The Great American Whatever (5 page)

“Okay, so Amir had this idea for a game we can play,” Carly goes, stepping past us and setting two six-packs of Iron City down on a coffee table that is fashioned, somewhat improbably, out of an old aquarium.

But who has time for details. Rooftop guy has a name. Amir. Now, that's a hell of a name. Strong, simple, super masculine. The very opposite of
Quinn
.

The partygoers are scattering around me, hunting for scraps of paper. Geoff is waving his hands in my face. They smell like hummus. “Earth to Quinn,” he goes.

“Uh-huh.”

“Have you ever played Celebrity?”

“If I haven't played it with you, no. So: no.”

“It's fun.”

“Okay,” Carly says, “if you're a native Pittsburgher, you're on my team. And if you're from out of town, you're on Amir's!”

Shouting and uproar. The “hot as balls” guy from earlier (not my type; not my Amir, ha) announces he's from Wheeling, West Virginia, so the out-of-town team “needs to come over here,” he goes, “because I'm not leaving the couch.” Instantly Amir's team crashes onto the sofa in a tight pack: a group of wolves not bred in Pittsburgh.

“Native Pittsburghers,” Carly says, adopting the longest, ugliest version of our local dialect that you can imagine, “let's just sit by the TV.” (If you don't know anyone from Pittsburgh, look it up on YouTube. You won't believe it. Our accent sounds something like a parrot doing an impression of a fire alarm.)

“Wait, the teams are uneven,” says a non-native. “You guys have two too many.”

“Quinny's not from Pittsburgh!” Geoff offers, unbelievably. “He's from Cleveland.”

“Uh, we moved down here when I was, like,
one
,” I say.

But Carly holds up her hands and does a big “Rules are rules!” thing, and I am so frustrated because the last thing I want is to be on Amir's team. I'm not ready to join forces. I don't even know how to play this game.

Geoff smiles at me like we're in on the same running joke that is my life. We are not.

I sit on the floor next to the couch. Somebody hands me five torn-up slips of notebook paper, and I go, “Thanks,” and when I'm sitting here long enough without doing anything, this girl literally furrows her brow like Faye Dunaway in
Mommie Dearest
and goes, “Can't think of anyone?”

I clear my throat. “Um.”

“Just write down five celebrities,” she says.

You have to see
Mommie Dearest
, by the way. Oh my God. Put it on the list.

“On the pieces of paper,” she continues. “One celebrity for each paper.” She holds out a pen and looks at me like I'm a dangerous alien in neutral clothes. Which, let's be honest.

Carly's kicking off her sandals. “Okay, does everybody have their celebrities?”

Somebody volunteers his Pirates hat to be used as the “bowl” for us to put our slips of paper into, and that's when Faye Dunaway says, louder than you'd believe: “Wait. The cute kid hasn't written down his names yet.”

I mean, at least she thinks I'm cute.

“Oh, you can go without me,” I say, but a tipsy guy from the Pittsburgh team goes, “No way. It
has
to be even numbers! It
has
to be.” As if party games are known for their fairness. As if that's the chief quality that gets people hooked on the party game circuit.

Geoff and I lock eyes, and he breaks into the biggest “I'm sorry” grin I've seen since the time in elementary school he let it slip to the other boys that I'd “borrowed” two of Carly's Barbies after a sleepover; he's clearly remembering, only now, how completely out of the loop I am about current pop culture.

“
Bro
, just think of five famous people,” a guy from my team says, and so I take the pen from Faye Dunaway and like a magic wand it supplies me with insight: I'll use my practically genetic aversion to being ordinary to my advantage.

1. Hitchcock. 2. Kubrick. 3. Mankiewicz. 4. Preminger. And, for the modern crowd: 5. Tarantino. Yes.
Yes.
Filmmaker celebrities for the ages.

I'm writing so fast that somebody actually goes: “The kid's on fire!” and I fold my sheets of paper in half and drop them in the Pirates hat. Carly claps her hands together. It's all good.

