by David Hopen
The night began formally, with a fleet of stretch limousines fetching us from a central location—Rebecca’s house—but, quickly enough, devolved into a drunken affair. The bartenders, influenced by Mr. White’s generosity, showed little interest in our age, circulating a constant flow of sparkling champagne and mixing exotic drinks with names I’d never heard of: Maiden’s Prayers, Gimlets, French 75s. Deafening music started soon enough, but I remained on my own, nodding along, sipping an Old-Fashioned.
Nicole, in a sleeveless blue dress, materialized next to me. “Always on the side, huh?”
“Yeah, but as you can probably tell,” I said, watching Noah and Rebecca dance, “Remi hired me to be the life of the party.”
“Wow, congratulations. That must be a pretty big promotion for you.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“I said I thought so, too,” I yelled over the music.
“Oh.” She offered a polite smile. “Right.”
People shuffled by, fighting for access to the dance floor. We remained in place, contorting our faces into what we hoped might be non-awkward expressions. “I’d ask you to dance,” I said eventually, trying to combat how uncomfortable I felt, “but I don’t exactly know how.”
“How to ask or how to dance?”
“Apparently they’re not mutually exclusive.”
Nicole put out her hand. “I’ll let you drag me to the dance floor.”
“You’re cool with me making a fool out of both of us?”
“It’s your skin on the line, not mine.” She took my drink, finished it herself and deposited it with a stray waiter. “Come on,” she said, steering me into the chaos, “pretend it’s the Hora.”
I allowed her to lead me, tried not to focus on the way Amir executed effortless spin moves with Lily. Against my better judgment, I attempted to imitate Amir and succeeded only in elbowing Nicole in the ribs. “Sorry about that. Apparently I wasn’t exaggerating entirely about my skills.”
“I can see that.” Nicole frowned at the way my hands hovered clumsily around her waist. “Somebody should probably teach you how to move like a normal human.”
I readjusted my positioning. “How’s this?”
“Literally not any better.”
“Awesome.”
Someone—Donny, it seemed—bumped me from behind, sending me crashing into Nicole’s chest. She blushed. “You’re really such a natural.”
“Listen, Nicole,” I said, deciding this was as good an opportunity as any, “we never really had a chance to talk about—”
She shook her head. “Nope. Not doing this.”
“But I never said sorry—”
“—sorry for what?”
“I don’t know. I just feel kind of weird we’ve never even, like, acknowledged the whole thing.”
Another grimace. “Eden?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re squeezing my waist a little too tightly.”
“Shit, sorry.”
Her hand retreated from my shoulders. “Is it true you’re hooking up with her?”
I stopped in my tracks. The spike of someone’s heel landed on my foot, crushing my big toe. “What?”
“The quiet girl with bushy hair. Katya?”
“Her name’s Kayla,” I said, trying to move my poor toe, which I could feel bruising.
“Someone said they saw you in a classroom together at lunch.” She drew away slightly. “Is she here tonight?”
“No, I’m not seeing her, I just—” Out of the corner of my eye, I finally found Sophia: black fitted dress, hair straightened to fall in a precise line on her shoulders, earrings dangling from a long, golden chain, eyeliner rendering her gaze dark and brilliant. She was off to the side, speaking with Evan, who wore a tuxedo and a red bow tie. My blood thinned.
Nicole’s hand was at her hip. “What’re you staring at?”
The lights in the room broke in green flashes, making it difficult to tell what Sophia and Evan were doing. Screaming? Laughing? “Sophia.”
“Sophia Winter?”
“Indeed,” I said, slightly humiliated at the way my interest in Sophia registered to Nicole as absurdly beyond the pale of reason.
She gave a soft titter. “Eden.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure you’re exactly her type,” she said, smiling to herself.
“What’s her type?”
She shrugged. “It’s always been Evan. Still is, by the look of it.”
