I shook my head. “This dance is like a four-hour headache,” I lied. Daylight was better than prom and the Valentine’s dance combined, and everyone knew it.
Nihal chortled, but his smile curdled as Connor Caskey approached us, tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair swept back.
“Sharps,” he said.
“Caskey,” Nihal said stiffly. I inclined my head in an unwilling nod.
“You guys sounded great.” He flashed that irritating smile. “For half an a cappella group.”
I gritted my teeth. “You know,” I said, “you’ve got some nerve, saying shit to us after you ruined our music.”
Connor’s smile faltered. A long, awkward second passed. Then he blurted, “I mean, we didn’t expect you guys to just give up.”
I traded a glance with Nihal, who looked blank.
“You what?” I said.
Connor fidgeted, clumsy hands adjusting his tie. “I mean, this is kind of the whole point of a rivalry.”
“. . . No,” Nihal said, utter disbelief dripping from the single syllable. “No, the point of rivalry is not to ruin each other’s lives. It’s an incentive to make everyone better.”
Connor arched an eyebrow, and humor snuck back into his voice. “Jesus. Your version sounds boring, Singh.”
“I used to wonder why all the Minuets call me Singh,” Nihal shot back, “and then I realized, it’s probably because you Neanderthals can’t pronounce Sehrawat.”
“To be fair,” I muttered, “I’ve misspelled your last name like eighty times.”
Nihal gave me a withering look. “It is a mystery that I keep you people around.”
A hand landed on my shoulder. I turned to find Victoria Taylor and one of the other Precautionary Measures, both in black dresses. “Julian, hey!” Victoria said, and went right for the hug. I froze for a second before awkwardly patting her back, praying I didn’t smell too feminine. Hell if I could afford cologne; and I did not have the time, resources, or desire to buy one of those dude body washes that looked like ultrasound gel and came in a dispenser shaped like a torture device.
Victoria’s head fit under my chin. Her wavy hair smelled like peppermint. I glanced around for Jon Cox, but he’d disappeared into the throng.
Victoria pulled back. She looked stunning, put together in the way rich girls could afford, with pearls dangling from her earlobes and draped in a line over her delicate collarbones, set in rose gold. A loose sack dress disguised her curves. I couldn’t look away. In some other lifetime, if she hadn’t left her sitcom for reality, she might have worn this on a red carpet with paparazzi crowding in to ask who she was dating or how she stayed wire-thin. She’d abandoned that lifestyle just before diets and dating became the questions that defined her. A lucky near-miss.
I was looking too hard at her. I looked down instead at the silvery heels that brought her up four inches or so, making her regular-short instead of hobbit-style tiny. Her weight shifted easily from one spindly heel to the other. “You were great,” she said. “You and the other new guy, what’s his name?”
“Marcus?”
“Yeah. Your solos sounded awesome.” She smiled. “Erik told me you’re a junior. You should’ve tried out before this year.”
I looked over at Nihal for backup, but he and Connor Caskey were in the middle of a duel of wits for the ages. “Right, well,” I said. “You know how busy . . . stuff . . . things are.”
Both Victoria and the other Measure looked like they were trying not to laugh. Mentally, I kicked myself. With my best friends excepted, I was awful at talking to girls, especially if they were prettier than me. It felt as if they had some sort of answer key to girlhood—how to walk and how to laugh and how to flirt—and they could tell that I was bullshitting my way through the whole female experience.
Logically, this couldn’t be true, but it still seemed like it sometimes. I would’ve thought it would be easier to be a guy, talking to girls. Apparently not. I felt defensive under their scrutiny.
Music boomed into life over the nearby speakers. Shit.
“You okay?” Victoria said.
“What? Yeah. Why?”
“You just—” She mock flinched.
“Nah, it’s nothing.” Nothing except that, now that the music was playing, the beat was slipping under my skin. I wanted nothing more than to stay and dance. And Victoria—she was all smile and interest and attention, and I couldn’t stop looking at the way her hair fell, collected, shifted, brushed over the curves of her collarbones. Why?
I should’ve escaped the second I got offstage.
