The Basic Eight (35 page)

“Hey Adam, hey Natasha,” he said, and leaned against the counter unsteadily. From behind him emerged a tiny little girl, leprechaun-thin and makeup-heavy. Who was she? She took his hand, oh–

“You must be that tambourine player everyone’s talked about,” I said, sitting up, thinking better of it and lying down again. I brushed up against the baguette that I couldn’t seem to leave behind.

“Who?” Adam asked.

I gestured toward her, but she had already turned her back and was making out with Steve Nervo. Lip-locked, they were edging closer and closer to a precarious mountain of pots. “She’s the one Steve dumped V for. She’s joined Steve’s band, on
tambourine
.” I heard myself cackling uglily. “We’re all very proud of her.
Wait a minute
,” I said. “You’re not invited to this party, Steve.”

Steve stopped for a second and wiped his mouth. “It’s a cast party,” he said, and the girl looked at me smugly. I saw, suddenly, V ’s fragile face at the Malleria Worldwide Food Court. He was evil. We had crossed Steve Nervo’s name off the guest list with much ceremony. I used the baguette like a crutch to help me stand up. Steve and Tambourine were kissing again.

“Hey,” I said, and if I were rewriting this journal rather than merely occasionally editing it I would say: “in a drunken snarl.” “Hey,” I said,
in a drunken snarl
. “You were not invited to this party.”

“Shut up,” the girl said, and I hit her with the baguette, straight across the face. Unfortunately I kept swinging and the air was filled with the cacophony of falling pots.

“You
bitch
,” the girl said, clutching her reddening cheek. Her eyes, and her eye shadow, blazed. I felt all-powerful in the red streak dress. I hit her again with the baguette.

“You
fat bitch
,” Steve Nervo said, and lunged at me. I stepped back and tripped on Adam’s legs, falling heavily on top of him. Only in a life going as horribly wrong as my own would Kate and V walk in at this time.

V started crying but suddenly just turned it off. Her face turned to rum-punch rage. “Get out of my house!” she screamed to Steve, who started to laugh.

“Oooh, I’m scared,” he said in a high-pitched voice, and Ms. Tambourine laughed and kissed his neck and V stepped for- ward and in one swift arm motion swept the rest of the pots clattering to the floor. My head pounded and I felt a sharp pain in my thigh; Natasha’s nail file was clawing my leg through the pocket.

“Get out of my house!” V said, breathing hard. Steve blinked and looked at her; the loud pots had startled the laughter out of him. Even the girl looked wary. “
Get out of my house fucking un- thrilled man from hell
!” Bob and Douglas were standing in the doorway and began applauding and cheering; I saw that Douglas was holding a rum bottle. Rachel State and some other people I didn’t know appeared in the other doorway, and with much ap- plause Steve Nervo and his percussionist left V ’s Halloween garden party. The drunk crowds dispersed as drunk crowds do and it was just V , crying again and picking up pots, and Kate and me and Adam and awkward.

“Now,” Kate said, squinting, “may I ask.”

“I don’t have to answer to you,” Adam said, instantly and harshly. He brushed his pants off like he’d just buried his mother. “Why can’t you get it, Kate? It’s over between us.
Jesus
.”

“I can’t believe this.” Kate put her hands on her hips and threw back her hair. There was a blinding flash of light; Flora Habstat had taken another photo and whooped off.

“I can’t believe this
either
,” V said in a long high wail. She was holding up two broken pieces of a glass casserole dish like cymbals in the symphony.

“Look–” Kate said, and grabbed Adam by the shoulder. “Look–” Her voice was toggling somewhere between steadfast fury and embarrassing, whiny desperation. “Look–”

He looked at his shoulder like there was a dead mouse on it.

It skittered off–it wasn’t dead. Like my love for him. She blinked; I felt shame in my stomach. “Look–” “Just
shut up
!” he said. “You–”

“
Fat bitch
?” I finished for him. I raised the baguette up high– Sorry, not yet.

–but he was smirking offstage. Kate was left looking at me with her hands open in a needy shrug. I looked right into her teary gaze and realized I’d just called her a fat bitch. The music poun- ded.

“I didn’t–” I said to her, but she was already crying, shaking. Shaking. I went to hug her and she shook me off, shoved me right to the wall, wailing primal and loud. V dropped the casserole dish and put her hands to her head.