The music stopped. The DJ announced a surprise video in Remi’s honor, giving Nicole a chance to slink away. A theater-size screen descended from the ceiling, featuring split-screen collages of Remi through the years: as a newborn, a toddler at the Eiffel Tower, a flower girl, a teenager posing in a one-piece bathing suit. After a few self-absorbed minutes the video ended and, dutifully, we applauded Remi: skintight, black designer gown; cerise lipstick; exquisite blond curls; a single pearl swaying from her neck. She and her father, an imposingly tall man with comically chiseled features, danced to Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” after which the remaining adults trickled out. The dancing restarted, the DJ imploring us to again “get wild,” and I grabbed two drinks, scanning for Sophia. After several nerve-wracking minutes, I spotted her in the back and fought my way over.
She was alone. Purple ropes blocked off the section. I sat beside her, handed her a drink. The pulsing green lights made it feel as if we were moving in slow motion. “Fancy yourself a VIP?” I asked.
“Don’t you?”
What does yearning look like? Studying her face, I thought not of desire but of need. This, I told myself, is what it looks like when an old life is shed and a new one begins. “I’d say you’re easily the most important person in the room. So yeah.”
“You wildly overrate me, Hamlet.”
“Are you all right?”
Airy, defiant eyes. She put the drink to her mouth and took the smallest sip one could take. “Don’t waste your night worrying about me.”
“I just—I saw you with Evan.” The buzz from my drink amplified, making the music pounding my eardrums deliquesce into unintelligible noise. “I wanted to see if you’re okay.”
She bit her lower lip, ran a finger around the rim of her cocktail. “Why were you looking at me?”
“Oh,” I said, blushing. “That I can’t much help.”
This time she took a long drink. When she finished she wet her lips with her tongue. “How long have you had that problem?”
“I’m pretty sure it started the day I met you at Noah’s pool.”
The force of entropy: the music, the strobe lights, the bodies on the dance floor. Sophia in her swimsuit, at the piano, beneath the tree, bathed in lights beside the water. These were strong drinks. I wanted, desperately, to hold her hand. And then two people came crashing from the dance floor into our section.
“Shit.” Remi, tousled, and Evan, bow tie draped over his shoulders. “I didn’t know you were here,” Remi said, raising her voice against the music.
Evan was sweaty, his eyes dim. He nodded curtly at Sophia and ignored me altogether. “Sorry.” He put a hand on Remi’s back and led her away. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said after they’d left. Sophia had returned to staring into her drink.
“What is it?”
“What happened between you two?”
Momentarily, Sophia tightened her eyes, making me immediately regret having opened my mouth. Then she stood, flattened her dress, held out her hand. “Are we dancing or not?”
I took her hand, confused, keenly aware of my heart throwing itself riotously against my rib cage. We downed our drinks and, light-headed, made our way to the dance floor, bodies parting at the sight of the boy from Brooklyn with Sophia Winter in her flawless dress. I held her, drinking in sparkling vanilla, feeling the soft curves of her body, spinning in ambient light.
* * *
WE WALKED, BAREFOOT, TOWARD THE beach behind the hotel. She handed me her black heels. “There.” She picked a deserted lounge chair at the base of the sand. Faint waves licked at our feet. The tide was coming.
We faced the ocean, lying silently on the chair, her head against my chest. There were wet drops on my shirt. I looked down at the crown of her head, overwhelmed by her tears, by the magnitude of our privacy. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you ever made a terrible mistake?”
Being this close to her, feeling the weight of her body against mine, gave me a sense of physical pain in my chest. I imagined my years of loneliness as a long corridor, one door after another, a passage of empty chambers leading me to this night. “I’ve never done anything important enough.”
“Ari.” Her voice rang out hoarse, broken. “What’s wrong with me?”
