Charlie in a Red Dress

by Zoe X Rider

  “That’s…um…flattering?” I said. And a little creepy.

  He leaned in close, and I flinched, not wanting zombie make-up on my bodice.

  “Hey, who knows,” he said, his breath beery. “I still might.”

  I got winked at by a zombie.

  I don’t know if it was him being dressed up or me, but he felt like someone I’d never met before. I gathered a fold at the back of Jeff’s shirt between my thumb and forefinger and tugged a little.

  “We’re gonna walk around,” Jeff said, pulling me along, “see who else is here.”

  “Sure. Bye…Charli,” John said, grinning like a three-day corpse.

  I gave a little wave.

  “He wasn’t serious, right?” I asked Jeff, Lydia’s warning in my head. When I turned my attention back to look where we were headed, I nearly walked into Katie.

  “Jeff. Is Tom still back there?” She was dressed as Sailor Moon, and I towered over her in my heels.

  It made me feel like a linebacker in a wig.

  “Yep,” Jeff said.

  “Hey Charlie,” she said. “You look nice. Lauren and Ashley’s boyfriends came as girls too but, uh, you could say they put a little less effort into it. Also, I think they were half-drunk already when they showed up.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “I’ve gotta find Tom.” And then she was gone. People were coming in, a crowd of them filling the living room.

  My scalp itched. I was pretty sure I was sweating underneath the fake hair. “Is it really hot in here or is just me?”

  “Do you want to go outside?”

  “No, I’m fine.” I took a pull off my beer. That helped.

  Since we couldn’t get into the living room just yet, Jeff leaned against the wall in the hallway.

  Someone dressed as what I think was supposed to be Putin walked by. I based that guess off the plastic mask he had propped on top of his head and the homemade “Gay Propaganda Is Punishable By Death” T-shirt he was wearing. On the back he’d painted a stick figure in a pink shirt hanging from a noose. The hanged man had a sign in his fist with a rainbow on it. I wondered what the odds were that he’d end up with a fist in his face by the end of the night from someone who didn’t get satire.

  Jeff straightened, his chin up, looking at something past my shoulder. I registered a low rumble coming over the floor, then his hand was at my waist, turning me and half pulling me against him. My breasts pressed into his dress shirt. His cheekbone was right in front of my face. I turned my head, following his eyes to see a couple guys rolling another keg in.

  My stomach moved against his as I breathed.

  I put a hand on his waist to keep myself steady.

  When the keg was past, he let go, and I stepped away.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  I shook my head, smoothing my skirt, the keg headed into the kitchen.

  Think about baseball.

  The last thing I needed was a bulge in my dress.

  Still looking toward the kitchen, I finished my beer.

  My feet ached. I turned my head the other way to see if there was room in the living room now.

  “You want to go sit down?”

  “Yeah. These shoes are killer.” I followed him into the crowd.

  We found a couch with a spot open at the end, and he gave it to me, asking if I wanted another beer. I shook my head.

  “I’m gonna get a refill. Back in a minute.”

  I nodded.

  And found myself with a moment alone to think about how it had been, being pressed up against Jeff for that, what, ten seconds? Looking at him up close.

  Unlike Lydia, whose hair was straight and fine, he’d inherited his mother’s genes, with thick and unruly whorls he wore it long enough that it hid his ears. His eyes were dark as his father’s and lively, like there was always something interesting he was seeing.

  I’d felt the press of his belt through the slip and dress. The warmth of his hand on my back. Something intimate and unexpected; it had almost made me want to apologize in the moment.

  The guy I’d perched next to took a look at me, looked away, then looked back and grinned. He’d come as a football player, complete with shoulder pads and slashes of black paint under his eyes. I didn’t recognize him.

  “Friend of Kurt’s or John’s?” he said, “Or just here with a date?”

  “All three.” I had an empty cup in one hand and the clutch in the other. I shifted them to one hand so I could tug at the bodice of my dress. It felt like the guy was looking down it. “You?”

