“We don’t have to do it,” Sam said. “I don’t think we should do it.” She’d said this the first time, too. Sam was smarter than Alice—she always had been.
Alice thought about what she actually remembered from the night, which parts had calcified over time into fact: how big it had felt when Tommy turned his face away from hers and toward Lizzie’s, how she had watched them vanish into her bedroom, Alice’s hope for true love going up in flames, and on her birthday, no less. After that, Alice had been engulfed by rage, like a mobster’s wife in an eighties movie. If she’d had clothing to dump out the window and set on fire, she would have. If Tommy didn’t want her, someone else might. Alice had wanted to kiss someone, anyone, and so she’d gone up to one boy after another and kissed them, each mouth less appealing than the one before it, just wet and jabby and gross. It didn’t matter, Alice kept going. She was going to die a virgin and Tommy had never belonged to her. Outside the bathroom, Kenji, the only sober person at the party, had said to her, “You don’t have to do that, you know,” and that was when Sam started to throw up and needed her help. Eventually everyone else left and it was just them and Helen and Jessica, all four of them asleep in Alice’s room until noon the next day, by which time everyone who was not at the party had heard about Alice’s orgy and Tommy and Lizzie’s romance and from then on, it was Alice’s thing, kissing and kissing and kissing and staying just shy of being called a slut because she didn’t actually have sex with anyone, but she definitely wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, either.
She hadn’t understood it at the time—the difference between her and Sam, the difference between her and Lizzie, the difference between wanting someone to fall in love with her and wanting anyone to fall in love with her. Sam had never had time for the Belvedere boys—they didn’t deserve her, it was obvious, and that was that. She could wait. Lizzie, and all the girls like her, understood that everyone was equally terrified all the time, and that all high school power required was confidence.
“I don’t need it,” Alice said. “I would like to, very much, but not tonight.” Making out with lots of people actually sounded wonderful, but making out with a passel of teenage boys sounded disgusting, like being attacked by very large frogs. They—teenagers, the ones all around her—didn’t look young to her, though, the way the Belvedere students did to her as an adult. They looked beautiful and sophisticated and fully grown, the way they always had. Alice realized that she wasn’t seeing them as a forty-year-old—she was seeing them as she had, or rather, as she was. Part of her brain was forty, but another part of it was sixteen. Alice was fully in herself and of herself. The hindsight was there （foresight?）， but Alice didn’t feel like a creep, or a narc.
“Okay,” Phoebe said. “Sarah and Sara said they’d do it, if you didn’t want to.” She slipped back out, and once she was gone, Alice leaned against the door, the hanging towels behind her back.
“I’m going to do something wild. I probably shouldn’t, but I’m going to, okay?” Alice shut her eyes tight and scrunched up her face, as if that would keep Sam’s good sense from intervening with her plan.
“Like what?” Sam crossed her arms.
“God, you are already a better forty-year-old than I am. Remember that part in Peggy Sue Got Married when Peggy Sue goes for a motorcycle ride with the poet and they have sex on a picnic blanket and then he dedicates his book to her, which is the only thing that happens in the whole movie that implies that the rest of the movie actually happened and wasn’t just a dream?” Alice was talking fast, but she knew Sam knew what she was talking about.
“Uh-huh,” Sam said.
“I’m going to go have sex with Tommy, if he wants to, and I think it’ll change my life. Not the actual sex, which I am almost positive will be terrible, but I think that if I actually take ownership of my feelings, and act on them, instead of being afraid all the time, I think that will change my life.” Alice opened one eye.
“Okay, here are my thoughts. Number one, he’s eighteen, and so even if it’s kind of weird, it’s also not a crime,” Sam said. “But number two, technically, you are sixteen. I don’t know what the rules are for people who are trapped inside their own bodies at an earlier point in their life, but I do think it’s okay. If he thinks it’s okay. And you do. And you use protection.”