“What’s wrong with you? Literally nothing. Sophia, I mean, come on, you’re brilliant, you’re incisive, you’re freaking heart-stopping. You terrify me and you’re fierce and honestly you’re entirely . . . yeah, I don’t know, alien, really, to anything I’ve ever thought I’d know. And yes, fine—you’re beautiful.” I forced myself, briefly, to look toward the water. Vocalizing all this immediately inverted whatever governed our previous dynamic. She had revealed weakness, and I had responded by revealing myself. “You make everything else hollow.”
“Beauty means nothing.” She rose, leaned forward drunkenly. “My beauty means nothing.” I was close enough to feel her breath. She kissed me softly, coolly, before falling back into my chest. I sat delirious, frozen in the night, running my fingers through her dark hair.
* * *
ECCE DEUS FORTIOR ME, qui veniens dominabitur michi. That’s what Dante, still a child, told himself when he first saw Beatrice. Behold, a god more powerful than I who will rule over me. Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps—how often will I be troubled hereafter!
I decided not to tell anyone, not even Noah. Withholding this secret felt like hiding stolen artwork. I had access to beauty that nobody else could see, an image stored away that was thrilling enough to illuminate the darkest recesses of my life but that I couldn’t actually reveal. I’d kissed the most powerful person I’d ever seen and no one knew. Still, there was a sense of fear: that Sophia, ashen-faced with humiliation, would claim the whole thing had been a drunken, colossal mistake.
On Monday, I walked in early to biology to find her waiting at my desk.
I hadn’t heard from her all weekend, nor had I worked up the nerve to text or call. I stood there, hands probing the depths of my pockets, bracing myself. “Hi.”
“Ari.” She was high-toned, bright-eyed again. “I want to apologize.”
A deep, exultant roar in my eardrums. “You want to apologize?”
“I know I was a mess,” she said, pink-cheeked, contorting her mouth into a smirk. “But I swear I’m not usually so, I don’t know, doleful. I had too much to drink, is all.”
Desperate, physical longing. I resisted the urge to throw down my books and gather her into my arms. “I don’t think you could be a mess if you tried.”
“Yeah? What would you call the tears?”
I smiled. “The natural result of finding yourself alone at the beach with me.”
“You’re too kind. And way too self-deprecating. But I just want to say that what happened with us—it was the highlight of the party.”
How many more times throughout my life span, I wondered, would I merit feeling such pure happiness? “It was?”
“Ari,” she said sheepishly, allowing herself to smile, “I mean it.”
“So if I were to, say, ask you out,” I said, enduring an unfamiliar surge of adrenaline, “theoretically you might consider saying yes?”
Dr. Flowers chose that moment to barge in, slamming her purse on her desk, accidentally sending a pack of Marlboros skidding across the laminate floor. “Shut the hell up, because today we cover the wonderful world of gene therapy.” I fell silent, took my seat, opened my notes. Sophia and I stared at each other, trying not to laugh. For the first time all year, I enjoyed every moment of biology, Dr. Flowers’ wheezing and all.
* * *
WE SAW A MOVIE THAT Saturday night, some big-budget superhero thriller. It took me an anxiety-ridden hour to shave, to decide which shirt best matched my newly acquired slim-fit jeans, to apply just the right dosage of cologne, to attempt to tame my hair. (Winking, clearly informed by Rebecca about my plans for the evening, Noah came over to drop off a new product, demonstrating in painstaking detail how best to achieve consciously disheveled, swept-back hair. Shoulder-length blond locks, I discovered, surrendered to gravity much more readily than did the tangled mess occupying the top of my head.)
My mother darted past my room, only to retrace her steps. She wore a proud, teasing grin. “Who’s the lucky lady?”
“What’s that?” I avoided her eyes, dousing myself in Creed and focusing on my reflection in the mirror. Undeniably presentable, I was, for a moment, unrecognizable to myself.
She continued to linger at the door. “Come on. I’ve never seen you dress so . . . meticulously. The only logical conclusion is that there’s a girl.”
