by Ciara Smyth
I let myself get pulled into the orbit of people congregating in the garden, slipping in between bodies, suffocating in a blanket of smoke, aftershave, and sweat. Being June in a heat wave, most people had opted for outdoors. It was still warm and bright at eight. Even so, once I’d got into the house, it was so crowded, navigating my way to the kitchen was like a special round of The Crystal Maze or the zombie apocalypse. I had my eye out for Izzy or Hannah so I could avoid them if I had to, but neither had replied to the group message that went out, so I wasn’t expecting them. Hands grabbed me and people called my name, but I couldn’t see who they were. I squeezed through arms and legs and a tangle of intertwined people who had decided foreplay was a spectator sport, and they were putting on a good show.
The kitchen heaved like a living organism. People slithered over one another, through gaps in cliques, to reach the fridge or the door. It looked strangely choreographed, and I felt out of place like a scientist observing it under a microscope instead of being part of it.
Luckily I’d been to many of Oliver’s parties before and I knew where the solution would be. I skittered around two people, who were basically dry humping against the kitchen island, to reach the freezer, and sure enough, several bottles of vodka were nestled among the luxury ice cream and ice cube trays. If you’re wondering what kind of kid has free booze at their party, it’s the really rich kind. I pulled a blue bottle from under a bag of frozen peas and used my sleeve to wipe off the frost on the neck. I took an empty bottle of Coke from my bag and started to fill it, clumsily spilling a little over the sides.
“Is that yours?” A girl had taken a stool at the kitchen island, and I hadn’t noticed her watching me. She’d been obscured by the humpers before. She had messy brown hair to her shoulders and most of it was flipped onto one side, where it curved in a quiff over her head like she had the habit of running her hands through it. She was round and soft in her face and her body. I liked it. A gold lip ring drew my attention to her lips.
“Oliver owes me.” I spoke far too quietly for the noise of the kitchen and gave her my crooked half smile that always worked. She leaned in over the counter to hear me better, and I could see a hint of bubblegum-pink lace peeking out of her top, which appeared to be an elaborate colorful scarf knotted like a halter top around her neck. I leaned forward too.
“Oh, does he?” The girl seemed unconvinced, but maybe a little amused. She was cute, even if she was an officer of the Vodka Crimes Unit.
“What’s it to you?”
I watched her lips move as she replied. “This is my uncle’s house. I’m staying for the summer.”
I registered an English accent then. I couldn’t place it, but I knew it wasn’t super posh and it wasn’t Northern. That was all my English accent knowledge depleted.
“You’re related to Oliver? How sad for you.” I rubbed her shoulder sympathetically, casually, as if I wasn’t noticing how soft her skin was. She locked eyes with me as I did.
“You’ll need one of these,” I said, and I poured us each a shot into (hopefully) clean plastic cups. I pressed one into her hand, letting my fingers linger for a second. I downed mine, the heat sliding down my throat and into my belly, but she set hers down and sipped from a can of Sprite.
“Living life on the wild side?” I remarked with a smirk.
“Is this the famous peer pressure I’ve heard so much about?” she said. She leaned back, breaking out of my orbit. Damn. “Are you the cool girl who’s going to shove me in a locker because I don’t drink?” She laughed to herself and hopped off the stool. My eyes followed her to the door, taking in the beachy waves in her hair, her bare shoulders, and tight jeans hugging curves that made me bite my lip, hard.
What a dick.
A quarter of my bottle of vodka and several dull conversations about exams later, I escaped upstairs. Technically there was a baby gate with a makeshift sign warning not to go up, but there was a really long queue for the toilet, so I used my initiative. After I left the ornate bathroom, I stood on the landing, drawn to the faint sound of a piano coming from one of the rooms.
Oliver was in the music room, no surprise there. I’d found him here before. He threw these parties and then he’d invariably get bored and leave. He looked tired as he tinkled on the piano, and a half-empty drink sat on the lid, sweating into a coaster. He had a real glass, though there wasn’t a single one to be found downstairs.
