My Beating Teenage Heart (22 page)

“Not me,” I lie.

“Oh.” The girl’s blond eyebrows slant in confusion. “Really?”

“No, not really.” I’m slurring my words. My teeth taste like sugar and a future atomic hangover. Big Red’s swaying to the music while one of Anya’s friends does the dancing for both of them. His hands are drifting down towards her ass, which means he could be in trouble here but that’s his problem, not mine. I get up and stumble into the kitchen to fix myself a rum and Coke.

There’s a hole inside me. It’s filled up with alcohol so that I can’t feel it at the moment, but I know it’s still there. How much do you need to drink to get alcohol poisoning? How much do you have to drink to check out completely and forever?

It’s too hot in here. My skin’s clammy like I’ve got a fever. Everything’s wrong. The music, the girls. I don’t want any of it. I stagger out the front door to get away from it all, my cup still in my hand. Ty forgot to lock the car door and I climb into the backseat and knock back the rest of the rum. My body doesn’t want any more but my brain’s still in cont stTy forgot rol.

I lie down, close my eyes and wait for sleep to take me.

I don’t know how long I’m out for, not long enough. Someone’s tapping on the car window, opening the car door and letting fresh air in. I stare out at whoever it is from behind eye slits, my face damp under the vinyl mask I don’t remember putting on in the first place but maybe I did. No, wait, I’m missing my shirt and socks too. Did I do all that or was I somebody’s easy prank target?

The blond girl from before (Kathryn/Kirsten/Kaitlin) laughs as she leans into the car and stares down at me. My eyes can’t focus. Her laughter sounds drunk and I’m not in the mood. “What do you want?” I bark, tearing the mask off and tossing it to the ground.

“I was just getting some air,” she sputters, giggling into her arm. “And I saw your foot in the window. Um … 
Bill
.”

My naked foot. Where the fuck’s my sock? I spy the pair of them shoved into the corner of the seat and pull them on. My shirt’s down beside me and I start cramming my arms into it.

“What the hell were you doing out here anyway?” she asks with what seems like a permanent grin. “Are you some kind of pervert?”

I don’t say anything about passing out or try to explain. I sit up and finish my shirt buttons. They’re not easy when you’re drunk. I’m a button short.

“You’ve lined them up wrong,” the blond girl says. “Here, I’ll do it.” She gets into the car with me and begins unbuttoning.

“You’re good at that,” I mumble. She’s not as annoying now that she’s helping me. I’m not really into blondes the way some guys are, but her hair’s really pretty. Soft too. I let go when I realize I’ve been touching it. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” the girl says. She gets the shirt fixed up right and climbs out of the car. “You coming out to join me or what?”

I want to shut my eyes again and go back to sleep but suddenly I can’t stop staring at her hair. I get out, shoeless, and stand with my back against the car so that it’s doing most of the work of keeping me upright.

“You’re actually pretty cute,” she declares, standing so close to me that our knees touch. She’s wearing almost the same kind of plaid skirt that Jules would wear, but on her it looks preppy because it’s paired with a fitted white top that she probably bought at someplace like Hollister. “But I’m drunk and you’re drunker than I am.”

“That’s true,” I say, and it makes her laugh again.

“So you know you’re cute, huh?”

“I know I’m drunk.” I’ve started running my fingers through her hair again. This girl doesn’t know a thingt k"0em" about me. To her I’m just some wasted guy at a party who stripped off half his clothes in his sleep. I wish I was that guy. Somebody who doesn’t have anything on his mind except scoring with a hot blond girl who’s decided he’s cute.

The girl presses her hands into my shoulders and inches forward. She licks at my lips. I open them and lean forward to catch her mouth, her tongue. The inside of her mouth’s warm and tastes exactly like mine, only more potent. I drink her in, pull her closer. I curve my hand around her head, smooth my fingers over her silky hair.

Then her plaid-covered ass is in my hands. My fingers trace her form, creep under the back of her skirt without thinking twice. She’s wearing black tights, so that mostly what I’m feeling is a mix of nylon and spandex, but she’s under there somewhere, round and soft.