“Here,” Victoria said, stepping closer. From the folds of her dress, where a pocket was apparently hiding, she pulled out a flask, keeping it low and hidden from any wandering eyes. “Want some?”
I absolutely did. My nerves were leaping, and the heat was getting unbearable. A bead of sweat itched its way down my spine with torturous slowness. The beat made me want to lose it, break into a dance in front of the speaker.
Victoria raised an eyebrow. She had exclamatory eyebrows, dashes of dark paint, a few shades darker than her hair.
I took the flask, unscrewed the cap, and hunched down to take a swig.
The rim was wider than I’d thought, and a rush of straight bourbon whited everything out for a second, a battering ram of bitterness. I swallowed hard and my ears went hot, the top of my nose burning. Victoria took her flask back, screwed the cap on, and tucked it away. “Feel free to have more, please,” she said. “I’m set for the night, and I have to get rid of that.”
“She can’t hold her liquor,” the other Measure said to me, knowingly.
“Hush, freshman,” Victoria said.
I gave her my guy-chuckle, the bourbon’s sting still chewing over my tongue. The room already looked brighter, the laser lights wilder. Threads of neon blue and green spun through the dark, drawing bright spots on the distant walls. Outside, night had fully settled over Kensington.
I spotted Jon Cox and Mama in my periphery and flagged them down. They forged past shining dresses and pressed button-ups.
“Hey, um, hi,” Jon Cox said over the music, leaning in to hug Victoria. It lasted longer than it needed to. As they pulled back, the DJ transitioned into another song, and to my right, Mama broke it down. I watched for a second, trying to hold back my dancing impulse—but watching him only made it worse, because shit, but Mama was a pretty good dancer. The vocal line soared. The beat pulsed. I felt it in my hips, my shoulders, my ribs.
When the others started dancing, too, I caved. One song, I told myself. One song, then I’ll go.
We formed a circle, the five of us, and I looked down at myself, trying to blend. Guys at school dances always did that awkward knee-bobbing move, nodding their heads, obviously hoping to grind on someone. I tried to strike a balance between that and my need to swivel my hips until my waist ached.
The lights dimmed, turning the crowd into a thousand frantic silhouettes. After the song ended, I tried to leave, but Jon Cox slung an arm around my shoulders. The song after that? “Love You Forever,” so obviously, I couldn’t leave then, either.
Soon, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t want to, and besides, did it really matter? Nobody was looking at faces in here. You could hardly see facial features in the blinking strobe, in the whirling flood of purple and green.
Our circle gravitated toward the deafening speakers, getting closer and closer to each other with every song. Soon, we weren’t so much a circle as a clot, a tangle of arms and legs and moving hips. To my right, I could tell Jon Cox was trying to get up on Victoria, but either he couldn’t work up the guts to ask her, or he assumed it was too loud to try verbal communication.
A couple of teachers kept having to break up kids who were grinding too obscenely. Worst job ever.
Victoria’s flask rotated between us. By the time it reached me, what I’d had earlier had sunk in. My head felt light and frothy and open, like someone had skim
med off the top of my skull, and I thought, What’s the harm? I took another secret swig. And a second. And a third.
Time disappeared. All around us, the crowd screamed the lyrics to “Lightning,” to “Club Love True Love,” to “Haley’s Eyes.” Sometime during “Haley’s Eyes,” the crowd shifted, and suddenly Victoria was pushed into me, her back against my chest. I expected her to pull away, but a beat later, she was moving against me. The bright mint smell of her hair intoxicated me more than the alcohol. My hands found her hips instinctively, the slick satiny fabric of her dress folding under my fingers, and we locked together. She pressed back into me, and the feeling of her curves made my stomach twist. My mind had gone blank.
Then she looked up over her shoulder at me. Bright, daring eyes, and thick black eyeliner. Smirking coral lips. She moved—twisted—and leaned up.
Her mouth pressed to mine. Something ignited in my stomach. I melted down into her.
The sensation lit up patterns of memory, sparks that set each other off in a chain reaction. I remembered how I’d used to kiss a year ago, when kissing had been a commodity: eager and greedy and reaching, all action, all fire. Right now, I was sinking down inside myself, where everything felt like the ocean, the slow but unavoidable sway of want. I wanted to wait, and savor, and watch. It was all different, but the same fundamental fascination.
