Beige (17 page)

“Fine, more for me, then,” she says.

I go and find a soda and then start scanning the room for Leo. He said he’d be there at eight p.m. By nine-thirty, I’m still standing in the corner with Lake. I’m feeling bored and I’m staring at the door, willing it to open and for Leo to finally step through it. Only when Leo arrives will the party really start.

I scan the room. People are huddled in corners. Music is blasting. Some kids are making out. There’s black light making everything glow. I notice a girl stumble out of the kitchen. She’s laughing hysterically as she trips over someone’s legs and stumbles.

This is not my kind of party. I ignore the crazy and concentrate on the door.

Lake goes on and on, providing me with a nonstop color commentary on how boring and lame everyone at the party is. Everyone is a poseur. Everyone has betrayed her. Everyone has a problem. She’s such a victim. Fuck them all. Blah, blah, blah.

I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that she’s the one with the social problem.

I tune her out and think of Leo.

Time keeps ticking by. He said to meet him here.

Where is he?

And then Leo walks in. Everything starts to move in slow motion and everyone around him blurs out. It is only him. Time stops.

“Oh, look what the cat finally dragged in,” Lake says.

Leo is with a posse of friends. He stands in the doorway and surveys the room. He looks gorgeous. His hair is perfectly tousled. He’s wearing khakis just like me, and flip-flops and a blue and white button-down shirt. The top two buttons are open, and I can see the hollow at the base of his throat. And his smooth skin.

Who am I kidding? A guy like Leo isn’t going to notice a girl like me.

He’s obviously going to pass me by. So many girls go right up to him and say hello. They surround him. He could have his pick of anyone. Maybe he just asked me here to be nice. To be neighborly.

But it’s me who he walks right up to.

“Hey, Katy, you made it,” he says. He calls me Katy. Not Beige.
Katy.

He ignores Lake.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Cool,” he says. Then he leans up against me. He puts one arm on the wall behind me, kind of pinning me in, and with the other hand he traces my cheek and then he leans his face into mine and kisses me.

I am kissing. At a party. I am kissing a god at a party. He’s moving his hands up and down my arms. I feel all shivery.

“See ya,” I think I hear Lake say next to me. I don’t know. I’m too busy kissing.

When he breaks away from me, I catch my breath. I notice Lake is gone. I don’t care.

“You’re a good kisser,” he says, and then kisses me again. And I don’t tell him that I’ve never kissed anyone before. I just go with it.

He licks my neck. He sucks on my neck. He sticks his tongue in my ear. I do whatever he does right back to him. I even feel up his chest.

He bites my earlobe and then whispers, “Do you want a beer?”

Even though I don’t want one, I say, “Yeah.”

I don’t tell him that I don’t drink beer. I don’t want to seem uncool.

He disappears into the kitchen to get us beer and brings them back and I just drink it. And then I kiss him some more.

“Oh, I love this song,” he says, and he puts his mouth next to my ear and begins singing in a whisper to me. And for the first time I really hear the music that is playing, and I feel how it accents the moment. Heightens it. I don’t say I don’t know who the band is or what song it is.

I just agree.

I just say, “Me, too.”

CRASH!

Sounds of bottles falling and someone thudding and people laughing. And then I hear it.

“You bitches blew off practice!”

I turn around, breaking away from Leo, to see Lake is shouting at the girls from her band. They look together and collected, like they just stepped out of a magazine photo shoot. Lake looks like a mess.

They are laughing at her.

“We have to stick together!” Lake is yelling at them with her high-pitched baby voice.

“Why?” one of the girls — I think her name is Zoe — says.

“Because we’re a
band.
A band is like blood. We’re a team,” Lake yells, pushing the hair back that keeps falling in her face. I have a ponytail holder in my bag she could borrow, but I just stand back and watch the fireworks. I don’t want to get my head cut off when I am trying to help.

“The point is,” Lake says, “if we’re going to make it, we have to practice.”

“But, why do we have to practice so
much
?” Zoe asks.

“Because, duh, that’s the only way to get better,” Lake says. “I practice every single day.”

“Which is why you’re not really socialized,” one of the girls — Kim, I think — says.

“Look, we don’t have to be best friends,” Lake says. “We just have to be great together.”

She kind of stumbles as she leans forward to make her point, and the keg cup goes flying out of her hand and rolls across the floor, spilling all its beer.

A bunch of people laugh, and for a second, I kind of feel bad for her.

“That bitch needs to be housebroken,” one of the girls says, and then high-fives one of the other girls.

Then Lake’s fist comes flying out, but before it connects, one of the boys has pinned her arms behind her back.

“Fuck off!” she shouts, trying to shake the boy off her. The Skooby’s flyers she brought flutter to the floor.

There’s more laughing.

I should really do something, but Leo pulls my face back toward him.

“Forget about her,” he says. Then he sticks his tongue in my mouth. I have no choice; I can’t say anything. I just keep kissing.

Later on, one of Leo’s friends comes over and interrupts us.

“Yo, Marco,” Leo says. “What’s up?”

Marco looks at me. “You’re Lake’s friend, right?”

“Not really,” I say. I don’t know why I say that except that I know Leo doesn’t think Lake is cool.

“Well, you came here with her, right?”

I nod.

“She’s puking her guts up in my bathroom. Can you get her out of here?”

At first I don’t move. But Leo and Marco are just kind of looking at me.

“It’s OK,” Leo says. “You should probably go help her.”