“How
could you
!” Kate screamed. “
How could you how could you how could you
–”

“It wasn’t–”

With a squawk the music was off and a great roar rose from the living room. Kate and I looked at each other, and I felt, glori- ously, the prospect of missing hot gossip rise up in her head and quench her fury, at least distract it. We both raced to the living room.

I realized I hadn’t been there yet, for the whole party, and like a resort in off-season, this probably wasn’t the best time. An enormous wooden table which had held the food had been turned on its side like people were making a fort. Plates and dips and who knows what else were ground into the carpet and Gabriel was kneeling on the ground picking up shards of something and dropping them into the gentle cup of his hand. Some blob of creamy something–salmon mousse, I think, it was sort of skin- toned–was perched on his face like he was about to apply whiteface. Douglas and Bob were sitting on the floor with a bottle between them; Douglas looked happy and Bob looked green. There were at least eighteen people in the room I didn’t know, or knew barely–I think the sophomore with curly red hair was Debbie something or other–Frank Whitelaw was standing in the middle of the room like a wobbly Maypole, looking warily at a small whirlpool of bright cloth and arms next to him. Nancy Butler and Cheryl and Jennifer Rose Milton–
Jennifer Rose Milton
–were in a full-out knock-down drag-out fight in V ’s living room.

I caught a glimpse at Kate’s face.
Jenn Milton. Fistfight
. V ’s living room. She was–
rapt
. Delighted almost to the point of sobriety.

Cheryl appeared to be winning–if in fact Cheryl was the one who could always fix the light board and cursed like a–

“
Fucking cunt
!”

Cheryl appeared to be winning, pulling Jenn to the ground by her hair and punching–actually
punching
, I

don’t think I had ever seen an actual
punch
in real life until jail–Nancy Butler right in the mouth. Nancy was screaming, but Jenn looked intense, like she was taking a final.

“Somebody turn the hose on them!” Douglas shouted, and everyone laughed.
Douglas
said that? I looked again; it was Bob. Something Nancy was wearing in her hair suddenly sprang out like a flying squirrel and hit Lily in the face just as she entered the room.

“
Natasha
!” she wailed and ran to me, sobbing into my waist. I took her cup of punch and downed it–felt the red roar of alcohol fill the void where the music had been. Her sobs shook my stomach like a bad meal. I was going to throw up soon. For the first time in my life I felt literally
blasted
–each cell electrically humming like the white heat of rocket ignition. I’d never been drunker. Blinking, I looked around the room and suddenly Adam’s face was huge in front of me like I had arrived late for the movie and had to sit in the front row. He shone so bright I had to shield my eyes; he reached out and touched that spot on my neck. Lily slid down my body to the floor like a leaky balloon of drunk sobbing mess. “I’ll be upstairs,” Adam whispered to me, breathing. “If you want.”

If I
want
–he was gone.

“
What did he say? What did he say
?” Kate screamed at me, so loud that several people looked over from the fight.

I took her hand, she slapped it away, I took her hand, she shook it off but I had learned, and held on. “He said he was sorry,” I said.

“Natasha–” she said, and swallowed. “
Flan
–”

“He said he was sorry,” I said again, forcing my voice into quiet resignation. How soon would Kate be distracted, so I could slip upstairs? I felt his finger inside me. I hadn’t had the breathless sex gasping of fooling

around on some parent’s bed at a party since Jim Hadley, after that mystery play we did where I got killed in the second act. “He was sorry, and I’m sorry, too.” Preapologizing. I looked at Gabriel, who was staring at his handful of shards with drunken Zen concentration. I’m sorry, everybody. Have to follow my heart. Kate was looking at me, deciding whether she’d gamble on belief or not, when the whole living room shouted. We hadn’t been paying attention to the fight, so I don’t know how it happened, but Jenn grabbed Cheryl’s leg and she fell to the ground. Jenn stood up and Nancy fell down, and then with horrid accuracy, Jennifer Rose Milton kicked Cheryl, then Nancy, each in the face, one with each foot. The girls screamed and held their mouths; in perfect sync blood ran between the fingers of their hands like choreographed scarlet floods. Jenn stepped back, clearly the winner. Even Bob clapped. Frank was looking at her

in slow horror-anger.

“What did you
do
?” he asked.