“Okay, anyone who hasn't played before: It's like, I don't know, verbal charades, and your team has to guess who you're acting out—”

“And you only get a minute each,
no cheating
,” Geoff goes. He cracks his knuckles and punches his fist into his hand, acting all mock competitive. It makes me laugh. This is going to be
fine
.

“First round!” Carly goes, grabbing the hat. “My house, my rules. Devon, you're up.”

Somebody offers to time the rounds on their phone, and we're off.

“Okay,” Devon says, looking at her first slip of paper and bouncing up and down a little. “Wait, can I, like, pass?”

“Fifty seconds left!” the timer from the other team says. I dare myself to glance at Amir. He is the only person on our team looking at Devon with a small smile on his face—a face that's distinguished by this jawline you could open a manila envelope with. Anyway, whatever. His little smile. It is the sweetest thing. Everybody else is teasing Devon for being so stuck on the first round. But Amir is smiling, smiling. The kind of smile you have to name twice.

“Time!” the timekeeper calls, and Devon slaps her hands down and goes, “I didn't even know who it
was
! It was like a long Russian name or something!” She shows the paper to us and somebody from the other team kicks her in the butt and says, “No cheating!” and she falls onto the floor and puts her feet against the aquarium and sighs.

“Let's go in order of birthdays,” someone suggests. “Like, whoever's birthday is next should just go.”

A Pittsburgh guy goes, “My birthday's on Tuesday!” and a bunch of girls go, “Aww, Josh!” like he just admitted he's not actually a human guy but in fact fifteen puppies in a tank top. Josh gets up and takes the hat and suddenly the game gets
serious
, though I'm not really thinking about that. I'm thinking about the fact that my birthday is this coming Sunday.

“Go.”

Josh grabs the first celebrity. “Okay, he owns like a million buildings and has crazy hair that looks like a frittata!”

“Donald Trump!”

Josh doesn't even say
yes
; he just throws the clue down and we non-natives moan but also secretly love that now we're all
about
something, together.

LIFE HACK: That's all anyone ever wants.

“Okay,” Josh goes, “he used to be, like, the biggest movie star ever when our parents were our age, but then he went crazy.”

“Tom Cruise!”

“No!”

“John Travolta!”

“Yes!”

Ugh. Biggest movie star ever? Marlon Brando much?

Whatever. Next. Josh twists a piece of hair between his fingers, and he's starting to sweat, and this is the most cardio-intense party game I've ever seen. “Okay,” Josh goes,
“You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car.”

The Pittsburghers erupt into laughter and everybody shouts, “Oprah!”—even my team does—and oh my God wait till they get to one of my names and are blown away that the cute kid is actually a mature man.

“Okay,” Josh goes, trying not to laugh, “I think he was, like, a famous mime.”

“Time!” Carly calls out. She's boogying around and eating some of the hummus that I brought. Nobody seems to mind the fact that I brought “another hummus” now. Life can be so weird.

“Who's up? Who's up?” somebody goes, and since I don't have a phone to pretend I'm getting a text, I fake a big yawn.

“Quinny, your birthday's on Sunday, right?”

I am going to kill Geoff.

“Birthday boy! Birthday boy!”
He attempts to start a chant. Fail.

I get up and wonder how sweaty my butt looks in my shorts and if I'll recognize a single celebrity name, and I pray pray pray I pick one of my own. I know just how to act out Hitchcock. Please: Crouch like birds are attacking, shriek like you're being stabbed in a shower, easy.

“Okay,
time
,” Carly says, for the first time not sounding excited but rather cautious. Can't blame her there. I literally have no idea who the first celebrity is.

“Oh, jeez.”

See, this is why I like everything written out beforehand. I am trying to star in my life story, not appear as the unbilled comic sidekick.

“Say something,” a girl from my team says. “Say anything.”

Amir and I catch eyes and dammit I look away.

“Is it a man or a woman?” says Faye Dunaway.

“I think a man.”

“Oh,
Christ
.”

“I mean—sorry—definitely a guy.”

“Thirty seconds!” Carly says.

