1140 PM Adam
Three minutes after Mia left to smoke a cigarette, Sasha told Adam she needed to use the bathroom.
“There’s finally no one in line,” she said. “This is my moment.”
After she was gone, Adam looked at the table where they had been playing quarters.
There were drops of spilled beer on its surface, along with ten or twelve mostly empty cups.
Using the corner of his shirt, Adam wiped away the beer, then stacked the extra cups in a neat tower, which he moved to one corner of the table.
The efforts were small and pointless—soon Sasha would return and throw another quarter, and the table would once again be coated in beer—but Adam had a difficult time stopping himself: he had a compulsion to please that had taken hold of him as a child.
While he didn’t blame himself for his parents’ deaths (he was raised Lutheran, not Catholic), he did occasionally feel as though their departure had rendered his own life a burden to other people.
Aunt Patty hadn’t wanted children—she had been content with her career and her six Rhodesian ridgebacks—but when Adam was four, she’d found herself cleaning out her home office to make room for a twin bed.
Adam had tried his best to be easy. He worked at a pet shop in town as soon as he was old enough, hauling bags of dog food from shelves to the trunks of cars, and took summer jobs as a counselor at a sleepaway camp outside Fort Collins.
He joined his high school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, and played varsity soccer as a freshman, and was the president of his class for sophomore and junior year.
On weekends he borrowed Patty’s car to volunteer at the local Meals on Wheels outpost. When he was helping someone else, he was able to see himself as purposeful, not extraneous.
Once, Mia had compared him to a roll of duct tape. He still counted it among the greatest compliments of his life.
On the other side of the living room, Alison Liu sat on the arm of the couch, her legs crossed and her hair gathered over one shoulder.
She was speaking to a man in a sweater-vest whom Adam didn’t recognize, though when she turned her head and saw him, she extricated herself from the conversation and walked over to him.
“Adam!” Alison kissed his cheek. She wore a silver spaghetti-strapped top, black pants, and blue eyeshadow. Glitter shone on both her cheeks. “Oh my God, hi.”
Alison’s voice was high and squeaky, as if she had always just finished sucking helium from a balloon.
In college they had both been history majors, and during senior year signed up for the same LSAT prep classes.
For an entire semester they’d taken practice tests together on the seventh floor of Van Pelt Library.
Adam could always tell when Alison was having trouble with Analytical Reasoning by the way she braided and unbraided her hair.
“You look so cute,” she said.
Adam looked at his shirt. It was a blue oxford.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“No, trust me, you do. Courtney and I were talking about it earlier. Like, so cute.”
“That’s nice of you.”
Alison smiled, like it was Adam who had complimented her, and Adam smiled back.
He’d come out three months ago, at the beginning of October and after much preparation.
He’d composed a speech that began with “I’m so sorry,” and delivered it to Aunt Patty when he was back in Fort Collins over his fall break.
They were hiking the Well Gulch trail with two of Patty’s ridgebacks, and once Adam had finished speaking, Patty asked if there was anything else, then threw an L-shaped stick for the dogs to chase into the brush.
When he got back to New York a week later, Adam had performed the same speech for Mia and Sasha, after making them a dinner of coq au vin.
Once he had cleaned up the dishes, he’d gone into the living room, where they were both sitting on the couch watching a rerun of Law and Order: SVU in which two incestuous teenagers murdered their parents.
Standing next to the television, Adam asked Sasha to pause the show, then said that he wanted to talk about something.
The color drained from Mia’s face. She said, “It wasn’t me” at the same time that Adam said, “I’m so sorry, but I think I’m gay.
” He put his hands into his pockets. Sasha looked at Mia, who looked at the television, where Ice-T was frozen, his finger pointing angrily at a sobbing blonde.
Adam had the strange feeling of walking into his own surprise party—of discovering something about himself that everyone else had known all along.
Now, in Richie Fournier’s apartment, Alison’s smile grew wider.
She took a breath as if preparing to speak, but stopped herself when she saw Sasha returning from the bathroom.
Sasha said hello—Adam could smell the soap on her hands—and Alison responded with a meek wave.
She muttered something about wanting to refill her drink before the New Year, then turned and walked into the kitchen.
Sasha didn’t say anything—she just wiped her hands against her pants.
Adam had noticed that many women didn’t like Sasha, or were at least intimidated by her.
He supposed it had something to do with her being beautiful, and rich, and dating Theo Wingate, whom most of the women and half the men he knew wanted to fuck.
He also thought that if those women could hear the way she sang *NSYNC in the shower, they’d probably think about her differently.
A Gwen Stefani song rattled the walls. Sasha picked up the cup with which they had been playing quarters and poured in a couple inches of tequila.
Adam looked over to the living room’s window, where Richie Fournier was standing with his hands in his pockets and talking to Nina Guzman.
Nina said something, and Richie nodded slowly; he reached up to run his hand through his hair.
Then he looked at Adam, and Adam waved. Richie responded to whatever Nina had said, and now Nina laughed.
Adam felt his cheeks go red, and his stomach sank. Richie turned his gaze up to the ceiling. He pulled something from his pocket, then looked down at his palm.
“Hey, Sasha?” Adam asked.
“Yes?”
“If you got a text from someone and it said, ‘u coming tonite,’ what would you think that meant?”
“I don’t know, I guess I would think the person was asking me if I was coming tonight.”
“Okay, but what if the person used u instead of y-o-u, and spelled tonight as t-o-n-i-t-e?”
Sasha tapped her chin with her forefinger.
Picking up the quarter, she said, “Personally? I’d think the person was illiterate.”
