From the bed, Cicely points a finger at Ruby and exclaims, “Oh, my God! You’re the virgin!”
Dorian breaks out of her kiss and exclaims, “You are!”
“Well, I mean, God—” Ruby stammers, feeling every bugged-out eye in the room home in on her. “I guess someone’s been talking to Calvin.”
Alice says, “Calvin tells me everything.” She is standing at a wall-mounted mirror examining a tiny blemish on her face. She meets Ruby’s eyes in the glass, her face fractured by a hairline crack running down the center. “We were just involved in this entire discourse about how there were no virgins at this party.”
Linen Blazer says, “And then a fucking virgin walks in and shit.”
Ruby raises the brandy snifter as if to toast them all—another bit of nonchalant fakery—then gulps down the contents. Her tongue swells and her throat constricts. She really is an inexperienced drinker.
“Leave her alone.” It’s the boy silhouetted in the corner again.
He stands suddenly, and she gets a quick look at him. His hair sticks out on top and runs below his ears, nearly as long as hers and dyed the same black. His sleeveless, scarlet T-shirt bears the logo of a band she likes, the Clash. He wears tight, knee-length shorts cut from black jeans. He wears black socks and black boots. Between shorts and socks is a strip of pale skin. Then he scurries to the bathroom and slams the door behind him. His gestures are jittery—he’s probably been doing coke with the rest of them.
“Ruby!” It’s Necktie Guy, raising his voice to command her attention. “You mean to tell me that Calvin hasn’t—”
Dorian interrupts him. “I wouldn’t give my cherry to Calvin.”
“Neither would I,” says Necktie Guy, through a burst of satirical laughter.
“Ewww—” Dorian whines.
“What’s so bad about Calvin?” Alice asks.
“Oh, you know, he’s just so…Calvin,” Cicely says. Snuggling up to the guy in the linen blazer, she says, “I couldn’t wait to get rid of my virginity.”
He throws an arm around her and says, “A big fuckin’ thank-you for that.”
“I’m so sure you’re fucking welcome, Nick.”
Alice, frowning into the mirror, says, “I sometimes wish I had my virginity again. I gave it away like a hundred years ago—”
“To my brother,” Dorian screeches. “Slut!”
“That’s right. I lost my virginity to your brother, and you’re like totally insulting mine. In front of Ruby.”
Ruby feels like a soft, small toy batted around by enormous paws in a room filled with cats. They’re only playing, but at any moment they might pounce, their sharp claws piercing her skin. Her eyes dart to the bathroom door. Why didn’t she go in there while she had a chance? She places the empty snifter on a dresser and wipes her beer-sticky hands on her shirt.
“Refill?” Alice asks.
“What I really could use is something clean to wear.”
“Oh, my God, yes, yes, yes!” Alice exclaims, tearing herself away from her reflection and throwing open a closet door. So many clothes!
Cicely exclaims, “Awesome,” as she rolls her curvaceous figure off the bed and joins Alice at the closet. Ruby steps gingerly between them as they pull hangers from the rack and hold the garments up in front of her.
“This would look soooo cute on you,” Cicely coos, pressing a shiny, violet, one-piece swimsuit against Ruby, “but it’s cut for my size. It’ll just hang off your little shoulders.”
“I have a bag in Calvin’s car,” Ruby says, “I should just get it.”
“You need something for tonight,” Alice says, though Ruby has no idea what tonight promises. Alice pairs a spaghetti-strapped top with bright white pants many inches too long for Ruby. “You really need something like this.”
“I mostly just wear black,” Ruby offers.
“I had no idea,” Alice says, airing a fuchsia-and-turquoise shirtdress with an attached silver belt. “You need more of a nightclub look. This vampire thing you’ve got going on, I mean…” She shakes her head.
“I’ve got it,” Cicely announces, waving a narrow yellow tank top and a pair of madras shorts.
“Hey, those are mine.” This reprimand comes from Dorian, scowling from across the room, as she pours champagne into a plastic beer cup. “She can’t wear my clothes, she smells like a keg.”
“She’ll shower,” Cicely says.