“Just going out.” I changed shirts: a pale-blue Oxford that Oliver had grown sick of and had donated to what he affectionately dubbed “the Ari Eden emergency fashion fund, may Hashem guard his soul.”
“Yeah, okay. Well, enjoy yourself. We can keep this between us.”
After the movie—two hours of furtive glances at Sophia, who wore her hair down and occasionally returned my looks—we went for pizza.
“Well,” Sophia said, biting into a mushroom slice, cheese hanging delicately from her chin, “it appears I’ve won.”
I offered her a napkin. She slapped away my hand. “Won what?”
“Wasn’t this your first date?”
I sipped my Coke. “No need to rub it in.”
“No mockery, I just want feedback.”
“Okay, I’ll admit,” I said, reaching for fries, “it wasn’t nearly as painful as expected.”
“How gratifying. I’m a fantastic teacher, aren’t I? Maybe you’d even say I’m as talented as your other teacher?”
A brief coughing session as Coke traveled down the wrong pipe. “Kayla, you mean? That’s nothing. Remedial math.”
“‘Poison in jest,’” she said. “I’m only kidding.”
“For what it’s worth,” I added, “you should know that I’m happy, too. That you’re my first, I mean.”
“Happy? You should be inconsolably exuberant.” An indeterminate smile, followed by a flare of hesitation. “So can I ask the difficult question?”
“Which one would that be?”
“Does anyone know?”
“Know what?”
“You haven’t told anyone?”
“About—us?”
She nodded.
“No. I haven’t.”
“Not even Noah? Or Amir or Oliver or—?”
“Nobody.” Pained silence. “Have you?”
“Maybe a slight hint to Rebecca,” she said, “but otherwise no.”
I found myself hoping she was lying. “You’re not too embarrassed of me,” I said, trying to appear at least half-joking, “are you?”
“Mortified.” A light smile returned to her. I focused my attention on her lower lip. “I mean, just look at you. All cleaned up. Did they give you a makeover on my behalf?”
My hands flew to my hair. “It’s way too much, isn’t it?”
“No, you’re cute. Actually, you don’t realize how handsome you are.”
“That’s for sure.”
“If only you recognized how people look at you.”
“I know how people look at me. For the most part, it’s pretty unflattering.”
Sophia put her hand on my back. I could feel the outlines of each of her fingertips through the thin material of Oliver’s shirt. “My oblivious Brooklyn boy.”
We paid, drove home. She lived near Oliver and Evan, in a stately Spanish colonial with thick, stuccoed walls, clerestory windows, royal palms, a flush of bougainvillea. Her house was big enough to swallow several of mine.
“Well.” She opened the car door. “Time for my nightly interrogation.”
“About me?”
“I’m afraid not. They don’t know about you.”
“Oh,” I said, unreasonably disappointed.
She undid her seatbelt, climbed out of the car. “They cross-examine me whenever I leave the house.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re—protective. They’re looking out for me. I don’t fault them for it.”
“Of course,” I said. “So what do you tell them?”
“I don’t really go places I can’t tell them about.”
“That makes it easier.”
“When I must, though, I’ll spare details and tell them I’m out with Rebecca or some such wholesome thing.”
“So what was your alibi tonight?”
“Babysitting.”
“Funny.”
“Tonight, I had a student council meeting, and then I was at Oliver’s, using Leon’s piano.”
“Genius.”
“They don’t need to know I’m on a date.”
I was clenching the steering wheel, doing so too tightly. “I know what you mean.”
“Ari.” Her voice was smaller now.
“Yeah?”
“I had a great time.” She clasped the back of her neck with her right hand, that far-off, icy-gray flickering in her eyes. “Can we just—can we be clear about something?”
“Clear?” I smiled distractedly, glanced at myself in the rearview mirror: a startled stranger, pale, blinking gravely.
“I like you, Hamlet. I mean that. It’s just, at the moment, I really can’t handle too much—”