So it hadn’t been a fluke with Jenna that summer. The way I’d felt something stirring.
Hang on, I thought vaguely. Isn’t this girl way out of my league? Another thought: I shouldn’t do this.
But I couldn’t remember why not. Victoria tasted citrusy and whiskey bitter, she kissed with total authority, her hands were hard knots on the back of my blazer. My eyes fluttered shut and I floated upward. I imagined, for a second, silence or stillness, the two of us at a quiet movie or a windy hillside or a mountain view that went on for miles. Walking with my arm around her waist, or her hand in mine. I imagined her powerful soprano voice kept to an absentminded hum as we worked side by side, tucked away in a corner of the library, maybe. And through it all, she felt, against me, like a line of electricity. My hands didn’t know where best to be. All of her was the perfect place, every inch the most intriguing inch.
Then she touched the front of my blazer, the heel of her hand brushed against my breast, and my mind snapped back into place. My eyes shot open. I stumbled out of her arms.
What the hell was I doing? She thought I was a boy. Maybe she wasn’t even into girls. And to my right, Jon Cox was dancing with zero rhythm, no heart in it at all, determinedly avoiding my eyes. Mama gave me a look: What the hell?
Julian was an asshole. I was an asshole.
This was a mistake. I needed to get out. I had to stay alone.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said. Victoria’s smile faltered. I turned from her. “I gotta—I have to go.”
I forced my way through the crowd, the wash of bodies and heat and humidity, and my tongue felt like a strip of tanned leather sitting at the bottom of my mouth, and I was blinking and sweating with every hit of the bass. As the song surged into the chorus, confusion swam over me, dulling the panic. Everyone was jostling everyone else, causing stumbling chain reactions, and only half the crowd even looked like they were having a good time, and what did I just do, what did I do, what did I do?
You’re drunk, said a voice in my head. That explained it. Definitely drunk. Was I into girls, or just drunk? Or was I both drunk and into girls? Why hadn’t I stayed sober, so I could make a controlled experiment out of this?
Near the door, someone’s hand landed on my back, and I turned. I tilted my head up. Isaac. Relief flooded me, cold. The face of someone who didn’t hate me yet.
“Hey, are you leaving?” he said.
“Isaac,” I said. Was I talking too loud? The music wasn’t so deafening back here. “Hey, Isaac.”
He tilted his head. “Are you drunk?”
“Ha. What? Me? No. Yes.”
Isaac sighed.
“I think I’m going to head out, too,” he said, scanning the room. “Not sure how much more of this I can do.”
“You don’t dance?”
He laughed. He was always laughing. There was something off about it this time. “No,” he said. “When I dance, I look like—you know those flailing inflatable tube guys that are always, like, thrashing on the side of the highway to advertise car sales? That’s how it looks.”
I laughed and wandered past him toward the door, by column after column. Marden Cathedral was so beautiful. Even this mess of people couldn’t hide it. Biblical scenes were hewn into the pearly gray rock, shepherds herding, women weeping, the Messiah lifting His hands. Grooves ran up from the carved vignettes to flowery scrollwork at the top of the columns, where they bled into the arched ceiling.
“Julian,” Isaac said, nudging me.
I gave my head a shake, realizing I’d stopped to look up. I’d been staring at the ceiling for a while. I wondered how long. “What?”
“We should go.” He glanced along the wall. So did I. Teachers, a line of them, one for every dark, stained glass window. The nearest one was eyeing me.
“Yeah, got it.” I focused on keeping myself steady as we headed for the doors. They stood wide, letting freezing drafts into the cathedral’s sweaty interior.
We passed Principal Busse, the Supreme Overlord of Kensington-Blaine Academy, who stood at the door checking people’s invitations. She was a short, round woman wearing bright red earmuffs. She didn’t spare us more than a passing glance. Her face was a blur. Everyone’s faces were blurring. Red mouths and black eyes.
