In the next room, Daniel stumbled onto a videogame tournament of some sort. An extra TV had been set up, and eight boys sprawled across sofas and chairs with an equal number of dead-bored girlfriends. Both TVs were broken into four squares, each square with its own gun bobbing in the center, chasing after something to kill. Somebody knocked over a plastic cup full of beer, which led to more screaming and cursing. A girl squealed and clutched her dress.
“Daniel!”
A hand slapped down on his shoulder; Daniel turned to see Roby grinning at him, a plastic red cup in his hand.
“You drinking?”
“Jada’s driving,” Roby said.
Daniel looked around. “Where is she?”
“Bathroom. Hey, Amanda Hicks is here.”
Daniel felt his temperature rise. Amanda Hicks was the first girl he’d ever kissed. Or she, at least, had kissed him. Or something. She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a vixen who could disappear around school, then leap out while you’re waiting on the bus one day and swirl her tongue in your mouth. Daniel was equal parts frightened by and in love with her.
“You want a cup?” Roby waved the yeasty scent of cheap beer in Daniel’s face.
“Nah. I told my mom I wouldn’t.”
“Me too,” Roby said, his voice rattling around in his raised cup. He took a long swig, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Hey, maybe the three of us will go swimming later.”
Daniel peeked through the living room and out to the partially lit deck. Each time the sliding glass doors opened, they let in the sounds of laughter, of girls squealing, and water splashing.
“I didn’t bring my trunks, and besides, we’re supposed to get all kinds of rain from that storm.”
Roby rolled his eyes. “You’re in a pool, asshole. You’re already wet. Hey, here’s Jada.”
Daniel looked over his shoulder to see a girl heading their way, a coy smile on her face. Jada was beautiful. Daniel nearly blurted it out loud, he was so surprised. She wasn’t gorgeous, not like a model, she was too short for that. But when he pictured a girl dating his friend Roby, he imagined someone overweight with bad skin and thick glasses. Jada was none of those things.
She stopped in front of Daniel and held out a slender arm, a hand on the end expecting to be clasped. Roby was saying their names to each other. Daniel noted her straight hair, so black and clean it looked purple. She had a normal face, thick lips, a wide smile, and dark eyes that threw out light. Daniel felt her pumping his hand and heard her say something. He was still stunned that his best friend was dating someone not hideous.
“Singing camp, huh?” he asked. He had no idea what he was supposed to be saying.
Jada smiled at Roby. “That’s right. Your friend has a powerful voice.” She smiled and raised a plastic cup to her lips.
“Aren’t you driving?” Daniel asked.
Jada took a gulp and shrugged. Roby slapped Daniel’s back and yelled over a sudden bout of excited screaming from the gamers. “She’s just gonna have one, and we’re not leaving for a while yet!”
Daniel wiped a bead of sweat from his hairline. “I think I’m gonna go outside for a second,” he said. The crush of people, the thumping music, the rat-a-tat gunfire from the games—they were stifling the hell out of him.
“We’ll meet you out there. I’m gonna go hit the keg again.”
Roby and Jada left him there and wove off through the crowd, their hands linked. Daniel felt nauseas. He scanned the throng of laughing, happy, popular people and felt perfectly alone. He really was a rando. A creeper. A sketch. He saw himself—for just an instant—how everyone else must see him: cringing from the music, no cup in hand, no girlfriend, no interest in shooting people online. He dug out his crappy cellphone and checked to see if maybe his brother had called. Perhaps their date had been called off for some unknown reason and he needed to pick Daniel up early. But there were no messages. No texts. No funny SMS clips of the latest thing bound to go viral that he would be last to discover. All he saw was the time, which let him know he’d only been at Jeremy Stevens’s party for fifteen minutes.
Daniel shoved the phone back in his pocket and moved toward the patio door. He wanted to get outside and let the humid coastal breeze cool his sudden sweat.
The glass doors slid open and burped more laughter, squeals, and wet swimming noises his way. Daniel pushed through the mob choked up by the doors, fought through the cup-holders and dripping bathers, and finally dove between the gaping glass teeth of Jeremy’s home, escaping the gullet of his teenage discomfort.
7
A stiff wind chilled the sweat on the back of Daniel’s neck, then moved off to rustle in the trees. The concrete patio behind the house was wet from the running, shivering, dripping swimmers. Daniel got out of the way as more people filed through the swish and slam of the glass door. He felt pathetic without anything in his hand and no one to talk to. He shoved his fists into his shorts and tried to look normal. He swore someone in the pool said something about a creeper, and further swore that they were referring to him.
Daniel strolled off to one corner of the patio where there was less light. He then realized that this would do nothing to make him appear more normal.
A girl from his homeroom—Valerie, he thought—ran by in a soaked t-shirt, her lacy red bra visible beneath. The glint of steel from her lip and nose piercings caught Daniel’s attention. He had no idea she had them, having never seen her outside of school. As she shuffled around to the pool’s steps, he saw that her shirt just came down to her waist, exposing the panties she was wearing for bottoms. A tattoo peeked out between the two at him, like a bashful eye. There was no way she was old enough to get a legal tattoo; he wasn’t sure about the piercings, what age you needed to be to get them. Daniel wondered what her parents thought about it all.
As the DJ moved from bass-heavy hip-hop to some rapid trance music, the energy of the crowd intensified. Or maybe it was the wind picking up. Daniel huddled up to the side of the house under a mildewed awning and watched his classmates in their natural environment. He felt like a naturalist on safari.
This is the missing episode of Planet Earth, he realized. They never did a show on the most bizarre life form of them alclass="underline" humans.
A boy one year older than his sister joined Daniel in the darkness, his red Mohawk spiked up tall. He leaned against the wall, slid down to his butt, and started trying to coax a flame out of his lighter, his hands forming a desperate variety of cup and bowl shapes against the wind.
Daniel looked from the triangular spikes pointing up at him, to the kid with the horn-rimmed frames and flat-billed trucker hat, to Valerie’s metallic adornments. He looked from the skinny jeans to the baggy pants that were shaped like shorts, but so large and worn so low, they almost went to the kid’s ankles. There were girls in glitter, girls with black lips, girls with fake tans, girls powdered to a vampiric pale, kids with spiked collars, with outrageous cowboy beltbuckles, with superhero shirts, with faded logos of products that none of them had been alive for the manufacture of—
And Daniel looked down at himself. He wore a pair of tan shorts that looked like at least a dozen other pair of his tan shorts. He had picked out one of the few t-shirts that was both clean and hadn’t been left in a twisted ball to wrinkle. There was nothing hip about his shirt. Nothing vintage. Nothing ironic. It was just plain and dull and normal, like him.
The wind whistled through Jeremy Stevens’s back yard, howling through the trees, heard even above the music. Daniel had a sudden realization: he was the only kid he knew who didn’t fit in somewhere. And it was because he wasn’t even trying. He had put no effort into it. A cannonball threw a splash of water his way, and Daniel danced to the side, catching a little on his shin. He laughed and scanned the cliques, wondering which one he could probably belong to. Were there any that didn’t require tattoos or needles? Was it too late to try and join a group during his senior year? How would he walk up to the hipsters in a pair of tight pants, the cuffs high above his ankles, a scarf around his neck in August, and explain to them that he was now one of them? Or would he be better off just dressing up and waiting for them to come to him? That sounded more reasonable. Daniel wondered what Roby would think. Then he wondered what was taking his friend so long to fill his cup and come out and join him. He looked around for the couple and saw, now that he was looking for differences amongst his classmates, what they all had in common. One accessory that even the swimmers had, holding them up above the turbulent, rippling water: