Nine Inches (25 page)

You just
fi
ll in the bubbles,
he told me.
I’ll take care of the rest.

Given the strictness of the code, it went without saying that partying on the eve of a test was totally prohibited, but Kyle said it anyway:
You will not drink alcohol or take illegal drugs on the night before a test. You will be home in bed by eleven
P.M.
I’d never violated this rule before and didn’t plan on starting now.

A
ft
er dinner, I put on my sweatpants, turned on my Xbox, and started campaign mode on Bioshock 2, doing my best not to think about the party I was missing, a party I’d been looking forward to all week. I would’ve gotten through the night just
fi
ne if not for the text I received around nine o’clock. It was from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, the
fi
rst one I’d ever received from her, and it put me in an awkward position.

Tequila is here!!!
it said.
Where the fuck r u???

I’D BEEN
overweight as a kid, academically gi
ft
ed but terrible at sports, and middle school had been a nightmare. As a result, I tended to be mumbly and apologetic around girls I liked, as if I had no business wasting their valuable time. With Kyle it was the other way around: he always acted like he was doing the girl a favor, honoring her with the blue ribbon of his attention, allowing her to tag along on his amazing adventures.

But I don’t want to make myself sound
too
pathetic.
Th
ings had de
fi
nitely gotten better in the past year. I’d been working out pretty regularly and was
fi
nally starting to show some de
fi
nition in my arms and chest. I’d acquired a new wardrobe, closely modeled on Kyle’s, and had started driving to school in my mom’s Toyota Matrix.

I wasn’t even a virgin anymore. I’d had my
fi
rst girlfriend in the fall, or at least my
fi
rst semiregular hookup. It was all on the down-low, just a once-or-twice-a-week, a
ft
er-school sex break with Iris Leggett — my former lab partner in AP bio — who had the biggest breasts in all of Greenwood High.
Th
is wasn’t as sexy as it sounds: Iris was short and stocky, but her breasts were enormous, way out of proportion to the rest of her, and they caused her a lot of discomfort, both physical and emotional.
Th
e
fi
rst time we took our clothes o
ff
, I said,
Holy shit,
and she started to cry.

I look like a cow,
she told me.
I used to love playing soccer, but then I got these and had to stop. And forget about the beach. I can’t go anywhere near it.

We only hooked up
fi
ve or six times before she called it quits, but it was fun and informative while it lasted and de
fi
nitely boosted my con
fi
dence. If it hadn’t been for Iris, I would never have dreamed of talking to Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, let alone
fl
irting with her. She was totally out of my league — a freakishly limber, cheerfully bisexual dancer with eyes like Mila Kunis’s — de
fi
nitely one of the Top Five Hottest Girls in the Junior Class. But one day in the Art Room, I just walked over to her easel and told her how much I liked her painting, this nocturnal scene of a girl in a black cocktail dress standing beneath a streetlight in the rain.

“She just looks so vulnerable,” I said. “Like there’s nothing to protect her from the elements.”

“Tell that to him,” she muttered, nodding at Mr. Coyle, who was sitting at his desk, reading a graphic novel with his usual expression of scowling concentration. “He hates it.”

Mr. Coyle wasn’t wrong; the painting de
fi
nitely had problems.
Th
e girl didn’t have much of a face, and the raindrops looked like golf balls, but I chose to focus on the positive.

“I like what you did with the streetlight. And the busted umbrella’s a great detail.”

“
Th
anks.” I could see how pleased she was. “I worked really hard on that.”

We got to be pretty good friends over the spring semester. On Monday mornings she liked to tell me all about her wild weekends:
Oh my God, Josh, I’ve got to stay away from the tequila. I always end up making out with the wrong person.
Sometimes the wrong person was a guy in our school, sometimes another girl, and sometimes a man in his twenties or early thirties she met at a club (she had a fake ID that never failed her; I wondered if it was one of Kyle’s). It would have been pretty excruciating for me, listening to these confessions, except that she always stood really close when she made them, so close that her breasts would sometimes brush against my arm. It was hard to feel jealous when all I could think about was the way my arm seemed to glow where she grazed me.

We’d never spent any time together outside of art class, so it had been a pretty big deal when we realized that we were going to Casey Amandola’s party. We’d been joking about it all week — I said I wanted to drink tequila with her, to
fi
nd out if the rumors of her bad behavior were true, and she said she’d trade me shot for shot until I was a puddle on the
fl
oor — but I wasn’t sure it was for real until she sent me that text.

Where the fuck r u???

I knew I’d never be her boyfriend, never take her to the movies or walk down the hall with my arm around her shoulder, and I was okay with that. I just wanted to be the wrong person she made out with at a party, a mistake she could confess to her friends on Monday morning, and I had a feeling this was the best chance I’d ever get.

I’ll be right there,
I texted back.
Don’t start without me.

WHEN I’D
imagined getting drunk with Sarabeth, I pictured an intimate, romantic scene, just the two of us o
ff
by ourselves, someplace dark and quiet. In front of a roaring
fi
replace, say, with a big bed nearby and a door that locked from the inside. I certainly hadn’t pictured us crowded into a bright kitchen, surrounded by a pack of drunken jocks, with hip-hop blasting in from the living room. In my fantasy, Sarabeth was giving me her undivided attention, laughing at my tragic tequila faces, closely monitoring my slide toward intoxication. In real life, though, she was all the way across the room, standing by the sink, too busy checking her phone and talking to Casey to notice the faces I made when the shots went down.

She looked great, though — at least that part of my fantasy remained intact — casual but festive in a tight white camisole and short black skirt, ru
ffl
ed at the bottom, that showed o
ff
her impressively muscled legs. Her arms were slender and toned, her hair gathered in a sleek ponytail that swayed when she moved, providing periodic glimpses of the tiny, green-tu
ft
ed carrot tattooed on the back of her neck (when I’d asked her about it in art class, she just shrugged and said she liked carrots). As far as I could tell, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and you could see the outline of her nipples pressing through the stretchy fabric of her top, two emphatic dots that commanded the attention of every guy in the room. Brendan Moroney, this ginger-haired lummox who’d been the bane of my middle school existence, nudged me with his elbow.

“Yo, dude, is it just me, or is it getting a little nippy in here?”

I smiled politely, not wanting to o
ff
end him, but not wanting to encourage him, either. Brendan was a total jackass, one of my least favorite people in the world. Back in
fift
h grade, he and his Pop Warner buddies had decided it would be amusing to call me Fosh, a ridiculous nickname I found deeply humiliating (I was pretty sure it stood for Fat Josh or Fag Josh, or maybe a combination of the two).
Th
ey kept it up for a full year before moving on to the next target. I still hated him for that, though I got the feeling that he barely remembered my real name, let alone the insulting substitute that had made me so miserable.

“Last week she made out with Emma Singer,” he informed me. “Capaldo got it on his cell phone. So hot. Like a fucking porno movie.”

“I heard about that.” Emma Singer was a sophomore who’d gotten kicked out of private school for some kind of scandalous o
ff
ense — arson, drugs, or sexting, depending on whom you asked. Last Monday, Sarabeth had told me she was a lousy kisser.

“I think Emma’s here tonight,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get an encore.”

I didn’t answer because Sarabeth was heading our way, passing out lime wedges for the next round. When she got to me, I smiled and asked how she was doing, but she didn’t seem to hear the question. She was looking up at Brendan, shaking her head in mock exasperation.

“You’re such a pig,” she told him, but her voice was sweet and friendly, as if
pig
were a compliment.

“What?” Brendan raised both hands in self-defense. “What did I do?”

“You know,” she teased him. “Don’t even try to deny it.”

Casey Amandola followed close behind Sarabeth, pouring tequila into our plastic cups. When everybody was ready, Sarabeth counted to three, and we all drank at once, tossing back the shots and sucking on our limes.

“Goddam!” Brendan said, punching himself hard in the chest. “
Th
at shit is poison!”

AFTER A
while, Brendan got bored and dri
ft
ed o
ff
, to my great relief. I probably should have le
ft
, too — three shots of tequila are enough for anyone — but I didn’t want to let Sarabeth out of my sight. I
fi
gured that sooner or later we’d get a chance to talk, and I was planning on coming right out and telling her how pretty she was, just state it like an obvious fact and see how she reacted.

In any case, the kitchen wasn’t the worst place to be. All sorts of people dri
ft
ed in and out — there was a keg on the back patio — and I found myself hugging a whole bunch of them, including some I barely knew, and one or two I didn’t especially like. Most of us were seniors who’d already gotten our college acceptances — I was heading across the country to Pomona — and a generalized cloud of goodwill was in the air, that sense of connection that comes from having a shared past and one foot out the door.

One of the few people who didn’t hug me was Iris Leggett. She just sort of materialized by my side while I was recovering from shot number four, which had gone down easier than its predecessors and then detonated like a
fi
reball in my stomach. I had to close my eyes and wait for the uproar to subside.

“You okay?” she said, tugging gently on my shirtsleeve.

“I think so.” I blinked a few times, getting the world back in focus. “Just a little wobbly.”

A
ft
er that there was an awkward pause. Despite our promise to remain friends a
ft
er the break-up, Iris and I had been avoiding each other for months, and now here she was, squinting up at me with an expression that seemed to hover somewhere between amusement and concern. I was also a bit distracted by her shirt, so tight and low-cut that it could barely contain her breasts. In school she always covered up, usually with an extra-large hoodie that hung down to her knees.

“I know.” She nodded ruefully, following my gaze down to her impressive cleavage. “
Holy shit,
right?”

I winced and mumbled an apology. I still felt bad about blurting that out, making her cry the
fi
rst time we had sex — the
fi
rst time for both of us.

“It’s okay,” she told me. “I’m trying to own it, you know? I’m sick of hating my body.”

“
Th
at’s good,” I said. “
Th
at’s a really healthy attitude.”

“Fuck it, right?”
Th
ere was something a little o
ff
about her smile, or maybe the tone of her voice. “If guys want to stare at my tits, who am I to stop them? I’m like,
Here they are, dudes. Knock yourselves out.
”

“Are you drunk?”

She raised her red plastic cup, tilting it to show me the contents. It was pretty big, at least twenty-four ounces, and more than halfway full. “Turns out I like beer,” she said, shrugging in a who-woulda-thunk-it sort of way.

“You should try some tequila.
Th
at’s pretty good, too.”

“Maybe,” she said, but her attention had shi
ft
ed from me to Sarabeth, who was taking a sel
fi
e by the sink, making a supermodel face for the camera. It seemed like everybody in the room was watching her.

“She’s pretty,” Iris observed. “But she’s such an exhibitionist.”

“She’s nice,” I said. “She’s in my art class.”

Casey joined Sarabeth for the next picture, the two of them posing with the tequila bottle. On the one a
ft
er that, they gave each other a playful kiss. Some guys started cheering for more, but Casey pulled away and gave them the
fi
nger, telling them to dream on.

“I should’ve gone to more parties,” Iris said. “I used to act like they were stupid, but that was bullshit. I pretty much wasted the past four years pretending I was above it all. But the joke was on me, you know?”

“You didn’t waste it,” I told her. “You worked your ass o
ff
and got into a great college. I bet you’re gonna love it at Northwestern.”

“I’m gonna go to more parties, that’s for sure.” She swirled the beer in her cup as if it were
fi
ne wine. “I just wanna have some fun for once.”

Th
ere was a disturbance just then, a bunch of football players scu
ffl
ing in the hallway. From the sound of it, I thought it might be a real
fi
ght, but they were just goo
fi
ng around, Brendan and Chad Capaldo and Dontay Williamson tugging on one of their buddies, dragging him forcibly into the kitchen.