Ricky laughed, his eyes on me. “You sound terrified.”
“I mean, it’s…”
“Weird,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, her friends always joke they’re on ‘Panty Patrol.’”
I glanced at the thong again, heat creeping up the back of my neck. “I assumed someone lost it from, like, hooking up in here.”
“In the corner of the family room?” He looked amused, like he thought I was trying to be funny. “Nah. I’m pretty sure the hookups were happening in the laundry room, ’cause my friend Leo was staked out there all night. He always shows up early for a party, finds the spot where people are most likely to hook up, stands there like a bouncer, and charges everyone ten dollars to use it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s how he pays for his weed. Leo’s a businessman.”
I felt pretty out of my element, hearing all this stuff, but Ricky didn’t seem to be judging me. He played James Brown’s greatest hits while we scrubbed the kitchen floor, and he sang along enthusiastically, dancing on his hands and knees. He caught my eye, daring me to dance with him, but I could only laugh and scrub harder at the floor.
“You need to loosen up,” he said, sitting back on his feet. “Can’t even dance to James Brown? Do I need to switch to Enya or something?”
“Very funny.”
“Come on, show me some moves.”
I blushed and shook my head, going back to my scrubbing. Ricky seemed perplexed, but he didn’t say anything more. He turned up the music and moved to clean a spill off the kitchen stools.
We worked without talking until I found a collection of aluminum beer tabs on one of the counters.
“Do we need to throw these away?” I asked.
Ricky went still. “Oh … yeah,” he said, staring hard at the tabs. “That was probably Tucker—um, the guy that—that you saw me with. He always does that.”
He scooped them into the trash bag he was holding. I got the impression he would have saved them if I hadn’t been there.
“I’m hungry,” he said, not quite looking at me. “Do you want some lunch?”
He made us grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. I sat plopped on a stool at the now-clean counter, leaning on my elbows while he hovered next to the stove. He flipped the sandwiches more than he needed to, and when he wasn’t flipping them, he tapped the handle of the spatula against the counter like someone doing Morse code. I could tell he was agitated, but I didn’t know why.
“I never add ham,” I said, trying to get the flow of conversation back. “I just make straight-up grilled cheese.”
“You’ve been missing out.”
“My best friend won’t eat grilled cheese at all. He says it’s disgusting.”
“Huh,” Ricky said, like he wasn’t truly listening. “Remind me not to hang out with him.”
“Yeah.” I paused. “He’s gay, too, though.”
Ricky made a stilted movement. I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t.
“He’s the one I came to pick up last night,” I went on. “Him and my other best friend, who’s bi. You didn’t meet them, did you? Maritza Vargas and JaKory Green?”
Ricky separated our sandwiches onto patterned ceramic plates. He wasn’t meeting my eyes. “No, I don’t think I did.”
“Oh. Well, they said they had a great time.” I paused. “Do you, um—do you always get to see that guy—Tucker—at parties?”
Ricky paused in the middle of passing my plate over. He looked up at me, his eyes careful and hard.
“Codi,” he said, “do you think I need you or something?”
I looked back at him, completely thrown by his serious tone. “What?”
“You think I’m, like, the closeted kid that needs someone to talk to? Is that why you came over?”
“No—?”
“Because it’s fine that you know about me and Tucker, but I don’t need anyone to know. It’s not a big deal. We’re not a serious thing. I’m not worried about it. I’m fine.”
I felt the heat rise in my face. Just like last night, with the girl who was trying to take the picture, I had somehow said the wrong thing.
“I’m not…” I said, struggling to explain. “I mean, I didn’t come over for that.”
He stared at me. “What did you come over for?”
It was rough, the way he asked it, and it left me feeling so stupid and small that all I wanted was to curl up from the shame of it. How foolish had I been to show up here? How presumptuous, how silly, to believe this boy would want to invite me into his world? Ricky’s dancing, his teasing, all of that felt a million miles away. I wanted nothing more than to bolt out of his house and never come back.
But then I remembered, with a clawing at my stomach, the accusation Maritza had leveled at me by the river:
You’ve always been afraid to put yourself out there, even when you want something badly.
I steadied myself. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to lose this chance at friendship because I was too chickenshit to put myself out there.
“I’m not trying to help you, or whatever,” I said slowly. “I mean, I’ve never even—I’ve never even kissed anyone, or dated, so how would I be helpful to talk to? My friends wanted to come to your party so they could meet new people, and I—I didn’t want to come, but then … Look, I don’t really know how to do this, okay? I don’t hang out with anyone other than Maritza and JaKory, but last night I met you and … and you seemed like someone I wanted to know. And I haven’t wanted that in a long time. Okay? That’s it. That’s why I’m here.”
Silence. Neither one of us had touched our sandwich. I wanted to look away from him, to be anywhere but in this vulnerable moment, but I forced myself to hold his gaze.
“Should I go?” I asked.
Ricky looked hard at me. The music blared in the silence between us.
On impulse, I reached for his phone and turned up the music. James Brown’s “I Got You” roared through the kitchen, and I began to dance without thinking. I threw in as many moves as I could remember from my friends’ Celine Dion choreography days, but mostly I was just making shit up, letting myself be a complete fool. I even grabbed Magic Dan’s cape off the table and whirled it around like a dance partner.
