Sara Jaffe - Dryland

I said, Do you keep old magazines?

He said, Some. What are you talking about, music magazines?

My dad came back into the room.

ERIKA CALLED TOask me what she should wear to the party. She said she wanted to wear something regular but a little special. She said, Something PT will know is for him.

PT wasn’t going to be at this party. What was he going to do, show up with his hat and his bent-back paperback? I said, Some kind of accessory?

Erika said, I guess what I mean is, I got this shirt that I thought might be too tight, but maybe I should wear it?

I didn’t want to picture Erika in a tight black scoopneck, to see her in it and know she was wearing it to get PT, who wasn’t going to be there, to look at her chest. I told her she should wear the shirt if she felt like it.

Erika said, Ah! I’m asking you what you think!

I said, I just told you.

Erika said, Fine. Okay. I probably won’t wear it. She said, What are you going to wear?

Erika’s mom dropped her off at my house after dinner. Erika was wearing lipstick, or gloss, something that made her lips pink and shiny. She came into my room and took off her coat dramatically. She was wearing the tight shirt. She said, I brought a backup, so just tell me. The shirt looked exactly the way I had imagined — not imagined, but pictured without wanting to. It was impossible to look at Erika in the shirt and not look at her boobs, or the shadow of cleavage the shirt revealed. The cleavage was new to me. It was there — she had made it, somehow, be there. Erika’s boobs looked bigger than I’d thought they were. I didn’t want to notice that. I didn’t want to spend the party worrying about whether people thought Erika looked slutty in her shirt, or whether she felt slutty, standing around imagining what PT’s hands would feel like on her. Erika was wearing her matching seed-bead necklace. She said, You were right about accessories.

I had on my off-white thermal henley over a navy T-shirt and my dark jeans. I had a little silver ring I sometimes wore, with a turquoise chip in it. Erika rolled on more lip gloss and offered it to me. I said, No thanks. I hoped Erika would put her jacket back on before we left the house so my parents wouldn’t see her tight shirt and wonder why she was dressed that way, or why I was dressed the same way I always was.

It was drizzling lightly and we put up our hoods. A couple blocks away a streetlight went out just as we were passing under it. Erika said, Weird.

I said, It happens all the time.

Erika stopped in the shadow and looked over her shoulder. She said, Wait a second and went into her bag. She took out a flat, wide red-and-white box. She said, Want one?

I said, Where did you get those?

She said, This place on the east side I heard about. Near my dad’s. She said, They sell to anyone.

I said, You heard from who?

She said, These girls who were smoking at the bus stop.

I said, And you just went up and asked them? There was a lot missing from the story — like what exactly Erika had said to those girls, and what kind of girls they were, and whether they went to our school. And if they had offered her one of their cloves and if she’d taken it, and if she’d known how to smoke it, and if they’d been rude or nice to her in her fleece pullover and Sebagos. I said, Whoa. All these secrets.

Erika burst out laughing, so hard that she had to stop trying to light the clove she was trying to light by cupping her hands around it against the rain. She said, That coming from the most secretive person in the world. She fake-wiped tears from her eyes. The streetlight buzzed back on and she paranoidly tucked the unlit clove inside her hand. She said, Compared to you, I’m like an open book.

I said, Come on.

She said, An open telephone book.

We arrived at the party reeking of cloves. I’d been better at inhaling than I thought I’d be. I liked the feeling of drawing the smoke down until it crowded my lungs and then letting it out in a strong, steady jet. It felt like completing a sentence. The swimmer whose house it was, who was called, by everyone, Grapestuff, opened the door. He said, Ladies! He stood there with his long arms hanging, expectant, as if waiting for a hug. I said, Alexis invited us. Grapestuff showed us where to throw our coats and pointed us toward the basement.

He said, My parents are home, so. . He shrugged.

Erika said, That means no beer. That was fine with me. Pulling the clove smoke so deep into my lungs had left me lightheaded. Grapestuff had a basement from the seventies, when people made basements for parties and called them, what, rumpus rooms? Carpeted and wood-paneled and a built-in bar with bowls of potato chips and two-liters of soda on it. There was a pool table no one was playing on. Leaning against it were two of the pro swimmers, a gangly guy and a girl, and another girl who must have gone to a different school, all wearing their silk All County jackets. They looked out of place in the wood-paneled basement, angel aliens on dry land, as if we’d burn up if we touched them. Erika nudged me. She said, Should we talk to them? Maybe they want to play pool.

I said, Do you know how? and as I was saying it the guy pro raised his hand to wave to us.

Erika said, He’s waving at you. She was right. I was who he was looking at. Erika said, We should go over there. How hard is it to play pool?

The guy said, What was your name again? I told him, and he said to the girls he was with, Do you know who her brother is? And then he said my brother’s name.

The girl who didn’t go to our school looked me up and down. Her eyes were half-closed and she looked barely awake. She said, Oh yeah, that guy. She kind of looks like him, right?

I said, Not really.

Erika said, You sort of do.

I said, No I don’t.

The guy said, What’s he doing these days? Bummer about Seoul.

I said, He travels all over. Doing speaking engagements and that kind of thing.

The guy said, Cool, cool. He still gets in the pool, right?

I pretended that Erika wasn’t standing right there. I said, Of course.

The guy nodded, slowly, longer than he needed to. Erika, too loud for how close we were standing to them, said, They are so stoned. The two girls had moved around to the other side of the pool table and were clacking the pool balls into their triangle frame. Of course they were stoned. They were stupid stoners asking pointless questions. Erika thought that because she always knew when people were on drugs meant she knew more about people.

Grapestuff was making the rounds with a platter of pigs in blankets. He made an exaggerated, obsequious lunge toward us with the platter, and said, Ladies? Specialty of the house. The pigs in blankets smelled like old hot-dog water. Grapestuff said, You’re swim team, right? He wasn’t even trying to pretend that he wasn’t staring at Erika’s boobs. It was disgusting. It was more disgusting to think that she knew he was staring and didn’t care, or liked it. I pulled my shirt away from my chest. Erika took a pig by the toothpick and dipped it in mustard.

I said, Those aren’t vegetarian.

Erika said, It’s the weekend.

I took one because Grapestuff was still standing there waiting for me to take one, and because I usually liked pigs in blankets. Grapestuff said, That’s what I like to see. He backed away with his platter and said, If you’re lucky, ladies, by the end of the night I’ll tell you why they call me Grapestuff.

The pros had started knocking around the pool balls. Erika and I found seats on a couch that had a clear view of the stairs, so Erika could keep watch for PT. The music was Pink Floyd or something, a band I didn’t get why people thought of as deep. It sounded like a music box under a pillow. Erika said, Maybe you should ask those swimmers for some pot.