doors that looked more like a set of glass-paneled windows and gazed out onto the pool that had been installed over Mrs. Amory’s objections. The rest of the rooms on the second floor—bedrooms, mostly—would be in high demand later tonight, but not now; it wasn’t late enough for coupling off. And I didn’t see a single person as I crossed from the rear of the house to the front.
I arrived at the main staircase, grand and twisting and ornately carved. For a long time I stood there, surveying the scene below. The lights in the front hall and living room were dim, the furniture pushed to the side to make way for three aluminum kegs and a massive pair of speakers, pumping out an old Rolling Stones song. Chandler liked to say its students hailed from around the globe, and they did. Mostly, though, they hailed from Boston and New York. Jamie’s hometown of Avon was exactly two hours from both cities—a nothing drive. And the place was already packed, people dancing and talking, drinking beer from translucent cups, taking jerky hits off sloppily wrapped joints.
I began fumbling along the wall with my hand. At last I found the light switch. My heart fluttered in my chest, a giggle slipped from my mouth, and thinking to myself, What fun, I flipped it. Immediately all activity stopped. Everyone looked up, dazed and blinking. I waited for the laughter that would follow as soon as their vision adjusted. But nobody laughed. Nobody even moved. They stared up at me, eyes all the way open, as if someone had put a cold fingertip to the backs of their necks. And then Maddie uttered a small cry, brought her hand to her mouth. I placed my palm on the banister, started down the stairs.
“Happy Independence Day, Slim Jim,” I sang out. Nica called Jamie Slim Jim, Nica and no one else.
Jamie stood there, plastic beer cup in his hand, his face pale under its tan and covered in sweat. He swallowed, or tried to, the muscles knotting in his throat. I watched Ruben go up to him, say something, but he pushed Ruben aside, moved swiftly to the stairs, his eyes never leaving mine. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His voice was harsh, strange. I could see the whites on all four sides of his eyes. Sexy, sleepy, stoned Jamie—mad.
I was unable to speak, only to look.
He dropped his cup, grabbed my arm. I could feel the pressure of each individual finger digging into my flesh. “I said, what do you think you’re doing?”
I was frightened, but I knew instinctively that I couldn’t show it. I had to bluff, make him back off. I blinked several times in rapid succession, jammed down the corners of my mouth. And then, in the coolest tone I could manage, I said, “You’re breaking my arm. Let go.”
To my surprise he did. To my even greater surprise I saw that beneath his anger was fear. And in that instant I understood how disturbed what I’d done really was, how sick, how fucked up. Jamie was scared of me, me. I brushed past him, walked over to the kegs, drew myself a cup. I drank it down as everybody watched. I drew myself another. Drank that one down, too.
After a bit, someone hit the light switch, plunging the downstairs back into darkness. Then a different someone turned up the volume on the stereo. And, slowly, the party started up again.
I should have left at that point. I’d gone to make a scene, I’d made a scene. Mission accomplished. I stayed, though. I’m not sure why. Maybe to punish myself. Sticking around certainly caused me misery. I’d been banished in spirit if not fact from the party, and wandering through it I felt beyond isolated, near wild with loneliness. It was almost as if I was wearing Nica’s magnetism the same way I was wearing her clothes, only I’d put it on inside out: I repelled people. I’d take one step toward them, they’d take two back from me. Or maybe I stayed in the hopes I could make Jamie forgive me.
The self-consciousness I was feeling was unbearable. What I needed to do was get away from myself, and the beer wouldn’t let me. Not fast enough, anyway. I found a bottle with a couple inches of vodka in it sitting, abandoned, on the piano stool. I gagged as I tipped its contents down my throat, swallowing as quickly as the suction allowed. It was like drinking gasoline. But I did it, again and again, until the bottle was empty. And soon it was as if the different parts and functions of my brain were scrambled and mashed together so that hearing was jumbled up with seeing and seeing with tasting and tasting with smelling and my thoughts were mixed up with all this, too, so that I couldn’t tell what went where.
My cheeks and neck and lips were hot, burning up. I considered losing the wig. I didn’t, though. Remembering Mr. Amory’s liquor cabinet, I decided to cool down with another drink instead. I was having a tough time walking, so I made my way to the back of the house by holding on to the furniture, one hand over the other. But even being careful, I tripped—on a curled edge of carpet, I think, or maybe my own feet—and went crashing into the row of chairs. Distantly I observed the blood from the gash in my knee pooling in my shoe, the funny angle my wrist was bent at. Finally I picked myself up, climbed the stairs, reached the study. That’s when I passed the French doors and saw Nica.
A few minutes later I was bleeding all over my reflection in the pool, gauzy with pain and confusion.
A light came on.
A voice called my name.
Who did the voice belong to? I don’t know. The scene ends there in my memory. A movie stopped mid-reel.
I woke up the next morning. It wasn’t quite dawn yet, the air suffused with the dull glow that comes just before first light. I reached groggily for my swivel-neck lamp, grasping at empty space until I realized that my lamp wasn’t there because I wasn’t home. Bolting upright, I flung my gaze around the room that wasn’t mine. Nothing offered the barest hint as to where I was. And for a few bug-eyed seconds I wondered if I was dead. Then I remembered. I was at Jamie’s. I remembered other things, too.
Slowly I eased myself back down onto the pillow, became very still. To move even a muscle was to stir up another hideous memory from the night before. They arrived anyway, though, in wave after scalding wave. Finally, all the waves had broken over me, and I lay there cringing in shame.
But I couldn’t cringe for long because something was tugging at my attention, impatient and demanding a response: pain. I was in a lot of it. My hand, in particular, the one I’d used to break my spill over the chairs. I held it up to my eyes. It looked like a rubber glove filled with water, not a knuckle in sight. I touched my face. It felt soft, shapeless, pummeled. There was a ridged scab above my eyebrow, and a lump as big as a walnut above that, and my upper lip was twice its normal size. The shoulder that had hit the ground first ached. So did the hipbone. So did the knee.
Was all this damage the result of my drugged-out, boozed-up attempt to pass through a door without opening it first, falling seven or eight feet (the way the Amorys’ house was built into the hill, the second story at the back was only half a story high), or had something happened after, something during the period my memory went so disturbingly blank? At the same time I posed this question, it dawned on me where exactly I was: the spare bedroom, directly down the hall from Jamie’s. It was one of last year’s hookup rooms. This year’s, too, judging from the stiffness of the sheets beneath me. Suddenly I felt a fear so big it filled my head, the room, the entire house. Had I lost my virginity? And then I felt a fear so big it filled everything, had no bounds at all. Or had my virginity been taken from me? All at once I was sick, barely having time to turn my face to the trash can next to the bed before an acid liquid was spewing out my mouth, my nose, dripping down my chin.
When I was emptied out, I reached for the unopened bottle of Evian on the nightstand. I drank, desperately thirsty. The water calmed me down. Someone, I realized, had left it for me. The trash can, too. A sexual predator worrying about his victim waking up dehydrated or making a mess on the rug? I hadn’t been raped. And everything I was wearing the night before I was still wearing now except for the wig. I hadn’t had sex either.
That I’d put myself in the position where such things were possible, though, was appalling, borderline grotesque. No more prescription drugs mixed with alcohol for me. No more prescription drugs period. This time I’d escaped with a few cuts and bruises, a minor sprain. Nasty injuries, to be sure, and painful, but nothing that wouldn’t heal. I’d gotten lucky.
Two months later