Oola. Brittany Newell
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I noticed her fingers were shaking. “What about protein?”
“I get all the protein I need from fruit!” she shrieked. I could see this was a question she got quite a lot. “The most important thing is to stay carbed up. And people say carbs make you fat!” Her laugh was shrill; her knobby shoulders convulsed. “You wouldn’t believe how much sugar is packed into one date. It’s like a little bomb! A tiny sugar bomb!”
In truth, her babbling was a blessing, for it vindicated my people-watching and protected me from a more involved conversation. I dreaded having to pretend to give a single shit. I metaphorically rested my chin on the top of her head and surveyed the crowd while she rhapsodized over spotty bananas (“Brown! They have to be brown!”). My eyes fell on Tay, holding court in a corner. He wore a black sweater, a headband (oh, he was sleek), and a gigantic homemade clockface around his neck, which he, every few minutes, consulted with a fierce concentration.
“Get ready!” he screamed. “Ten-minute warning!”
The theme of the party was Last New Year’s Eve Ever (despite it being February). Tay had hidden every clock in the flat and confiscated watches at the door. If he caught someone sneaking a peek at their phone, he stormed over and demanded that they not only hand him the offending device but their drink as well. He was a mad king, stalking around the apartment, declaring every hour, then every fifteen minutes, then every time he saw a pretty face, to be midnight. Someone made the mistake of handing him a saucepan and a spoon, which he clanged mightily when, according to his private logic, the time came.
“Countdown, people!” he bellowed, hopping from couch to couch like a little boy convinced that the carpet was lava. “Couple up! It’s the end, the end of time, and this is the last chance you get! To get fucked!” He stopped to consult his fake clockface, with one leg up on the back of the sofa, posing like a New World explorer. “Ready? Three … two … one … HAPPY BOOB YEAR!” And he sprang off the sofa onto the suddenly stable ground and sprinted around the flat with his spoon in the air, holding the backs of people’s heads as they kissed to make sure that it counted.
Even for a party of trim twenty-somethings, the atmosphere was unusually abuzz. Tay’s was a hyperbolic universe of cheek-kisses galore. The effect of the theme was that everybody kept a list of who they wanted to make out with; I guess everyone does this at every party, but tonight the concept of sloppy seconds became inoffensive, and people accepted their middling rankings, flattered to have been jotted down at all. The fact that we’d each spent at least an hour beforehand appraising our worth in the mirror (and still hopped off to the bathroom to do so every now and again) was brought to the fore by Tay’s counterfeit midnights. Yes, we were predators, eyeing all thighs, but we also just wanted to cuddle. In the minutes between Tay’s exclamations, even the most hammered partygoers were hyperaware of their whereabouts, shuffling across the carpet like chess pieces, scheming their way toward a particular ponytail so that when the time came and Tay started banging his pot, one could glance incidentally to the left and catch that particular eye as if to say, God, this is stupid. But if we must …
And if this body was taken, there was always the next round and this OK-looking person beside you, whose mouth you could sample, and perhaps have a chat with, before spying a memorized sweater pass out of the room and suddenly finding yourself needing to pee very badly; you could pursue these hallowed scapulae over the dance floor, down the hall, while you whispered under your breath not the words you would say to her but a countdown to midnight that Tay, draped over an ottoman, had yet to begin. You would pray that the timing would link up, that the last-train apprehension in your gut would resolve in a swooshing open of lips and/or doors, shunting you homeward, toward any bed. Tay announced: It was all a joke, this thing we based our lives on. I thought about you on the train ride here; I wore this dress for you alone, just as I wear my skin for you; but in the humid center of this shit show, let’s laugh while we kiss, because the Moment is a construct and we all get a bit dimply in the end.
I, for the most part, was curious: What would it be like to kiss a fat girl? What about a young techie, with facial hair that I normally found inexcusable? At 11:17 p.m., I got my answer. Afterward he patted my wrist and said, “Awesome.” I drifted back to my corner, like a fish having fed.
“The man, the man!” Tay erupted from the crowd and threw his arms around my neck. “Having fun?”
“Always.” My words were muffled by his sweater. “Where’s Pumpkin?”
“Mono.”
“Oh.” I tested myself for disappointment: none. “Tough break. So how’d you come up with this theme?”
“The Internet, obviously.” He pulled away but leaned on me to keep his balance; he smelled like a medicine cabinet. I hoped, for a moment, that he would call midnight right then and there. He acted so differently now, with a new swagger, new accent; would he still taste the same? He squinted at me. “It’s a good one, right? Very educational.”
I nodded.
“You never get to kiss your friends,” he said, taking on the pensive but authoritative tone of a professor. “Well, you can.” He giggled, as if to say, We would know. “But after a certain age, it gets tricky. Kissing means, like, marking territory. It becomes an act that freezes instead of … unleashes. But what if I just want to tell you I’ll miss you? Wouldn’t it be easier to do it like this?” He grabbed me by the collar and thrust me up against a wall, clockface bumping between our chests. I was laughing and splashing my drink on the ground; he released me before I could catch my breath. “Tonight,” he went on, “I feel absolved of responsibility. I kiss and tell! I kiss and text.” He paused to think, grinning. He was as pretty and pretentious as I remembered. “Honestly, I kind of feel like a Hare Krishna, passing out pamphlets.”
“The Way of Tay.” I considered. “It does have a nice ring to it. Maybe I’ll enlist.”
“Uh-oh.” He smiled. “I can see you mean business.”
He adjusted his headband with a gesture I interpreted as nervous. I flashed back to a similar moment, when he and I were sixteen. We were in his car, knee-deep in fast-food wrappers that never stopped smelling delicious, driving, it would be safe to assume, in circles. I’d made a joke about a girl that Tay was crushing on, a shy salutatorian named Sophie. They’d hooked up once, when she was moderately tipsy, and now he fretted over the likelihood of getting to third base.
“Would poppers help?”
I had laughed aloud. “This isn’t San Francisco.”
He shrugged. “I found some in the medicine cabinet. I think they were my uncle’s. Well, what about weed? I think she’ll let me if she feels relaxed.”
“Fat chance,” I said, not really even listening. I was more interested in the joint that I was rolling on my knee. “If I didn’t really wanna, what makes you think she would? She’s, like, in the choir.”
He’d stopped fiddling with the radio and looked at me sideways. “That was different. We were bored.” His expression was not unkind, but his tight eyes and lowered tone still stung.
I was caught off guard. I focused on the joint.
I knew that I loved Tay; I just wasn’t sure if I was in love with him. I didn’t etch his name into the flesh of my thighs or wonder at the smell of his shit, as if such an angel couldn’t possibly empty his innards of anything other СКАЧАТЬ