When In Rome

I spent most of the toga party in the girls’ bathroom.

I kept going in and out to do coke with Nicola, then getting caught up in conversations; after a while it made more sense just to stay. Plus it was a prime observation post: I stood on the lid of the leftmost toilet and watched everything from above like a security camera, omniscient.

For some reason, this party was even more debauched and louche than our usual high school parties. Maybe it was because it was in a rented dance studio instead of someone’s house, or because we were all wearing bedsheets, or maybe there was a sale on drugs, but everyone got very fucked up very quickly.

I personally was on acid and coke, on top of smoking joints and drinking. I hadn’t planned it that way, it was a fluke of opportunity, but since it happened, I made sure to tell everyone I saw about this bonkers combo platter of drugs I was on, in case anyone had forgotten how hardcore I was.

At sixteen and three-fourths, I had so many sexual partners that I had to keep a list of them in my notebook, or I would forget some. I didn’t know whether to put the blowjobs on the list, and if so, whether I should include the partials or only the ones that ended in release, so I left them off. Then I stopped counting people who only got it a little bit in, or left no deposit of semen, but the list was still too long to keep memorized, and it was growing. The other night, I was about to have sex with a lifeguard at the Yorkville public pool, until Alice and Hope were like, Uccch, at least go inside.

Lately, I’d fixed my sights on Zach Robbins, a senior who’d just broken up with his longtime girlfriend, Megan. He had not indicated any particular interest in me, despite my flirting,  but I was undeterred. Plenty of people who weren’t interested in me slept with me anyway.

By midnight, Zach was drinking hard liquor straight from the bottle, his toga bunched around his waist like the Baby New Year. I saw him on the dance floor and he grabbed me around the waist, pulling me in close: There she is. I could taste his bitter breath, that curdled mix of beer, liquor, cigarettes, and sweat I’d learned to associate with impending sex, with the relief of an urgent anxiety, and I got excited.

What’s up?, I said. Nothing, he said, his hands on my ass. Just saying hello. His friend Rob called out to him, and Zach disentangled from me, put one hand on my shoulder and kind of patted it as he moved past. Come find me later, he said wetly into my ear.

I rolled away, elated, a promise in my pocket. And then I saw Megan come in, her girlfriends at her side. She was trying to put a good face on things, but you could see from her swollen eyes, the line between them, the woozy way she stood: she was a mess.

It was discomfiting. I didn’t know Megan, but she’d always seemed like a cool chick, like she had some equanimity, which I admired. Now she looked desperate, scanning the room like a lighthouse searching for a wreck. I had the strong desire to hide, not that I had done anything I needed to hide from. I just didn’t want to look at her like this, or vice versa.

I went to go find Alice and Hope. Why wasn’t I hanging out with them that night? Too busy doing coke with Nicola. Alice and Hope would have joined in, but they disliked Nicola more than they liked cocaine. They had colonized the closed-off stairwell with some of the prime guys: Drew, who’d just started going out with Hope, and Ollie Wythe, who Alice was seeing on and off. Or he was seeing her on and off. It wasn’t really Alice’s decision.

They acted like the stairwell was some kind of VIP room – whenever the door opened, they yelled for it to be shut. If I wasn’t going to sit down on the stairs with them, smoke a joint and chill like a normal person instead of hopping around babbling, I might as well just retake my position in the bathroom.

I stood on my lifeguard perch and watched girls lean in to the mirror, their long necks and googly eyes, the two-headed monsters they made. Jennifer Berghardt tapped some tobacco out of a cigarette and poured in a little coke, then lit it and passed it my way, holding it upright so the ash didn’t fall off the end. I approached it carefully from underneath, doing the coke-smoking limbo. If the ash fell, you lost all the potency.

Right away I was feeling it: the rightness that rang through me; the tinnitus it left. The night kept splitting apart, separating into layers of red and green like bad reception on an old TV, but now it had come together again. Everything impossible was now inevitable.

Somebody called out a greeting to me: A freshman named Leah. As a graduating junior, I did not ordinarily acknowledge freshmen, but Leah was the younger sister of a party friend of ours, and she’d become kind of a mascot among us girls – an exceptionally pretty, sweet, fresh, adorable mascot, of whom you could not help but be fond. Leah genuinely looked up to me and Alice and Hope; she thought we were teaching her lessons worth learning: how to get guys to buy you drinks, how to dress so that doormen and bartenders will ignore your baby-fat face, how to fuck and get fucked up and come out of it looking like you had a good time.

