Devotion was a word from a song on the radio. I squeezed out the water from my tea bag. Ben seemed too at home in my house, at my table, drinking from my mug with hot air balloons on it. I said, Where do you live?
Ben said, Over in Southeast. Near 20th and Morrison.
I said, But you went to high school with my brother.
Ben said, My parents lived over here. But I crossed the river as soon as I could.
I said, Why?
He said, The east side is more my speed. More my kind of people.
I wanted to drill Ben with questions until he disappeared. I said, What are your kind of people?
Ben laughed. He looped his hair behind his ear. He said, Are you trying to get at something?
I didn’t like the way he laughed as if he knew more than I did about a question I had been the one to ask. I was just making conversation. I could have been reading the paper and making him drink his coffee in silence. I said, Where do your parents live now? Maybe his parents were dead.
Ben said, Arizona, of all places. You ever been there?
I said, No.
Ben said, I get it, if you like the sun. But it’s super dull there. Nothing’s happening.
Whatever he meant by that. Ben sat with his hands around his coffee cup as if he were as comfortable in our kitchen as he’d ever been in any room. Ben talked to me as easily as if I were, what, his friend, and he was too old to talk to me like that. He could have been in the kitchen in the past with my brother, but that didn’t mean he knew anything about it. If Ben thought our freezer would be stocked with Hot Pockets, he’d be wrong. Everything he said had a wink to it, and he didn’t care whether I understood or not. I said, What’s that necklace you’re wearing?
Ben’s fingers went to it. His body got still. He said, Oh, a friend gave it to me. And then he was quiet.
The toilet flushed upstairs.
Ben said, Oh hey Julie, don’t think I forgot about that R.E.M. tape.
I said, It doesn’t matter. Then, because the way he’d touched the bead made me think that he missed my brother, I said, Thanks. He turned the newspaper around to get a look at it.
I said, Do you keep old magazines?
He said, Some. What are you talking about, music magazines?
My dad came back into the room.
ERIKA CALLED TO ask me what she should wear to the party. She said she wanted to wear something regular but a little special. She said, Something PT will know is for him.
PT wasn’t going to be at this party. What was he going to do, show up with his hat and his bent-back paperback? I said, Some kind of accessory?
Erika said, I guess what I mean is, I got this shirt that I thought might be too tight, but maybe I should wear it?
I didn’t want to picture Erika in a tight black scoopneck, to see her in it and know she was wearing it to get PT, who wasn’t going to be there, to look at her chest. I told her she should wear the shirt if she felt like it.
Erika said, Ah! I’m asking you what you think!
I said, I just told you.
Erika said, Fine. Okay. I probably won’t wear it. She said, What are you going to wear?
Erika’s mom dropped her off at my house after dinner. Erika was wearing lipstick, or gloss, something that made her lips pink and shiny. She came into my room and took off her coat dramatically. She was wearing the tight shirt. She said, I brought a backup, so just tell me. The shirt looked exactly the way I had imagined — not imagined, but pictured without wanting to. It was impossible to look at Erika in the shirt and not look at her boobs, or the shadow of cleavage the shirt revealed. The cleavage was new to me. It was there — she had made it, somehow, be there. Erika’s boobs looked bigger than I’d thought they were. I didn’t want to notice that. I didn’t want to spend the party worrying about whether people thought Erika looked slutty in her shirt, or whether she felt slutty, standing around imagining what PT’s hands would feel like on her. Erika was wearing her matching seed-bead necklace. She said, You were right about accessories.
I had on my off-white thermal henley over a navy T-shirt and my dark jeans. I had a little silver ring I sometimes wore, with a turquoise chip in it. Erika rolled on more lip gloss and offered it to me. I said, No thanks. I hoped Erika would put her jacket back on before we left the house so my parents wouldn’t see her tight shirt and wonder why she was dressed that way, or why I was dressed the same way I always was.
It was drizzling lightly and we put up our hoods. A couple blocks away a streetlight went out just as we were passing under it. Erika said, Weird.
I said, It happens all the time.
Erika stopped in the shadow and looked over her shoulder. She said, Wait a second and went into her bag. She took out a flat, wide red-and-white box. She said, Want one?
I said, Where did you get those?
She said, This place on the east side I heard about. Near my dad’s. She said, They sell to anyone.
I said, You heard from who?
She said, These girls who were smoking at the bus stop.
I said, And you just went up and asked them? There was a lot missing from the story — like what exactly Erika had said to those girls, and what kind of girls they were, and whether they went to our school. And if they had offered her one of their cloves and if she’d taken it, and if she’d known how to smoke it, and if they’d been rude or nice to her in her fleece pullover and Sebagos. I said, Whoa. All these secrets.
Erika burst out laughing, so hard that she had to stop trying to light the clove she was trying to light by cupping her hands around it against the rain. She said, That coming from the most secretive person in the world. She fake-wiped tears from her eyes. The streetlight buzzed back on and she paranoidly tucked the unlit clove inside her hand. She said, Compared to you, I’m like an open book.
I said, Come on.
She said, An open telephone book.
We arrived at the party reeking of cloves. I’d been better at inhaling than I thought I’d be. I liked the feeling of drawing the smoke down until it crowded my lungs and then letting it out in a strong, steady jet. It felt like completing a sentence. The swimmer whose house it was, who was called, by everyone, Grapestuff, opened the door. He said, Ladies! He stood there with his long arms hanging, expectant, as if waiting for a hug. I said, Alexis invited us. Grapestuff showed us where to throw our coats and pointed us toward the basement.
He said, My parents are home, so. . He shrugged.
Erika said, That means no beer. That was fine with me. Pulling the clove smoke so deep into my lungs had left me lightheaded. Grapestuff had a basement from the seventies, when people made basements for parties and called them, what, rumpus rooms? Carpeted and wood-paneled and a built-in bar with bowls of potato chips and two-liters of soda on it. There was a pool table no one was playing on. Leaning against it were two of the pro swimmers, a gangly guy and a girl, and another girl who must have gone to a different school, all wearing their silk All County jackets. They looked out of place in the wood-paneled basement, angel aliens on dry land, as if we’d burn up if we touched them. Erika nudged me. She said, Should we talk to them? Maybe they want to play pool.
I said, Do you know how? and as I was saying it the guy pro raised his hand to wave to us.
Erika said, He’s waving at you. She was right. I was who he was looking at. Erika said, We should go over there. How hard is it to play pool?
The guy said, What was your name again? I told him, and he said to the girls he was with, Do you know who her brother is? And then he said my brother’s name.
The girl who didn’t go to our school looked me up and down. Her eyes were half-closed and she looked barely awake. She said, Oh yeah, that guy. She kind of looks like him, right?
I said, Not really.