They had run into him last weekend at a gay bar called Barracuda, down on West Twenty-Second Street.
It was one of those places with shirtless bartenders and a DJ who played the same twenty pop songs over and over, but with slightly different remixes; when they showed their IDs at the door, the bouncer said, “Hi, Sasha,” and unhooked a stained red rope.
There was a five-dollar cover. They paid it to a thin man wearing a tank top that said “SLUT” in rhinestones, who stamped their wrists with the word BOTTOM in wet black ink.
Inside, there were high-top cocktail tables, televisions playing vintage porn, and an empty fish tank emitting a blue-green glow from a corner next to the bar.
Because bartenders tended to notice her, Sasha volunteered to get them both drinks.
On one of the TV screens, a man dressed as a policeman spit in the mouth of another man dressed as a burglar.
Then the burglar grabbed the policeman’s crotch and forced him to his knees.
Sasha came back with two vodka sodas. She said, “I’ve always thought cop porn was kind of unethical? But it’s nice to see traditional power structures inverted.”
The drink was pure vodka, poured over a handful of ice—when Adam took a sip of it, he almost threw up.
A Christina Aguilera song was playing; Sasha bobbed her head to the music, while Adam squinted at the television screens.
At the table next to them, two men in tight torn jeans were talking about Lindsay Lohan getting arrested.
“It was just a little bit of cocaine,” one of them said. “What’s wrong with a little bit of cocaine?”
“I think she was also driving drunk.”
“Everyone drives drunk in LA.”
Adam watched them both nod, as if they’d solved a riddle. Then a man with a thick beard and an open flannel shirt walked by their table and grabbed Sasha’s arm.
“You’re gorgeous,” he said.
Sasha smiled. Then she finished her drink and said to Adam, “Let’s go dance.”
The dance floor was in the back of the bar, through a bottleneck formed by a DJ booth and the bathrooms. The light was red and murky.
Adam and Sasha found an empty corner of the dance floor and huddled together, their straws pinched between their teeth as they stepped left and right to the beat.
Christina Aguilera turned over to Amy Winehouse.
Sasha said, “Oh, shit, this is my jam,” and threw her hands in the air.
A lime flew from the lip of her glass. Her elbow knocked Richie Fournier’s head.
He said, “What the hell,” and then: “Wait, aren’t you Adam Parker?”
The straw was still pinched between Adam’s teeth; he was holding the glass with both hands.
Richie smiled at him. Throughout the entirety of college, Adam had observed him from a distance.
At parties, in the dining hall, serving him coffee in the library’s weird fake Starbucks: seeing him always felt like spotting a celebrity, or a foreign dignitary with extraordinary hair.
Everyone loved him and flocked around him.
He also seemed to care so much less about disappointing people than Adam did, which made Adam envious.
He could never tell if he wanted to sleep with Richie Fournier, or to be Richie Fournier, or if there was even a difference between the two, and if that’s what it meant to be in love.
Sasha said, “Hey, Richie.”
“Holy shit, Sasha.” Richie kissed both her cheeks. “Wait a sec: are you all here together?”
Adam nodded; Richie smirked.
He said, a little unkindly, “That’s really cute.”
They went to the front of the bar, where they could hear each other better.
Richie bought them another round of drinks, and then went back for three shots of tequila.
Sasha made small talk with Richie, gossiping about people from college.
On the television screens, an electrician unbuttoned a businessman’s jeans.
Adam didn’t know what to do with himself.
He put his hands in his pockets, then crossed his arms, then put his hands in his pockets again; he laughed very loudly at all of Richie’s jokes.
He finished his drink much faster than anyone else, and then began wondering if he should offer to buy another round.
Richie touched Sasha’s arm, and Adam felt an unbearable surge of jealousy course through him.
The electrician spun the businessman around.
Adam removed his hands from his pockets.
Richie said, “Wait a sec. What are you guys doing for New Year’s Eve?”
“The more important question,” Sasha said, throwing another quarter, “is how did you respond.”
Adam drank his third shot.
“I said, ‘Yeah, totally!’ ”
“That’s bad.”
“It is?”
“Did you use an exclamation point?”
“No. Yes?”
“Oh, that’s really bad.”
Adam scratched his left temple. The tequila slowed his thoughts. “Shit,” he said.
Sasha tightened her ponytail. “What you should have done—I mean, it’s too late now—but what you should have done, is not respond at all, and then wait until he texted you again tonight, and then say, ‘I might come. Have a few things lined up.’ ”
“But we didn’t have a few things lined up, Sasha. And what if he didn’t text me again?”
“He would have.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I just know.” Sasha shook her head. She sighed. “You know, sometimes I worry that all that studying you do is getting in the way of you being smart.”
Adam threw a quarter. This time it landed in Sasha’s cup.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Tilting the cup back, Sasha drank the tequila. She ran her tongue between her teeth and her lips.
“Do you remember when Theo first tried to hook up with me?”
“Not really.”
“It was at the beginning of sophomore year, when we were both in that Rocks for Jocks class. He’d just been diagnosed with testicular cancer, and he came up to me at some party on Beige Block, and said, ‘Hey, you’re in Geology 103, right?’ ”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing—I just walked away.” She poured more tequila into the cup. “And I kept walking away for the next two months, because that’s what you do.”
“I can’t believe you walked away from a guy with cancer.”
“Whatever, it has a treatment rate of, like, ninety-five percent. Besides, it gave him something to live for.”
Closing one eye, Sasha threw the quarter. Adam looked back at Richie and heard a familiar kerplunk.