Fans of the Impossible Life (21 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Mira was waiting on the front porch for me when I got to her house. She had put her hair up in a mess of curls on the top of her head, and she had on her lucky one-dollar blue coat and cowboy boots.

“Hey,” I said. “You look nice.”

“Thanks,” she said.

I suddenly felt like I was picking her up for a date.

“So, Sebby and Rose are meeting us there, I guess,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It's this way.”

We started walking down the sidewalk in the direction of Molly's house.

“Should we take bets on whether Rose finally convinced Ali to come?” she said.

“I'm going to say no,” I said.

“You're such a pessimist, Jeremy,” she said. “Don't you believe in true love?”

“I believe that Rose comes on a little strong.”

“Maybe Ali secretly likes that,” Mira said. “Or else we need to find someone else for Rose to obsess over.”

“Not a lot of options for her at St. F,” I said.

“Poor Rose. The only lesbian in the village.”

We walked the rest of that block in silence. I had rehearsed what I wanted to say on my way over, but now it all sounded so stupid in my head.

“Did you want to talk to me about something?” Mira said finally.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yes.”

“About Sebby?”

I stopped and turned to her.

“Something's wrong,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“He's been staying at my house. He comes over after he's with Nick. And he's been . . . kind of messed up lately. And I guess the other morning Dave said something to him. I don't know what, but I think maybe Dave heard him throwing up.”

Mira shook her head.

“I don't know what to do,” I said.

“There's nothing we can do tonight,” she said. “We're not going to stage an intervention at Molly's party.”

“Maybe I'm making a big deal out of nothing,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You're not.”

We kept walking, finally reaching Molly's block, where it was immediately obvious which house was hers. She had made
sure to get the word out that one of her older brothers would be buying alcohol in bulk from Costco for the event, and people were now streaming in the front door.

Mira and I stood in the driveway for a minute before following them in. She looked at me.

“We'll figure it out,” she said. “Okay? We just have to keep him close to us.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Inside the front hall we found Molly wearing a tight black dress with an oval cutout between her boobs.

“Omigod, Mira!” She squealed and pulled Mira into a giant hug as if they hadn't seen each other in years. “I'm so glad you came.” She turned to some disinterested upper classmen lounging on the stairs behind her and declared, “Mira lives right down the street,” as if it were the most amazing thing imaginable.

“Looks like a pretty successful party so far,” Mira said.

“So fun.” Molly was teetering on her stilettos, so excited to be the most popular girl in school for one night that she was overdosing on joy. She was also about five shots ahead of everyone else.

“And you know Jeremy,” Mira said.

“Oh, yeah, hi!” Molly said, awkwardly hugging me.

“Hi, Molly,” I said.

“Drinks in the kitchen,” Molly instructed us and a few people who had come in behind us. “My brother went crazy at Costco.”

The island in the middle of the kitchen looked like it
belonged to an alcoholic giant. Oversized bottles of whatever Molly's brother could get ahold of were interspersed with gallon jugs of soda and juice. Tequila, vodka, Bailey's, gin—he had played his own version of supermarket sweep. If you can get out of the store before the cashier guesses that you're buying for a hundred underage drinkers, you get to keep it.

Mira turned to me.

“What'll you have?” she asked.

“Whatever,” I said.

“Bartender,” she said to an invisible person, “a Jeremy special.” She grabbed two plastic cups. “Coming right up,” she replied to herself.

The Jeremy special ended up being an elaborate mix of fruit juices and vodka, and wasn't half bad.

“I think you have a successful bartending career ahead of you,” I said, as we made our way into the living room.

“Later I'll make you the Sebby special,” she said. “It's used to remove paint from cars.”

Some of the girls had started an impromptu dance floor in the corner of the living room, sending flirty looks at a group of boys from the football team. Sarah was holding court on the couch, watching over them.

“Let's say hi to Sarah,” Mira said to me.

“Really?” I said.

“If we're going to do this party right we have to mingle with cheerleaders,” Mira said. “I believe I saw it in a John Hughes movie.”

