The Awesome (4 page)

“Oh, thanks.”

“That Hermione girl wore it like that too. What’s her... Emma something. You know, from
Potter
? I couldn’t do it, but you’ve got the face for it.”

I had no idea what she meant, but I nodded emphatically regardless, following her through the front door and into a den of decadence. There had to be forty kids here, some milling around the living room talking, others standing sentry by the keg in the kitchen. Music blared, hip-hop stuff I couldn’t name because my mother wouldn’t listen to anything recorded past 1990, and the lights were kept dim if not on purpose, then by shirts and coats strewn haphazardly over table lamps. Red and blue plastic cups seemed to be the token party favor. I could tell by the smell no one was getting down with their bad, ginger-aled selves tonight. It reeked like a brewery already, and it wasn’t nine yet.

“Bathroom’s over there,” she pointed, and I pushed through a sea of bodies to take care of the pee problem. A thorough examination of my reflection in the medicine cabinet later, I walked back out, looking for Julie’s shiny blond head. She was in the kitchen, hugging some tall skinny guy with spiky black hair. I hoped she’d be decent enough to introduce me. I knew no one, and though I wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, I wasn’t so ballsy as to say a foot-in wouldn’t be appreciated.

“Oh hey. Maggie, over here. This is my cousin Ian.”

I craned my head back and smiled. Ian was tall, like 6’4” tall, and though I was 5’7”, he made me feel dumpy, like I stood in a hole.

“’Sup,” Ian said. I expected something more beyond a three letter greeting, but apparently that was all I would get. He was too busy guzzling beer and looking down my shirt to muster anything else.

Stare away, dude, and while we’re at it, let me introduce the girls. Perky left and slightly perkier right, which makes me self-conscious when I’m naked. Not that I’d tell you that or anything.

“’Sup,” I said back.

It was weird the times my mother’s advice reared its ugly head. There I was, standing in the kitchen surrounded by my fellow teenage man, and Mom’s voice piped into my brain, like she’d pressed play on a recording. “The best way to bag a monster is to fit into your surroundings. Look like you belong there, imitate what you see. If you’re in a public venue, don’t be conspicuous. Keep your head down and your ears cracked. For that matter, listen more than talk, and never, ever let your guard down.”

Okay, so if it worked for hunting monsters, it could work for hunting guys. Right?

“Cool party,” I blurted out before I could remind myself about the whole ‘listening more than talking’ thing.

“Thanks. You want a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Jules?”

“’Course.”

A plastic cup found its way into my hand, and I stared at the foamy contents with something akin to dread. When I was fifteen, I made the mistake of asking Mom if I could have a sip of her Heineken. She responded by putting the twelve pack on the kitchen table and telling me to go to town, that beer drinking was a rite of passage, and she was happy to be my copilot. Thinking I was Queen Crap of Turd Mountain, I drank one, and then two, and before I knew better, eight. I didn’t like the taste but because drinking made me feel older and awesomer by its very nature, I sucked ’em down like a stoner on a taco-binge.

I remember nothing about being drunk—I must have blacked out around the fifth beer—but when I woke up the next day, I proceeded to paint the walls of my bedroom with vomit. The puking was bad enough, but Mom’s subsequent insistence that I clean up my mess
right then
combined with Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” played so loudly it shook the walls meant that I swore off alcohol forever.

This beer, though the first ever served to me at my first ever party, didn’t interest me in the slightest.

In an attempt to blend in, I took a tiny sip, stopping myself from making a blech face. Blech face rivaled Duck Face in ugly, and I aimed for sex siren, not a
Cosmo
top ten list of Things Not To Do To Impress A Guy.

I was about to attempt lamer small talk with Ian again, hoping to engage him in a battle of wits that would dazzle Plato himself, but a kid with a shaved head came into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer, essentially cock-blocking me.

Or would that be vag-blocking me?

“Hey. Melissa coming?”

Ian finished off his beer and poured another. “We broke up last week.”

“Shit, man. Sorry to hear it.”

“It’s cool.”

