8
House Party
ATTIRE: Black T-shirt, jeans, weekend Jordans.
GOALS: (1) A meaningful exchange with Aarti Puri, (2) not getting hurled down a flight of stairs.
SPECIAL ARTILLERY: Year-old condom from health class in wallet, because optimism plus preparedness is like teaming up Superman and Batman.
“Remember,” Judith said as the car’s navigation system announced that they had arrived at their destination. “Same rules as back home.”
“No drinking, no drugs . . .” Norris recited listlessly, eye on the house in question. “No calls to your phone tomorrow morning and text you by eleven for pickup. I know, Mom.”
She’d given him the exact same speech at his first sleepover at Eric’s. They had been in the fourth grade at the time. To make matters worse, this spirit-fingered gathering was at Meredith’s house—a fun fact Norris had learned only a few hours ago via text. Maddie assured him there wouldn’t be any pig’s blood over the doorway.
The address Maddie had given him had taken them to the deeper suburbs of Pflugerville and onto a street with impressive two-story homes. The neighborhood was at least one full income bracket over their own garden of apartments, and Norris recognized a few of the cars from the school’s parking lot parked alongside the overcrowded street. There weren’t that many turquoise Beetles around, thank God.
“You have a job, and I’m already dropping you off at pool parties.” Judith smiled, touching the back of his neck and folding the flipped-out tag back out of sight. “Not so bad, this Austin thing, huh?”
“Right,” he said, hurrying out of the car. “I’ll text you later. Bye, Mom.”
He’d omitted the deal he’d struck with Maddie, the flip side of which was that she had the misconception that he wanted to attend this . . . situation.
The party was in full swing through the door, and the ground was booming as Norris rang the bell.
NotMeredithNotMeredithNotMeredithNotMeredith—
A small and very chipper Asian girl with auburn streaks in her hair answered, a lipstick-rimmed Solo cup in one hand. She eyed him for a second and her smile widened.
“Hi,” she greeted. “Anderson or Trinity?”
She didn’t seem to associate any previous bad experiences with Norris. Thank God.
“Hi!” Norris matched, smiling as widely as he could and hoping his face/soul did not crack. “Maddie invited me.”
“Maddie M.? That makes you Anderson then.” She smiled, leading him in. “Sorry, we’re keeping a tally.” She motioned to a gigantic disarray of fluffy white towels. Norris imagined they’d started the day neatly folded by some poor mother or, more likely, maid. He guessed that this party’s embryonic form was a pool party that had now been going on for hours.
“Drinks are in the kitchen, pool’s in the back, the boys are barbecuing on the hour, bathrooms are upstairs—already clogged, ew—and Meredith and Maddie should be . . . somewhere around here.” She then laughed for no reason.
It felt like he’d stumbled into a rerun of The O.C. or some other nineties show with angsty midtwenties models cast as kids escaping Austin’s pummeling sun in bikini tops and basketball shorts.
He could hear water splashing and girls’ shrieks from what he assumed to be the pool in the backyard and didn’t have to wonder if there was even one adult present on the premises in the middle of the afternoon. This was the other half, he realized. Kids who had never spent a single moment of their lives not fitting in. It was the sort of party he thought existed only in the minds of screenwriters trying to aggrandize the high school experience—to make kids in basements feel like their Mario Kart parties and stolen beer cans from their dad’s garage mini-fridges lacked meaning, which to be fair, they might.
Norris took a deep breath and went in.
Twenty-nine minutes and two hot dogs later, Norris still hadn’t seen Maddie or Aarti. As far as he could tell, the party combined kids from two different schools that seemed to share a football field. It was a Canadiens and Quebec Nordiques situation. One landmass; two designated NHL teams.
So far, no one had mocked or insulted him, and he’d made chitchat with a guy whose Rick and Morty T-shirt had caught his eye. He might have learned the kid’s name, but he chose to disentangle the moment the conversation stopped flowing naturally.
Norris took a lap around the house, catching bits of scintillating conversations as he moved.
“It was a frozen hot dog she made out with,” some girl said. “Frozen, that’s the sick part!”
“I hate when they do that,” someone was whispering to a friend in the corner. “When you know they hate you and . . . Hi, Brittany!”
It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do at parties. He just found them viscerally boring: like getting dressed for a big night out and then spending your evening in an intermission lobby, bumping against people you vaguely recognize and fumbling to align conversation topics for brief windows of validation. He refused to believe that this was the meter by which people measured their lives. He was getting bored, Aarti was still nowhere to be seen, and Norris thought it was a good time to send Maddie a text calling off their “deal.” He didn’t want to get invited to parties; he wanted a chance to talk to—
“Are you doing that thing where you pretend to text in a corner of a party so people assume you have plans at another, much cooler party?”