Leah had a glow about her that night – I guess everyone did, since I was on acid, which I kept forgetting in the rush of the coke – but she had an apricot glow that was so dewy and plump, you wanted to bite her shoulder, feel the delicious resistance of her flesh. Her toga was wrapped to expose her toast-brown midriff, and she had a brilliant red jewel lodged in her bellybutton.

Ooh, said everyone, flocking to admire it, and I wanted to kill myself for not thinking of it first.

I mean, all of this was upping the stakes so high for me. I was always the one with the bared midriff. I had the smallest waist, and the largest hip-to-waist ratio, among my friends. I even had abs, before abs were cool, because I was always sucking in my exposed stomach. If I could have figured out, as Leah had, how to loop the sheet around my neck so that it crossed over my breasts, my famous stomach would have been fully on view tonight, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Leah still had her jewel.

And now I was going to have to publicly acknowledge how adorable she was, and how much, as her elder, I approved of her: Squeal of joy, you look great, kiss kiss. I went through the motions while watching myself going through the motions and grading myself on how well I went through the motions. Very well, I thought. Very nearly sincere.

Somehow I knew that it was not her fault, that she was actually a lovely girl, and if I’d thought there was anything better out there for a young woman than doing drugs and fucking guys from parties, bars, and nightclubs, I’d have wished that for her. Since there wasn’t another acceptable alternative, I didn’t know. She would do it and succeed, I guessed, but at what price? Did she have any idea what a den of wolves it was out there? If Zach saw her, he was going to drop any notion of me, that was for sure.

I caught a glimpse in the mirror of my enormous pupils, my mottled pallor, my cracked, ashy lips ringed with the dried remnants of lipstick, and I knew what it felt like to be old and used up. I was aware that I was very young to be having this feeling, and that if I already knew I was on my way out, it was only going to go downhill from here. The Leah Jacobses had arrived, and they weren’t going away.

The bathroom had become oppressive. I went downstairs with Nicola to buy cigarettes and a lollipop, because Jesus Christ, my jaw. Such a shock when you walked outside and the whole matrix changed, the air hot and dense, smelling of tar and summer garbage.

Zach and Megan were arguing on the sidewalk, attended by their friends. She was weeping, shrieking at him: You fucking asshole, you fucking LIAR! He shouted back at her: I don’t give a fuck, you crazy bitch! Her friends were tugging on her arms, trying to get her to walk away, but she was intent on some kind of satisfaction from him.

I know what you’re doing!, she screamed.

It’s none of your fucking business!

She lunged at Zach with her nails out; Rob caught him under the armpits to keep him from striking back. I scurried past them with Nicola, maintaining an expression of innocent concern, like, Gosh, I’m so sorry this is happening. I hope everyone will be all right.

Everybody went nuts that night. This kid Noel had to be talked down from the roof. Noel was a big cokehead – little guy, but big cokehead. After a while it stopped being fun. This other guy Matt, who’d stood up in the auditorium when Jesse Jackson visited our school to pledge aloud, “I will NOT do drugs,” and who had taken shit every time he did drugs since, went to talk to him.

Someone came down for reinforcements: Matt’s talking Noel out of suicide, somebody get up there and help. If I’d had any good reasons against it I might have tried to intervene.

By three a.m., the kegs were empty, and the hard liquor was gone. People staggered, some barefoot, towards the stairs, the dirty hems of their bedsheets dragging through puddles of beer. The coke was gone. Nicola was going home.

I floated through the wreckage of the party, looking for Zach, and found him of course in the stairwell, with Alice and Hope and Ollie and Drew. There she is, he said, for the second time that night, and I agreed. My most notable attribute was my existence.

We all went to Ollie’s house, where I had sex with Zach. He was rough, like drunk teenage boys will be, his bones bumping my bones. This was what I’d wanted so much. I was aware that I was still tripping, and that it would be nice to have a conversation, or even a pen and my notebook, but I had neither, so when we were done, I went into the bathroom and talked to myself in my head.

Leah Jacobs and her jewel were coming for me. I was going to be the next Megan. No, I’d never let myself get like that over a guy, I never had and never would. My spite was too strong.

Still, it was clear that I was getting too old for this. I could think about retiring; it wouldn’t even be that bad. But then I’d never find love.

I had to keep at it.

(2014)