It made me a bad person, but I could have done cartwheels right about then. Ian was not only single, he was rebounding, which boded well for random, bumbling hookups with career-minded young women such as myself. Hopefully he didn’t think I was gross. I wasn’t ugly or anything, but I knew I was rounder than I should be, and in comparison to the normal standards of beauty—a la Julie who had everything going for her ever, the douchebag—I seemed plain with my brown eyes and brown hair. Ian was a good-looking guy, and though I’d known him for all of five minutes, I’d pinned my hopes on him being The One, but that hinged on him deciding I wasn’t a swamp beast from Hell.

The good news for me? He alternated between drinks and blatant peeks down my shirt. Shaved head guy kept talking to him, and Ian would shrug or nod answers here and there, but he focused on me pretty hardcore. Julie noticed it, too. She caught my eye, grinned, and gave me a wink that would have done my mother proud.

That should have been my first sign that I was screwed, and not in the way I’d planned.

CHAPTER FOUR

B
Y ELEVEN O’CLOCK
, Ian walked me around the house with his arm slung over my shoulders. I discovered something important that night: the ratio of alcohol consumed would, over time, equate to willingness to engage other human beings in conversation. His answers went from one and two words to four and five words, eventually evolving into full sentences and dialogue. The strange part was none of it was directed
at me
, but he lugged me around with him anyway, every once in a while pulling me into his conversations with a well-timed “Right?” or a “Hey, meet Maggie. She’s pretty cool.” He had no idea if I was cool or not because he hadn’t actually talked to me, but whatever, I wasn’t picky. This wasn’t Romeo and Juliet. It was ‘drunken shenanigans and you won’t respect me in the morning.’ I hadn’t set my expectations very high.

Over the next hour, he drank some more, and then more after that, socking beer away like it was the nectar of life. When he high-fived random dudes—basketball teammates, Julie said when she swept by to check on me—I knew we’d gone from ‘a little buzzed’ to full on drunk. This assertion proved itself when he ran over to some guy whose name started with L and dry humped him from behind while making woo woo noises.

Yeah, I knew how to pick ’em.

Apparently making L-guy his bitch put him in a mood. When he came back my way, he bent down to whisper into my ear that I was pretty. It seemed so random; one minute he butt slapped some dude, the next he told me I was pretty. A glib part of me wanted to point out exactly what a leap that was, but that wouldn’t win me any points, and as Imaginary Head Janice said, “Listen more, talk less.” So I shut my mouth and smiled, which he must have taken as encouragement because he took my hand and pulled me towards the stairs. He weaved around his guests, nodding at some, “’sup”ing others, and pausing only once to take a shot of whiskey with the team captain.

The next thing you know, we climbed towards the great unknown. It was weird; the whole night I’d hoped for this, planned on it, really, but now that I went somewhere alone with him, I felt nauseated. It wasn’t a shame thing so much as a worry that he’d find me lacking, and oh God, what would he think if he took off my shirt and saw two black bras instead of one? I should have realized taking fashion tips from Snooki would result in disaster.

She’s Snooki, for Christ’s sake.

I cast a frantic glance behind me to look for Julie and saw her sitting in some guy’s lap in the corner, talking to six people at once. They laughed and smiled and drank, acting like kids ought to act, and for a moment I wished I was over there next to her, hanging out and being normal. The fact was, though, I wasn’t normal. I was a hunter, I was the daughter of a hunter, and that meant I was atypical in every way, shape, and form.

Oh God, form. Get the second bra off, stupid.

Ian led me to a room, his room if I had to guess by the Celtics poster on the door. I stopped short, looking down the hall at a second bathroom. A celestial choir ought to have descended from the heavens to sing Hallelujah then, because I’d been handed an opportunity to de-bra myself before I looked like a total jerkoff in front of this new guy.

“Hey, give me two seconds? Need to hit the bathroom.”

He nodded and smiled, cracking the door and backing inside. “I’ll be here.”

“You better be.”