She went and sat down next to Sarah on the couch. I followed reluctantly.

“Hey, Sarah,” Mira said. “How's it going?”

Sarah was perched at the edge of the couch, her legs crossed under a silver miniskirt.

“Fine,” she said.

“Hi, Sarah,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“No dancing for you?” Mira asked. Anna was enthusiastically attempting to make a duet with a lamp look sexy.

“Molly has the absolute worst taste in music,” Sarah said. She was holding a real wine glass, not a red plastic cup from the stack in the kitchen.

“Where did you get that?” Mira asked.

“Molly's dad always leaves the liquor cabinet open,” she said. “I think he does it on purpose. Maybe he thinks it'll chill her out or something if she drinks. Fat chance.” She took a sip.

“You don't seem like you're having fun,” Mira said.

“Oh, no. Loads of fun.” Sarah plastered on a smile and raised her glass in the direction of the football players, who were now watching her instead of Anna.

Mira's phone beeped. She took it out of her pocket and checked it.

“They're running late,” she said to me. “Should we just go?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“If you leave now you'll miss everything,” Sarah said. “This party's just getting started.”

Mira raised an eyebrow at me.

“How can we say no to that?” she said.

We distracted ourselves by making another drink in the kitchen, this one involved some elaborate parsley garnish that Mira found in the fridge.

“Let's call it . . .” She thought for a minute. “The Peter.”

“Isn't that kind of dirty?” I said.

“It is dirty, I put olive juice in it.”

I laughed.

“Isn't that weird?” she said. “To have your name be Peter. Like, ‘Hi I'm Peter, meet my peter.'”

Drink number one had gone down a little too easily, and tipsiness was setting in quickly. We were finding ourselves to be much more amusing than anyone else would.

“I do not want to meet Peter's peter,” I said.

“No?” Mira smiled. “You and Peter never had ‘special time' at his place?”

“No. Come on.”

“Listen, Peter's cute,” she said. “No one would blame you.”

“You think he's cute?” I said, sipping my second drink.

“Of course I do. That's, like, a fact. There's no debate about that. I mean, I don't think he's cute the way that Talia thinks he's cute, because that would be psycho, but yeah, he's a cutie.”

Suddenly she froze and looked behind me. I turned and saw Talia standing there, just having emerged from the hallway. Her face was completely white.

“Oh, hi, Talia,” I said awkwardly.

She pushed past us, past the other people in the kitchen, and ran out the front door.

Mira looked at me.

“Shit,” she said. “She heard all of that, didn't she?”

“It seems like it.”

“Oh, shit. What should I do?”

“I don't know.”

“I mean, she knows everyone knows that she loves Peter. It's not like it's a big secret.”

“I guess.”

Mira put her drink down. “Okay, well, I'll just apologize when I see her at school. Oh man, I'm such an idiot. But who expected that girl to come to a party like this?”

“Well, no one would expect to see us at a party like this,” I said, “so I guess anything's possible.”

We downed our second drinks quickly in an attempt to forget the stricken look on Talia's face, and started working on our third concoction when the front door opened, and in walked Sebby, Rose, and Ali.

Mira hit me in the arm.

“Ali!” she whispered.

“No way,” I said.

The three of them were being attacked by Molly, who was squealing in delight when Nick walked in the door behind them.

“Oh no,” Mira said. “Nick.”

Sebby managed to extricate himself from Molly's enthusiasm and led the girls into the kitchen. Nick went off into the
other room.

“Hi, pretty ladies,” Sebby said. He gave us each a kiss on the cheek.

Rose and Ali came in behind him. Rose immediately grabbed two cups and poured giant helpings of vodka.

“Ali, you know Mira,” Sebby said.

“Yeah, I see you guys at the diner, like, three times a week,” Ali said.

Sebby, ignoring her, turned to me.

“And this is my boyfriend, Jeremy.”

“Boyfriend?” Rose looked up from her cup.

Sebby put his arm around me.

