Chapter 7 #3
Lucy makes a small sound that is somewhere between a laugh and an oh no, and Gianna walks past her brother and shoves his head with the flat of her hand.
“Disgusting.”
“Hi to you too,” Benson says, not fazed for one second.
“You look so hot, baby,” Benson mutters.
Gianna says, “Get up, Benson.”
Mila and I look at each other, wondering what’s going on.
Then Benson falls to the ground, puts his legs and arms straight and rests his forehead on the concrete.
Lucy chuckles, “Get up.”
One of the guys chuckles, smacking Benson on his ass. Benson plays it off, finally standing. He grabs Lucy and kisses her.
Mara inhales. “Okay.”
Gianna from the porch rolls her eyes. “I can’t watch this anymore.”
“Gianna,” Lucy says, taking Benson’s outstretched hand and stepping up beside him, “be nice.”
“He’s my brother.”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
Benson tugs Lucy into him. He kisses the top of her head because he is that much taller than her.
“Sticking up for me, baby?” he murmurs into her hair, and I get where Gianna is coming from — they are sickening in a way that is also somehow heart-stoppingly sweet. He leans down and kisses her.
Mara wolf-whistles.
Gianna gags.
Then Benson looks up.
“Happy Halloween, girls.” He looks at each of us in turn. “Mara, Penelope, Mila, and —” He looks at me. “Melly.”
It’s the pause that does it for me. He’s staring straight into my eyes, and it makes me feel uneasy.
I hold my breath and look up at the other mask.
I can’t see his eyes through the slits.
But I know.
I know which one is Blue. I would know his body in a room of a thousand bodies. I would know his shoulders, the way he stands. This is a fact about myself that I’m not going to be able to talk myself out of in this lifetime.
He doesn’t move or say hello.
He stands beside Benson on the porch with a bowl of candy in his hands and the mask on, and I can’t tell if he’s looking at me or not. Probably not.
I smile at Benson.
Benson plays it off. “Come in. There’s lots of food.” He glances down at the platter in my hands and then at Mila’s Tupperware. “You brought snacks. Nice. Put them on the counter. Stanley or Percy’s in there somewhere.”
A pile of kids walks up behind us. “Trick-or-treat!”
We rush into the house.
The house has been transformed. Pumpkin lights overhead in long string loops along the ceiling.
Cobwebs in the corners. A black tablecloth on the dining room table covered in food platters.
A veggie tray on the counter shaped like a pumpkin, the carrots and orange peppers arranged in rings around a bowl of hummus, which I stop and stare at for a second because somebody at this party can prep a pretty damn good vegetable tray.
There’s a punch bowl with orange liquid.
There’s a second punch bowl with darker orange liquid and a hand-written index card next to it that says punch (boring) in neat block letters.
The room smells like cinnamon and pumpkin and the faint warm thread of whatever is keeping in the oven, and underneath all of it the deeper note of a college house full of bodies and beer and somebody’s perfume.
Spooky Halloween music is playing on a Bluetooth speaker somewhere.
Everyone in here is dressed up.
A girl I don’t know is a Squid Game guard.
There’s a guy in a banana suit. There’s a group of three guys in matching Risky Business outfits — white button-downs, black sunglasses, no pants.
There are at least three sexy cats. There’s one fully committed inflatable T-Rex who’s been struggling at the kitchen doorway for two minutes now and has acquired a small audience that’s rooting for him.
The room turns when we walk in.
I feel it more than I see it. The way conversations dip half a volume when six girls walk through a doorway in matching costumes. The way heads cycle in a slow appraisal that I, three weeks ago, would have hated. I kind of hate it now, but I pretend not to notice.
Mara is eating it.
Stanley appears out of the kitchen with a Solo cup in his hand and his devil mask shoved up on top of his head like a pair of pushed-up sunglasses.
“Girls.”
“Stanley,” Gianna calls back.
“Girls!” He opens his arms wide and almost spills his drink. Gianna walks right up to him and pulls the mask off his head.
She looks at the mask.
She looks at Stanley.
She looks at Benson, who has just come in behind us. She looks at the mask Blue is still wearing in the doorway.
“I can’t believe you’re all matching.”
“On theme,” Stanley says, smug, “with the girls.”
Lucy says, “You’re devils?”
Stanley and Benson, at the same time, say, “Yes.”
Across the living room, in the doorway to the kitchen, Rowan is leaning against the frame with his own devil mask shoved up on top of his head. He shrugs at Gianna. She almost smiles.