A dog barks from somewhere nearby, breaking my concentration. Three teenage girls, two of them clutching cigarettes, are walking a Doberman pinscher. The trio is approaching the end of Anya’s drive and the tallest of the three shouts, “Sorry! We’re not looking.” She shields her face with her hand to emphasize her disinterest but the two other girls are still rubbernecking.

I’ve taken my hands off the blond girl and am peering into the distance at the girls with the dog. I could be wrong but I think maybe one of them went to my school in ninth grade.

“I’m going in,” the blond girl with the silky hair murmurs, pulling away from me. “I need to pee.”

I watch her walk away, still not sure precisely what her name is. All I know for sure is the “K.” K turns to see if I’m trailing after her and closes the front door behind her when she sees I’m not. I climb into the backseat of the car again and sleep there, with all my clothes on this time and the doors locked, until Ty and Rory are finished partying and the night of my seventeenth birthday is behind me.

seventeen
                            
ashlyn

My mom was
out for the night the first time I got my period. I remember that now too. I remember the more and more infrequent bad dreams about Dylan and how, in later years, it was Celeste’s room I crept into in the middle of the night rather than my parents’. She’d wake me up before sunrise, in time to slip back into my own bed without my mother or father noticing.

My parents worried enough as it was. I didn’t want to give them reasons to wonder whether I was all right or not because I honestly was. Just, sometimes my subconscious would play tricks and put me back there in the Hobsons’ hallway—or other places where I couldn’t get away. It’s not something that happened a lot but it did happen.

But otherwise I was happy—not the most popular kid in my class but not an outcast either. I’d stopped breaking things and had gained a sense of balance. I coul stTy0; sing a little and dance a little and, for a time, until I got old enough to feel self-conscious about it, my grandmother would show me off to her friends by having me sing “I Say a Little Prayer” or “Reflections.”

I wasn’t as good as she liked to say I was but I was okay. By the time I was eleven I mostly stuck to singing into my brush while dancing in front of the mirror and pretending I was a diva. You can be a diva and still not be stick-insect skinny. If you’re a diva it doesn’t even matter what you weigh and yes, I was a little chubby. Enough that kids could’ve teased me about it but they hardly ever did.

My favorite song to sing back then was Alicia Keys’s “No One” and that’s what I was singing into the mirror when I noticed that my underwear felt damp. It’d felt like that a lot lately but my sister said it was normal—something that happened when your body was starting to mature enough to have periods. The book my mom had bought me called it “discharge,” which made it sound like it had something to do with firearms. But anyway, this time felt wetter than usual, and when I stopped singing to check my underwear I saw that the cotton part that fit between my legs was streaked with brown.

I was eleven years and ten and a half months old and didn’t understand that Margaret girl who was desperate for her period in the book I’d read. Periods sounded messy and stupid. Five days of the month that you couldn’t go swimming unless you wore a tampon, and I definitely didn’t want to do that.

The timing was especially bad because my mom had gone straight from work to spend the evening with an old friend who had just split up with her husband, and my dad was supposed to drop me off at Shenice Campbell’s birthday party in thirty minutes.

I knocked on Celeste’s door. Half the time she didn’t hear me because she had earbuds in, but she always yelled at me and Garrett if we didn’t knock.

“What?” she shouted from inside.

I opened her door and told her I had my first period and that I had to go to a party and what was I supposed to do? Celeste rifled through the linen closet shelf where she and my mom kept their sanitary products. “There’s only tampons and panty liners,” she complained. “Nothing in between like what you need. I better get Dad to take us to the store.”

I frowned like I didn’t want to involve him. I wasn’t used to grown-up female stuff, let alone having my dad know about it. “It’s okay,” Celeste teased. “He does realize you’re a girl, you know. And we can just get him to sit in the car and wait for us.”

My sister went off to discuss my first period with my father while I changed my underwear and stuck on the panty liner my sister had pulled from the box in the linen closet. It didn’t matter that I was suddenly a woman, I still had to get in the backseat while Celeste sat up front with my father. My sister and I went into the pharmacy together and she scanned the female-product shelves like an expert. “The ones with wings don’t bunch up in the middle as much,” she told me, selecting a box from one of the lower shelves and handing it to me.

