“Tell me something scandalous,” Sam said.
Alice took a drag and thought about what she would have been most impressed by on her sixteenth birthday. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people.”
Sam stopped and held a clump of dresses to her chest. “How many is a lot?”
She didn’t know the exact number—college had been fuzzy, as had large swaths of her twenties. Did blow jobs count, or times when she’d started having sex but gotten interrupted and then just given up? “Thirty? Or so?” There had been many years when she’d only slept with one person, and years when she’d spent six months without so much as a kiss. But there were a lot of years with a lot of people in between.
The look on Sam’s face was somewhere between awe and horror, worse than when Alice had said she would move to New Jersey, but she collected herself quickly. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me. What do I need to know that I don’t know?” Sam and Alice were both virgins, and would stay that way until they were in college. Sam would have two boyfriends before Josh. Three people, total, as far as Alice knew—that was Sam’s list. Alice remembered what it had felt like, their shared belief that they would never, ever have sex with another human, that they would stay virgins until they were old and gray. Alice had forgotten that worry, that she didn’t know what to do with her body, that she didn’t know how to produce pleasure in herself or someone else, but she could feel it right now, the panic and fear and desire all swirling together in her guts.
“Oh god,” Alice said. “Probably a lot? Starting with understanding the clitoris?” It was easier to imagine a teenage boy at Belvedere solving world hunger than it was to imagine a teenage boy at Belvedere able to locate or stimulate the clitoris in 1996.
Sam’s face turned purple. “Oh my god,” she said. “Okay. Maybe just forget I asked. I feel like I’m getting a one-on-one health class, and that’s kind of the only thing more awkward than a regular health class.”
The doorbell rang, and Alice began to panic. “I should have canceled.”
Taking her time to climb out of the closet, Sam tiptoed over to the bed, where she dropped the armfuls of clothes. “I’ll get the door. You put something on. And if the party sucks, we kick everybody out and watch Pretty in Pink. Whatever you want.”
Everything was already different—it had to be. Could one person do everything the same way twice, even if they were trying? Alice couldn’t remember what she’d had for lunch the day before; how could she remember everything that happened on her sixteenth birthday? There were two open beers on her nightstand, and Alice drank the first one as quickly as she could, and then the second. The goal was to get back, wasn’t it? Or to figure out what the hell was going on? Was the goal not to vomit, not to let Tommy break her heart, not to exist as she always had? Was the goal to make sure that Leonard took up running instead of pounding cans of Coca-Cola as his favorite exercise? Birthdays were inherently disappointing—they always had been. There wasn’t a birthday she could remember truly enjoying. That was one way that social media had buoyed depression rates across the globe—now it was easy to see how much fun everyone else had on their birthdays, the elaborate gifts they received from their partners, the parties they were thrown, surprise! Alice did not want a surprise party, but still. More than not wanting a giant party, she didn’t want to feel unworthy of one. This was the last big birthday party she’d ever had, the last one with people she hadn’t invited swimming in and out of view.
* * *
? ? ?
If there was one thing that Alice felt like she’d done wrong, it was being too passive. She hadn’t quit working at Belvedere like everyone else had, she hadn’t broken up with people when she knew they weren’t right for her, she hadn’t ever moved anywhere or done anything surprising. She was just floating. Like a seahorse.
Seahorses were Leonard’s favorite animal. There was an Eric Carle book about seahorse fathers, who carried their young, and Alice thought that was probably why. Raising children required a lot of conversations about animals, and favorites, and so every parent had to have an answer, and all the better if it was one on display at the museum blocks from their house. There weren’t that many animals in the wild whose mothers treated them like Alice’s had. There were lots of mothers who abandoned their young straight off the bat—snakes, lizards, cuckoos—but Serena hadn’t done that. She’d stuck around long enough that it hurt, and after that, Leonard had carried Alice. There were good reasons and bad reasons to do anything. Her father had floated on purpose, holding fast, never going too far, and then Alice had done the same thing by accident. It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.