“So when are Mommy and Daddy getting back this time, sad little rich boy?” I said, sitting beside him on the piano bench. He barely looked at me, but I caught a hint of a smile.
“Tomorrow.” He tucked a lock of ashy blond hair behind his ear.
“I think they’re going to notice downstairs is kind of a bomb site,” I said.
“I have a cleaner coming in the morning.”
“Must be nice to have so much money you forget how to clean up after yourself,” I sighed wistfully.
“Saoirse, it’s nice to be rich enough that I’m not annoyed you stole a bottle of CÎROC Ten from me.” He tapped the Coke bottle in my hand, which created an odd gap in the music. How he knew I’d filled it with his expensive vodka, I don’t know. Let’s call it an educated guess.
“Dude . . . this is vodka? It goes down like water.”
“I bet.”
“Besides,” I said, stretching my arms overhead, “you owe me.”
“Still?” His fingers fluttered over the keys impressively. Not that I’d ever tell him it was impressive, of course.
“Forever. You stole Gracie Belle Corban from me and I never really got over it. My cold, shriveled heart still mourns for her.”
“I’m sure. I hear there are plenty of girls since to take your mind off her.”
Oliver acted like I was some kind of lesbian playboy with a harem of curious ladies lining up each night. His perception of my sex life couldn’t have been more wrong. I hadn’t done anything more than a sneaky shift since Hannah and I split. OK, so the list of kissing partners was long, but so what?
I think the indiscriminate snogging started the rumor that I was getting it regularly, but in truth, a bit of over-the-bra action was as far as it ever went.
Oliver paused in his complicated sonata and then played the first confident notes of “Heart and Soul.” After a moment I joined in, my fingers sloppy over the keys. I was tipsy and missed half the notes and Oliver laughed. We’d both gone to the same piano teacher at school when we were eight. “Heart and Soul” was about as much as I could remember. I’d quit after a few weeks. Oliver had been practicing, obviously.
After our impromptu duet, we drank for a few silent minutes.
Oliver started playing again, and I took it as my cue to leave and continue my journey to the bathroom. When I reached the door, the music stopped abruptly, so I looked back. Oliver was frowning, fingers frozen, hovering above the keys.
“Her name was Gracie Belle Circarelli,” he said.
“What? No, it wasn’t.” I shook my head emphatically, but after all the vodka it made me kind of dizzy.
“Yeah, it was. Her dad was this big Italian dude. They had an ice cream place on the promenade. Circarelli’s.”
“Huh . . . well, that doesn’t even sound a bit like Corban, does it? First love can be so confusing.”
Somehow the party lured me in again. The kitchen was greenhouse hot and smelled like sweat and hormones, so I rummaged in the back of the junk drawer and found the key to the French doors. They stayed locked at Oliver’s parties since the time Loren Blake climbed a tree, jumped into the neighbors’ garden, and got caught throwing up in their koi pond. Oliver’s problem was that although he knew that I knew where the good vodka was, where he stashed the patio keys, and where the bodies were buried, he never remembered to do anything about it.
I slipped out through the smallest crack I could make in the door and locked it behind me. The garden would be no relief if everyone could get out there, after all.
The thump thump thump of the
music followed me with the occasional squeal or scream, but it was like submerging yourself underwater—the detail didn’t get through. I breathed in a lungful of night air and found myself following a stone trail that twisted and turned through flower beds of azaleas, past a Victorian gazebo that looked like something out of The Sound of Music, and down to the lilac bush at the end of the garden.
At one of the first parties Oliver ever threw, Hannah and I wandered away from everyone else. She took my hand and pulled me along to a carved stone love seat set into the overgrown lilac bush. If you shook the branches, petals landed in your hair. I was fuzzy from Bacardi Breezers that night and the garden seemed like the quietest, warmest place in the world. Hannah and I sat side by side, legs touching. I thought I could hear her heart beating in time with mine. She intertwined our fingers and hummed along, out of tune, to music playing in the house. I didn’t even stop to think before I kissed her, as though thinking would break the moment.
