The Wild One

 

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FOR EVERYBODY

 

CHAPTER
1

“Snort the salt, slam the tequila, squeeze the lime in your eye!” screams Pia over the music.

“Snort! Snort!” Angie pounds the bar with her fist.

Two guys lean over, snort a line of salt through a straw, take a shot of Patrón, and—howling in pain—squeeze limes into their eyes.

“SUICIDE TEQUILA!” they yell in unison.

Pia and Angie fall against one another, laughing so hard they gasp for air. But I can't bring myself to laugh with them.

I'm kind of stressed out.

I haven't seen my boyfriend, Ethan, in ages, and I really wanted my friends to get to know him better tonight. Instead, I'm standing at the bar with two random dudes who haven't said a word to me. Being the least hot girl in group sucks. Hard.

“That hurts so much! Let's do it again!”

“Fuck yeah!”

Two random,
stupid
dudes.

We're at a dark nightclub—well, the lobby of the Jane Hotel in the West Village, all velvet sofas and giant ferns, but at midnight on a Saturday, it's throbbing chaotically with music and people and drinks. And that makes it a nightclub, right?

It's certainly not like any club I've been to before. But I'm not exactly New York's craziest party girl, so how would I know what's normal? I still get nervous when I come to a place like this, as though someone's going to look at me and tell me I don't belong. And that makes me babble in my head—

“This is the shit, huh, Coco?” shouts Angie, breaking into my thoughts.

“It's the poop, all right!”

“The poop. You're adorable,” says Pia, pinching my cheek.

“We're on a mission to get Coco to swear with confidence,” explains Pia to one of the dudes. I think his name is Nick. Or Patrick. “But she's too much of a good girl.”

Nick/Patrick glances at me and nods briefly, then looks back at Pia. “I bet you do
everything
with confidence,” he says to her, winking. Pia's eyes flicker to Angie's. “Where are you from? Venezuela? I met a girl from Venezuela once. She was hot like you.”

Pia and Angie look at each other again, and crack up. Pia is half Indian and half Swiss, and beautiful, but people never know where she's from. Angie has been her best friend since birth, and she's equally stunning, albeit in a platinum punk princess kind of way. The two of them have a kind of friendship shorthand that means they're always laughing at private jokes. It's fun to be around, but inevitably, you can feel a little left out.

We all got here about two hours ago. By “we all” I mean Pia, Angie, me, my boyfriend, Ethan, and our other roommates: Madeleine and my older sister, Julia.

The evening started well. We all had a couple of drinks, and Ethan told everyone about his childhood summering in Oregon (“you use ‘summer' as a verb?” asked Julia, before I gave her a look and she shut up). Then the club/lobby/whatever it is became really crowded, and Maddy disappeared and Jules went to find her, and then these guys started hitting on Angie and Pia. And now, somehow, I've lost Ethan.

I want to know where he is, but I stay put. I'm trying not to seem needy. Guys hate that, right?

Anyway, he's probably just hanging out with my sister, right?

“Your turn!” Nick/Patrick holds the salt straw out for Angie.

“Oh, no.” Angie laughs. “Snorting salt is, like, totally dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Pia adds somberly. “Did you know that your nasal passages have a direct route to your brain?”

“Don't you mean my dick?” says Nick/Patrick, suddenly serious.

Angie arches an eyebrow. “Your nasal passages have a direct route to your dick?”

“No. My dick has a direct route to my brain.”

Angie and Pia look at each other and dissolve into shrieks of laughter again.

“Oh, my God! My song! My song!” Pia and Angie are climbing up on the coffee table behind us. If there is anything that can be used as a platform for dancing, Angie and Pia will find it. In the past year I've seen them dance on dining tables, chairs, benches, stoops, and even Pia's food truck, Toto.

“Coco!” Pia holds out a hand. “Get up here!”