At first Ricky looked embarrassed for me, and I almost stopped. But then he started to laugh.
“All right,” he said, nodding along. “All right.”
Before I knew it, he was dancing with me. His moves were smooth at first, but then he devolved into goofiness, matching my energy. We danced until the end of the song, and when James Brown screamed the last “Hey!” I did a kind of crazy pirouette and landed in a heap on the floor, the song’s final note ringing in my ears.
Ricky pressed pause as the next song started up. He was all smiles when he looked over at me.
“Okay,” he said, like he’d finally made up his mind about me. “That was definitely unexpected.”
I grinned.
He stood watching me for another moment, and then a smirk took over his face. “Let’s go out to the deck. I’m gonna show you something.”
* * *
The deck was bright and burning compared to the coolness of the house. I hovered by the screen door while Ricky stepped his way over to a mess of scattered beer cans. I couldn’t help but answer his mischievous look with a smile.
“Last night you said you didn’t know what shotgunning was,” Ricky said, looking pointedly at me. He walked over to an open box of beer cans and fished two of them out. “I’m gonna fix that.”
He was grinning again, like he liked being a bad influence and knew it was exactly what I needed.
A wave of nervousness swept over me. “Right now?”
“You got anything better to do?”
I rubbed my neck. “I mean, I was looking forward to that sandwich…”
He rolled his eyes. “Come over here.”
I went and stood next to him. He held out a beer, and I hesitated.
/> “Is it gonna make me drunk?”
“A little tipsy, maybe, but not drunk. You’d have to have a few of these for that to happen.”
I couldn’t figure out what I wanted. I’d never drunk a beer before, but I’d also never wanted a beer before, and this seemed like a safe place to try it.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Ricky said. “And obviously you shouldn’t do this unless you want to, but for what it’s worth, I think you might have fun.”
I nodded and accepted the beer he handed me.
“These are gonna be warm,” Ricky said, “so it’s gonna taste nasty, but that doesn’t matter when you’re chugging.”
“We’re chugging?”
“Yeah, we’re chugging.”
He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and explained what we were going to do. I listened carefully, trying to make sure I understood.
“Dude,” he said, clapping a hand to my shoulder. “Breathe. It’s not rocket science.”
“Right,” I said, trying to steady myself.
“You ready?”
I nodded and turned my can horizontally. Ricky stabbed a hole in the bottom of my can, then his can, and we held them to our mouths like we were about to eat corn on the cob.
“Ready … and … pop the tab!” Ricky yelled.
I popped it open and chugged from the hole in the bottom, throwing my head back wildly. The beer was warm and tasted vaguely of aluminum, but I chugged it down as fast as I could, ignoring the dribble that spilled onto my neck and T-shirt.
“YES!” Ricky shouted, his own face and T-shirt spotless. “You got it! Keep going!”
I drank the last of it and let the can clatter to the deck. I bent forward, hands on my knees, wiping my mouth like a boy would do. Ricky roared with delight and pulled me into a hug.
“That,” he said, with his arms around me, “was fucking awesome.”
* * *
It turned out drinking beer left my stomach feeling swollen and carbonated like I’d been drinking soda, but with one special side effect.
“So this is what being drunk feels like,” I laughed, spraying the hose over the beer stains on the deck.
“You’re not drunk,” Ricky said, chowing down on his sandwich. “You’re maybe tipsy.”
“Either way, it feels good. I’m starting to understand why that girl wants to take her underwear off all the time.”
“Please don’t do that.”
I snorted. “I’ll spare you.”
Ricky had been right that the beer was gross-tasting, but I was enjoying the effect nonetheless. I felt like I could laugh more easily, like I wasn’t so trapped in my head.
“You missed a spot,” Ricky said, pointing toward the corner of the deck.
I turned the hose on him, spraying his legs and bare feet, laughing when he dropped his sandwich in shock.
“I’m eating this anyway,” he said, picking up the soggy sandwich and stuffing it in his mouth. “Now, c’mere, we’d better spray those beer stains off your shirt.”
He wrangled the hose from me and sprayed straight at my torso, drenching my work shirt. I screamed and stole the hose back from him, drenching his T-shirt and athletic shorts.
We dashed around the deck, chasing each other, until we were both soaked through to our skin.
“Shit,” I said, pulling off my Vans and stretching my bare feet into the sun. “What now? Do we have more to clean?”
“Fuck cleaning,” Ricky said. “It’s time for a drive.”
* * *
Ricky lent me a size XXL T-shirt to wear over my damp shorts. We spread pool towels over the seats of his truck and climbed inside in our bare feet. The interior smelled like boy, like sweaty football pads mixed with cologne, and there were hints of Ricky throughout: a brush in the cup holder, a strip of photo-booth pictures sticking out from the side compartment, a graduation tassel hanging from the rearview mirror.
