I slouched around quietly, checking everything out, trying to stay away from situations that might erupt into a sudden ridicule/torture session and blow my cover.
Despite the civilizing influence of the unusually numer-ous drama people, there were a lot of these situations brew-ing. I mean: clumps of normal guys horsing around and asking each other “Who you lookin’ at, homo?” And gaggles of normal girls, any one of whom might suddenly decide it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.
That is one of life’s most trying and irritating situations.
Sam Hellerman and I have given it a catchy name: the Make-out/Fake-out. I don’t know if it has a real name. The object of the game isn’t actually to make you think they’re sincere 67
and go for it, which no one would be stupid enough to think, but just to watch you squirm and see how you’ll try to get out of it. You can’t win. You might as well just bite down and break open the cyanide capsule concealed in your false front tooth. If you’ve got one of those. It was fresh in my mind because there had just recently been a Make-out/Fake-out attempt on my dignity during PE class, and I could still feel the pain of having no cyanide capsule to make it all go away.
The danger zones were easy to avoid, though. Steer clear of the schools of sharks and flesh-eating piranhas. Avoid the sirens. Drift toward the playful mod dolphins, who are so busy being entranced with their own wonderfulness that they don’t even notice your ungainly boat paddling in their midst. “It’s quite a lagoon you’ve got here,” I said, to no one in particular.
Eventually, I drifted into a little basement room down some stairs at the end of the hall. This was presumably the TV room Sam Hellerman had mentioned. It was quite dark, and almost totally empty. There was a turned-off TV and a sofa, and on the sofa was this girl. She was staring intently at a candle that was burning on top of the TV and holding the smoking stub of a joint in a mall head-shop roach clip. You know, with feathers dangling from it, and I think maybe a pentagram or an ankh.
She didn’t have a full-on mod costume, but I could tell she was one of the funky CHS drama people because she had a Maximum R & B T-shirt underneath a crazy-looking denim and—what? Yarn?—yeah, it was a yarn ’n’ denim jacket that looked homemade. She had on this black soft cap that looked kind of military. And these little black glasses. I was pretty sure she was older than me, a junior maybe. The Who shirt was tiny and didn’t go down all the way and her belly looked really good, what I could see of it. I mean really good.
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She waved me over and said, “I’m trying to make the candle go out with the power of my mind.”
I walked over, unsure of what to do. She said I should sit down and help her. Concentrate, she said. I sat down next to her and stared at the candle. It didn’t go out.
“You call yourself a hypnotizer?” she said after a while.
No. I’m quite certain I had never said I was a hypnotizer. I hadn’t said anything. Part of me was off in the corner thinking, Maybe these are my people? Eccentric and funny and weird with good taste in music and off-the-wall hobbies, I mean. Another part of me realized that I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t exactly radiating Good Eccentric around here. But the biggest part of me was just staring at her bare stomach, which was, like, the nicest thing I’d ever seen in person, though I was trying to do it kind of sideways, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t seem like she was in much of a noticing mood, to be honest.
She asked me if I wanted the roach. Now, the thing I said sounds really stupid and goofy, but I know from having watched people smoke pot all my life that it’s the thing you say. I still felt like a big ass saying it, though.
“I’m cool.”
Never in the history of the world had there been a less accurate statement.
She shrugged and popped the roach in her mouth—
reminding me, weirdly, of my mom—and grabbed my half-filled cup and drank it all in one long swallow.
“Fiona,” she said after a lengthy grimace. “I’m in drama.
I’m an actor and I also do costume. What’s your story?”
Wow, a female actor. Just like Mrs. Teneb. I guess she could tell my jumpy brain was mulling over the concept of the female actor, because she quickly added, in a slightly lecturing tone: “We don’t say actress. Everyone is an actor. It’s unisex.” Then she said, carefully, “Actress is diminutive.”
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Well, okay. Not that I didn’t love how she said “diminutive”: with great care and delicacy and solemnity and attention to detail, the way you lean two cards together on a new level of a card house.
But I still had to tell her my “story.” What was my story, exactly?
“I’m in a band,” I said.
“Yeah? What are you called and where are your gigs?”
“The Stoned Marmadukes,” I said, making a mental note to make sure to tell Sam Hellerman the new band name so our stories would be straight. Me on guitar, him on bass and paleontology, first album Right Lane Must Exit. Then, out loud and rather lamely, I said, “We’re working on some, um, on some . . .” Gigs. As if.
But Fiona had already lost interest in that topic. She was scanning the room to see if there might be anyone else around to liven up the conversation. There was no one, so she started talking, in a distant way, about something or other. But I was getting the feeling that she had started to realize what she was dealing with here and had reached the conclusion that my fitness as a participant in any future spooky telekinesis experiments was in serious question.
I sat there while she spoke, trying not to make it too obvious how intently I was examining her, which I totally just couldn’t help doing. She had some really tight jeans on, and black boots. Shiny boots of leather. She mentioned how she was making all the costumes for some play she was in. She always ended up doing the costumes, she said, because she was such a good seamstress.
“You mean seamster,” I said.
She paused, and said, as though talking to herself, “Mmm, that’s interesting.” Then she stared at me. The candlelight made her glasses glisten when she moved her head. At times 70
they looked almost like they were made of liquid. I suddenly noticed that she looked a little sad, or so it seemed to me, but maybe she was just stoned and sleepy. Maybe I was just imagining the sadness for my own purposes—I always think girls are prettier when they’re crying.
Now, Hillmont is known as Hellmont, or less commonly as Swillmont. And most of the people at the party went to CHS, so I’d have guessed they probably lived either in Clearview or Clearview Heights. Queerview. So that’s why Fiona said, “How are things in Hellmont?” And that’s why I said, in response, “Diabolical.”
She seemed to spring to life. A bit. I mean, she acted as though she thought that was pretty funny. I was sitting there in silence trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. Well, she was at least a little stoned. But I gotta say, her giggling like that in response to my powerful vocabulary, THC-enhanced and sarcastic or not, was pretty fucking charming.
She was hitting my arm. I guess she had said something while I had been in my own world trying to psychoanalyze her, mesmerized by her belly, which her T-shirt had been designed to reveal, but maybe not quite as much as was being revealed now that she was all stretched out on the couch, and which I couldn’t stop staring at. I mean, it was almost physically impossible to pry my eyes away from it. I did, though, which made a ripping sound, like Velcro.