your rules. You can’t say no.”
She’s right, as she is so infuriatingly often, so he stays and lets himself get shoved around, pressed so closely against the shoulder blades and shirts of his fellow partygoers that he can smell their shampoo and the moist, musky scent of their perspiration, and even, he’s sure of it, the trace odor of toothpaste. Althea reaches out and nonchalantly plucks a full beer from some stranger’s grasp, quickly chugging half the contents before he can protest, then passing the remains to Oliver. Howard empties his own beer onto the kids closest to the mic and hurls the can into the audience.
The end is anticlimactic. There’s no stage for the band to exit; they just finish their last song and start breaking down the equipment before the tepid applause has even stopped. As soon as it’s over, it’s as though they never played. Someone turns on the lights and the stereo and starts rearranging the cups on the beer pong table.
“Althea, come be my partner for beer pong,” Valerie says, pulling on her sleeve. Althea looks at Oliver helplessly. He shrugs. He can’t go back on his own rule now, although he knows beer pong is not her game. She’d be better off playing Asshole; no doubt she’d end up as president within a few rounds and have a great time spending the rest of the party telling people what to do. But Valerie’s made her request; the proverbial die has been cast.
“Let’s go make friends,” Val says. “Expand the gene pool.”
Coby reappears with a beer for Oliver.
“You didn’t just pull this out of a toilet, did you?” Oliver asks, wiping the top of the can on his shirt.
“By the time it comes to that, you’ll be too drunk to care.” Coby gestures toward Althea with his beer. “What did you have to do to drag her out?”
“We go out,” Oliver says.
“To parties? With other people?” Coby drinks. “Be real.”
The cement floor is slick with spilled beer. From an unseen corner behind the laundry room comes the sound of muscular, robust vomiting. The president of Asshole is demanding that his secretary give him a lap dance while singing “I’m a Little Teapot” in a Russian accent.
“You’re right,” says Oliver. “We should do this more often.”
Coby smirks. “Don’t be such a prick. These are our peers.”
They both snicker derisively.
As suspected, Althea is terrible at beer pong; hand-eye coordination has never been her strong suit. This is why they never go bowling or shoot pool. Coby cheers her on every time she plucks the Ping-Pong ball out of another red plastic cup and drinks its warm, flat contents.
“Got any plans for the summer?” he asks Oliver.
“I’m taking an astronomy class at UNC. Bulk up my college apps.”
“You should go to Space Camp. That’ll dazzle them.”
“You got some big projects scheduled? You going to put up some drywall in that tree house you built above the garage? You should put up some of those Christmas lights—you know, the ones shaped like chili peppers? The ladies will come running.”
“It’s not the décor they come for,” says Coby, resting a hand on his belt buckle and shrugging modestly. “It’s the company.”
“Come for the video games, stay for the syphilis.”
“That was just a rumor.”
Grimacing, Oliver finishes his beer. At the table, Althea is squatting to retrieve the ball, and as she gets up, she smacks her head on the underside of the flimsy table. Beer sloshes out of several cups on top. “You okay?” he yells.
“Only my pride, whatever,” she replies.
“Dude, your girlfriend is drunk,” Coby says to Oliver.
“You know she’s not my girlfriend.”
“You two aren’t even hooking up?”
“No.”
“Why not? You’re together all the time.” Coby shakes his head, seeming genuinely perplexed, as if proximity and opportunity should be enough.
“She’s my best friend.”
“So who is she hooking up with?”
“No one,” Oliver says.
“Are you sure?”
He remembers the night of the Jell-O, the way Althea had looked at him in the too-small pool. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
Althea misses another shot, and Coby applauds as she chugs. Valerie shakes her head
, mourning her choice of partner.
“I knew Al shouldn’t have played this game,” Oliver says. “She’s terrible at shit like this. Pool, bowling, anything with—”
“Balls?” Coby chortles.
“—spatial relations,” Oliver finishes.
“Let me see if I can help her out.” Coby is eager to be Althea’s instructor, standing close behind her, demonstrating the gentle wrist flick necessary to arc the ball into an opponent’s cup. She leans in to hear Coby’s advice over the music, intent on improving her game, but even one-on-one coaching can’t help her. When she misses her sixth shot in a row, Oliver turns his back. He can’t watch anymore.
“Where are you going?” Althea yells across the table.
“To check the mail,” he says.