  “Kurt’s in my tech writing class.”

  “Are you going for aerospace engineering too?”

  “Oh God no. Environmental science. What about you?”

  “I flunked out the first year. I was kind of sick of being in school anyway.”

  “I hear you. So what do you do now?”

  “I drive a forklift.”

  “No shit? That’s kind of hot, chicks on forklifts.”

  “You know I’m not a chick, right?”

  He shrugged. “I’d still watch you drive a forklift in a dress.”

  He was definitely looking down my cleavage. And he seemed awfully close suddenly, on this end of the couch.

  “Okay. I’m gonna—” I gestured, trying to get as gracefully to my feet as I could. As I walked away, it felt like my skirt was trying to crawl into my butt. I brushed it smooth, hopefully not looking like a complete dork as I did it.

  The bathroom was upstairs. I grasped the railing and made my unsteady way past people talking on the steps. The bathroom line formed against the hallway wall. I clomped up behind a girl whose bunny ears came up as high as my nose. She looked over her shoulder, smiled, and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Cute dress,” she said.

  “Thanks. Cute ears.”

  She touched one as if just remembering it was there. “Thanks.”

  If I were in another outfit, I might have thought she was cute too, with her pointy-chinned, heart-shaped face, but tonight she just made me feel the same way Katie had: like a giant trying to pass for a cute little thing. Like Alice after she ate the cake in the rabbit hole.

  “How’d you get your chin so smooth?” she asked. “Or is it naturally that way?”

  “Nair.”

  “Huh.”

  The bathroom door opened, and our line moved up. Then Jeff was at my shoulder.

  “I wondered where you went,” he said.

  “You know us girls. Always using the bathroom. I’ve been talking to a bunny.”

  Jeff looked over—and down—and gave her a nod. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” She smiled. “Are you two together?”

  “That’s our costume,” Jeff said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  “Oh. I thought you were supposed to be a Mormon.”

  “Nope. No bicycle.”

  Her gaze swept to both sides of him, and she nodded and said, “Right.”

  We moved up another place. Jeff’s cup was mostly full, and I started regretting not having him get me one. He saw me peering in it and held it out.

  “Thanks.” I took a sip and handed it back. He took my empty from me and slipped his cup into it.

  I still wished I had a place to set the clutch. It was too big for Jeff’s pockets, and it probably wouldn’t be ladylike to shove it down my pantyhose.

  I couldn’t believe women carried these things around all the time. What a pain in the ass.

  When it was my turn to go in, Jeff said, “Don’t leave your purse behind this time.”

  I held it over my shoulder as I walked in, and set it on the side of the sink once the door was closed.

  The window over the bathtub was open, letting a breeze in. I climbed right over the side of the tub and stood in front of it with my eyes closed. I kind of didn’t want to be at the party at all. It wasn’t like I’d thought. I’d enjoyed the whole girlfriend/boyfriend thing when it was just me and Jeff, but
. Jeff hadn’t been copping looks down my cleavage, or creeping closer to me while he did it.

  The other people in line probably actually had to go. I held onto the wall to get back out of the tub, then went through the rigmarole of hiking my dress up and pulling down the hose, tucking myself between my legs while I sat on the toilet. My phone chirped. I dragged the clutch into my lap and pulled the phone out. A text from Lydia, asking how it was going. I started to give her a semi-honest response, but the press-on nails kept fucking up my typing. I settled on “fine” and pressed Send.

  When I was done, I straightened my clothes, took a look at myself in the mirror—and there Charli was again. I’d started to forget about her. Her lashes were thick and dark, her lipstick half worn off, but her mouth was still plumper than I was used to seeing. She smiled a little. She dragged a plump lip under her teeth and smiled some more. Okay, she was taller than the bunny girl and didn’t have a pointy little chin, but she wasn’t half bad looking, with her bouncy curls and the eyeliner bringing out the green in her eyes.

