3. Chapter Three
Percy
My first house party turns out to be an endurance event.
Movies make it look like something you attend — you show up, you hold a cup, things happen to you in a pleasant order. Nobody mentions that it’s four hours of standing in a room where the air has been used too many times, watching each exit door.
By nine, Hawthorne House doesn’t look like the place Josh dropped me off at a week ago.
The front door won’t stay shut. Somebody’s shoe got wedged under it around eight, so now it just breathes, open and closed, letting the noise out onto the porch in bursts.
Every surface has collected something — red cups, half a beer, somebody’s keys, a phone facedown that’s been buzzing against the counter for twenty minutes.
There’s a paper plate on the arm of the couch with a slice of pizza folded in half on it that nobody is going to eat and nobody is going to throw away.
The house smells like beer gone warm, too many bodies, and a mix of men and women’s cologne.
I’m standing at the edge of the kitchen with my back to the wall and a cup of something I haven’t drunk from, running the exits.
The front door is blocked. Two guys are in the frame having a conversation that keeps folding both of them in half laughing.
The stairs are worse. There’s a couple on the fourth step and a girl sitting on the seventh with her phone.
The back door, through the kitchen, past the sink is in the clear.
That’s the one. That’s the route. But a room full of people rearranges itself every forty seconds, so I keep my eye on it.
I breathe in for four, hold for four, and out for six. I’m fine.
Stanley steers me into the living room and announces to a group of girls.
“This is the freshman goalie, and he has emotional depth.”
I swallow the lump in my throat.
One of the girls tilts her head and says, “Does he?”
Stanley feeds into it. “Enormous depth. Fathoms.”
I stand there and don’t say a word. Stanley goes on for four minutes, talking for the both of us. The girls listen and laugh way too loud. The brunette keeps looking at me, and I don’t look back.
Then Benson walks over and says, “Stop using the freshman as a prop.”
Stanley argues, “I’m involving him.” He pulls me closer. “He’s doing fine.”
I remove myself from Stanley’s hold while Benson takes my cup out of my hand, looks in it, and gives it back.
He knows I haven’t taken a sip of it, but he doesn’t say anything.
Someone calls his name, and he peels off after patting my back.
I catch Blue across the room against the wall by himself.
I’m about to join him when the brunette with the green top walks over to me.
“Hi,” she says, smiling up at me.
Her arm is linked with her friend. They’re both looking at me.
“We’re freshmen, too,” she says.
Her friend says, “You play hockey?”
“Yeah,” I say, but it comes out quiet. I think it’s the first word I’ve said all night.
“What position?”
“Stanley said he’s a goalie,” the brunette says. Then, to me, “I’m Margo. This is Delaney.”
I nod.
They both stare at me. “What’s your name?”
“Percy.”
“Percy.” She says it back like she’s testing it. “That’s a good name.”
“Okay.”
Okay. Christ.
There’s a version of this where I say nice to meet you. It’s four syllables. It exists in my mouth, but I can’t get myself to say it, so I say nothing.
“Where are you from?”
“Maine.”
“Oh,” she says, lighting up. “I’ve never been. I bet it’s beautiful.”
I nod, looking at the back door.
They come closer. “What?”
I glance down. Her hand lands on my forearm. I lock. It’s fast, and everything in me goes to stone under her palm. She takes her hand back.
“Sorry,” she says, looking at me. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay.”
“Well. It was nice meeting you, Percy.”
Delaney says, “We’ll see you around.”
“Yeah.”
They go.
This is my chance, so I move my feet. Stanley’s behind me telling another story.
I wait for the two guys at the kitchen entrance to drift.
They finally move, so I walk through the gap they leave, shoulders in, chin down, eyes on the floor so I don’t accidentally start a conversation.
Conversations are how you get asked things.
I learned early that questions are almost never free.
I walk past the sink, past a girl sitting up on the counter with her heels hooked in the cabinet handles, and I keep my eyes at knee height and go around her. Past Drew Faulkner — sophomore, defense, met him Tuesday — laughing with one hand braced on the wall above some girl’s head.
There’s a phone on the floor getting kicked. I pick it up and set it on the counter without breaking stride. The back door is right there, but there are people everywhere. I get impatient and keep moving.
Somebody steps into my path, and there’s no time to stop.
We hit hard enough that I hear it. Her drink goes straight up between us and comes down across both of us — cold, all down the front of my shirt, all down the front of her dress — and her heel skids on the wet floor and she goes back.
