Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,22

on the lawn next to the keg. Two of the blossoms had been trampled into yellow mush, but the others were intact.

“For me?” Zelda asked. She laughed, then took the flowers out of my hand and put her nose into one of their big brown centers. “Well, I can honestly say I’ve never been given a bouquet of sunflowers. And you have no idea how rare it is for someone to surprise me.” She kissed me on the cheek again, though this time I felt the corner of her mouth graze the corner of mine. “Now let’s dance.”

Sunflowers held aloft like a torch, Zelda led us all back into the house. The living room was packed with dancers, moving in sync like one gigantic, many-limbed organism. I’ve always liked dancing—probably because communication between bodies is always speechless, so my disability more or less disappears. Zelda was a strange dancer, moving in a way that once again brought to mind that comment I’d gotten on my old history paper: anachronistic. She didn’t seem bothered by the fact that nobody else in the room was dancing the way she was, and though she got a few sidelong glances, they were the good kind of sidelong glance, the kind that said, Man, that girl over there is dancing pretty weird, but I can tell she’s not doing it because she has to be the center of attention by acting different, but because that is just the crazy-ass way she dances, because she is her own unique, magical, beautiful self, and she doesn’t give a fuck what anybody else thinks, and any boy in here would be lucky as hell to be her dance partner tonight.

I should add that I was definitely starting to feel drunk.

The crowd kept pushing Zelda and me closer and closer together, until our bodies met and there was nowhere to put my arms but around her. She was sparkly with sweat, swinging like a crystal chandelier in a hurricane. When the DJ finally put on a slow song, Zelda molded herself to me, so that I could feel each breath she took as a warm pressure against my chest. I looked over to Alana, who had Tyler’s big hands placed perfectly on her butt cheeks. We made eye contact, and she gave me a subtle thumbs-up, mouthing the words, Well done, Santé.

DRINK #5: A SWIG FROM A BOTTLE OF $1,000 SCOTCH

WE EXHAUSTED OURSELVES OVER THE course of the next hour, mashing our bodies into a liquid. Between her unique moves on the dance floor and all that champagne, Zelda already had Alana and company in the palm of her hand. I could tell they were seeing me in a new light now; I felt like a pitted little moon that had just been discovered orbiting a supernova.

“I’m tired of being cooped up,” Zelda declared in the brief silence between songs. “How about we take this party down to the water?”

Another cheer went up. If she’d suggested we move the festivities to Brazil, everyone probably would’ve gone along with it. The limousine was still parked outside, so ten of us smushed inside while the rest of the partygoers trekked over to the N Judah, the train line that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. I ended up having to sit apart from Zelda, who was talking up a storm with Jamie and his friends.

I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket.

Who is this girl?! Alana had texted me.

I looked up and saw her sitting across the limo from me. She raised an eyebrow.

She’s Zelda, I wrote back.

That’s her costume, but who is she really?

Her name’s really Zelda.

But she told me she’s dressed up as Zelda Fitzgerald for Halloween.

Who?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. We studied her in American history, remember? The Jazz Age?

I think I slept through that one.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that “Zelda” might be some kind of pseudonym, but it wasn’t as if I’d seen her driver’s license or anything. And now that I thought about it, it did make for a pretty weird coincidence, and one having nothing to do with some rando historical figure: here was this girl very much in need of rescue—given her insistence that she was going to jump off a bridge any minute now—who just happened to have the same name as a famous video-game princess perpetually in need of saving. What were the odds?

Then again, Zelda hadn’t actually asked for my help. In fact, she was the one