  I picked up my clutch and let myself out. Jeff waited against the opposite side of the hallway, so he was out of the way of the people in line.

  “Ready for a drink?” His was pretty low already.

  I slipped my arm around his elbow and said, “You bet.”

  People moved out of our way as we came down—for which I was grateful because I needed both Jeff’s arm and the railing to make it down all those stairs in my shoes. When we got to the bottom, the crowd wasn’t so accommodating, and Jeff led the way, his arm stretched back to hold my hand so we didn’t get separated. He ran into people we knew before we got to the kitchen, and they held him up. I didn’t really care about the conversation. I just stood behind him scratching his back with my new fingernails.

  Reaching behind him, he curved his fingers around my thigh. Almost a thoughtless gesture. I scratched his neck, up under his hair. I was okay if he wanted to hang out right there, talking to—apparently—Paulie, dressed as Iron Man, and Paulie’s boyfriend, Captain America.

  Jeff rubbed my leg absently. I kind of longed to lean against him, like a girlfriend would do, but I was afraid of the, uh, ‘subject’ that would come up if I did.

  Then we were moving again, erupting out of the hallway into the kitchen. The area around the keg was packed. Jeff guided me to a spot by the back door and said, “I’ll be back.”

  I watched him get in line. And this time it was his turn to have the chick in front of him turn and start talking. This one was dressed as a cat, and I knew her. Clementine Darling. Seriously. Clementine. Darling. Clemmy to her friends, which had the effect of taking a name that was too precious for words and turning it into something that made me think of phlegm.

  She had a huge smile. It was a surprising thing, because when she wasn’t smiling, her lips were thin, her mouth a little pinched, but then she’d smile and she became Julia Roberts all of the sudden. She was being Julia Roberts now for Jeff. And then, thankfully, it was her turn at the keg. She crouched in front of the tap and pointed the nozzle into her cup, and apparently she was having trouble because then Jeff was leaning over her. He straightened and started pumping the keg, and she laughed, and beer started spurting. She stayed crouched on the floor beside him, smiling and chatting, while he tapped our drinks.

  I kind of hated her.

  The both of them headed my way.

  I took my cup from Jeff and sucked a big gulp off it, foam and all.

  “Clemmy went to the Dominican Republic over the summer,” Jeff said.

  “Not for vacation,” she was quick to add. Drawn-in whiskers rippled as she flashed that impossible smile. “We were working with children. It was so amazing.”

  “I’m sure it was.” I watched other people fill their cups—a dog on his girlfriend’s leash, a woman cop, a Walter White.

  “I’d love to go back there,” Clemmy said. “We’re thinking of doing a Kickstarter, me and Piper and Trevor, to raise money to go next summer before grad school, because there’s so much more we can do down there.”

  “Where are you going to grad school?” Jeff asked.

  “It’s kind of between three places right now.”

  I slipped my hand in Jeff’s and tuned her out while I did some more costume watching. I think we had three Lokis here. I’d give anything to see a three-way Loki fight in the back yard.

  “Wow, Oregon,” Jeff was saying. “That’s far from home.”

  I drank more beer.

  Clementine Darling had had a crush on Jeff since seventh grade, back when she had braces and no boobs to speak of.

  I rubbed the back of his hand with my thumb.

  “Well good luck with that,” Jeff said, slipping his hand free—to put his arm around my shoulder. “I think we’re gonna walk around a bit. See who else is here.”

  “I think I saw Peter Chennault dressed up as a redneck trucker in the other room,” she said.

  We used to hang out with Peter Chennault. In, like, seventh grade.

  I didn’t give a fuck if she got the idea that we were ‘together.’ Maybe it’d get her off Jeff’s back. I slid my clutch-holding arm around his waist, pressing my hip against him as he said, “Cool. See ya later.”