My hands are on her before I’ve decided anything.
One at her waist, one flat at the base of her spine, and I plant like I’m in the crease, because it’s the only thing my body actually knows how to do — get in front of a thing, stop it, don’t let it past.
She catches my forearm. Her nails go in far enough to bite.
And everything shrinks down to about eighteen inches.
Her weight coming into my palms. The wet fabric under my hand.
Her breath going in fast and stopping. Then she’s got her feet as she catches herself.
She looks up at the culprit. Me. Her eyes slice through me, and I release her quickly.
She’s shorter than I am by most of a head.
Dark hair pinned back off her face, some of it come loose at the temple.
She’s in a navy dress. It’s not a party dress.
It looks like something professional you’d wear to work.
And it’s ruined. It’s got a dark stain going from her collarbone down to below her ribs, spreading while I watch, and there is a piece of ice caught in the fold of the fabric at her waist.
Oh non.
Her face doesn’t do what I expect. There’s no flinch, no laugh, no swearing, nothing thrown wide open for an audience. She just looks at me.
Say something, I tell myself. Say something.
The English isn’t there. I go looking for it, and there’s nothing in my mind. When I’m caught off guard, when I’m stunned, the wrong language comes to the surface. Always.
“Désolé.”
She blinks. Confusion moves behind her eyes.
And I finally hear myself. I’m apologizing to a stranger in French like a lunatic. My ears go so hot I can feel my pulse in them. I turn and grab the whole stack of napkins off the counter beside the cups and hold them out for her.
I can’t get anything else out. Not sorry. Not are you okay. Not I’ll get you a new drink, which is the sentence roaring around behind my sternum with nowhere to go. I just have the napkins. I hold them out in two hands, like an idiot.
She looks at them. Then she takes one. Not the stack. One.
“Thank you,” she says.
Her voice is calm, and it’s pitched low enough that only I get it. I don’t know why that undoes me, but it does. She isn’t mad. She has a soaked dress, and she’s handling it at conversational volume like it’s a thing only for the two of us.
She presses the napkin to the fabric once.
It does nothing. The stain is already gone into the fabric, and both of us can see it.
Her chin comes up a fraction. Her shoulders square.
And she puts herself back together in front of me in about a second and a half — so completely that if I hadn’t had my hands on her ten seconds ago I’d think I made it up.
I’ve seen that. I know that. I’ve done that in the hallway outside a caseworker’s office and in the front seat of a car with my whole life in a bag at my feet. You don’t get that good at it for no reason.
“It’s okay,” she says.
She’s letting me off.
I want to tell her no, it isn’t. It’s a nice dress and I destroyed it. What I do instead? I nod.
Her eyes come up to mine once more.
“Penelope.” A blonde girl arrives out of nowhere at full volume, hands already on her. “Oh my God — okay, okay, come here, bathroom, now, before it sets—”
“Ivory—”
“Come on!”
And she’s gone, towed off through the crowd by the wrist with her free hand still holding one napkin, and the crowd closes up behind her like water.
There’s a puddle on the floor about the size of a dinner plate and a slick of it spreading toward the doorway where somebody’s going to go down. I crouch and start mopping it up with the rest of the napkins.
I know how this looks. I’m aware, the entire time, that I am a six-foot-two person on one knee on a kitchen floor during a party, cleaning up liquid with cocktail napkins while people step over me.
Somebody’s shoe comes down four inches from my hand.
Somebody says something to somebody else about the goalie and I don’t turn around.
The napkins go transparent and useless. I get the second stack.
From down here I’ve got a good view of the whiteboard on the wall by the fridge.
1. No falling in love before the draft.
Somebody has drawn something anatomical next to it in a different marker since this morning.
Great. Fantastic. Excellent house.
“Okay, so this is a look.” Stanley’s legs appear beside me. Then the rest of him, crouching down, elbows on his knees, beer dangling.
“You good?”
“Somebody’s going to fall.”
He looks at the floor. Then at me. Then at the floor again.
“Percy. Buddy. Statistically, four people are going to slip in this house tonight and two of them are going to enjoy it.”
I keep going.
He watches me for a second longer than is comfortable. Then he stands up, sticks a hand in my armpit, and hauls me upright with about forty percent more strength than I thought he had.
“Come on. You cleaned it all up. It’s good.”