Jennifer Rose Milton blinked for a minute like she too was just realizing that prim Jenn-Jenn, daughter of the coolest French teacher in the world, gorgeous and thin and gentle and thin, had just kicked two women in the face like one of those dizzying ar- cade games. But then she toughened right up.

“How
dare
you,” Frank snarled. “It’s
over
between us, Jenn, can’t you face that?”

“Fuck you,” she said calmly. “Get out of this house. You weren’t invited to this party anyway.”

“You
fat bitch
!” he said, and the party gasped like a Greek chorus.

“Get out!” she said. Cheryl was trying to stand up, bleeding on the rug. I realized I was still holding the

baguette, though it was half-eaten and doubled over like a dying flower. I guess the Basic Bakery doesn’t design its loaves to withstand battle.

“
No
,” Frank said, and took a step toward Jenn. Nancy tried to stand up and Cheryl slapped her down. Jenn blinked and looked scared; Frank was dumb but tall and had stage crew arms. The party was getting more and more ugly. Behind me I could hear somebody throwing up.

Douglas stood up. “Frank–”
Bam
, Douglas was down. Below me, Lily screamed. Slapstick violence, that’s what comes from watching too much TV. Gabriel was watching Frank closely but wasn’t going to do anything. Nobody was going to do anything. Mr. Baker, no one listens to you. We are a nation of children let- ting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc. Frank raised a hand. It felt so literal: Frank
raising a hand
to her. She screamed and–although you’d think there was enough drama ’round these parts without a drama
teacher
–that’s when Ron Piper entered the room.

Never had teacher supervision been so appreciated. He looked around the room, took in the overturned table, all the liquor, Rachel State slouched in a corner with her eyes closed and her mouth open. “Oh,” he said. He was in a black turtleneck and had on a purple beaded mask I think we used for that French play we did sophomore year. “Hello, everybody,” he said.

“
Ron
!” V said, from nowhere. Her hand went up to straighten her hair; Satan was doing something right. “I thought you would
never
come.”

“It looks like this party is, well, a little–”

“
Nonsense
,” she crowed. “Just a little charades getting out of hand. Some people were just leaving,” she said, smiling directly at Nancy Butler who was already yanking her coat out from under the table, “but the party

is still in full swing. Come in, come in. Love your mask. Is that from that French thing we did–”

“What’s going on?” Ron said simply, not amused. Cheryl was wiping blood off her mouth with a little cocktail napkin already dripping mustard. “Is everyone OK?”

Not that there would have been an opportune time, but that’s when Lily threw up, a tidy little pile on the floor. Even V ’s smile faltered and everyone waited while the room spun around my head again like one of those propeller beanies. It was a toss- up what Ron would do; he was a cool teacher, but he was a
teacher
. Millie would have burned us alive. Or, come to think of it, she may have merely stood there in shock after seeing her daughter kick two other girls in the face like some television ninja. With Ron, though, who would know?

Incidentally, Ron, if you are reading this, I’m so sorry that everybody burned down your house and stuff.

Ron looked at Lily on the floor and then knelt down to help her up. He didn’t know her very well–she was never in the plays, but sometimes did makeup–but he took out a purple handkerchief and wiped her mouth. She leaned on him and wailed, her face bright red like a baby with that sickness thing that makes you cry all the time. Cholera?

“Oh dear,” V tried. “Lily hasn’t looked well all evening. A touch of the flu, I’m afraid.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, V ,” Ron said. “None of you guys are of age. I just thought this was going to be a garden party. All of you, Douglas, Bob”–how did he know Bob? Or do gay people just sort of
sense
one another?–“V , Kate, Natasha.”

“Flannery,” I said.

“
All
of you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“We are,” Nancy Butler said quickly. She had her purse and Frank had his car keys out; some people move like lightning when they’re busted. “Good-bye.”

Ron uprighted a chair and put Lily in it. “Now, I think–”

Flora Habstat ran in. She had a shower curtain draped over her like a cape. “Ta da!” she sang, and snapped several pictures all in succession: the corner of the room where Rachel was sitting, Douglas and Bob helping Gabriel pick up potato chips and Ron leaning over Lily and glaring at her. Flash, flash, flash. By the third flash Ron’s face looked more careful, wary even. You could read it like a journal; he was slowly figuring out he had to save himself first. It wasn’t a good idea for a teacher to be at this party. “You know,” he said, but Flora cut him off with another “Ta da!” and ran out of the room shrieking. Flora was really coming into her own tonight.