Justin rolled over onto his back and hugged the pillow to his chest. “Who are you?” he asked.
Lizzie’s stomach sank. “Lizzie,” she said. She stood up and hit the button for her floor. The elevator lurched and began to rise. “Lizzie Miller. I’m on the swim team with you. I do the breaststroke.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Lizzie. Lizzie of the breaststroke. Lizzie of the breasts. Lizzie, know where we can get some beer?”
“No,” she said.
“I think I might have some alcohol in my room,” he said. “I just can’t remember where my room is. Do you know where my room is?”
The elevator slid to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal two kids slurping at each other’s faces. Justin and Lizzie watched for an endless few seconds, the air filled with suggestion and the liquid sound of spit being exchanged, before Lizzie hit the “Door Close” button with her fist. The doors slid shut again, and the elevator rose. She considered her options: he was clearly a mess, but when else would she be alone with Justin Bellstrom?
“What does your room key say?” she asked.
Justin propped himself up against the mirrored wall of the elevator. His curls were flattened on one side, with cigarette ash caught in the front. He dug in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a room key with the number 302 on it. He looked up at Lizzie with frank admiration. “Wow, you’re really smart.”
Lizzie shrugged. “Logic,” she said.
“Wanna come have a drink?”
The hair on her forearms prickled up, as if she’d just put her finger in a light socket. Her heart began to race. “Sure,” she said, more nonchalantly than she felt.
Room 302 was at the end of the corridor. She followed Justin as he reeled down the hallway, bouncing from wall to wall like a pinball and stopping at each door to squint at the number and compare it to his key. He dropped the pillow and left it behind. She picked it up and took a quick whiff. It smelled like scalp. At the door, he fumbled with the key, attempting to insert it upside down. She grabbed it from him and let them in.
The hotel room was hazy from cigarette smoke, and all the sheets had been ripped from the bed and piled in a heap by the television. His roommate, whoever he was, was gone. Justin crawled over, flung himself facedown on the pile of sheets, and rummaged under the bed. He emerged with a plastic jug of blue liquid and held it up over his head.
“Victory is mine,” he said.
“What is that?” Lizzie asked.
“Everclear. With blueberry Kool-Aid.”
“Everclear?”
“Grain alcohol. Hundred and fifty-one proof. This stuff will get you fucked up.” He lifted the bottle and took a swig before handing it to Lizzie. She paused and smelled it—it made the hair in her nose stand on end—before taking a gulp. The alcohol felt like it was peeling a layer off the inside of her throat, and the Kool-Aid left a gummy sugar coating on the inside of her mouth. She choked and dribbled blue juice down the front of her T-shirt.
“Um,” she said. “That’s awful.”
“Yeah, isn’t it? It’s the bomb.”
With Justin watching, she gamely took another swig. Already she could feel the heat radiating from her belly up to her chest and out through her fingertips. She had tasted alcohol before—the occasional swig from her parents’ abandoned glasses after dinner, a whole glass of champagne snuck at a bar mitzvah last year—but she had never experienced anything like this. It was, she decided, a pleasant sensation. It made her feel weightless, almost like she was swimming. She took the bottle out of Justin’s hands and swallowed again. She lay back on the pile of sheets next to Justin, and stared up at the pebbled ceiling; someone had managed to stick a wad of gum on it.
Justin lit a cigarette and took a puff. “Isn’t this lame? I hate this shit.”
“Cigarettes? Yeah, they’re kinda gross.”
“Nah. Swim team. I only do it because my mom makes me. She thinks it will get me into a good college. But I hate all this gwoooo…” He burped. “I mean, giving up my weekends. Sacramento sucks, you know? I wanna stay home and party with my friends. Fucking six-in-the-morning wake-up. It’s too much work.”
“I don’t know,” said Lizzie. The cigarette was making her nauseous and light-headed and she could feel sweat beading up at her temples. “I think it’s fun to be good at something.”
“Are you good at swimming?”
“I’m getting better. I guess I’m pretty decent.” She blushed. When she looked up, Justin had rolled onto his side and was examining her intently. He reached out and pulled a strand of her hair over her eyes, so that she was peeking out from behind it.
“Hey,” he said. “Didn’t you lose a bunch of weight or something?”
She nodded, finding her tongue incapable of motion. Instead, she took another gulp of the booze, which rendered her limbs immobile, too. The gum on the ceiling was beginning to undulate in a peculiar way.