Outside, in the dry cold, the sweat and heat under my blazer evaporated in what felt like seconds. For an instant, it invigorated me, the shock of the temperature, and I wanted to sprint, or climb something, or dig deep into the world. But soon the back of my neck stung with the chill, and then I couldn’t feel my nose, and my eyes were globes of ice in their sockets. August Drive had grown to twice its usual length.
They’d said it on the news the other day—a storm was coming. Winter Storm Saul. Or was it Paul? Some Biblical boy name. Whoever it was, he was going to drench us in snow.
“Look,” Isaac said, “we’ll talk about this when you’re not drunk, but what happened Thursday with Trav shouldn’t have happened. I’m going to figure this shit out.” The words circled my head, not quite sinking in. An array of vaguely important sentences I wasn’t quite hearing. “I don’t know,” he went on. “You and Nihal seemed stressed out today, and that’s not a good rehearsal vibe, and I feel kind of bad since it’s your first semester and the president is supposed to, like, set an examp—”
I walked into his shoulder.
He stopped and steadied me. After a second I levered my head upward because I had been staring at my feet. There were his eyes. Not laughing now.
“How much did you have?” Isaac said.
“It’s cold,” I said. It was important that he knew this. How cold it was. Isaac had on a coat—the same hooded black fleece he’d worn the other night. Why hadn’t I brought my coat? This blazer didn’t keep the warmth in at all.
“Pretty cold, yeah,” he said. Then, after a second, “Where’d you even get a drink?”
“Victoria,” I said, and the back of my hand came to my mouth.
“Girls. Terrible influence.” Isaac sighed. “Okay, you live in Burgess, right?”
Bad. The plan was bad. He wanted to make sure I got back to my dorm. If he saw where I lived . . .
I hunted for a diversion. We stood across from the administrative buildings, that curving line of brick cubes. Identical gables stood out over their doors. To our right, a shallow hill led down to the music buildings. What to do?
“No, don’t,” I said. “You don’t have to w—don’t worry. About it, man, don’t worry.”
“I’m not gonna risk you passing out outside somewhere. It’s fine. I’ll walk you back.”
We kept walking down August Drive. I had to stop
him. “It’s cold, though,” I reminded him. “I’m really cold . . .”
I shivered. And then my leg was somewhere left of where I’d wanted it to be. I staggered, and Isaac caught my upper arm. I regained my footing. We stood by a stop sign. The single intersection on campus. Four corners of white sidewalks glowed like paint in the moonlight. The narrow stream of August Drive crossed over the wide black river of Main Street. “Can I get some water?” I said. “Use a bathroom?”
“Water. Good plan,” he said, looking around. “Here, come on.”
We turned right on Main, heading downhill toward the dappled stone of Wingate. Isaac took a wallet out of his khakis and scanned us in. The warmth of the Wingate lounge enveloped us. Hardwood floors beneath my feet and uncomfortable-looking leather sofas passing by my legs. On the wall hung portraits of old people in wigs, rimmed in thick golden frames.
I spotted a water fountain in the corner and made for it. Isaac’s footsteps followed. As I hunched over the fountain, quaffing mouthful after mouthful, I got the urge to call Jenna. Tell her what had happened at the dance with Victoria.
Jenna had known since forever. Since she was six. How could I still not know? I had to be a fake. She wouldn’t believe me. Would she? Did I believe me?
Thoughts wandered around my head unrestricted. It was better being drunk and alone than drunk and crowded in. Everything felt important. Isaac stood a few feet away.
“I made out with Victoria,” I told the water fountain.
“Uh. What?” said Isaac’s voice. The water fountain had nothing to say.
“I mean, she made out with me. We made out with each other. She started it. I don’t know. What?”
“Classy,” Isaac said, sounding amused.
“I feel bad. Jon Cox was right there, and I felt bad.”
“That’s shitty luck. Same thing happened to Ted last year with this girl Cameron. I think I told you about him? Ted? He’s . . .”
Isaac’s steady voice soothed me. I listened to the cadences and rhythms of it for a minute, unable to wring any meaning out of the sounds. Eventually, I straightened up from the water fountain. Swayed. “You ever miss New York City?” I asked, cutting him off from some tangent or other.
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