As if summoned by the mere thought of her, Aarti’s voice over his shoulder startled him.
“Worse: weather app,” Norris blurted, proud of his quick recovery. He pocketed the phone and tried to appear nonchalant as he turned to face her.
The black of her hair had already begun to peek through the red dye, and this time, instead of Parisian, she had a whole Los Angeles thing going: oversize sunglasses framing her hair, cutoff jeans, and a baggy sleeveless T-shirt, all of which looked both secondhand and very expensive, like those celebrities caught at the gas station who still managed to look unattainable. She was better dressed than everyone else at the moment. Norris was kind of in awe of her ability to move across the globe through wardrobe change alone.
“I was beginning to think you were a ghost,” he said with a throat clear.
“Now that you mention it”—Aarti smiled—“an Indian exchange student did fall down a well fifteen years ago.”
“Man, I hope not,” Norris said. “I’m screwed if Anderson turns out to be a horror movie high school. The black guy always dies first.”
She laughed, which somehow made her eyes sparkle even more than usual. God, how wasn’t every guy in school after her 24/7? Or maybe they were—to Maddie’s point, he just didn’t know.
“Come on,” Aarti said, already walking ahead. A few people were giving her odd looks as she squeezed past them, leading Norris to a door that led to a concrete basement filled with unmatched couches and a pool table, pushed to the side.
“The best thing about Meredith’s parties is that only about half of those in attendance know that her house even has a basement,” Aarti said. “Which means that booze is always untouched.”
The crowd was sparser and seemed less magazine chiseled than the above swim and football teams. She navigated them to a corner of the basement where a guy was manning the makeshift bar and currently trying to spin a bottle in an attempt to impress a couple of girls but failing miserably.
“Dennis!” she said, leaning both forearms on the table and turning what Norris might assume—he was the sort of pervert to look—were Bs into Cs.
“Can you pass us the rum? And a couple of Cokes.”
The boy behind the counter, presumably Dennis, was shirtless, with hair still wet from the pool.
“ID, please.”
“That never gets old, Dennis,” Aarti said, rolling her eyes as she grabbed a couple of red Solo cups.
“I’m hilarious,” Dennis confirmed, reaching under the makeshift bar.
“New kid?” Dennis said, shooting Norris an inquisitive look as he handed her the Cokes and a handle of rum.
“Norris,” Aarti confirmed. “Norris Last Name, meet Dennis Meyer.” Without waiting for either party to acknowledge the introduction, she followed up with a not too subtle, “So, Dennis, have you seen . . . him around?”
Dennis shook his head, almost sympathetically. Norris reviewed his memory of Maddie’s social geography lesson.
“No, sorry. I’ve seen his girlfriend, though. She’s on the second floor with the rest of the cheer squad,” Dennis continued.
“Fantastic.” Aarti sighed.
“Is there going to be drama?”
“Not from me.”
“If there is drama, can you two make it happen in a kiddie pool filled with Jell-O?”
Aarti rolled her eyes and grabbed Norris by the forearm, dragging him away. “You’re a prince, Dennis.”
“Actually, let’s sit on the couch,” Aarti suddenly said as they headed back toward the stairs, grabbing him by the forearm and moving them across the space.
“Couch it is,” Norris agreed. He sincerely did not care; an underpass would be okay if it meant spending more time with her.
They settled into a nearby couch, and Aarti brought her legs up under her, taking another look around the room. She seemed intent on keeping an eye on the staircase that led back to the ground floor.
“By the way, it’s okay if you don’t drink,” Aarti said, nodding over to his untouched red cup.
“I drink,” Norris quickly said, and then proved it with a large gulp.
Of course, Norris had drunk before. The drinking age in Quebec was three years under the one in America, which meant that he and Eric had started to chip away at that underage rite of passage at an even younger age. One of Norris’s many “sorority house behaviors,” according to Eric, was that he didn’t particularly like the taste of beer.
They both sipped their drinks in silence for a moment, watching the room. All things considered, the basement was where Norris should have been all along. It was where all the misfit toys of the party had naturally retreated. The two girls sitting on the stairs were retaking their umpteenth selfie and, at the pool table, a kid from math class smeared an unsubtle booger along the wooden table.
“Gross,” Aarti commented, catching Norris’s grimace. That she was also a natural people watcher was the latest in an apparently infinite series of similar qualities.
“How many beers is that finger accidentally going to slip into throughout the night?” Norris pondered with a grimace. Aarti’s reply was interrupted as two more girls threw her a long look and then turned away the second Aarti made defiant eye contact back.