That’s how I kissed the only girl I ever loved to a corny eighties pop hit. When the sax solo kicked in, we broke apart laughing. For years afterward all we had to do was hum a few bars and we would giggle. It became a refrain for our relationship. A code between us. Whenever I felt sad or stressed, she’d hum a few bars and I couldn’t help but laugh and feel like everything would be OK. Because I had her.
Let me give you a word of advice. Never, ever have “your song” be something cheesy. Even if it’s funny at the time. Even if nothing else makes any sense. I beg you, pick something epic, something soft and timeless and sweet. Because one day when you’ve had your heart broken, you will cry every time you hear that song. And nothing will make you feel more utterly ridiculous than being the girl who cries at “Careless Whisper.”
I was about to sit down on the bench when I noticed, on the other side, a person lying on the ground, their torso underneath the bush, their legs and bum sticking out.
If I hadn’t stared at that bum earlier, I would have assumed a drunk person had crawled under there and passed out. I stood for a second, wondering how to play this, then I heard her making strange kissing sounds and I burst out laughing before I could stop myself.
In a flash, the girl shimmied out from the bush and popped up onto her feet with surprising agility.
“So this is embarrassing,” I said.
She planted one hand on her hip and looked at me, confused. “Why are you embarrassed?”
I stared.
“I mean for you?”
She frowned like she was trying hard to think of what she had to be embarrassed about.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, blowing a stray strand of hair out of her eyes, but I saw her try not to smile.
I reached out and picked a leaf that had nestled in the folds of fabric around her neck.
“You’re right, totally normal to find a girl face-first in a bush at a party.”
I saw her trying to work out if that was pun intended or not. Then she laughed and pulled on my hand, dragging me to the ground. Even in the confusion, as my face hurtled toward the grass, I hoped my palm wasn’t sweaty.
She let go of my hand and I followed her lead, shimmying under the bush army-style. She pushed aside the branches near the ground, and we squeezed in as far as we could get. She looked at me and then peered into the tangle of branches and leaves. I followed her gaze, but my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the lack of light. Awkwardly, I maneuvered my arm around to take my phone out of my pocket, brushing up against her as I did. When I shuffled back into place, I’d closed any gap between us and I could feel the length of her body up against mine.
I turned the lit screen into the darkness. A pair of green eyes flashed first and then I made out a kitten, curled up so far into the hedge it was almost on the other side, in the neighbors’ garden.
I looked at the girl. She looked back at me again. There were only centimeters between my lips and hers.
“You lost your cat?” I said, trying to sound like I hadn’t been thinking about the space between our lips. With my compromised sobriety, I didn’t question that this girl would have brought a cat with her to Ireland for the summer.
This would come back to bite me in the ass, of course. Almost literally.
She was about to respond when, in the light from my phone, I noticed the strangest thing and I moved closer. Only slightly, but we were so close my nose bumped up against hers. She didn’t move away. I think she held her breath.
She had a blue freckle, like a tiny spot of ink under her eye.
“You have a blue freckle.”
“No one has ever noticed that,” she said, the way you know everyone she’s ever met had mentioned it.
I pursed my lips to hide a smile and I looked back at the kitten, suddenly aware that the vodka was making me dizzy. Probably the vodka.
“What’s she called?” I asked.
“Why do you think it’s a girl?” the girl asked.
“Dogs are boys, cats are girls,” I said witheringly. “Everyone knows that.”
She snorted.
“That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.” She nudged me with her shoulder. Was that an excuse to touch me or was I reading into it too much?
“Well, you must not get out much,” I said, nudging her back.
The kitten mewled.
“Aw, see, she’s saying Rescue me, drunk girl, I’m so sad and lonely.”
