by Nina Kenwood
My phone battery drops to 30% and I reluctantly put it away. I have to keep it for emergency moments only now. Or maybe I can find a charger in the house. That could be a conversation opener, if I can figure out who Benny is and then ask him if I could borrow a charger, and then maybe we keep talking and I ask a bunch of really engaging questions and we hit it off. Maybe Benny and I will fall in love.
I walk back into the kitchen. Someone has spilled Coke all over the bench, so I grab a cloth and clean it up. I throw a few empty beer bottles in the bin and I’m contemplating the dirty dishes when Alex walks in.
‘Are you cleaning? Why are you cleaning?’ He’s laughing.
‘Just wiping up a spill,’ I say.
He stops laughing. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t have to stay here, you know.’ Alex sits on the bench I just wiped, and I try not to be annoyed by this.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Parties aren’t your thing.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘You did.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yeah, you did. About six months ago. You said you can’t stand parties and you hate most people.’
That definitely sounds like something I would say. I mean, it’s kind of true, but it’s also a great line for someone who is looking for an excuse not to leave her house. It’s such a relief when every internet quiz I do says I’m an introvert, like I’ve been given written permission to avoid everyone and everything. You don’t have to try now because you’re an introvert, is what I take it to mean.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I say.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I love parties now. And people.’ I’m using my most upbeat tone.
‘What brought on this turnaround?’
‘I’m trying to be more open-minded. It’s my New Year’s resolution,’ I say. This is a lie. My real New Year’s resolutions are to learn how to do my own eyeliner, read one hundred books, and fix all my issues (emotional, physical, mental) before I start uni.
‘But it’s not New Year’s Eve for another four days,’ he says, smiling and making what I think my ‘top ten tips for talking to people at parties’ article would call ‘warm eye contact’.
‘I’m starting early,’ I say, trying to maintain the eye contact, which is difficult because my heart is racing.
‘Smart,’ he says.
Alex stops smiling, and his eyes go to someone behind me. I turn, and see that it’s Vanessa Nguyen, his ex. She went to my school, a year ahead of me. Now she studies fine arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and she has a nose piercing and a tattoo of a bird on her wrist and she’s cooler than I can ever dream of being. She and Alex were on-and-off again all through high school.
‘Hey, Ness,’ Alex says, and his face is all tight and tense. He’s still in love with her, I assume.
‘Hi, Vanessa,’ I say, because I am trying to show Alex that I don’t hate people.
‘Hi,’ she says to me with a hint of uncertainty. I can tell she vaguely recognises me but has no idea who I am.
‘How are you?’ Vanessa says to Alex.
I should leave, so they can have their awkward conversation in private, but I have nowhere to go and, also, I was here first.
‘I’m good, how are you?’
‘Busy. You know.’
‘Yeah. Are you still working at that bar?’
‘Nah, I quit.’
‘I’m glad. That manager was sleazy.’
‘He was the worst. How do you two know each other?’
It takes me several seconds to realise Vanessa is referring to Alex and me. It’s such an odd question—as if Alex and I are here together, as if how I know Alex matters at all.
I laugh nervously.
‘Natalie is friends with Zach. You would have seen her at my house,’ Alex says.
‘Oh yeah, I thought you looked familiar.’
I don’t know what to say to that—I want to point out that we also went to school together—but I stick with my trademark move and say nothing.
‘Well, I’ve got to go say hi to Jacqui. I’ll talk to you later,’ Vanessa says, and she touches his arm and then walks off.
Alex sighs after she’s out of earshot.
I hitch myself up onto the kitchen bench beside him. ‘Are you two still friends?’ I ask.
‘Not really. Or, yes, we are but in a weird way,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘About what?’
‘Seeing her makes you sad.’
‘No, it doesn’t. I’m not sad. I’m…’ But he doesn’t finish the sentence. I raise my eyebrows.
