Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

But I don’t want to make myself sound too pathetic. Things had definitely gotten better in the past year. I’d been working out pretty regularly and was finally starting to show some definition in my arms and chest. I’d acquired a new wardrobe, closely modeled on Kyle’s, and had started driving to school in my mom’s Toyota Matrix.

I wasn’t even a virgin anymore. I’d had my first girlfriend in the fall, or at least my first semiregular hookup. It was all on the down-low, just a once-or-twice-a-week, after-school sex break with Iris Leggett — my former lab partner in AP bio — who had the biggest breasts in all of Greenwood High. This wasn’t as sexy as it sounds: Iris was short and stocky, but her breasts were enormous, way out of proportion to the rest of her, and they caused her a lot of discomfort, both physical and emotional. The first time we took our clothes off, I said, Holy shit, and she started to cry.

I look like a cow, she told me. I used to love playing soccer, but then I got these and had to stop. And forget about the beach. I can’t go anywhere near it.

We only hooked up five or six times before she called it quits, but it was fun and informative while it lasted and definitely boosted my confidence. If it hadn’t been for Iris, I would never have dreamed of talking to Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, let alone flirting with her. She was totally out of my league — a freakishly limber, cheerfully bisexual dancer with eyes like Mila Kunis’s — definitely one of the Top Five Hottest Girls in the Junior Class. But one day in the Art Room, I just walked over to her easel and told her how much I liked her painting, this nocturnal scene of a girl in a black cocktail dress standing beneath a streetlight in the rain.

“She just looks so vulnerable,” I said. “Like there’s nothing to protect her from the elements.”

“Tell that to him,” she muttered, nodding at Mr. Coyle, who was sitting at his desk, reading a graphic novel with his usual expression of scowling concentration. “He hates it.”

Mr. Coyle wasn’t wrong; the painting definitely had problems. The girl didn’t have much of a face, and the raindrops looked like golf balls, but I chose to focus on the positive.

“I like what you did with the streetlight. And the busted umbrella’s a great detail.”

“Thanks.” I could see how pleased she was. “I worked really hard on that.”

We got to be pretty good friends over the spring semester. On Monday mornings she liked to tell me all about her wild weekends: Oh my God, Josh, I’ve got to stay away from the tequila. I always end up making out with the wrong person. Sometimes the wrong person was a guy in our school, sometimes another girl, and sometimes a man in his twenties or early thirties she met at a club (she had a fake ID that never failed her; I wondered if it was one of Kyle’s). It would have been pretty excruciating for me, listening to these confessions, except that she always stood really close when she made them, so close that her breasts would sometimes brush against my arm. It was hard to feel jealous when all I could think about was the way my arm seemed to glow where she grazed me.

We’d never spent any time together outside of art class, so it had been a pretty big deal when we realized that we were going to Casey Amandola’s party. We’d been joking about it all week — I said I wanted to drink tequila with her, to find out if the rumors of her bad behavior were true, and she said she’d trade me shot for shot until I was a puddle on the floor — but I wasn’t sure it was for real until she sent me that text.

Where the fuck r u???

I knew I’d never be her boyfriend, never take her to the movies or walk down the hall with my arm around her shoulder, and I was okay with that. I just wanted to be the wrong person she made out with at a party, a mistake she could confess to her friends on Monday morning, and I had a feeling this was the best chance I’d ever get.

I’ll be right there, I texted back. Don’t start without me.

WHEN I’D imagined getting drunk with Sarabeth, I pictured an intimate, romantic scene, just the two of us off by ourselves, someplace dark and quiet. In front of a roaring fireplace, say, with a big bed nearby and a door that locked from the inside. I certainly hadn’t pictured us crowded into a bright kitchen, surrounded by a pack of drunken jocks, with hip-hop blasting in from the living room. In my fantasy, Sarabeth was giving me her undivided attention, laughing at my tragic tequila faces, closely monitoring my slide toward intoxication. In real life, though, she was all the way across the room, standing by the sink, too busy checking her phone and talking to Casey to notice the faces I made when the shots went down.

She looked great, though — at least that part of my fantasy remained intact — casual but festive in a tight white camisole and short black skirt, ruffled at the bottom, that showed off her impressively muscled legs. Her arms were slender and toned, her hair gathered in a sleek ponytail that swayed when she moved, providing periodic glimpses of the tiny, green-tufted carrot tattooed on the back of her neck (when I’d asked her about it in art class, she just shrugged and said she liked carrots). As far as I could tell, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and you could see the outline of her nipples pressing through the stretchy fabric of her top, two emphatic dots that commanded the attention of every guy in the room. Brendan Moroney, this ginger-haired lummox who’d been the bane of my middle school existence, nudged me with his elbow.

“Yo, dude, is it just me, or is it getting a little nippy in here?”

I smiled politely, not wanting to offend him, but not wanting to encourage him, either. Brendan was a total jackass, one of my least favorite people in the world. Back in fifth grade, he and his Pop Warner buddies had decided it would be amusing to call me Fosh, a ridiculous nickname I found deeply humiliating (I was pretty sure it stood for Fat Josh or Fag Josh, or maybe a combination of the two). They kept it up for a full year before moving on to the next target. I still hated him for that, though I got the feeling that he barely remembered my real name, let alone the insulting substitute that had made me so miserable.

“Last week she made out with Emma Singer,” he informed me. “Capaldo got it on his cell phone. So hot. Like a fucking porno movie.”

“I heard about that.” Emma Singer was a sophomore who’d gotten kicked out of private school for some kind of scandalous offense — arson, drugs, or sexting, depending on whom you asked. Last Monday, Sarabeth had told me she was a lousy kisser.

“I think Emma’s here tonight,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get an encore.”

I didn’t answer because Sarabeth was heading our way, passing out lime wedges for the next round. When she got to me, I smiled and asked how she was doing, but she didn’t seem to hear the question. She was looking up at Brendan, shaking her head in mock exasperation.

“You’re such a pig,” she told him, but her voice was sweet and friendly, as if pig were a compliment.

“What?” Brendan raised both hands in self-defense. “What did I do?”

“You know,” she teased him. “Don’t even try to deny it.”

Casey Amandola followed close behind Sarabeth, pouring tequila into our plastic cups. When everybody was ready, Sarabeth counted to three, and we all drank at once, tossing back the shots and sucking on our limes.

“Goddam!” Brendan said, punching himself hard in the chest. “That shit is poison!”

AFTER A while, Brendan got bored and drifted off, to my great relief. I probably should have left, too — three shots of tequila are enough for anyone — but I didn’t want to let Sarabeth out of my sight. I figured that sooner or later we’d get a chance to talk, and I was planning on coming right out and telling her how pretty she was, just state it like an obvious fact and see how she reacted.