The Carrie Diaries and Summer in the City. Candace Bushnell

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      The driver takes his time getting out, flashing his lights and rolling his windows up, down, and back up again as if he can’t decide if he wants to go to this party either. Finally, the door opens and Sebastian Kydd rises from behind the car like the Great Pumpkin himself, if the Great Pumpkin were eighteen years old, six-foot-one, and smoked Marlboro cigarettes. He looks up at the house, smirks, and starts up the walk.

      “Good evening,” he says, nodding at me and Walt. “At least I hope it’s a good one. Are we going inside?”

      “After you,”Walt says, rolling his eyes.

      We. My legs turn to jelly.

      Sebastian immediately disappears into a throng of kids as Walt and I weave our way through the crowd to the bar. We snag a couple of beers, and then I go back to the front door to make sure Maggie’s car is still at the end of the street. It is. Then I run into The Mouse and Peter, who are backed up against a speaker. “I hope you don’t have to go to the bathroom,”The Mouse shouts, by way of greeting. “Jen P saw Sebastian Kydd and freaked out because he’s so cute she couldn’t handle it and started hyperventilating, and now she and Jen S have locked themselves in the toilet.”

      “Ha,” I say, staring carefully at The Mouse. I’m trying to see if she looks any different since she’s had sex, but she seems pretty much the same.

      “If you ask me, I think Jen P has too many hormones,”The Mouse adds, to no one in particular. “There ought to be a law.”

      “What’s that?” Peter asks loudly.

      “Nothing,”The Mouse says. She looks around. “Where’s Maggie?”

      “Hiding in her car.”

      “Of course.”The Mouse nods and takes a swig of her beer.

      “Maggie’s here?” Peter says, perking up.

      “She’s still in her car,” I explain. “Maybe you can get her out. I’ve given up.”

      “No problem,” Peter shouts. He hurries away like a man on a mission.

      The bathroom scene sounds too interesting to miss, so I head upstairs. The toilet is at the end of a long hall and a line of kids are snaked behind it, trying to get in. Donna LaDonna is knocking on the door. “Jen, it’s me. Let me in,” she commands. The door opens a crack and Donna slips inside. The line goes crazy.

      “Hey! What about us?” someone shouts.

      “I hear there’s a half-bath downstairs.”

      Several annoyed kids push past as Lali comes bounding up the stairs. “What the hell is going on?”

      “Jen P freaked out over Sebastian Kydd and locked herself in the bathroom with Jen S and now Donna LaDonna went in to try to get her out.”

      “This is ridiculous,” Lali declares. She goes up to the door, pounds on it, and yells, “Get the hell out of there, you twits. People have to pee!” When several minutes pass in which Lali does more knocking and yelling to no avail, she gives me an exaggerated shrug and says loudly, “Let’s go to The Emerald.”

      “Sure,” I say, full of bluster, like we go there all the time.

      The Emerald is one of the few bars in town with—according to my father—a reputation for being full of shady characters: i.e. alcoholics, divorcées, and drug addicts. I’ve only been three times, and each time I looked around desperately for these so-called degenerates but was never able to spot any patrons that fit the bill. In fact, I was the one who looked suspicious—I was shaking like a Slinky, terrified that someone was going to ask for my ID and, when I couldn’t produce it, call the police.

      But that was last year. This year I’ll be seventeen. Maggie and The Mouse are nearly eighteen, and Walt is already legal, so they can’t kick him out.

      Lali and I find Walt and The Mouse and they want to go too. We troop out to Maggie’s car, where she and Peter are deep in conversation. I find this slightly irritating, although I don’t know why. We decide that Maggie will drive Walt to The Emerald, while The Mouse will take Peter, and I’ll go with Lali.

      Thanks to Lali’s speedy driving, we’re the first to arrive. We park the truck as far away from the building as possible in order to avoid detection. “Okay, this is weird,” I say, while we wait. “Did you notice how Maggie and Peter were having some big discussion? It’s very strange, especially since Walt says he and Maggie are having problems.”

      “Like that’s a surprise.” Lali snorts.“My father thinks Walt is gay.”

      “Your father thinks everyone is gay. Including Jimmy Carter. Anyway, [A-Z]alt can’t be gay. He’s been with Maggie for two years. And I know they definitely do more than make out because he told me.”

      “A guy can have sex with a woman and still be gay,” Lali insists. “Remember Ms. Crutchins?”

      “Poor Ms. Crutchins,” I sigh, conceding the argument. She was our English teacher last year. She was about forty years old and she’d never been married and then she met “a wonderful man” and couldn’t stop talking about him, and after three months they got married. But then, one month later, she announced to the class that she’d annulled her marriage. The rumor was that her husband turned out to be gay. Ms. Crutchins never came right out and admitted it, but she would let revealing tidbits drop, like, “There are just some things a woman can’t live with.” And after that, Ms. Crutchins, who was always full of life and passionate about English literature, seemed to shrink right into herself like a deflated balloon.

      The Mouse pulls up next to us in a green Gremlin, followed by the Cadillac. It’s terrible what they say about women drivers, but Maggie really is bad. As she’s trying to park the car, she runs the front tires over the curb. She gets out of the car, looks at the tires, and shrugs.

      Then we all do our best to stroll casually into The Emerald, which isn’t really seedy at all—at least not to look at. It has red leather banquettes and a small dance floor with a disco ball, and a hostess with bleached blond hair who appears to be the definition of the word “blousy.”

      “Table for six?” she asks, like we’re all absolutely old enough to drink.

      We pile into a banquette. When the waitress comes over, I order a Singapore Sling. Whenever I’m in a bar I always try to order the most exotic drink on the menu. A Singapore Sling has several different kinds of alcohol in it, including something called “Galliano,” and it comes with a maraschino cherry and an umbrella. Then Peter, who’s ordered a whiskey on the rocks, looks at my drink and laughs. “Not too obvious,” he says.

      “What are you talking about?” I ask innocently, sipping my cocktail through a straw.

      “That you’re underage. Only someone who’s underage orders a drink with an umbrella and fruit. And a straw,” he adds.

      “Yeah, but then I get to take the umbrella home. And what do you get to take home besides a hangover?”

      The Mouse and Walt think this is pretty funny, and decide to only order umbrella drinks for the rest of the night.

      Maggie, who usually drinks White Russians, orders a whiskey on the rocks, СКАЧАТЬ