“Dodo,” Alice says to Dorian, her voice cooing with persuasion, “you’re the only one who’s Ruby’s size.”
“What if I planned on, like, wearing it?”
The sourness in Dorian’s voice is obvious to Ruby, but Alice pays no mind. She presses the clothes into Ruby’s hands. Ruby holds them in front of her body and takes a quick look in the mirror. She can see how they will fit her. The shirt feels expensive to the touch, with the kind of fine stitching that indicates good tailoring; its softness will feel good against her sunburned skin. This is exactly the kind of stuff her mother is always buying for her—and always returning when Ruby refuses to wear it.
Dorian shouts, “Like, am I talking to deaf people?”
“I hear you loud and clear,” Ruby says to Dorian, holding her stare, thinking, I’ll just wear her ugly preppie clothes to spite her. She’s not sure how this girl became her instant nemesis, but there’s no mistaking it.
“Put them on,” Alice insists. She shoots a daggered look to Dorian.
“Oh, like I even care,” Dorian says, raising her middle finger and then downing the champagne. She tosses the empty cup across the room and flops down on the bed between the two boys, exhorting, “Let the virgin wear my whore’s clothes.”
“You’re such a bitch.” It’s him again, the black-haired boy, standing in the bathroom doorway, looking at her with such intense sympathy she can’t hold his stare. How long has he been watching?
She steps toward him, flapping Dorian’s clothes. “I need to—”
He nods, but he’s blocking her passage. His eyes, intriguingly, are rimmed with black liner. His face is strangely familiar—is he a friend of Calvin’s she’s met before? Maybe at that awful Barnard-Columbia mixer. The memory is buried just below an opaque surface, poking upward for air.
She takes a step closer. “Can you let me by?”
He turns sideways, forcing her to squeeze past. She sees a thin, crescent scar bisecting the childlike swell of his upper lip.
Nearly face-to-face, he whispers: “I can’t believe it’s you.”
She says, “I was trying to remember where—”
He says, “Don’t let them make you over.” She lets out a little chuckle, meant to neutralize. He touches her shoulder. “I’m not joking. You’re perfect.”
“What?” She can’t believe this guy’s nerve, using a line like that—just one more thwack from the cat’s paw. These people are unbelievable. But his eyes, slightly forlorn even in their cocaine alertness, beseech her to pay attention.
He says, “I’m sorry about this.” Then he tilts his head, dreamily, his eyelids half closing. He leans in. He wants to kiss her.
She pulls back, her shoulders hitting the door frame. She feels his breath as his mouth approaches. He makes contact. Lips, no tongue. She’s aware of the delicate ridge where the scar interrupts the flesh. He tastes clean, like mouthwash.
She understands that she is letting herself accept this. She feels his breath move into her. She feels herself giving in—her throat flutters warmly.
Calvin doesn’t kiss this way, to romance her, as if in slow motion. Maybe if he did, she wouldn’t be doing this now.
“Christopher! Let the de-virginizing begin.” A clownish hoot from the room. It’s that guy with the stupid necktie on his head.
Ruby breaks from the kiss, pushes the boy away, slides behind the bathroom door, pushes the lock on the knob. She leans against the wall and catches her breath.
God, what was that?
She flicks a switch and starts the hum of a fan.
Blown air hits the wet circle where he kissed her. Blood pulses in her head—liquor, nerves, excitement. Her thighs are sticky from the spill. She can smell her own body odor beneath the yeasty stench of beer and the floral waft from an air freshener on the toilet tank. The walls are papered in a metallic pattern, chrome and cobalt, abstractions of butterflies and snails. In that reflective surface she sees a blurred, schismed version of herself—a soiled, frazzled girl working through an alcohol buzz, clutching borrowed clothes.
She starts the water, testing hot and cold on her open palm. Pulls her shirt over her head, shimmies out of her skirt. She pauses in front of the mirror, staring at herself in black bra and panties, at her bare legs and thick-soled black shoes. She doesn’t look like a virgin. That’s why they all took so much pleasure in the rumor. Calvin’s girlfriend, the unlikely virgin. But Calvin believes it, and that’s what’s important—he accepts that this is the reason why their sex life never gets past kissing and hand jobs.