I climb up obediently next to Pia. Dancing on tables isn't really my thing. A few months ago, I was dancing on a chair and kind of fell off it and ended up in the hospital. Of course, that had less to do with the dancing and more to do with the cocktail of prescription meds and booze and hash I'd accidentally-sort-of-on-purpose-but-no-mostly-accidentally taken.

But let's not talk about that right now.

Angie leans over to shout in my ear. “You okay, sugarnuts?”

“I'm fine. Totally awesome.”

“Good girl!”

From up here, I can finally see my boyfriend. That's Ethan, with his downy pale brown hair that he seems determined to brush up rather than brush down …

Wait.

Ethan isn't talking to Julia or Madeleine. He's with some girl I don't know. She's short and thin and pretty and smiling at him in the way that I smile at him and flicking her hair and—

OhmyGod.

I feel my heart miss a beat as I see my boyfriend,
my
boyfriend, lean in to her, grinning, trace his finger slowly down her cheek, and—

Oh, my gosh, he's kissing her. Ethan is kissing
her,
not
me. HER.

My stomach flips over so fast that I lose my balance, falling face-first to the floor.

Please tell me I didn't just fall off a coffee table in a crowded nightclub. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease …

I just want to hide right here and not get up, ever. Maybe I could roll under the coffee table and live there. It would be so nice and quiet.

But before I can settle in for life, Angie and Pia pull me up.

Pia is laughing. “Coco! Killer moves.”

I scan the crowd, trying to see Ethan, but the place is too busy.

“Are you on something again?” Angie peers into my pupils.

“No! No, no, no,” I say quickly. “I'd never—I mean, not again, you know, I wouldn't—”

Pia narrows her eyes at me. “Are you sure?”

“Totally sure.” I smile as brightly as I can. “I just lost my balance. Um, and I have to pee.”

“Do you want us to come with you, ladybitch?” asks Angie.

“No, no. I know how to pee. I've been doing it for, like, years …

I feel sick.

The bathroom is full of girls, all gossiping and preening and laughing. I push my way in to the only empty stall, locking the door behind me, and sit down on the toilet, my breath coming in stops and starts.

I lean on my knees, staring at my feet, trying to calm down. I hate these shoes. They're my work shoes. I only wore them because I hate all my other shoes more.

My boyfriend is cheating on me.

My chest hurts. I can't breathe.

How do I deal with this? What do I do now? Like, seriously, what am I supposed to
do
? One of the other assistants at the preschool where I work introduced us a few months ago. And Ethan seemed, you know, really great.

I didn't, like,
fall
for him immediately or anything. But he has a good job and he seemed nice and all that. And he asked
me
out. Me. And my family—I mean, Julia and my father—said he sounded great.

So I went out with him.

But then I started caring about him, because that's the kind of person I am.

Plus, it's way easier to be twenty-one and living in New York City if you have a boyfriend. I don't know why, it just is. Ethan is someone I can hang out with when my friends are busy, you know? If I'm feeling lonely, I can text him. We go to the movies together. He just makes me feel secure.

Or he did.

Who the hell is that girl, anyway? How dare she kiss another girl's boyfriend as though it's a totally okay thing to do?

But maybe, oh, gosh, maybe he didn't tell her he had a girlfriend. And it looked like
he
was kissing
her
first, not the other way around …

Breathe, Coco. Breathe.

The last time I felt like this was at prom. When I found out Eric—the guy I'd been crushing on, lusting after, pining for, seriously, just pick a verb, you know what I mean—had just slept with my (now former) best friend. I'd liked him for so long, it was like being punched. And then—no, actually, I can't talk about Eric right now, I can't even think about him. I'll get even more upset.

And now Ethan is cheating on me. My first real boyfriend ever.

I'm such a loser.

If I was like Pia or Angie or any of the other girls, I would unlock the toilet door, walk back out there, right up to Ethan, and slap him, yelling, “How dare you cheat on me?” Or, “It's over, motherfucker, yippee-kay-yay!”

But I can't. I'm not like them. I'm too scared of doing something I can't undo.

Anyway, all I really want to say is: “How can you treat me like this when I'm always so nice to you?”