Stanley throws his head back and groans dramatically.
Lucy says, “Did you plan this?”
Benson says, “I had to match my baby.”
Gianna scoffs and turns away from him. She looks at me, Mila, and Penelope.
“Will you girls be my wing ladies tonight?”
The three of us nod.
I look around the room. Mara is already gone. She’s already three feet deep into a conversation with two boys I don’t know, gesturing at her wings, throwing her head back at something one of them just said.
Lucy looks at Benson. “Can I hand out candy with you?”
He looks at her like she has just suggested they fly to Paris together. “You sure?”
She nods.
“Okay.”
They both go back out the front door, hand in hand. Benson puts his mask back on as he steps onto the porch. Lucy, costume and all, sits down on the porch swing with the candy bowl in her lap and waves to a kid in a witch hat coming up the walk.
We have lost two angels in under five minutes.
Gianna, Mila, Penelope, and I relocate to the kitchen island.
Mila gives us each another Jell-O shot — black this time, the strongest one she made. Rowan and Percy appear at the island with us and take one.
Penelope coughs again.
I start picking food off the dining table.
“Do not let me puke tonight,” I say to Mila.
“Same,” she says back, eating one of my pretzels. “These are good, by the way. You committed to the eyes.”
“I committed to the eyes.”
“It shows.”
A song changes from something spooky to something upbeat.
Mara comes back out of nowhere and grabs us by the wrists, both hands, two of us at a time, and drags us into the living room.
The press of bodies in the living room has thickened. Lucy is back from the porch. She’s dancing with a girl dressed as a deer, the two of them laughing into each other’s shoulders. Benson is in the doorway arguing with Stanley about something I can’t hear. There are people everywhere.
We dance.
Mara hands each of us a red Solo cup that she has filled from the fun punch bowl.
Mila keeps coming back with Jell-O shots, feeding me like a mama bird.
I laugh so hard at Mila trying to moonwalk in nylons that I have to sit down on the arm of the couch and catch my breath.
Mara and Mila scream the lyrics of the next song at each other across two feet of space.
Penelope, against every instinct I would have had about her two weeks ago, is dancing — actually dancing, not just shifting her weight politely — and her hair has come a little loose from the knot at the back of her head, and she is beautiful.
She doesn’t know it, and I have one of those moments — the kind I am realizing I am going to keep having — where I look at the people in my life and feel almost dizzy with the gift of them.
Gianna re-clips my left wing without me asking.
A new song comes on.
Mila throws her head back and screams along to it, having the time of her life.
It is just us girls in the middle of the floor. The rest of the crowd is in clumps around the walls, talking, drinking, laughing.
I’m sweating through the bodysuit. I wonder if I should take a two-minute break to go outside and cool down. I glance around the room, trying to figure out which way I should go. Out the front means dealing with the straggling trick-or-treaters. Out the back —
I notice the cluster of hockey players by the kitchen doorway.
They have taken their masks off.
They’re doing the small ritual men do at parties where they cluster, hold their drinks at chest height, lean their heads in to say something quietly, lean back out to laugh at it.
Benson is in the middle. Stanley is on his right.
Percy is on his left. Rowan is half-turned toward the keg.
And Blue is standing at the back of the group with his cup in his hand.
His hair is brushed back, and he’s wearing a black t-shirt.
He’s smiling at something Benson just said.
This time, it doesn’t steal my breath away.
It makes me feel at ease to see him like this.
All of them lift their cups at the same time, the small unspoken cheers boys do without making it a thing, and his eyes find mine across the room.
Shit.
I told myself I wasn’t going to do this again.
I promised myself I wasn’t going to look.
I was doing so good. I’ve been keeping my eyes off him in every room he’s been in.
I’ve been doing the work of becoming a girl who doesn’t look at Blue Golding, and I’ve been making progress.
But after a dozen Jell-O shots and this fun drink, my mind has lost all of its self-control.
Because here is the thing about me and Blue.
Sober, I can hold the line. I can keep my eyes on the floor. Sober, I can remember every reason I’m not doing this anymore — the way he can’t handle when I look at him, the texts unanswered, the years of him telling me without ever saying it that I wasn’t the one.
Drunk, none of that exists.
Drunk, my body remembers that night in the bedroom at our friend’s house when we first kissed, and it remembers it like it happened last week.
Drunk, I remember the moment I lost my virginity to him and thought he was the one.
He drinks from his cup, keeping eye contact with me the whole way.