Justin crawled closer. She could feel the warmth of his skin through the cotton of her shirt, so near that all she need do was shift her hand an inch and she would make contact. She was petrified.
This is the moment of my reinvention,
she thought.
I can be anyone.
“Do you have a crush on me?” Justin asked. He paused. “It’s okay if you do.”
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his response and nodded. With her eyes closed, she felt like she was on a merry-go-round spinning at top speed.
Please,
she thought to herself,
please when I open my eyes let him be madly in love with me.
She counted to three and opened them. Justin was leaning in, looking straight down at her from five inches away. His eyes, she noticed, were pale blue, almost the color of the water in the school swimming pool. She thought she could feel the blood pulsing through her veins, in time to the whacking of her heart.
Before she could second-guess herself, she lurched upward, closing the space between them, and kissed him. He didn’t seem the slightest bit surprised.
His tongue was sloppy and tasted like a raw steak tenderized with ash and lemons, and their noses bumped in the dark.
Thank God,
she thought, and closed her eyes again. She had to concentrate very hard on breathing through her nose and she could feel saliva dripping down her chin. The alcohol washed over her in waves, carrying her gently along the tides, tugging away her T-shirt, her jeans, her bra and panties, until she found herself, six minutes later, naked and exposed on the opposite shore.
Later, she would try to dredge up the details of losing her virginity and come up with very few. It hadn’t really hurt—maybe she was anesthetized by the Everclear?—but it hadn’t exactly felt fantastic either. It was, she decided, much like when she’d had a root canal and the dentist gave her nitrous before he fired up his drill: kind of unpleasant and violent and lovely and blurry all at the same time.
What
was
nice was afterward, when they lay there naked, and she could hear his slowing breath by her ear. His sweat dripped onto her stomach, and she didn’t wipe it away. She’d never been so close to a boy in her life, flesh pressing against flesh, hair in each other’s faces. Her father wasn’t really the hugging type, and her mom didn’t count. So this is what intimacy is, she thought. This is what it means to be close to someone. This is what it feels like to be beautiful. It’s this simple.
“Thanks,” he said. “That was fun.”
They lay there in silence for a few minutes, as the air-conditioning kicked on and goose bumps rose on their naked skin. A knock sounded at the door. Lizzie froze, afraid to breathe, as the voice of Coach Jones drifted through the plywood. “Lights out, kids. Set your alarms for six
A.M.”
She could hear him walk away and knock on the door of the next room over.
“I should go,” Lizzie whispered, hoping that Justin would ask her to stay. Justin didn’t reply. She craned her neck and looked down at where he lay on her chest. He’d passed out. His mouth hung open, and she could see that his tongue had turned blue from the Kool-Aid. She had to use both hands to push him off her. He flopped to the floor and began to snore. Lizzie scrubbed herself clean with a wad of toilet paper in the bathroom and reluctantly got dressed, feeling like every article of smelly clothing she put back over her naked skin further erased the momentous thing that had just occurred. Then she let herself out. She stumbled back to her room, where she found Becky asleep in the middle of the bed, hugging a teddy bear to her chest.
Justin didn’t call her. Not that she’d given him her number, but secretly she hoped he’d look it up anyway. When she saw him in the hallway at school the next week, he smiled and waggled his fingers and even mouthed a “hello” as he walked by with his friends. She thought she saw—
wait, did he?
Yes. He winked. And this time it was for real, it was meant for her.
Becky watched this interaction with bewilderment. “Since when are you and Justin Bellstrom friendly?” Becky asked.
And Lizzie just smiled, a mysterious smile that she thought looked maybe a little like the Mona Lisa, and let the warmth of her secret intimacy suffuse her. She saw the puzzled look on Becky’s face and thought she might pop right out of her own skin, she was so happy.
maybe it was true that losing her virginity was kind of a disappointment. Justin wasn’t madly in love with her after all, and he didn’t want to be her boyfriend. But it cracked open a sealed door in the social strata of Millard Fillmore High. Justin would, on occasion, come talk to her after swim team—just to say hello—and some of Justin’s guy friends began nodding to her in the hallways too. She began to find notes shoved in her locker, inviting her to the parties she’d always felt excluded from before; notes asking if she wanted to hang out after school to do homework together; notes wondering if she wanted to come by when parents were out of town.
Her mother had been right: Lose the weight, learn to hold your fork correctly, and you’d have all the dates you could dream of. Boys liked her after all. Besotted with her new popularity, she ended up having sex with Justin’s friends, too. More than one of them. Actually, six.