It was supposed to be flirty and funny, but it came out threatening, like I’d punch him in the sack if he changed his mind. Good thing the booze dulled his senses too much to notice, though for all I knew he was stupid and hadn’t picked up on it. I hoped that wasn’t the case. I’d like to have something good to say about the guy that de-virginized me other than, “well, his hair spikes were equidistantly spaced and he had a decent smile.”

I wriggled out of the second bra and checked my makeup, sweeping the back of my hand across my forehead to rid myself of the sweat. I was more nervous than I wanted to admit, but I wasn’t backing out now. Hell, at that point I didn’t know if this was going anywhere. He could want to talk or make out or show me his stamp collection. No sense in assuming this was it, though I secretly prayed it was. I wanted to get it over with. Don’t get me wrong, I liked hanging out with Julie, and it had been an interesting night if not exactly fun, but I didn’t want to have to keep doing this to score myself a promotion. That felt like I used Julie for her network of normal people, which was shady. Plus? She looked kinda happy talking to everyone downstairs. It’d be nice to think the next time we did this, if there was a next time, I could sit on the couch and participate in the hang out instead of gluing myself to some random guy’s side.

“Totally fine. I got this,” I mumbled, doing a cursory pit sniff to make sure I didn’t stink. I spotted a can of Lysol, and I toyed with the idea of giving myself spritzes underneath my arms, but Ian probably wasn’t so drunk he wouldn’t notice that I smelled like antibacterial bathroom spray.

I stood up straight and breathed hard, steeling myself for whatever awaited me in the other room.

I could do this. I was
strong
. I was
awesome
.

I was scared to death.

I
T OCCURRED TO
me halfway between the bathroom and Ian’s room that I had problems beyond the nerves thing, namely logistics. For one I’d never kissed anyone before. The movies made it look pretty easy; there were a lot of lingering gazes and glimpses of tongue, and I supposed the rule of mimicry applied here. If he did it first, it was okay for me to do it back, and if he didn’t like it, he had no one to blame but his own dumb ass.

The second concern was endowment. Under the premise that I was quasi-small in the bits thanks to my inexperience, was I in for ultimate pain? Not only was Ian tall, but he had huge feet, and there was some stupid thing about junk size correlating to foot size. I’d liked to have dismissed it as an old wives’ tale, but the last time I’d dismissed something that sounded ridiculous, I got rabid leprechaun video thrust in my face.

I put my hand on Ian’s door and pushed it open, getting my first good look at his room. Besides basketball posters, he had a bunch of velvet paintings, the kind with neon paints so they’d glow under a black light. Some were skulls with snakes, others were funky, psychedelic patterns. I wasn’t sure why, but I was disappointed he hadn’t turned on a black light. I wanted to see everything purple and bright. I looked around, and sure enough I spotted the long cylinder bulb above a wall mirror covered in baseball cards. I walked over and snapped it on, hoping he wouldn’t yell at me for touching his stuff without invitation.

He didn’t. Instead he killed the lamp at his bedside and sat down on his mattress, smiling at me. Though his teeth glowed eerie white, it was better like this, less scary in the dark. Maybe he wouldn’t see that I was about to crap pickles all over his floor.

“Everything’s awesomer with black light.”

He slurred the sentence so badly I flinched. That didn’t stop me from approaching him, standing a foot and a half away from his bed. He extended a long arm to wrap his fingers around mine, pulling me between his splayed knees.

“You’re cool, Meggie.”

“... Maggie.”

“S’what I said.”

I wouldn’t argue with a drunk dude mainly because, well, he was drunk, but also because he pulled me in close. The nausea from the stairs returned tenfold. It wasn’t that he wasn’t cute, or that he smelled like he’d bathed in a vat of beer, though that wasn’t the most attractive thing in the world. It was that this thing that was happening, whatever it was, might be standard fare for him, but it was foreign to me. I had no idea what I was doing. Sure, I was good at a lot of stuff. How many girls my age could kill a dude with her bare hands in under fourteen seconds? That’s a skill, and one that’d get me places in life, but it didn’t help me here. All the combat training in the world couldn’t make being a normal teenager any easier.