We drove to Sonic, where Ricky ordered us popcorn chicken, Tater Tots, and Snickers Blasts. We sat with the windows down, gorging ourselves on the hot food and fending off brain freezes from the ice cream. Ricky played Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” singing unabashedly along, bragging about how he’d gotten the other football guys interested in her music. Then he kept driving, going nowhere in particular, making turns whenever he seemed to feel like it.
After a while, we ended up along the river. Ricky parked with his truck facing the water, and we kicked our feet up on the dash, slurping the last of the ice cream from the bottoms of our cups.
“So what do you and Maritza and JaKory do when you hang out?” Ricky asked. “Is it anything like this?”
I told him. I talked about our movies, and swimming, and our annual Halloween sleepovers, and how Maritza couldn’t make it through a Harry Potter movie without losing her shit laughing at the centaurs, and how JaKory once wrote a poem for every person in my family. I kept checking his expression the whole time, worrying that I was boring him, but he had this open look on his face that made me feel like he cared what I had to say.
When I’d said enough, I asked him, “What about your friends? What’s your favorite thing about them?”
He looked out over the river. A whole minute must have passed, but he didn’t seem pressed to come up with the answer right away. Finally, he started nodding to himself and said, “That I feel like I could have met them in kindergarten.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t meet most of my friends until high school, but every single one of them is someone I could have met on the kindergarten playground—it’s natural and easy, nothing held against each other. Remember how easy it was to make friends at that age?”
I let that settle into me; it felt like something I’d forgotten a long time ago, but I knew what he meant. I wondered if Maritza and JaKory felt that way about me, and, more important, if I felt that way about them.
We got back to his house around dinnertime. I changed into my own T-shirt, now dry after lying in the sun. Ricky walked me out to my car and hugged me close like we’d been friends for ages.
“Text me about hanging out again,” he said.
“I will,” I said, and I meant it.
6
Summer kicked into full swing after Memorial Day. The days became sunny and scorching; my thighs burned when I plopped into the seat of my car. My dad wore cotton polo shirts to the office and my mom walked barefoot to the mailbox when she got home from work. The neighborhood pool was busy with swim meets and birthday parties, and Totes-n-Goats was flooded with moms pulling elementary-school-age kids behind them. I worked nearly every day, rubbing my arms to keep warm in the store’s freezing air-conditioning, then immediately sweating when I stepped into the parking lot at the end of a shift.
Maritza, JaKory, and I usually spent our summer days together, but this year, with my job at Totes-n-Goats and Maritza’s job at dance camp, we saw each other much less. Part of me was sad about it—nostalgic, almost—but another part of me didn’t mind having some space, especially after that day by the river. JaKory, however, was at a loss for what to do with himself. Unlike Maritza and me, he wasn’t working a summer job—he’d never gotten his license, and we didn’t have the best public transportation in the suburbs. He was so bored without our usual swimming dates that he took to texting us a running monologue of his thoughts throughout the day.
JaKory Green: I’ve decided I’m going to curate my own summer reading list featuring both classic novels and the latest movers and shakers, and maybe once the school realizes how much better it is than their deplorable compilation, they’ll ask me to sell it to the district. That’ll give me something to do while you two are “working,” a.k.a. betraying our childhood.
Maritza Vargas: If you were any more dramatic, you’d have your own Bravo show.
My brother spent those first few days of June at a basketball camp for rising high schoolers. My parents dropped him off before work in the morning, but it was my job to
pick him up in the afternoon. Every day I’d wait outside the gym, and Grant would come trudging into the car stinking of sweat, and we’d make the ten-minute drive home speaking only about what our family was eating for dinner. Sometimes there would be a pocket of silence when I would want to say something interesting or funny, anything to make him look at me the way he did when he was younger, but I could never bring myself to do it.
The most exciting thing in my life quickly became Ricky’s friendship. We went for more drives, sometimes to pick up milkshakes, other times just to talk. He told me more about his family, his football stats, even the bad dreams he had sometimes; I told him about my art, my brother, and the fear I felt when speaking to people I didn’t know. When he scored free Braves tickets from his part-time job at his dad’s software sales company, he asked me to go with him to the game, and we ate hot dogs and nachos with our feet kicked up on the empty seats in front of us.
Part of me longed to tell Maritza and JaKory about Ricky, but a bigger part knew to hold it inside for myself. For one thing, Ricky had asked me not to tell anyone about him and Tucker, and I didn’t know how I could explain meeting him without bringing that up. But there was a deeper reason that I wasn’t really letting myself think about. There was something about hanging out with Ricky that made me feel like a newer, better version of myself, and I wasn’t ready to share that version with anyone else, not even—maybe especially not—my two best friends.
On the first Thursday of June, after Maritza and I got off work, we picked up JaKory and went to a park on the Chattahoochee, several miles down from the coffee shop. It was brilliantly sunny, the sky pure blue and cloudless.
We meandered around the people on the park trail, Maritza plucking JaKory away from the speedy runners trying to slip past him. After we’d walked a good distance and the trail had become denser with trees, Maritza found a narrow dirt path that opened onto the river. There was a craggy boulder jutting into the water where we could all sit comfortably, so we plopped down and hung our legs off the sides and watched the kayakers going past.
Late to the Party Page 6