She marveled at the attention; it was unreal. Never before had she shown up at a party and found herself surrounded by boys from her class, who seemed to hang on her every word, who made sure her hands were never empty. They thoughtfully retrieved her pint glasses of rum and Coke purloined from liquor cabinets; cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon purchased by a gracious older brother; bongs generously filled with foul-smelling skunkweed that someone had purchased at the grammar school playground. She drifted through the end of her freshman year on a cloud of booze and pot, intoxicated as much by the sudden male attention as by the alcohol. And if the boys didn’t necessarily hang out with her at school, exactly, it was okay, too; the social hours after school and on the weekends were when the alternate Lizzie came into existence. She felt just a little like Cinderella: the coal-covered drudge that—after the school bell rang—turned into a prom queen with endless boyfriends.
She seemed to walk an inch taller. She begged more money from her mother to buy high heels, visited the hairdresser at the mall and got her brown hair streaked with blond for the first time, even went on a shopping spree at Walgreens and bought a whole drawer full of makeup. So what if the girls at school still didn’t really talk to her; if, in fact, they seemed to be snubbing her more than usual. And maybe she didn’t spend as much time with Becky anymore, but Becky was a pill these days. Her idea of a wild and crazy Saturday night was watching a corny old Meg Ryan movie and plying a Ouija board with questions about their future husbands. Lizzie had no time for fuzzy romantic visions anymore; she had the real deal. She had boys paying attention to her
now.
Even if Justin, who she still had a hopeless crush on, was dating a cheerleader and limited his interactions with her to a “Yo, Lizzie!” and a slap on the back.
Her mother, in turn, was thrilled that her daughter had so many social engagements—and with the children of her friends, too! “I’m glad you’re having fun,” she told Lizzie, as Lizzie headed out to yet another party. “Ten o’clock curfew, keep your cell phone on, and don’t forget to thank your hosts, remember?”
Being with a boy was amazing. She was in love with it all: The significant looks in the kitchen, so dense with meaning and portent. The lingering touch on the thigh, the waist, the hand, followed by the invitation to go upstairs and “check out the house.” Then, the closed door and the beating heart. Naked skin exposed to the air. For those minutes, when she was being grabbed, touched, kissed, desired, she felt like she was floating, suspended in gossamer threads high above the earth. They really liked her, they found her totally irresistible. She bounced from one boy to the next and back, hooking up with each guy for a week or two, maybe a weekend, maybe just a night, before the next would swoop in. If she closed her eyes, sometimes she could even pretend it was Justin who was kissing her.
“Brian told me you were really hot,” said Tom Liverbach, right after they had sex in the walk-in closet at a party one weekend in May. “He was totally right.” The fact that they were talking about her made her bloat with pride—she was being
discussed,
as an object of group desire!—though she felt a vague twinge of concern that perhaps they weren’t talking about her in precisely the way a girl would want to be talked about. Each time she launched into a whirlwind courtship with a new guy, eventually leading to a sweaty bout in a sticky twin bed or a lunchtime make-out session at the back of the football field, she secretly wondered whether this guy would be the one. Whether this time he would stick around for a month, or two, or even longer. And they never did. Which made Lizzie just a little bit worried. They weren’t, like, using her for sex, were they?
Everyone
was having sex, weren’t they? Plus, it felt so good that it seemed stupid to worry about it. What was the phrase Margaret had used to describe herself? “Pro-sex feminist.” She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded good. Maybe that’s what she was.
And as she slept with her fifth and, finally, sixth suitor, she did feel a growing modicum of pride. When she listened to other girls talk about their hookups in the bathrooms now, she realized that some of them didn’t actually know what they were talking about after all. (She knew from experience, for example, that the male anatomy did not taste like chicken, despite Jennifer Hillbrand’s announcement in the girls’ locker room.) She saw her female classmates staring at her in the hallways of school with darkly curious eyes, bending in toward each other like willow trees in anticipation of the moment when she would be out of earshot, and she
knew
that they were talking about her. They would, wouldn’t they? Girls in her class had always gossiped about other girls who had sex, but now she understood that they did this just because they were jealous, because she had all the power. She had proven herself desirable despite it all, had even bested them in the sexual competitions. (She had, after all, slept with more than a few of their crushes and ex-boyfriends, including the ex of her avowed enemy Susan Gossett, Max Grouper, just a week after they had broken up.) She squared her shoulders, reminded herself that she was
winning
for once.