Someone in that room is going to tell him that she was just kissing this boy. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’ll prepare Calvin for what she has to say to him when they get home.
The kiss didn’t mean anything. It was just his intensity. And his style—the only person at this party who looks like someone she’d actually want to hang out with. And those eyes, the wounded look he was giving her. And I’m in a daring mood. And I know him, don’t I? But from where?
The pounding shower unknots her shoulders. Who is he, who is he, who is he? She almost has it, pushing up through memory. Can picture him against a wall—a blank, institutional cement wall. His hair isn’t black. Neither is hers. This was years ago. Long before Calvin. Before college. Those first couple years of high school, St. Vincent’s.
In an instant she knows. It’s Chris Cleary.
“Oh, my God,” she says out loud. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” Even under the hot water she feels the chill of goose bumps.
How could she not have recognized him right away?
But he looks like a different person now. The hair, the clothes. The shape of his face seems changed—longer, more narrow. That scar on his lip—that’s new.
They met at a Catholic program called Crossroads. Teenagers from parishes all over the city and beyond. A weekend away at a seminary in the country. The girls in one dorm and the boys in the other. Communal meals in a cafeteria, mass in the “multipurpose room.” There were blindfolded trust exercises. And “talks” about forgiveness, about God’s love.
They held hands during Shared Prayer. They sang songs from Godspell—“All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above…” In a room lit by candles he told her he’d been messing with drugs. She told him she felt guilty for her little brother’s death. They talked about not giving in to peer pressure, and they cried together, because Jesus understood.
They went for a walk in the woods, held hands, and they kissed, quickly and anxiously, because they were breaking the rules.
It’s all there now, all of it, returning.
After the weekend, there were phone calls. For several weeks, they spent hours on the phone—her mother scolding her for tying up the line, her brother teasing her about her new boyfriend, offering to cover if she wanted to meet Chris on the weekend without Dorothy knowing. But they didn’t meet. He lived out on Long Island. Neither had a driver’s license. Their phone calls, carried on in quiet, confessional voices, in rooms with the lights turned off, were their own covert meetings.
They had talked about everything, so easily. They had so many things in common: life as the middle child in the inescapable shadow of a favored older sibling. The need to tiptoe around unhappy parents—hers newly divorced, his married but hardly speaking. The knowledge that there was some other life out there, years in the distance, and if you just hung on long enough maybe you’d get to see it. Secrets to be shared. Chris: “I put modeling glue in a paper bag, with the cap off, and then I inhaled and my brain just went crazy.” Ruby: “It’s so easy to shoplift. They never even notice me. And everything just fits under my sweatshirt.” She stole a Stephen King novel, Fire-starter, and she was going to mail it to him.
Jesus will forgive us, they told each other.
Then one day the phone calls stopped. She guessed that maybe he moved, because his line was disconnected. But she never knew. He never called. She was crushed. She prayed, Jesus, help me find Chris. He was Chris in those days, not Christopher like they call him now. Chris Cleary.
She needs to let him know she remembers. He’s out there, in the room with those cruel-cat people, snorting poison. She needs to get him away from them. But first she has to get herself made up. All these pricey cosmetics to choose from. Alice won’t mind. None of the lipstick is dark enough, and in this borrowed yellow shirt, these ridiculous plaid shorts, which are too long, nearly to her knees, she looks not like herself at all, not like the person she’s turned herself into, but like the Catholic schoolgirl she once was. Is it better that way, better for Chris to see her like she was?
There’s a knock on the bathroom door—Calvin, calling her name, jiggling the knob.
She says loudly, “I’m changing.”
“Are you okay?”
“Alice gave me clothes. I’m fine.”
“I had no idea where you—”
“I’m fine. Will you get me a beer?”
“Open the door, Ruby.”
He clears his throat loudly—the telltale signal for a kind of impatience that Calvin falls into when Ruby doesn’t answer him the way he expects. Usually this leaves her stabbed with guilt, but she doesn’t care now. Chris Cleary is out there.
She checks the mirror once more.
