“You go,” Mom says. “The kids and I will stay home.”
“No, Mom,” I call to her from the office, where I’ve been eavesdropping. “We’re going. Our friends will be there.”
“You call them friends, Hannah,” Mom lashes out, confronting me from the doorway with hands on hips. “But your connection to them is situational. Years from now you’ll look back and marvel at what you could have seen in most of these people.”
“You’re probably right,” I say, because Mom’s predictions have turned out to be right a surprising number of times. “But in three weeks, when the party is, they’ll still be our friends.”
* * *
Stephanie’s cocktail party is on a warm evening in mid-June, close to the end of the school year. My AP exams are done and the scores haven’t come in yet and the sky is still pale summer blue. I’ve always loved parties with every age included, even before my friends and I started getting drunk alongside the parents. Here it is, the world that made me: a fantasy I get to believe in for one more year, according to Mom. This, too, is a fairy tale, and after I grow up, these parties will become part of the lost mythical land of my childhood.
Mom waits for us at the kitchen table wearing a black dress with big white polka dots—an odd choice for a person who claims not to want to be noticed. She holds a seltzer bottle in each hand.
Dad comes downstairs in one of the dapper bow ties he always wears to parties. “I’m guessing they have seltzer,” he tells Mom.
“He may be serving,” Mom says. “And I will not accept a drink from that man.”
All of us leave our house through the front door as if we’re walking to church. I go ahead with Dad, our arms linked. We descend our pebbled driveway and then turn back up the white paving stones that lead to the Salazars’ front door.
“We could have just climbed over the fence,” Mom says. Dad gives her a severe look, and she smiles. “Kidding.”
The front door is open. People are milling around just inside it, the women in bright summer dresses, the men in seersucker shorts or patterned golf pants, holding gin and tonics. They all work in the city, and everyone knows which ones are richest. We’ll never be rich-rich, according to Mom, because lawyers can only bill by the hour. “But when the bubble bursts, and I’m guessing it’ll be soon,” she’s been saying lately, “your father will still have a job.”
It’s hard to imagine Bennie Salazar in this crowd, with his brown skin and wild hair, but until two years ago, it was his house. What a loss.
Stephanie greets us at the door in a sleeveless salmon-colored dress. Her shoulders are hard and tanned: all that tennis. “I really appreciate your coming, Noreen,” she says, removing the seltzer bottles from Mom’s clenched fists. “Can I bring these to the bar and pour you a glass?”
“Thank you,” Mom says stiffly. “I would like that.”
Dad vanishes. A few minutes later I hear him laughing, which means he’s drinking bourbon. Brian and Molly have gone upstairs to where the kids are. The High Priestess of Bitches, Kathy Bingham, reigns by a window in a white sleeveless dress, her taut shoulders a paler version of Stephanie’s. Mom averts her eyes from Kathy with a flinch, and I can’t bring myself to leave her.
“I don’t see your brother anywhere,” Mom remarks to Stephanie as a bartender fills a glass with seltzer from one of her bottles.
“Ah,” Stephanie says heavily. “I think Jules may sit this party out.”
I feel Mom’s whole body tense, the way Fizzy’s does when a hawk lands in the tree behind our house. “And why is that?” Mom asks carefully.
Stephanie lowers her voice. “I made the mistake of inviting his ex.”