He folds his arms as if he’s not going to say anything, then says, ‘Fine, seeing her makes me feel a teeny, tiny bit sad.’
‘That sucks.’
‘But it’s not like I still want to be with her. I don’t. I just… I don’t know. It’s weird.’
Alex is jiggling his leg and I reach out and put my hand on his knee to stop him. Only after I remove my hand from his leg does it occur to me that I’ve never touched him before. I’m suddenly self-conscious about the intimate gesture.
He looks at me, as if he’s thinking the same thing about us never having touched before.
‘Zach does that leg jiggling too. It drives me nuts,’ I say, suddenly filled with the need to explain.
‘Must be genetic,’ Alex says, smiling now.
‘Or he learned it from you.’
‘That’s scary. To think of all the things he might have learned from me.’
‘What’s the best thing about having three brothers?’ I ask, partly because it seems like an engaging question, but also because I am paranoid about the things I might have missed out on not having siblings. Like, could there have been a whole other Natalie, a better Natalie, who would have existed if she’d had a cool older sibling to show her the way in life, or a younger sibling who looked up to her.
Alex makes a face at my question.
‘Humour me. I’m an only child,’ I say.
‘Never feeling alone.’
‘And what’s the worst thing?’ I’m getting good at these questions now.
‘Never feeling alone.’
‘Ha.’
‘It’s like…sometimes they take up so much space in my life I’m afraid I’ll never have room for all the other people I want to fit in. And I worry about them. Zach’s okay, he’s so smart, and he’s got you and Lucy, but I think Anthony gets bullied a bit, and Glenn thinks he’s invincible and he’s going to grow up and be a bit too wild.’ He stops, and seems surprised at himself for saying so much.
I’ve never heard him talk like this. And I’ve never looked at him up this close before. His eyes go all crinkly when he smiles. He has messy eyebrows, like Zach used to have before Lucy started plucking them.
‘My parents broke up,’ I say.
I have no idea why I just blurted this out.
‘I know. I heard Zach and Lucy talking about it. I’m sorry. I always thought your parents seemed like a nice couple.’
‘You’ve met my parents?’
‘No. But Mum talks about you, and them, so much that I feel like I have.’
‘It’s not like a bad break-up, with yelling and fighting over money or anything like that. It’s all very relaxed,’ I say.
‘That’s good.’
‘I mean, I’m eighteen, so there’s not a child anyone needs to have a custody battle over or anything.’
‘That makes things easier, I guess.’
‘And I feel completely and totally fine about it all.’
‘Sounds ideal.’
‘Yes. It is ideal. They’ll have a perfect divorce.’ I plan to laugh in a mature and ironic way, but what comes out is a kind of hiccupped sob. I put my hand to my mouth, more out of shock than anything, and tears start burning my eyes. The thing is, I’m not a crier. Never a public crier. Not even when a guy on a train said
‘You’ve got something on your face’ very loudly to me, and everyone around us looked at me and when I touched my face, thinking it was a smear of peanut butter, he said, ‘Oh, it’s a pimple, it looked like something else for a minute,’ and I had spent thirty-seven minutes and missed my usual train that morning getting my foundation to a point where I thought my skin looked pretty good for a change.
I’m not about to start public crying now, at this party.
‘Hey,’ Alex puts his hand on my arm. He looks a bit scared. Probably he’s worried he’s going to be stuck looking after his little brother’s pathetic, blubbering friend all night.
Now I truly am crying. I put my hands over my face to catch the tears that are slipping out of my eyes.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, trying desperately to sound it.
What is happening? I didn’t even cry when they told me. It must be the word divorce. I haven’t said that word out loud until this moment, even though I’ve been thinking it since they told me. I know it’s coming.
I keep my head in my hands. I should go to the bathroom and hide but I can’t face the idea of being caught in there again.
Alex keeps his hand on my arm and leans in. He whispers, ‘You probably don’t know this yet, but you’re not supposed to cry at parties.’