Sure enough, there are two beers in the mailbox at the end of the driveway, nestled between the pages of the Pennysaver. He pops one open and puts the other in the pocket of his sweatshirt. Wandering back to the house, he’s able to fully appreciate how many people are here tonight: kids running to greet one another, girls shrieking like harpies and falling off the porch while boys roll their eyes and feign disinterest. He vaguely recognizes Jason, the host, who occasionally sells Coby pot, and they nod to each other across the lawn.
He goes inside to find Althea, but the girls have been replaced at the table. He steps out the back door. Howard and a girl wearing tight black jeans covered in useless straps and zippers are pawing at each other on a bench set back among the dogwood trees. His hand is clutching the back of her neck as if he’s nervous she might sprint off into the shrubbery. The safety pin in her ear gleams in the moonlight. The screen door opens continuously to spill teenagers into the backyard or suck them back into the house. Howard whispers something and the girl giggles, pricking her hand gently on the spikes of his Mohawk. He slips a hand between her jacket and shirt, down to the small of her back, and pulls her close. Oliver finishes the beer in his hand, tosses it aside, and opens the spare.
The girls are in the kitchen, Valerie holding aloft a funnel full of beer while Althea, on her knees, eagerly waits for the foam to subside. The floor shudders with the drumbeats of “Lust for Life,” which is cranked up on the speakers in the living room.
“Valerie’s teaching me to funnel beers,” Althea tells him. “She says I’m a natural because I seem to be lacking a gag reflex.”
“Our girl here is going to make one lucky man very happy someday,” Valerie says. “Go ahead, Althea. Don’t forget to open your throat.”
Althea wraps her mouth around the plastic tube, keeping it pinched shut until the last moment. She tilts her head back and releases, shooting all of the beer down her throat in one impossibly long swallow. When she’s drained it she stands, wipes her mouth with the inside of her wrist, and hands the beer funnel back to Valerie. “Oliver’s next,” she says.
Coby approaches. “Anyone seen Minty Fresh? I need a partner for beer pong.”
“He’s out back, expanding the gene pool,” Oliver says.
“Fuck yourself,” Coby says.
“I swear on my eyes,” Oliver says. “Some girl with zippers.”
“Unbelievable. He looks like a clown, he smells like toothpaste, and he’s still getting more action than either of us. It’s a sad fucking state of affairs.”
“Jealousy is not a good look for you,” Valerie says.
“Please, like you wouldn’t switch places with him in a second,” Coby says.
“Fair’s fair. He saw her first. Oliver, come here.”
“I’ll hold it for him,” Althea says, taking the loaded funnel from Valerie. “Oliver, get down on your knees.”
“Whatever we’re doing,” Coby says, “I want to be next.”
Oliver can’t figure out how to open his throat. His lungs fill with liquid, and he tears the tube from his mouth, spilling the rest of its contents across the floor in a thin foamy puddle. He wheezes but can’t draw in any air; for a few panicked seconds, he’s suffocating. Finally, some of the beer comes out his nose and he coughs up the rest, spraying it across Althea’s bare legs while everyone hoots with laughter. She bends over to dry her knees with a dish towel, and Oliver, still on the floor, gets a quick look up her skirt, a harrowing glimpse of the space between the tops of her thighs, a flash of blue panties and taut cotton. It’s so quick it’s over before it’s begun, but it’s just long enough to make him regret his earlier comment. First, I would have to pretend that you’re a girl. She’s a girl, all right.
Coby asks Oliver to be his partner for beer pong instead, and Oliver can’t say no. Every time he tries to leave the table, Coby asks him to stay for just one more game. By the time he makes it back upstairs, there’s no sign of Althea anywhere. He wanders around in a gentle haze. Things seem to be operating on a three- or four-second delay. That’s fine with him. Pretty much everything is fine with him. Eventually he finds his way into the master bedroom. A sliver of light shines under the door of the attached bathroom. As he raises his hand to knock, there’s a crash and the spectacular, decadent sound of heavy glass shattering into a thousand pieces.
“Hey,” he says, knocking on the door. The occupant gasps. He recognizes that sharp intake of air. “Althea, is that you in there making all that beautiful music?”
“Ollie?” she whispers, regressing to his childhood nickname. She opens the door a crack and looks around frantically. Satisfied there are no witnesses, she grabs him by the wrist, pulling him inside the bathroom and locking the door. “I did a bad thing.”