So, even though I don’t want to, I follow Marco down the hallway to the bathroom.

Lake is lying on the floor, her arms draped around the toilet bowl, her hair covering her face. Her dirty black sweatshirt is covered with Grown-Ups patches, meticulously hand sewn. This is no Hot Topic outfit. Lake even looks like she’s keeping it real when hugging a toilet.

She retches again. I try to hold her hair back, but there’s too much of it. I take the ponytail holder out of my hair and wrap it around hers.

Lake looks up at me. One eye open, trying to focus. I bet she’s seeing double.

“Can you just get me out of here?” she slurs. “Beige,
please
just get me out of here!”

There is a little piece of vomit in the corner of her mouth. I take a piece of toilet paper and wipe it off. I can’t leave Lake. I don’t want to take her home. But I pick her up off the floor and lead her out of the house. I want to say good-bye to Leo, but I don’t see him.

What should I do? Think, Katy, think. Whatever you do, just don’t make a beige choice. Get it right. It wouldn’t be good for her grandmother to see her all messed up.

I know. I’ll take her to her jam space. It’s not so far from here. I can think about what to do there.

I go through all of Lake’s keys and try to find the one that opens the door.

Lake, knowing where she is, stumbles out of my arms and gropes for the angel, producing a spare key from behind its wing.

“There,” she says, holding up the key. She stumbles to the door and tries to put it in the lock, but gives up and so I do it.

When the door finally opens, she pushes past me and flops down onto the couch.

I pop open the fridge and get her a Coke.

“Drink this,” I say.

I want to go back to the party. I don’t want to be here. Maybe I can leave her now. Maybe I’ve done enough. I will still win my nice-girl points.

“Get me a blanket,” Lake demands.

I look around. I shrug.

Can’t I just go?

Lake starts waving madly, so I turn and I notice a wardrobe. I open it up and find a bunch of jackets, and at the bottom, there is a sleeping bag. I pull it out. Underneath it, I notice a knit blanket. I know that knit.

I cover Lake with the sleeping bag and sit at her feet, and I wrap myself in the knit blanket. My mom’s knit blanket. It’s probably the one she sent to Sam Suck, or to Yana.

Lake starts monologuing, but it makes no sense at all. I can only understand, like, every fifth word, and the thread of her thoughts is all over the place. She’s mixing up school, band, the world, unfairness, Leo, me, Sam Suck, people, making out, sex, love, and rock and roll.

She’s just messed up. She’s just drunk. She’s not in control of herself. I don’t like it. It scares me.

I’m a little buzzed, but I don’t know if it’s from the half beer I drank or from kissing Leo.

“Lake, are you ever afraid?” I say, pulling the blanket tighter around me. She probably won’t answer me. She probably can’t focus on what I’m saying. But it feels good to ask her something from my heart right out loud.

“Afraid of what?” Lake mumbles after a minute, surprising me.

“That we’ll become addicts,” I’m whispering. “That we’ll lose control?”

“No,” Lake says. “I’m not going down that road. No way.”

“I’m afraid of it,” I say.

I don’t say anything after that.

I am quiet for a while. I’m not going to go back to the party.

“Your hair looks really good like that,” Lake says. “You should wear it down more often.”

The next sound I hear is her snoring.

I flip open my cell phone and call The Rat.

While I’m waiting for him to get there, I walk around the jam space. I’m feeling too hopped-up on endorphins or adrenaline or kissing or beer or truth to sit still. And the space, walking this jam space, is soothing. That’s when I see it, handwritten words on the wall. I thought it was graffiti or something, but it’s not. It’s something more than that. It’s hard to see from anywhere but up close that the handwritten words are sentences. I move some of the instruments aside so I can get close and read what’s written.

The Rat knocks on the jam space door and it makes me jump. Like I’ve been caught with my thoughts hanging out. Caught agreeing. He knocks again. I forgot I locked the door behind me because I was scared. I let him in.

“Whoa,” he says. “This is twice as big as mine.”

He looks around, nodding in approval. I wonder if it feels as good to him in here as it does to me.

“Is she OK?” he asks.

“I think so. She got drunk. She fought with her friends.”

“OK, we’ll call Mrs. Hassock and let her know that Lake is all right.”

“It’s not too late?”

“Mrs. Hassock’s rules. When we were growing up, as long as Sam and I called his mom to tell her where we were sleeping, no matter what time, she didn’t care where we were.”

“What about you?” I ask. “What about your parents?”

The Rat shakes his head.

“They didn’t care,” The Rat says. “I pretty much lived at the Hassocks’.”

The Rat came out in the middle of the night and picked me up.

He didn’t mind at all. He was fine about it. He was glad I called.

No questions asked.

Lake leans too long on the doorbell. I know it’s her, and I don’t want to answer. She doesn’t give up, and I know she won’t go away.

I don’t want to talk to her.

But then she starts screaming my name up at the window, so I break down and I let her in.

She blows into my room like nothing happened last night and shoves a shirt into my hand.

“This is for you,” she says. “I don’t wear it anymore.”

It’s a faded black T-shirt with a maple leaf on it. It says
CANADUH
.

I take it as her way of saying thank you. Or I’m sorry. She should be sorry! She’s supposed to say it. I deserve an apology. I don’t even know why I took care of her.

But she’d never say the words. She’s not that kind of person. It bugs me. No one is that kind of person. Except me. I could be. I am. I say it. I say the words.