Norris was beginning to realize that for all these kids, life in Austin hadn’t started nineteen days prior. They were all in the middle of their own dramas and lives that he had simply been dropped into without a road map.
“I’m sorry for bogarting you, by the way,” Aarti said throwing another glance at the stairs. “Sitting with the girl getting dirty looks from people can’t be fun.”
“Right, I had a pretty packed schedule of awkwardly standing in the corner and trying to guess the Wi-Fi password on my phone.”
She smiled again.
“I have to say . . . I did not expect to see you here,” Aarti said. “Doesn’t seem like your type of crowd. The jocks and cheerleaders.”
Norris shrugged. “Is it yours?”
She took an assessing look around the room. “Not particularly. I still haven’t found my tribe. Going on seventeen years now. I just didn’t . . . I don’t know. I didn’t want them to think . . .”
“That this Ian drama had you huddled under a blanket in bed, eating ice cream with your hands?”
She laughed. Norris smiled. God, he wanted to make her laugh again.
“So,” she said, taking it upon herself to change the topic as she finally turned to face him. “Has anyone given you a tour yet?”
“Of Meredith Santiago’s house? No . . . but I’m guessing there’s at least one trap room where you have to cut off your own arm to get the key to the exit.”
“Of Austin, ass.”
“You mean there’s more than school, restaurants, and football fields?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Well, you’d be the right person to know then. You, um, skip class a lot,” Norris noted in a tone he hoped wasn’t too accusatory. It really wasn’t any of his business. “You can’t think it’s all that great either.”
“Been keeping track, have you?” she asked with a quick smirk. Norris shrugged as nonchalantly as he could.
“I keep up with the assignments,” she went on. “I just have better stuff to do with my time than track the speed of Mrs. Garrett’s nose hair growth.”
“It’s growing pretty fas—”
“Aarti!” someone interrupted. A boy was perched at the top of the stairs, looking at the two of them, unsure of what he was actually seeing. “Jesus.” He tumbled down the stairs to approach them.
“Hello, Ian.”
Something about his aura of unearned self-confidence almost caught Norris off guard. He was tall enough, blond enough, trim enough, and all those enoughs together averaged up to handsome by high school standards. Sort of. In a boring, homegrown sort of way. Norris would bet money that his family owned a golden retriever named Bailey. Not that he was intimidated, of course. Not one bit.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” the guy grumbled.
“These parties are open doored, if I recall,” Aarti answered coolly. She was looking at him as if he were some outfit she disapproved of in a magazine: tacky. “Or did your girlfriend make you the designated bouncer tonight?”
“You haven’t answered any of my texts,” Ian said in a low, almost hurt voice, still only focused on Aarti.
“No, I haven’t,” she said with another sip of her drink. “I’m under no obligation to answer your texts, Ian, because I’m not your girlfriend. You already have one of those, remember? Even though you told me—swore to me—that you’d broken up. And just like that, I’m the town ho, macking on another girl’s boyfriend.”
Despite her detached demeanor, Norris was close enough to notice the new tension in Aarti’s back.
“C’mon,” Ian said, bringing his voice to a whisper. “Don’t be like that. I told you, it’s com—”
“Yes, complicated,” Aarti acknowledged. “I know just how complicated.”
Everything about her answer felt rehearsed, and suddenly their placement on this specific couch, right in the line of sight of whoever happened to be passing in front of the door upstairs, made complete sense.
“Who is this?” Ian asked instead, finally granting a measured look of concern at Norris.
“I’m Norris,” Norris said with a quick and empty smile.
Ian looked at him with a . . . sneer? The guy was actually sneering at him. All that was missing was the pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt.
Seemingly done with his evaluation of Norris, he shifted his attention back to Aarti. “Aarti, can we just please talk? Please.” There was something pleading in his voice that seemed to work.
Aarti turned to Norris, looking torn about leaving him even though she was already standing up.
“Um, are you going to be okay, Norris?” she asked. “I won’t be too long. I just need to deal with . . . this.”
“Oh yeah, sure, I’m good.” Norris smiled tightly. “No babysitter needed, really.”
Ian scoffed and Norris got a sudden, powerful urge to lock the guy in Meredith’s torture chamber and start peeling his skin away with a razor. No, not a torture razor either—an old shower razor that really needed you to dig into the skin.
Norris watched as the two of them disappeared up the staircase, already engaged in hushed whispers. Ian made a move to put his hand on the small of her back as they went up, which she swatted away, though not as fast as she could have in Norris’s biased opinion. And that is when he finally got it: she’d invited Norris down here exactly for this to happen.
Texas was turning him into a freaking idiot.
Norris was left on the couch alone, and suddenly, the thought of eating ice cream in bed with his fingers seemed downright appealing.