“How am I supposed to get her?” I’d done some ridiculous things when I was drunk, but I didn’t believe I could fit my whole body that far under the hedge.
The girl looked at me with a pouty, sad face. I rolled my eyes as though that definitely wouldn’t work on me. It was an eye roll of lies.
“Fine.” I sighed. “I suppose I can try and get in next door somehow.” I didn’t think the neighbors would appreciate a drunk teenager on their doorstep in the middle of the night slurring about a kitten, though.
We crawled backward out of the hedge. It took me a lot longer than it took her and my hair got tangled up on a branch. When I emerged, she was already upright, her hand extended to help me up.
I dusted myself off and walked along the wall, trailing my hand as though I thought I’d find a secret door into the garden, but I knew the only way I was getting in was by going over. I was really going to do this. Why was I doing this? I glanced over my shoulder. The girl was a few feet behind me, and I caught a flash of guilt before she grinned at me that made me wonder what she’d been looking at.
OK, so that was why.
Closing my eyes, I summoned any heretofore untapped athletic prowess. If I was sober this would be easier, I thought.
If I was sober I wouldn’t be doing it.
When I opened my eyes, I didn’t feel any different, but my head was swimming. I approached the tree next to the garden wall. The Loren Blake tree. The girl was still looking at me, I could feel it in the way my skin prickled. It was a good feeling. I resisted the urge to swing my hips or toss my hair. Then I spun on my heel.
“Turn around,” I said, gesturing in a twirling motion with my finger. “I’m not climbing up there with you watching.”
“Stage fright?” She smirked, but she covered her eyes and stuck her tongue out at me.
“Something like that,” I muttered. More like if I had to pant and puff my way up this tree, I wasn’t having a pretty girl watch me do it. It’d be like climbing up the rope in PE with Kristen Stewart at the bottom looking disappointed in you. I mean she’d look like that anyway, that’s just her face, but you know what I mean.
I hooked my foot around a gnarled knot in the trunk and hoisted myself up. I looked down. I was a whole foot off the ground. I looked up. Only seven more to go. I quickly realized, thankfully, how a totally stocious girl with no athletic ability like Loren, had managed it. There were knobbly bits and ridges in all the right places. That didn’t mean it was easy, mind you. My thighs burned and my hands stung from clinging so tight to branches. At one point I slipped
and grazed my knee, letting out a string of expletives that impressed even me.
“You can do it!” the girl shouted out.
“Are you looking?” I shouted back.
“No, I promise.” A pause. “But also we should probably clean that cut when you get down.”
Great.
With one final push I didn’t know I had in me, I reached level with the top of the wall and stepped gingerly from the base of the branch onto the relative safety of solid stone.
“I made it,” I called out. I looked down at my leg. My jeans were ripped and there was a trickling sensation trailing from my knee into my sock.
Then I realized the real problem was still before me. I had scaled a tree, risked life and limb, and there was nothing on the other side but an eight-foot drop.
“Shit.”
She was cute. But she wasn’t break-your-leg cute.
“What’s wrong?”
I jumped slightly. The girl was right below me. She looked worried and ran her fingers through her hair, flipping it from one side to the other.
Was she?
“Don’t scare me when I’m on a bloody tightrope,” I grumbled. The world seemed to sway when I looked down. Or was that me swaying?
“Exaggerate much? The wall is two feet thick.”
“Uh-huh, well, it’s eight feet high and there’s nothing on the other side except a pretty poky-looking rosebush, my friend, so I think your cat is going to have to chill over there for tonight.”
Believe me when I say I wanted to play kitten hero for her and have her wrap her arms around me in gratitude, but a woozy feeling in my stomach said it was a terrible idea. The vodka hubris was wearing off in the fresh air. I couldn’t do it.
“You can’t leave her!”
“I really can.”
Within a few seconds, the girl had scooted up the tree trunk like a monkey and was standing beside me.
“How did you do that?”
She grinned and shrugged.