Calvin is standing right outside the door, chewing on a fingernail, bouncing on his toes. He blinks, taking in her changed appearance. “What’s going on here? I heard about you and that guy—”
She looks past him, into the room, but doesn’t see the one she wants to see.
Alice is pushing Calvin out of the way. “Let’s see, let’s see. Oh, my God. We so got it right, you’re totally bitchin’ now. Oh, yes, yes, yes. This is so fun, I want to do it again, can we keep changing your outfit all night, please? We have ten million outfits, you have to try them all.” Her speech is even more rapid-fire than before. More coked up.
Cicely calls out to Dorian, “Look, Dodo, she’s all dressed up like one of us,” but Dorian is sandwiched on the bed between Necktie Guy and Linen Blazer. The boys fumble messily, a hand inside her blouse, a face nuzzling her collarbone. Necktie Guy is thrusting at the hips. Ruby sees his white briefs humping Dorian’s exposed thigh—no, he’s actually humping the other guy’s thigh, which is mashed into Dorian’s. One of the boys’ hands is snapping at the elastic of her pink bikini bottom.
Ruby sees that Calvin is staring at the bed, too. “Ben? Um, you guys are grossing us all out.” They ignore him.
Alice turns Ruby this way and that, running hands across her back to smooth wrinkles, pinching at the waistline of the shorts. She says, “It’s big at the waist, maybe we have some safety pins or something. God, you’re a skinny little virgin.”
“Alice!” Calvin protests. “What the hell?”
Alice flaps her hand at him. “Ruby and I are friends now.”
Ruby catches Calvin’s gaze, shrugs her shoulders. Out of my hands.
“Let go of her, Malice,” Calvin barks at his sister. “Come here, Ruby. I’m sorry I spilled on you. Don’t go kissing other guys.” His arms pull her close, and he sniffs her hair.
For just a moment she thinks, I guess I’ll stay here with Calvin wrapped around me, and we’ll get through this stupid weekend together—a thought with so little gravity that she feels herself float free of it, released from him like smoke from a cigarette.
She hears a blast of pop music from the house, a honeyed male vocalist insisting, “I wanna be your lover, lover, loverboy.”
Beyond the bedroom doorframe, a parade of partygoers crowds the hallway, as if i
n an adjacent universe. Where did he go? Chris Cleary from East Meadow, Long Island. Chris Cleary from the Crossroads youth retreat weekend. Chris Cleary in your new black hair, where in God’s name are you?
It’s as if he had never been there, as if he’d been an apparition she’d conjured out of her need to give her life some greater purpose.
Chris is nowhere to be found. Apparently he left the house while she was in the shower, after Calvin came into the bedroom and Alice or someone else told him what happened.
Ruby has gleaned this disappointing information from Necktie Guy, whose name, it turns out, is Benjamin Dinkelberg, and who knows “Christopher” from Princeton, where they all go to school. The necktie is no longer wrapped around his head. She imagines it tangled in the bedsheets, loosened during his ménage à trois.
He’s taken to calling her Princess. “You’re a princess in a temple of whores,” he told her, after emerging from the bedroom for a smoke and finding her here, on the back porch, leaning against the splintering railing and staring quietly at the raucous backyard. She’s barefoot now—too hot to put her boots back on, and anyway she did her toe-nails in black polish before she came down the shore, so why not show it off?
She asked Benjamin about Chris, and he reported that Chris was seen leaving the party on foot, in a hurry. “Are you hot for Christopher?” Benjamin wanted to know. “Are you warm for his form? There’s a certain kind of damaged chick—you might be the type—that finds an enigma like him irresistible.”
“Did he say where he went?”
“As his former roommate, I can report that he has a small penis,” Benjamin said. “I myself am above average.”
“You’re an average idiot,” Ruby told him, as he smiled in a way that said he didn’t care.
The sun is setting, the sky glazed in pink and tangerine. The porch looks out onto a grid of backyards, most of which are crowded with kids her age doing variations of the things going on here. To the left, the smell of reefer and the music of the Grateful Dead. To the right, a gang of jocks and frat boys doing beer funnels. People flow between the yards.
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