“Okay,” I say, “his last name is, like, French.”

“Gérard Depardieu!” a teammate says, and I appreciate, at least, the relatively obscure movie star reference.

“No, but really good guess.”

“Thanks. I don't need positive reinforcement, I need
clues
.”

Yikes.

“
Guys
, back off,” Carly goes, but oh God: I don't want to be that kid who everyone has to be nice to because their parents got a handout at the beginning of the year saying their child would be sharing the classroom with “someone exceptional.”

“Oh!” I say. I swing my arms so wide that it knocks an entire liter of Fanta into a bowl of corn chips. Worth it. “His last name is like Pepé Le Pew. You know, the, like, possum cartoon thing.”

“He was a
skunk
,” a girl says, wiping Fanta from her leg. You could say it kind of splashed “everywhere.”

“And his first name is Italian!” I go.

“Time!”
Carly hollers. Big hoots from the Pittsburgh team, who are up three-nothing. Josh is literally still getting high-fives for the John Travolta/Oprah sequence.

“Pepé Le Pew was a
skunk
,” that girl says again, in case I didn't hear her, which I did.

“Well, who
was
it?” asks my “hot as balls” teammate, who never even tried to guess during my round, not even once.

“I thought we weren't showing clues,” I say, but
now
nobody puts up a fight, and so I hold up the celebrity for him to see.

“Mario
Lemieux
?” he goes. “You don't know who Mario
Lemieux
is?”

“One of the most legendary Penguins of all time,” somebody else adds.

Ugh. A hockey reference. The clue might as well have been written upside down, in Arabic.

“Jesus, you call yourself a Pittsburgher?”

“No.” I sit down. “I'm from Cleveland.”

The “hot as balls” guy leans forward. Now I see what he's doing. He's impressing this girl next to him. “You could have literally just said, ‘This guy's first name was one of the most iconic Nintendo characters of all time.' ”

I try not to scrunch my eyebrows at him, but
whoops
.

“Super
Mario
Brothers,” he goes. “Hello? Are you secretly
ninety
?”

The girl next to him giggles and whaps his shoulder in a “You big lug” kind of way. They are definitely doing it later tonight.

I hug my knees. I am the last American virgin.

“So, whose birthday is next?” Carly tries to say, but it's as if the soundman forgot to turn on her microphone; that's the effect her prompt has. Nothing.

I get up to take the ruined corn chips to the kitchen—also to launch an investigation into whether my face is incredibly hot or incredibly cold (it's one or the other)—and as I set the bowl in the sink, a spider crawls out from beneath the windowsill and startles me enough that I back up, hard, into somebody.

“Sorry,” I say. With my luck, it's probably the girl whose bright white jeans were splashed with Fanta.

Nope. It's worse.

“No problem.”

It's Amir. We made actual physical contact and I didn't even have the benefit of experiencing it face-to-face.

I mumble something and duck my head down, sidestepping out of the kitchen, taking great notice of the floor, of exquisite dust bunnies and a fascinating paper clip, of anything but up.

“We should go,” Geoff says, when I nearly crash into him, too. “First shift at Loco Mocha.”

But that's not what he's saying, or what he's meaning, anyway.
“The minute we got your air conditioner today,”
is what he's really saying,
“we should have just gone back to install it and never let you leave home again.”

That's the one dangerous thing about having a best friend. You can always tell when they're glad not to be you.

W
e have to pull off of I-79 because Geoff's Corolla is running super low on gas. Usually he just fills it up for free at his dad's dealership—did you know car dealerships have their own on-site gas stations? I didn't—so tonight Geoff is in his version of a pissy mood because he actually has to pay to refill his tank.

Geoff's version of pissy is still pretty optimistic.

“Hey, Quinny,” he says, sticking his head through the driver's window from outside. “Can you pump for a second? I actually really have to take a leak.”

Sure. I unbuckle and walk around and take the nozzle from him, and when he stumbles away a little bit, I go, “Are you, like, sober enough to drive?” and he goes, “
Now
you ask me,” which isn't exactly an answer.