* * *
? ? ?
Alice pushed herself up to stand. She wasn’t drunk, but she was certainly en route. She walked to the doorway of her room to survey what was going on in the rest of the house. There were already half a dozen people standing in the living room, each of them holding an enormous bottle of beer. Sarah and Sara, Phoebe, Hannah and Jenn, Jessica and Helen. Except for Sarah, they were all still around in Alice’s adult life, more or less—Alice knew at least the broadest strokes of where they were living and what they were up to. Sara and Hannah were doctors and spent their time on Facebook, posting pictures of their kids on ice skates. Phoebe posted pictures of things she made out of clay, and sunsets. Jessica had moved to California and taken up surfing—all of her photos were old, but she had at least two kids, maybe more, and a hot husband with visible abdominal muscles. Helen lived up the hill from Alice in Park Slope, and had had a string of glamorous, low-paying jobs, but that was fine, because Helen’s great-grandfather had invented some part in a machine that was used to make sneakers and so she could have made pot holders for the rest of her life and sold them for fifty cents apiece and she could still buy expensive clogs. Once or twice a year, Alice and Helen would run into each other on the street and hug and kiss each other’s cheek and swear to make a plan for dinner, which neither of them would follow up on.
“Alice Stern, there are only girls at this party,” Helen said, coming up to Alice and kissing her on the cheek. Her breath smelled like vodka. Maybe that’s why everyone had thrown up—her friends had already been drunk when they arrived. The doorbell rang, and Alice excused herself to answer it.
The boys arrived in a solid mass. A forest of boys, a school of boys. Their bodies took up nearly the whole space in between the two sides of Pomander Walk. The boy in front, Matt B., put a hand to the side of his mouth and said, “We roll mad DEEP,” which was probably supposed to sound tough but instead sounded like he was an effective camp counselor who had ferried his flock from one side of the street to the other. Alice stepped aside and they filed in. There were some she didn’t recognize—boys always seemed to have cousins, or friends from other schools, which was fine, but boys from other schools existed somewhere outside real life, extras in the movie. Every boy kissed Alice on the cheek on his way through the door, even the ones she didn’t know, like it was the price of admission. Tommy was in the middle of the pack, which meant that she had to accept his kiss and then stand there while strangers kissed her and walked into her house. She shut the door behind the last one—Kenji Morris, the tall sophomore who was handsome and quiet enough to hang with the older boys, with one sad eye peering out from behind a curtain of dark hair—and locked it. Alice had known most of the boys since she was in the fifth grade, but even so, only single facts about them came to mind: Matt B. supposedly had a crooked penis, James had barfed on the school bus on the way to a field trip in the seventh grade, Kenji’s father had died, David had made Alice a mixtape with so many songs from musicals that Alice understood that he was gay.
Someone had put on music—her CD booklet was open on the kitchen counter, next to the boom box. It didn’t matter that when she was alone, Alice listened to all different kinds of music: Green Day, Liz Phair, Oasis, Mary J. Blige, even Sheryl Crow if she came on the radio and no one was around to make fun. At parties, it was all Biggie and Method Man and the Fugees and A Tribe Called Quest. It wasn’t that all the white boys in private school were pretending to be Black, it was that they thought that being from New York City meant they had a claim to Black culture that other white boys didn’t have, even if they lived in a classic six overlooking Central Park. They were playing the Method Man/Mary J. Blige version of “You’re All I Need to Get By” and every single girl was singing along while the boys were just bobbing their heads and pretending not to notice anyone or anything. Phoebe pushed through the crowd and grabbed Sam and Alice by their wrists and pulled them both into the bathroom.
“Voilà!” she said, pulling three pills out of her pocket.
“What is that?” Alice said, though she knew the answer.
Sam looked nervous. “Phoebe said that her brother said that it’s like ecstasy, but it’s not made of chemicals, so it’s like, natural?”
It wasn’t natural. It was pure chemicals. It was a real drug, bought from a real drug dealer, and now it was in her bathroom, in the palm of her friend’s hand.