  I thought maybe we’d head to the living room again, but Jeff opened the back door, and down the little set of concrete steps we went. There were smokers out there, standing around a grouping of folding lawn chairs, the kind with the woven plastic straps, some of them broken and dangling below the seats. Out in the yard, Jeff hopped on a picnic table. He offered me a hand, and I got up there with him, pinching my knees together and wondering if anyone could see anything where my dress hung away from my thighs.

  “How come you never got together with Clementine Darling?” I asked.

  “I got together with her.”

  “What? When?”

  “While you were away at school.” He took another pull off his beer. I just stared at him, so when he lowered the cup he said, “It was just a couple dates.”

  “Did you go, ‘Oh Clemmy, CLEMMY!’?”

  Some of the smokers looked my way.

  Fuck ’em.

  “She’s kind of bony,” was all he said about it.

  Fine. I opened the clutch and pulled my phone out to check for new messages.

  “Not like you,” he said.

  “Not like me what?”

  “She’s bony, not like you.”

  “Gee thanks. Every girl loves to be called fat.”

  “I didn’t say ‘fat.’” His arm snaked around my back, his hand coming to hold on where the control top squeezed my stomach against itself. Every breath pushed me against his fingers.

  Fuck Clementine Darling.

  I put the phone away. People we knew showed up, we chatted. People stumbled outside, drunk, whipping their dicks out and pissing against whatever looked like a good thing to piss against. Jeff’s arm hung over my shoulder. My head leaned against his. People’d almost definitely be leaving here thinking we were gay.

  All in all, it was an okay night.

  Once we passed through John and Kurt’s front gate, it was just the two of us again. I wouldn’t say I was drunk, but walking seemed a lot easier than it had on the way here. My hips just went with it.

  “Did you have fun?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t like I was thinking.”

  “How so?”

  I shrugged. My heels clacked on the sidewalk. “I pictured myself flirting and playing it up, but then I got there and guys started leering, and I was just like, ‘Ew. Step off.’ This one guy I didn’t even know told me the idea of a chick driving a forklift was hot. I said, ‘You know I’m not a chick, right?’ He didn’t care.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Left and went to stand in line for the bathroom.” Which I’d done two more times—apparently the control top hose flattened my stomach by squeezing it into the space normally held by my bladder.

  “Sorry,” he
said.

  “I mean,” I said, “I was there with my boyfriend.” In the costume sense, but still: shouldn’t they have respected it all the same?

  “Some guys just like that sort of thing,” he said, taking my hand.

  “Well, they’re creepy.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. We walked to the irregular beat of my high-heeled shoes. The temperature had come down some, but I was still hot from the house. It felt good. A car passed, its headlights blocking out any detail about what kind of car it might be. Someone cat-called out the window. I turned, nearly breaking an ankle, and gave them the finger. When I turned back around, Jeff caught my bird-flipping hand in his, and we kept going.

  I’d liked the date part of the night.

  The street was quiet. Windows glowed. Our fingers intertwined, and feeling the alcohol again, I started swinging our arms a little as we walked.

  All too soon, the building we lived in came into sight, silent and blocky, like a shoebox stood on end. My date was walking me home, like in a movie. He’d even said, “Can I walk you home?” when we were leaving the party.

  In real life, I don’t think I’d ever walked a date all the way to her door, not unless I knew I was going inside. Of course, in this case Jeff couldn’t help but go all the way to the door, being as it was where he lived.

  We climbed the back steps, shoulder to shoulder, my scarlet nails skimming up the paint-peeled banister. We walked slowly, as if we were both kind of reluctant for the evening to end.

  But we reached the landing, inevitably. And our door.

  He stopped, not going for his keys—because, of course, this was supposed to be my place. He said, “Well.”

  I didn’t fish in the little clutch purse just yet. I turned, facing him, my high heels putting us eye to eye—something I was still getting used to. It definitely added to the strangeness of the evening.

  “Well,” I said. “I had a good time tonight. Thanks for taking me.”

  He smiled, his head tilted a little. “Me too. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”

  “I’d like that.”

  We were having that awkward moment, that one where it was time to say goodnight.