He grinned with his funny teeth and warm eyes.
The DJ announced there was going to be a fifties dance contest the next night.
“Hey, we should enter,” A said.
I was surprised that he’d ask me in front of his friends. I said yes.
* * *
I found an old dress of my mother’s. She’d worn it to marry my father at the courthouse downtown. It was both of their second marriages, so white wasn’t appropriate, she said. Since they’d gotten married, my parents hadn’t been apart from each other a single night.
The dress was gold silk damask with a full skirt. The waist and chest were a little too big and the hem was longer than it should have been because my mother had always been taller and more voluptuous than I am. I belted the dress tightly and put on a pair of her cream-colored leather pumps with pointed toes and pearl buttons.
At Phases, I found A sitting by the DJ booth wearing a pair of black jeans, a white short-sleeved button-down shirt, and black and white creepers with heavy black rubber soles. He knew how to swing dance; it was crazy how good he was. The only other people in the contest were a couple of heavy metal kids, who seemed drunk, and some punk girl with bleached skunk stripes in her dyed-black hair and a silver nose ring, who danced by herself while watching A out of the corner of her eye. He and I won. The DJ gave us a mirror that said “Phases” on it. My charming partner, A, let me keep it. M said it was a coke mirror. Sick Pleasure sat in the corner and ignored the whole thing.
“Do you and your friends want to come to a party at my house this weekend?” A asked before M told me we had to leave.
* * *
Calabasas was dark at night, with fewer streetlamps and more trees than where my friends and I were from. A’s house was surrounded by huge hedges. That Saturday night, M, J, L, and I walked up the lit path to a three-story mansion and went inside through tall doors. Loud punk music was playing, so we knew we were at the right place. Kids with punk hairstyles and clothes were hanging out drinking from plastic cups of beer. I wondered what A’s parents did to have a house like this.
Where was he?
Rat Catcher and Ken were sitting on leather couches in the main room with a girl on either side of them. Rat Catcher eyed us narrowly. I felt self-conscious in my pink-and-lavender striped stretchy Betsey Johnson minidress that I had been so excited to wear. The girls all wore cutoff jeans or plaid skirts and torn T-shirts adorned with safety pins; their hair was bleached and teased.
We went looking for the beer in the kitchen and J filled our cups. I’d never drunk much before, and the beer tasted sour, but I chugged it anyway, hoping it would fortify me against my self-consciousness.
Warm hands around my waist. I turned and saw A grinning.
“You came,” he said.
“Hey, nice house.”
He took my hand firmly in his. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
M gave me the stink eye, L frowned, and J smiled as A led me outside through glass doors. The pool shimmered blue. Beyond it stretched dark gardens. The air smelled sweet, like jasmine, maybe, or roses, and crickets and frogs chirped and croaked.
“It’s so cool here.”
“Thanks. You look cute.”
“Thanks. I thought maybe I wore the wrong thing.”
“No. You look good.”
We stopped and stared at each other. I was suddenly shy. I still hadn’t even kissed a boy. Neither had J or L, but M had already had sex last year. She said it wasn’t all that great but she did feel kind of different afterward. I asked her how and she shrugged and just said, “Mature,” and the way she said it made me feel like a stupid little kid.
“You’re the best dancer of your friends,” A said. I wasn’t used to being the best at much.
Once, the summer after junior year, M, J, and I had gone on a trip to our friend S’s beach condo. L didn’t go. Her parents wouldn’t have let her, even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. M, J, and I didn’t tell our parents that S’s parents would be out of town. My parents didn’t even ask any questions about the trip; they trusted me.
M, J, S, and I went to the beach all day. Then we showered, put on tight jeans, and walked from the condo to a restaurant overlooking the water. Some older guys approached us and S flirted with them. The guys ordered us beers and oysters. They had a limo and offered to take us to their condo for more drinks. S said sure, and the rest of us nervously went along with it. The condo was decorated in silver and black with a mirrored ceiling. The guys lay back on the couch, watching us dance for them.
“Let’s see. Yeah, you’re the best looking,” the blond one had said, pointing drunkenly at me.
Then he’d passed out, his friend went to take a piss, and we left, giggling, and ran home. We had no idea, at the time, how dangerous the whole thing could have been. And all I cared about was having been singled out for once.
I worried about S, but I didn’t know what to do or even how to talk about it. There was something about her dad. I didn’t like the way he looked at S. I wondered about her painfully bitten nails, her nervous laughter, and her flirtatious ways. The fact that she sometimes went out of the house without underpants on. Eventually her parents divorced and she moved away. I wish I’d said something.
Now A said, “Like, you dance like you mean it. Like you have to dance or something.”
“I do,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I feel depressed otherwise.”
“Why?”
I shrugged and tried to smile. I didn’t want him to think of me as a depressed person.
“Let’s swim,” A said.
He pulled off his T-shirt and jeans and jumped into the pool in his boxer briefs. I stood there watching him bobbing up and down, spitting water out of his mouth.
“Come on.”
So I finished my beer in a gulp, took off my pumps and my dress, and jumped into the water. It was cold, and when I started to shiver, A swam over and put his arms around me. His Mohawk had flattened out against his head. I wondered what he would have looked like with a full head of hair. In the dark I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could feel the cool, smooth flesh of his arms and chest, and I could feel his heartbeat in the night. His dick pressed against my thigh and all my muscles loosened against him.
I’d never seen a penis in person, and I had mixed feelings about them. Fear. Aversion. Curiosity. A mild, tingling delight.
“Can I kiss you?” A asked.
I nodded. He put his hand behind my neck and brought my face to his. I closed my eyes and tilted my mouth up to him. His lips. His firm, gentle tongue. Then stronger. I ran my fingers over his busted nose, his bony cheekbones, his skull. I felt myself slipping away into the water and the night. Teenage boys are not so far away from being kids and are very far away from being men. Most of them. A seemed pretty close to both.
“We’re going,” M shouted. “Hurry up, I, or we’re going to leave you.”
I pulled away from A, suddenly aware that I was wearing only a bra and underpants, wet ones so that everything showed through. “I have to go,” I said, getting out of the pool.
* * *
When A said he’d pick me up at my house, I told him I’d meet him outside, because I knew my mom would never let me go out on a motorcycle. It was really the only rule she had, and even though she was distracted with what was happening with my dad, I knew I couldn’t get away with it.
I met A a little way down the street. He was wearing a leather jacket, leaning on his bike with his arms folded and his legs crossed like James Dean. He had two helmets and he put mine on for me. Then we got on his motorcycle. As I straddled the seat I felt A between my legs. Bikes are so dangerous and hot. Death and sex. I guess that’s why people like them. Or hate them. He revved the engine and we rode.
Laurel Canyon twisted like the river that had probably originally forged it, among the steep hillsides covered with wildflowers. Vines had grown across the telephone wires and hung down in green clumps above our heads. A girl in a black taffeta dress with black cowboy boots and a shock of magenta hair was hitchhiking. I wished I were dressed like her.