A man with silver hair and a burgundy walking cane shuffled by us and I felt mortified that he could see me holding the box and guess that I had my period.

I said, “I don’t want to go to Shenice’s party anymore. What if I …” My mouth hesitated, not wanting to say the word
leaked
.

“It starts off slow,” Celeste explained. “You’ll be okay. Just change the pad when you’re home later, okay?” Then she scanned my face with the same evaluating look she’d given the shelves. “Do you have cramps?”

“No.” Older girls seemed to complain about cramps all the time. Even some girls in my class. Shenice told me she used it as an excuse to get out of gym.

I didn’t like gym. Maybe the period would be good for something after all.

Celeste bought two packages of the pads with wings—one overnight and one regular—with the bills my father had slid out from his wallet. When we got back to the car my father smiled at us and said, “So, all set now?”

“Uh-huh,” Celeste said. “All good.”

We drove home and I changed into my party clothes, black jeans with sequins down the side and a teal top with sequins on the shoulders. I guess I was big into sequins at the time. The only thing I was missing was a sequined sanitary pad.

Both my parents had gotten better at acting casual about me hanging out at friends’ houses, but there were times that I could still spot a difference between their reaction to Celeste socializing and me doing it. “You just give me a call if you want me to pick you up early,” my father said once we got to Shenice’s. “Otherwise I’ll be here at ten.” He would’ve come to the door with me and introduced himself to Shenice’s parents except that he’d already met them two weeks earlier, and my mom had called Mrs. Campbell about the party when Shenice had given me the invitation. But none of that’s really what I mean when I said my parents were different about Celeste going out, it was just in their faces a little sometimes when I was going to a party or spending time at a new friend’s house.

Shenice was a new friend and my dad had that slightly wary look in his eyes as I stepped out of the car. Truthfully, I was surprised that Shenice had invited me to her party because she was one of the most popular girls in the sixth grade and had only really started talking to me about a month before. Someone was crying in one of the stalls in the school bathroom when I walked in during lunch. At first I ignored it, like I figured whoever it was would want me to, but she was still crying when I was washing my hands so I said, “Are you okay?”

“Who is that?” said the girl in the stall in a weepy voice.

“It’s Ashlyn,” I replied. The girl remained silent and I added, “It’s okay, I’m going.”

“Ashlyn?” the girl said tentatively.

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“I’ve used up all the toilet paper in here—can you check the other stalls for me?” I found her some more toilet paper and passed a wad under the stall. A darker hand than mine took it but I still didn’t know who I’d been listening to cry. “Thanks,” she said.

“It’s okay.” I took a step towards the door. “Are
you
going to be okay?”

The girl sniffled from behind the stall. “Yeah, I’ll be all right. Thanks.”

I didn’t know it was Shenice until Ms. Marinangeli paired us up for a geography project two days later. She had to come to my house to work on it and someone called her on her cell phone and she started to cry all over again. When she got off the phone she could see that I’d put two and two together and she told me that her parents had thrown her sister out of the house because she was doing bad things, and now she was going to move to Montreal where she could stay with a friend for free, but Shenice didn’t know when she would see her again.

Shenice had three older sisters. One of them had graduated valedictorian of our future high school and was aiming for an MBA, another had a collection of shiny track-and-field medals and was in tenth grade, but the third sister, the eldest, was
trouble
.

Shenice didn’t say what kind and I didn’t ask. She kept talking to me, even after the project was finished, and she didn’t really have to be as nice to me anymore because I was only a regular kid and she was so popular that the popular fourth- and fifth-grade kids tried to look like her by buying the same clothes.

None of my other friends were at Shenice’s birthday party, but I knew her popular friends a bit by then. We ate Chinese food and played “I Never” with M&M’s, danced and then her dad brought down the iNail machine they’d rented as a surprise and everyone did their nails with funky designs and cartoons. I went to the bathroom to check the progress of my period a zillion times but Celeste was right, it was starting out slow.