Chapter 1 #5
Luke stiffens beside me, even though his smile doesn’t fall. “Guys, come on,” he protests.
“He was a bit of a celebrity,” I say slowly. “But I think people loved him mostly because of his . . .”
“His what?” the guy asks.
Luke is watching me too, as if by finishing this sentence, I’ll be answering more than one question.
“His natural charm,” I say. “Just the way he is.”
Luke’s eyes widen in surprise, then soften on me.
But his friend snorts. “Yeah, that part, maybe, but are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the six-pack or his trophy cabinet?”
“I told you I don’t have a trophy cabinet,” Luke says, elbowing him.
“I notice you’re not denying the six-pack allegations,” his friend goes on.
“You know what they say,” another guy chimes in. “Luke Blythe . . .” He pauses dramatically, and the others join in as if they’ve been rehearsing this:
“Luke Blythe always wins.”
I remember the chant; a few cheerleaders started it in high school, and it quickly caught on. Everyone would stand up and scream it from the bleachers as he flew across the finish line, winning one race after another.
“Stop it, you guys,” Luke says in a friendly manner, yet I notice the tightness in his jaw. “Be polite and introduce yourselves, why don’t you?”
The three guys go around telling me their names; despite my best efforts, I forget them almost instantly, except the last one, Adam, because that’s the name of our CFO. He’s brought his girlfriend, Caroline, who’s tall and tanned and gorgeous in a way I thought was only possible on social media.
“You are so pretty,” she gushes to me, but I can’t tell if she’s saying this as a genuine compliment or the way cashiers automatically say “How’s your day?” to everyone they see.
Before I can think of a good response, we’re ushered inside, and I find myself shuffling up the line with the same kind of confused panic I experience in the security line at airports, trying not to hold people up or drop things from my purse.
Then we’re in, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, except in movies.
The music thudding like a second heartbeat, people everywhere, pressed elbow to elbow, bright-colored drinks passed between hands or left half-finished on black tabletops.
We pass a guy slumped over on his girlfriend’s shoulder, his eyes half closed, even as his body continues swaying to the beat.
“He’s fucked-up,” someone yells to her, laughing.
“Yeah, I know, he always gets like this after the fifth drink,” she says with an exasperated little shake of her head, but her tone is almost smug.
Proof that she has done this countless times with him before, that she knows him better than anyone else.
That even if he is a mess right now, he’s her mess to deal with.
It reminds me of when someone would cry in grade school, and their best friend would step up as a kind of temporary spokesperson while everyone crowded around asking what happened and why they were crying.
I wonder what it’s like to be that close to someone, to navigate this kind of setting with so much confidence and ease.
“I’m going to grab us some drinks,” Luke says, and hands me a menu. “What do you usually like?”
I have no idea. I point at the first thing I recognize by name, a Bloody Mary, even though I’ve never tried it before.
Luke’s lips twitch. “You don’t drink much, do you?”
I feel myself going hot. Is it that obvious?
When I made the mistake of confessing to a colleague that I hadn’t dated or partied or even really tasted alcohol in college, she gaped at me.
“Now how the hell did you go through all of college without doing any of that?” she asked in a tone of wonder, as if it were some great feat.
But actually, it wasn’t very difficult.
I hated being alone, yet I was desperate to be alone.
There was this resistance in me I couldn’t make sense of back then, still can’t fully make sense of now.
During group discussions, I was almost stubbornly quiet; when I saw people from my class lingering outside the bookstore café, I would lower my head and walk past them; if they brought up a party happening that Friday, I automatically withdrew, assuming I wasn’t invited.
Maybe I thought it hurt less if my aloneness felt like a choice.
Sometimes I could go an entire day without talking to another person.
The only time my presence was noted was when the professors were taking attendance at the start of class, and even then, I said “Here” as quietly as possible.
Like this, I’d effortlessly achieved near-perfect anonymity.
By the time I walked home, I felt like only half a person, like there was a translucent but hard layer separating me from everyone else.
But my biggest fear wasn’t of remaining unseen, undetected; it was of being noticed. I was terrified of someone spotting me in the crowd and recognizing instantly that I was this freak of nature, cast out from the social world, the world of normal people and normal things.
And now I’ve been noticed, by the last person who’d understand how it feels to not fit in.