I give a small laugh.
‘I’m not crying.’ I wipe my cheeks and take deep breaths. Get it together. My nose gets red and swollen when I cry, and it runs like a tap. My eyes go bloodshot. I get an instant headache. Crying is not therapeutic for me.
‘Oh, I know you’re not crying. I was telling you just in case.’
His hand is still on my arm. I don’t want him to take it away. Focusing on that thought helps me to stop crying, because it’s a brand new, of-this-very-moment feeling.
I’ve known Alex for years and never felt a flicker of attraction. Or at least I don’t think I have. He has chest hair (I’ve seen him in a towel walking from the bathroom to his bedroom). He is obsessed with soccer. He has a heavy five-o’clock shadow and sometimes a scruffy beard. He’s a year older than me. He’s not tall. He likes partying. I’ve never seen him read or hold a book. He is nothing like Zach. These are things I would have previously said were problematic for me.
I look at the wall until I’ve pulled myself together and I’ve not only stopped crying but the urge to cry has completely disappeared, and then I lift my face. Alex takes his hand off my arm, and it almost seems worth crying again to see if he’ll put it back.
‘Do I have mascara running down my face?’ I ask him. As much as I hate to tell anyone to look directly at my face, I urgently need to know how bad things are.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t even look properly.’
He leans close to my face. ‘No mascara running.’
We hold eye contact for a long time (okay, a second or two, which is ages for me) and I feel embarrassed and ridiculously vulnerable because of my probably red post-crying nose and my bumpy skin, but I don’t want to look away.
‘So what other party wisdom do you have?’ I ask.
‘Well, every party has a guy that gets really drunk before everyone else and embarrasses himself. And a couple who get into an awkward, public argument. And an opinionated know-it-all who never shuts up and gets on everyone’s nerves.’
‘So who are all those people tonight?’
‘The drunk guy who embarrasses himself is’—Alex pauses and looks outside the kitchen window for a minute—‘Benny… In the red T-shirt.’
The guy he’s pointing to is balancing a plastic bucket on his head, yelling ‘Now fill it with water’ with a look of total delight on his face. So that’s Benny. Benny and I are almost definitely not going to fall in love.
‘Yes, that seems right,’ I say.
‘And the couple who argue?’ Alex scans the backyard and shakes his head. ‘They must be in the lounge room. You’ll know them when you see them. Annika has red hair, and Jes is wearing skinny black jeans, and they’re both very loud.’
‘Oh yeah, I think I saw them before, arguing about returning a Christmas present one of them bought the other.’
‘That’s where the argument will start, but it will spiral into the fact they both cheated on each other earlier this year, on the same night.’
‘Oh, wow.’
‘With the same person,’ Alex says.
‘That sounds complicated.’
‘And the opinionated guy—that one is easy.’
‘Let me guess.’ I look out the kitchen window into the backyard.
‘Him,’ I say, pointing to a guy with a beer in one hand who is wildly gesturing with the other. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Anarchy’.
‘Bingo. He loves conspiracy theories, arguing about politics and telling people why the music they like is crap.’
‘He sounds charming,’ I say. I turn away from the window and we smile at each other, and Alex looks like he’s going to say something when Owen yells at us from outside.
‘Hey, Alex and Natalie!’
We look away from each other, and I jump down from the bench. My legs feel a little shaky.
‘Come outside,’ Owen says. And just like that, I’m part of the party.
We go outside and sit on crappy folding camping chairs. A bunch of people are arguing about the existence of aliens and the best way to way to eat a croissant. After a while, I feel myself unclenching. It seems almost strange that I was hiding in the bathroom at the beginning of the night. I feel nostalgically sad for my pathetic self of an hour ago—what a loser. Now I am a goddess on a rickety camping chair pretending to drink a beer.
