“You too, man. It’s going to be great.”
“I’m-a tell you what’s going to be great: this party,” Aaron said, and he began pacing, counting on his fingers. “I need for you to go and get some seltzer, for spritzers. Also we gotta put away all of my dad’s books and writing so it doesn’t get damaged. Also, call this girl; her dad threatened to call the cops if I called again; say you’re with Greenpeace.”
“I’m not going to remember this; hold on,” I said, taking an index card from Aaron’s coffee table. I was numbering it with a Sharpie, from one, when the weed hit me.
“Whoa. Wow.”
“Uh-oh,” Aaron said. He looked up.
“Whoa.”
“You feeling it?”
Is my brain falling out of my head? I thought.
I looked down at the index card that said 1)get seltzer, and 1) get seltzer twisted back, as if it had decided to fall off the card. I looked up at Aaron’s bookshelves and they looked the same, but as I turned, they moved in frames. It wasn’t like the slowness that came from being underwater; it was like I was under air—thick and heavy air that had decided to follow me. For being high, it felt pretty heavy.
“You feeling it?” Aaron repeated.
I looked at his stand-up ashtray, filled with crumpled cigarettes and the one clear, shining metal cigarette.
“It’s like the king of the cigarette butts!” I said.
“Oh, boy,” Aaron was like. “Craig. Are you going to be able to do the stuff for the party?”
Was I? I was able to do anything. Here I was making clever statements like “king of the cigarette butts”; if I went outside, there was no telling what I would be capable of.
“What’s first?” I asked.
Aaron gave me a few bucks to get the seltzer, but just as I was opening the door to go out into the world, his buzzer rang.
“It’s Nia,” Aaron said, leaping to the closed-circuit phone in his kitchen, which was full of grapefruits and dark wood cabinets.
“She’s coming?” I asked.
Nia was in our class; she was half Chinese and half Jewish; she dressed well. Every day she came in with something different—a chain of SpongeBob Burger King toys strung around her neck; one asymmetrical, giant, red-plastic hoop earring; black clown circles on her cheeks. I think her accessories were a courtesy meant to distract from her small, lucrative body and baby-doll face. If she let it all go natural, if she just let her hair swing down the way it would have if she’d grown up in a field with the wind, she’d make all us boys explode.
“Nia’s pretty hot, huh,” Aaron said, hanging up the phone.
“She’s okay.”
We sat watching the door like we were waiting for the mama bird to bring us food. She knocked.
“Heyyyy,” Aaron called, beating me.
“Hi!” I said. We rushed to the doorknob; Aaron gave a look, pulled it toward him, and there she was—in a green dress with a rainbow of fuzzy anklets on one leg. Her eyes were so big and dark that she seemed even more tiny and spindly, on high-heeled shoes that threw her forward at us and made her dress outline her little breasts.
“Boys,” she said. “I think someone has been smoking pah-aht.”
“No way,” Aaron said.
“My friends are coming. When’s the party starting?”
“Five minutes ago,” Aaron said. “You want to play Scrabble?”
“Scrabble!” Nia put her bag down—it was shaped like a hippo. “Who plays Scrabble?”
“Well, I do, duh, and Craig does, too”—I didn’t, actually—“and we’re some smart guys, seeing as we got in.”
“I heard!” Nia grabbed her hippo bag and hit Aaron with it. “I did too!” As an afterthought, she hit me. “Congratulations!”
“Group hug!” Aaron announced, and we got together, a tiered threesome—Nia’s head came up to my chin; my head came up to Aaron’s chin. I put my hand around Nia’s waist and felt her warmth and how narrow she was. Her palm curled around my shoulder. We pushed our torsos together in a sort of ballet. I could feel Nia’s breath between us. I turned to look—“Scrabble,” Aaron said. He went across the living room, took it out of one of the bookshelves. He put it on the floor and we sat, Aaron between me and Nia, the ashtray taking up the fourth spot.
“House rules,” Aaron said as he flipped over the tiles. “If you don’t have any words to put on the board, you can make a word up, as long as you have an actual definition for that word in your head. If your definition makes the other people laugh, you get the points, but otherwise, you lose that many points.”
“We can make up words?” I asked. This was brimming with possibilities. I could make up Niaed—what happens when Nia touches you, you get Niaed. That would make her laugh. Or not.
“What about Chinese words?” Nia asked.
“You have to know what they mean and be able to explain them.”
“Oh. That shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiled wickedly.
“Who’s going first?”
“Can we smoke?”
“So demanding.” Aaron gave her the metal cigarette—I said no this time; I’d had enough.
For her first word, Nia put down M-U-W-L-I.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Chinese word.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Uh, cat.”
“That’s ridiculous. How do we know if muwli is real?” I turned to Aaron.
He shrugged. “Benefit of the doubt?”
Nia stuck out her tongue at me and damn it was a cute tongue. Is that a ring? I thought. Can’t be. Wait—it’s gone.
“I swear.” she said. “‘Come here, little muwli!’ See?”
“I’m checking you on your next one,” I said.
“The Internet’s over there.” Aaron was like.
“But while you’re gone, we’re going to give you all consonants.” Nia smiled.
“Is it my go?” I put down M-O-P off M-U-W-L-I. Ten points.
Aaron put down S-M-A-P off M-O-P. “That’s a cross between a smack and a slap. Like, ‘I’m-a smap you.’”
Nia laughed and laughed. I chuckled even though I didn’t want to. Aaron got the points.
Nia put down T-R-I-I-L.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s a trill, you know, like a trill on the flute, except the first L is lowercase and the second is uppercase!”
“That’s not trill, that’s ‘tree-eel’!”
“Okay, fine.” She switched the letters. Now it said T-R-I-L-I.
“Trill-ee! What is a trilhee?”
“An unmentionable act.”
Aaron laughed so hard that he just had to ease his body into Nia’s, leaning on her shoulder. She pushed back, tilting her flank into him.
I saw where this was going. I made eye contact with Nia and here’s what her eyes said:
Craig, we’re all headed to the same school. I’m going to need a boyfriend going in, to give me some stability, a little bit of backup, you know? Nothing serious. You’re cool, but you’re not as cool as Aaron. He has pot and he’s so much more laid back than you; you spent the last year studying for this test; he didn’t lift a finger for it. That means he’s smarter than you. Not that you’re not smart, but intelligence is very important in a guy—it really is the most important thing, up there with sense of humor. And he has a better sense of humor than you, too. It doesn’t hurt that he’s taller. So I’ll be your friend, but right now let’s let this develop. And don’t be jealous. That would be a waste of everybody’s time.