“You don't mind if I call you that, do you, my darling?”

He was already drunk. I could tell. But I was on my way there. I could at least match him on this night, not be the sober caretaker to his recklessness.

“I like it,” I said.

He kissed me. A long kiss. A few other kids in the room made goofy whooping noises. I didn't care. He was kissing me in front of people. He had called me his boyfriend. He released me and I took a long drink from my cup. I needed this feeling to last.

After that we found ourselves on the floor in the corner of the living room for a while. The music was too loud to hear anything and no one seemed to be saying anything anyway. Just a lot of shouting and Rose trying to get Ali to dance with her, and me and Sebby and Mira piled together in the corner. Next
to us some boys had cracked a window open in an attempt to send the smoke from a joint outside, instead of twirling up to the smoke alarm.

The more we drank, the farther Sebby's hand crept down my back, until it rested in the waistband of my jeans, inside the top of the elastic of my underwear. My boyfriend. My boyfriend touching me.

Nick appeared again after a while, came over, and whispered something in Sebby's ear.

“I'll be back,” Sebby said, disentangling himself from us.

Mira gave me a look as the two of them made their way across the room.

Whatever went wrong between Rose and Ali happened quickly, because neither of us saw it. All of a sudden there was yelling and Ali was out the front door and Rose was running after her. We saw them on the lawn out the window. Rose was saying something to Ali and Ali was crying. Then Ali yelled something and went off down the driveway.

“Uh-oh,” Mira said. She got up and I followed.

I had become undeniably drunk while sitting down, and I was now forced to struggle with the more strenuous activity of getting across the room. We pushed our way through the dance floor, past Molly falling on one of the boys who had been passing the joint before. Somewhere in the back of my mind I tried dully to calculate what time it was, and wondered if it was an amateur move for us all to be this wasted before midnight.

Outside Rose was blowing puffs of smoke from a cigarette
at the place where Ali had been standing. We went to her. Mira hugged her.

“You need your coat,” she said.

Rose was shaking.

“What happened?” I said.

“I told her I'm not going to be her puppy dog just following her around anymore,” Rose said. “She acts all sweet and then is like, ‘don't hold my hand,' or whatever, and I'm sick of it.”

“What did she say?” Mira said.

“She just left,” Rose said.

She threw her cigarette on the ground.

“I'm going after her,” she said.

“No, Rose,” I said.

Rose started down the driveway.

“Rose, your coat!” Mira called, but she was already in her car, turning on the engine.

“Well, that can only end well,” Mira said.

“Should we try to stop her?” I asked.

“I don't think we can.”

We watched Rose drive off down the street.

“Let's go in,” Mira said, “I'm freezing.”

In the kitchen most of the jugs of alcohol had been emptied. Only the gin and the Bailey's remained.

“Where the hell is Sebby?” Mira asked, getting us two fresh cups.

“With Nick,” I said. “Always with Nick. Awesome Nick.”

“Nick is not awesome. Nick is bad.”

“Yeah?” I was laughing without knowing what was funny. Everything was funny now. Or else everything was horribly sad. I couldn't remember which.

“He is a bad news bear. Here.” She handed me a gin-and-Bailey's cocktail. “What should we call this one?”

“Disgusting,” I said. “We're going to call that disgusting.”

“Don't be afraid to try new things, Jeremy,” she said.

“I am afraid,” I said.

“I'll protect you,” she said, smiling. “Cheers.” We toasted our plastic cups.

I took a sip.

“Yes, it's disgusting,” I said, nearly choking.

“I can't even taste anything anymore,” Mira said. “When did we get this drunk?”

“I think it happened pretty recently,” I said.

She laughed and leaned her head into my shoulder, we were laughing and holding each other, my arm now around her waist. It felt so nice to have her lean on me, to know how comfortable we were with each other, how well she knew me. Nothing else at this stupid party mattered because Mira was here, and Mira wouldn't leave me. And then suddenly we were kissing, the haze of the alcohol having it all make some kind of sense. Here was her body, my body, our mouths.