5
Never Have I Ever
I’ve been outside for about twenty minutes, occasionally chiming in on the conversations around me, and watching Owen get louder and drunker. At one point, he turns to me and winks. I pretend not to notice, because there is nothing on Earth that makes me more uncomfortable than someone winking at me.
Alex checks in on me, asking if I want another drink, and then if I’m cold, and both times I smile and shake my head.
At some stage, I’m not sure how, it is decided that everyone will play a drinking game. I’ve never actually seen a drinking game played before, so I’m quite fascinated. I cross my legs on the chair, and settle in. It feels anthropological.
The chosen game is Never Have I Ever. One person says something they’ve never done and everyone who has done it must drink. (There’s a good five minutes of arguing and googling on how to play the game—do you drink if you have done it, or do you drink if you haven’t? Everyone is very, very sure their way is correct.)
‘Never have I ever…vomited on my parents’ front lawn.’
‘Never have I ever…kissed more than five people in one night.’
‘Never have I ever…watched porn with my friends.’
‘Never have I ever…passed out naked on someone else’s couch.’
Predictably, most questions are sex- or alcohol-focused, and there is a fuss after each one, yelling and laughing at the people who do and don’t drink. I sit my bottle on the ground, so it’s clear I am here to watch and not participate. In fact, I’m getting bored and not even paying attention (the game is much less fascinating than I thought it would be), wishing my phone battery wasn’t so low, when Owen taps my arm.
‘Your turn.’
‘My turn what?’
‘To say “Never have I ever…”’
‘Oh, crap.’
Everyone is looking at me. Vanessa arches an eyebrow (a perfect eyebrow, she has the kind of eyebrows that should be studied for how perfect they are). Alex gives me a small, commiserating smile that seems to say I know you’re going to stuff this up, but that’s okay.
I have no idea what to say. Think, think, think. Okay, stop thinking, just say anything.
‘I’ve never…played spin the bottle.’ I don’t know why, of all possible words in the English language, these are the ones that come out of my mouth. Th
ere’s a pause, and I contemplate standing up and leaving, just running into the night. Does anyone play spin the bottle anymore? Did anyone ever play it? Does it exist as a thing outside of 90s’ TV shows? Does it exist outside of my own head?
No one drinks.
‘What, has no one here ever played spin the bottle?’ Owen yells. He’s drunk enough that he says everything at volume.
Everyone looks at each other and they’re all shaking their heads.
‘Let’s play,’ says a girl. I think her name is Lana. Or maybe Petra.
And just like that Never Have I Ever is abandoned and an empty bottle is placed on the ground in the middle of us all.
‘Wait, do you have to kiss in front of everyone or do you go off into the dark?’ asks a guy called Raj.
‘You’re confusing it with Seven Minutes in Heaven, where you are locked in the cupboard for seven minutes together,’ Vanessa says.
‘Has anyone played that one, either?’ Owen yells.
‘Nope,’ says Raj.
‘Let’s combine them. Spin the bottle, and then the two people go around there for a one-minute countdown,’ Lana/Petra says, pointing to a narrow, dark walkway down the side of the house.
‘How much can you do in one minute?’ Benny asks.
There is a lot of laughter and teasing about what can happen in a minute. I am practically dizzy with how quickly the situation has gone from one terrifying thing (my complete failure at a drinking game) to another (my soon-to-be complete failure at a kissing game).
I edge my chair nearer to Owen’s, so it will be harder to tell if the bottle is pointing to me or him, and everyone will want it to be pointing to him, so I can politely back out.
I don’t want to play this game.
I don’t want to play this game so badly that I take my phone out of my pocket, scroll through my contacts and hold my finger over the word Mum, but then I picture myself in the future saying to my inquisitive child ‘I left the party before the game started, so no, honey, I’ve never played spin the bottle’ and my child looking at me with deep disappointment. So I will stay to avoid my future imaginary child from being disappointed in my life experience, which is as good a reason as any to stay anywhere.