21. Chapter Twenty-One
Percy
I learned that the strawberries have to be cut small, or they clog the blender.
I’ve got two pounds of strawberries on the cutting board while the party builds behind me, the music coming up louder every time somebody props the front door.
I work through the flat of them with the little paring knife from Rowan’s block, tops off, quarters, into the bowl.
Mango next. I know how to pick a mango now — thumb at the stem end, a little give, not soft — and I’ve got four good ones.
I cut them the way I saw in a YouTube video.
Last year, one pitcher was gone inside an hour.
So this year it’s two, and I strain it through the sieve so there’s no pulp in it, because pulp in the bottom of a cup is the difference between a thing people drink and a thing people make a face at.
Lime goes in last. One drop of the liquor, so it tastes like juice.
I taste it off the back of a spoon. Adjust. Taste it again.
Somebody I’ve never met leans into the kitchen and asks did the goalie make the juice.
I don’t answer, and she takes that as a yes and yells it back into the living room like it’s news, like it’s a fact about this house now — the goalie makes the juice — and I pour it into the two pitchers and set them out on the counter with a stack of cups.
The front door opens, and it’s three girls from the volleyball team. It opens again, and Drew and Theo. No Ivory tonight. And if she’s not here, then Penelope isn’t coming.
A year ago at this party, a girl walked into me in this kitchen and spilled a beer down both of us, and I caught her before she went down, and I have been watching that door ever since. I thought I fucked up back then. Now I’m really fucked.
Stanley’s at the keg, going after Benson again about his sister. “When is Gianna coming?”
“She’s not.”
“She’s basically staff, she’s invited.”
“She’s a freshman, Stanley.” Benson doesn’t turn around. “She’s not allowed here. That’s the end of it.”
“I’m asking about her general availability—”
Benson glares at him. Stanley puts his hands up and laughs.
Then their conversation rolls into an argument about whether the transfer defenseman can actually skate. Rowan walks over and tells them to keep their voices down because he should be here any second now.
Stanley listens, for once in his life, but it’s bad news for me because he looks over and smiles.
He slings an arm around my neck and announces to a group of girls that I am the one making the juice for the party, and if they have any complaints, to report it to him, and he’ll take care of it.
A year ago my whole body would have gone to wood under his arm, under the attention he’s pulling my way, but tonight, I let it happen.
My jaw’s loose. Blue’s across the room, and when I find him, he lifts his chin an inch.
Somebody tells me, good juice, Deveroux, on his way to get more.
I swear Stanley is going around and telling everyone to compliment me as some kind of joke.
Stanley grabs the back of my neck and hangs off me, grinning, all his weight on it.
That does it. The hand on my neck, the weight, the noise — I thought I could handle it, and my body decides before I do.
My vision goes first. I get his arm off me, and he laughs like it’s nothing.
I’m already looking for the exit. The side door.
I push toward it with no air getting in.
My pulse is in my ears, loud enough that it drowns the room, and the mouths around me are moving, and I can’t hear any of them.
I reach the side door and step out into the night.
I thought I was past this. My vision still isn’t right, and I stand in the cold and work at it, in for four, hold for four, out for six.
Someone comes up behind me, and I’m back a step, arms out, before I’ve seen who it is.
“Water,” Blue says, holding it out.
I take it.
He doesn’t say anything else. He stands out there in the cold with me while I drink it and waits for my breath to come back.
“You good?”
I nod. “Yeah. Going to bed.”
I go up to my room and nobody makes anything of it, and I’m glad.
There’s a magazine on the desk. I bought it on Tuesday, stood at the rack on Ninth long enough that the woman at the register started watching me, counted the bills out in ones, and carried the magazine home like it was worth something.
Fourteen dollars on houses I’ll never stand inside.
I sit on the edge of the bed with it and turn the pages, my hands not all the way steady yet.
There are kitchens the size of my living room downstairs.
A wall of glass with a lake behind it. Rooms photographed empty on purpose.
Then on page sixty-four, there is a house cut into a hill, and the caption says the main room takes its light from a band of high windows under the roofline, north-facing, so it stays even all day and never glares. Clerestory.
My hand stops on the page.
I get my phone out.
Me: The light thing. Clerestory.
It’s gone before I’ve read it back. It just sends. And then it’s out there. My gut turns over because I can’t unsend it. I read it four times like the fourth time might give me the option.
The house is still going under the floor.
I hold the phone in both hands in the dark and I wait for it to buzz.
It doesn’t.