“Okay, how about this,” Luke says. He’s laughing a little, yet strangely, he doesn’t seem to be laughing at me. “I’ll pick a drink for you, and if you don’t like it, I’ll finish the rest. Deal?”
“Deal,” I say weakly.
As soon as he leaves, the panic sets in. There’s a couple making out right behind me, and some girl’s purse keeps whacking me in the ribs, and the crimson lights are flashing too fast. It’s too overwhelming. Desperate, I escape into the bathroom to breathe.
It’s complete chaos inside there as well.
A girl is crouching down underneath the hand dryer, stretching out the front of her shirt, which is visibly soaked.
“Some asshole spilled his drink on me,” she explains to nobody in particular.
Someone else is FaceTiming a guy while she touches up her makeup; she redraws her eyeliner with a steady hand and says in a toneless voice, “Well, you never picked a place or confirmed the time, so, like, I don’t know what you were expecting.
I’ve already told you . . .” More girls wait around the sinks, editing photos, texting their friends, checking their hair in the mirror.
A slim blond girl in a white lace dress turns around to face me. “Would you like some?” she asks in a dreamy voice.
I frown, confused. “What?”
She inches closer and gestures to her pocket. I can’t see exactly what’s inside, but I doubt she’s offering me plain gum.
“Oh! No, thank you,” I say politely.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, very,” I say, taking this as my cue to slip out.
The music seems to have grown louder, and I have to shove through the crowd to find my way back to Luke.
When he catches sight of me, his face breaks into a relieved smile.
“Where did you go?” he calls over to me. “I was looking for you.”
It is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me. But then, everything feels romantic with him. Even the lightest touch of his hand on my arm, guiding me toward the group on the dance floor. He hands me a pink cocktail and waits for my reaction.
I take a slow sip. It tastes like lychee, like summer. “It’s not bad,” I tell him, surprised.
He grins. “Only ‘not bad’?”
“Not as sweet as soda.”
“Okay, noted. I’ll get you a sweeter drink next time,” he promises.
I can’t believe there’s going to be a next time.
The song switches to something even more upbeat, and he moves his body effortlessly to the music, like he’s not even trying to dance, this is just his natural state. There’s no stiffness, no self-consciousness.
He notices me watching and takes my hand, helps me set the drink back down. “Come here,” he says. “Join me.”
“I don’t really know how to dance,” I say.
He flashes his dimples at me. “Yeah you do, everyone does, you just have to relax.”
“I don’t know how to do that either.”
“Why not? There’s nothing to be scared of.”
It seems so obvious in this moment, why I have loved him this entire time. It isn’t just who he is; it’s what he represents. A kind of goodness, a wholesomeness. A light that I lack. He’s someone who understands how to live his life, how to be happy, how to seize the present before it’s too late.
So I let myself dance with him. I know I’m dancing badly, but maybe being bad at something isn’t as big of a deal as I thought. Maybe it’s worse to not do it at all, to never even try, for fear of looking stupid.
“What happened to it?” he asks. He’s leaning in very close to be heard over the music, his head bowed toward me, and I can sense his words from how he’s looking at me more than I can actually hear them.
“To what?” I ask.
“That crush you had on me in high school,” he says. He’s grinning like he’s kidding, but his eyes are intent on me.
The alcohol is warm in my blood, softening the world up, yet I experience a flash of perfect clarity as I grin back up at him. “Who said anything happened to it?”
He seems to go still. Then he shakes his head, laughing. “Is that a line? It’s pretty good.”
“What, you think I just tell guys stuff like that all the time?”
“Maybe,” he says.
“Would it make you feel better if it was only a line?”
He shakes his head harder. “No. No, the opposite. I want you to mean it.”
“I do mean it,” I say.
“Okay, really? That’s good,” he says.
“It’s good?” I repeat.
“It’s great,” he says, and by now we’re both laughing, and everything is going so well that I almost want to stop time just to savor it, like when you come across a line in a book that’s so moving you go back to read it again and again.
I can’t keep track of how much time has passed; it feels like the night is frozen in this club, like it’ll never, ever end. But at one point Adam comes up to us and says, “All right, we’re going to Benny’s.”
He’s met with reiterations of this same sentiment from the others:
“Hell yeah, we’re going to Benny’s.”
“I’m so ready for Benny’s.”
“You ever been to Benny’s before, Allison?” Luke asks, turning to me.