Ruby settled into her seat, and the safe-seeming silence became immediately stressful. I drove to the end of the street, waiting for her to direct me. But she was absorbed by her phone and didn’t notice that we’d been stopped at the stop sign for a full ten seconds. I stole a glance at her screen but couldn’t read the name of the person she was texting. I had a pretty good guess, though. I cleared my throat, and Ruby flipped the phone facedown in her lap.
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I just, um. Don’t know where I’m going.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right. Turn left.”
As it turned out, the Tovar house was only about a mile uphill from Ruby’s, and even more imposingly palatial; it looked like the kind of house an evil twin from a soap opera would make threatening phone calls from before taking to the balcony with a bottle of Scotch. When Ruby saw me see the house she explained, “His dad’s a plastic surgeon to, like, famous people.”
The street was lined with BMWs and Lexuses (Lexii?) and Mercedes-Benz SUVs, a number of which I recognized from the school parking lot. I did a quick, impressive parallel-parking job (Ruby said so herself) a few houses down, and we made our way up the wide, pitch-black street. There were never any streetlamps or sidewalks in the rich neighborhoods, I’d noticed; everyone wanted to pretend they were neighborless and alone at the edge of the ocean. In the dark, Ruby’s hand brushed past mine, or maybe it was mine that brushed past hers, and I felt the short route of her fingertips across my skin like fire. To keep it from happening again—unless Ruby really, really wanted it to—I stuck my hands in the pockets of my jacket for the remainder of the walk up the driveway.
Ruby did not ring the doorbell, or knock; she pushed the door open with the familiarity of someone who’d let herself in a hundred times. She’d told me Sweets practiced in an unused bedroom David’s father had lined with soundproof foam. His folks were out of town at the moment, in Las Vegas for a plastic-surgery conference, Ruby explained, and a wave of nerves washed over me, imagining the debauched scene inside before I actually encountered it. All the parties I’d been to had been thrown by soccer girls or water polo guys, and they all blended together in my head, the same forty people drinking out of the same red Solo cups and dancing to the same five songs. As a sophomore and a junior there was nothing I’d looked forward to more, and as a senior I took pride in being one of the seniors laughing at the overeager, quickly intoxicated sophomores and juniors. But now, walking into what I assumed would be a very different sort of party, I felt newly and frighteningly aware of the limitations of my experience. In my own familiar setting I was reasonably cool, and well-liked, a jock among jocks. In this one, I could only hope that arriving with Ruby granted me acceptance by proxy.
Inside the dimmed foyer, Ruby pointed me to a sea of shoes spreading across the white tiled floor, and I reluctantly bent over to untie my laces as she sat on the steps to do the same. I said a silent prayer of thanks that I’d worn normal white athletic socks and not novelty ones, and slid my boots underneath an end table covered in silver-framed pictures of David’s family. David frowned handsomely in every last one.
“I was not expecting a shoes-off vibe,” I yelled over the music.
Ruby grinned. “It’s his mom’s one rule.”
Together we slid down the hallway into the kitchen, where we took in the scene. A spacious granite island countertop was covered in liquor bottles and empty cardboard six-packs and red Solo cups, misplaced or abandoned for new ones. David stood behind it, pouring drinks for Alex Grant and Emily Heidegger, who were laughing so hard their cups shook. Vodka trailed down Alex’s hand and wrist, and Emily licked it off. “EW!” Alex screamed before licking the rest off herself. David noticed Ruby and raised the vodka bottle in triumphant greeting. “RUUUUUBE!” he