The bathroom is large and opulent. There’s a glass-enclosed shower in one corner, an enormous Jacuzzi in another, and a bathmat between them as thick and soft as the carpet in Althea’s living room. Dried flowers hang from the walls and lavender clay pots of potpourri are lined up in a row on the toilet tank. A series of vanity bulbs frame a large blank square on the wall above the sink, and below them, twinkling like a galaxy of fallen stars, the mirror lies shattered and dazzling across the porcelain.
“Did you do that?” he asks.
“I thought it was the medicine cabinet, so I tried to open it, and it came off the wall instead,” she says.
“Why were you trying to get into the medicine cabinet?”
“It’s sort of great-looking, isn’t it?”
The light from all the vanity bulbs reflecting off the fragments piled in the sink is a gorgeous, arresting sight. He’s never seen anything like it. It makes him think of all the antiques in Althea’s house, all the glass figurines that make him so nervous, all the things people buy with abandon because they think they’re so lovely, and none of them compares to the beauty of this disaster. There’s no doubt that this, this is the mirror’s finest moment.
Althea covers her face with her hands, peeks at him from a crack between her fingers, and catches him staring at the sink. “See?” she says softly.
“Shush.”
“Don’t shush me.”
“You love it when I shush you.”
Someone knocks on the door. “Who’s in there?”
Althea chooses this moment to begin laughing uncontrollably.
“Hello? Okay, seriously, you aren’t supposed to be in there.” It sounds like Jason.
Althea can’t stop herself, clutching the windowsill, holding her stomach, and shaking from head to toe. Jason pounds on the door.
“Coby? Is that you? I swear, if I find you fucking in my parents’ bathtub again, I’m gonna mess you up like a goddamn car crash.”
This new piece of information incites a fresh fit of hysteria. Jason keeps banging on the door, and Althea turns on the faucet in the bathtub.
“Coby, you motherfucker! I’m serious!” Jason shouts.
It sounds like he’s ramming the door with his shoulder. A voice speaks up from somewhere behind Jason. “Coby’s not in there, he’s at the beer pong table. He just
kicked my ass.”
“Then who the hell is fucking in my parents’ bathtub?” Jason hollers, slamming the door with his fist for emphasis.
A siren wails in front of the house. At once, it seems, the entire party erupts with a cry of “Cops!” and everyone starts running. The bedroom instantly clears. Screen doors slam shut. The music cuts off abruptly, leaving the house feeling hollow as its occupants flee. All the noise is coming from outside now, and it seems like Althea and Oliver might be the only two people left when they hear heavy footsteps on the stairs. A dispatcher’s voice crackles on a radio. Althea gives a nervous titter, and Oliver claps a hand over her mouth.
The bathroom window opens onto the slanted roof of the back porch. “It would seem,” he whispers, “that we are out of options.”
“I’m not going out that window,” says Althea. The radio sputters again, closer, in the hallway this time.
“Non-Stop Party Wagon. You can’t say no.” He climbs out. Reluctantly, Althea follows.
In the backyard, kids are stashing their drugs under potted plants so they can return and find them later. The red and blue lights in the driveway sweep rhythmically over the scene. Cops burst out the back door telling everyone to stay where they are. Hand in hand, Oliver and Althea scoot toward the edge of the roof until their feet are dangling below the gutter. They ease themselves off, falling briefly through space until they land, crouched, in the wet grass. They run through the dogwoods and the shallow creek that borders the property, then across the neighboring backyards, climbing fences and setting off motion sensor lights. With the sirens behind them, the sense of urgency fades. Slowing to a walk, they catch their breath.
This late hour has always been like their living room, the temporal equivalent of Althea’s basement, whether they were reading to each other in a pup tent in his backyard, building a fort of blankets and cardboard boxes in her basement, or whispering to each other via two-way radios while they lay in their respective beds, sending schemes for future mischief across the airwaves between their houses.
The sky is still dark, the moon like a curved piece of broken glass, and a bird sings above them in a young sugar maple. They look at each other with gauzy surprise. Althea sidles up to the tree, peering into its branches, but the bird is hidden in the early summer leaves. It waits a beat and then begins again, a different tune but the same somehow, like the next verse in a torch song. Enraptured, they squint through the mess of buds and leaves as the bird trills on.
Althea and Oliver Page 5