She feels his hot breath at her nose. The way he is looking at her doesn’t feel like a crush. It doesn’t even feel that he likes her that much.
He tells her about a party that weekend. Asks her if it sounds like something she’d be into. She feels her head bobbing. She’s afraid of not saying yes. She doesn’t think it’s a date but she does like the idea that someone else finds her attractive. It’s like being a display lamp in a lighting store that wasn’t plugged in but now is: suddenly customers are slowing down and going, Hey honey, how about this one?
She’s in love with Aidan but she figures this will be a fun night out and she thinks he might be out, too. That’s the trouble, actually. She hasn’t been able to account for his evenings lately. Actually, she never has, but she’s suddenly realizing that hasn’t changed. They haven’t morphed into an actual couple, leashed to each other, the way Jennifer and Rod are.
Lina says to herself, It will be nice to be taken out to a party. To get out of the house. But really, if she is being honest, she’s going because Aidan hasn’t called her in a few days, and at school he’s smiled in the hallway but he’s been distant and Lina is not letting her mind go there just yet. But it’s in her subconscious, like the will of her mother.
Her memory is blurred. The guy who picks her up, the one who allegedly has a crush on her, is not one of the ones. That much she knows.
He takes her to a friend’s house where there isn’t really a party. It’s four guys just drinking. She remembers thinking, When are we leaving to go to the party? Then suddenly the friend of her sister, the one who brought her there, is gone, or he’s gone from her memory. Now it’s just a room with three guys drinking, and Lina.
One of the three guys, the first one is how she remembers him, gives her a drink in a red Solo cup. She’s not sure if it’s alcohol. It looks purple inside the cup, or dark ocean blue. It doesn’t really taste like alcohol. It tastes dark and gross and warm. Lina has never really drunk alcohol anyhow so even if it were liquor, she wouldn’t one hundred percent know.
I remember him the most, she will say later, when she’s older, and I know he was the first one. I remember the first one the most. We were doing it. I wasn’t really aware of how it was happening down there. I just felt someone on top of me and I knew it was sex. Next thing I remember is him rolling me over, so I’m on my stomach. Then there’s another guy on me and I hear him say, Oh no this is Abby’s little sister, I can’t do this. And he quit. Then there was a third guy, but my memory is awful by that point. I wasn’t fighting, that much I remember. I was just chill about it. I think I thought that I didn’t want to say no to anyone, that I wanted them to like me. I just didn’t want to give them any reason not to. Like me.
The next day and all the days that follow the rumor is that Lina fucked three guys in one night.
Sloane
Sloane Ford has very long, very beautiful hair the color of chestnuts. An improbably warm tone of brown, but she doesn’t dye it. She’s thin and in her early forties but her face is like a sorority girl’s; it has the look of making out. She goes to the gym more often than she eats lunch with other mothers. She both does and doesn’t look like a woman people gossip about. She appears genuine, if sly, and says things like, I am intrigued by the politics of service. She means the way a dining experience is a microcosm for the dynamics of familiars and strangers coming together, under conditions in which one side of the encounter is somewhat indentured to the other, at least for the course of several hours.
She gives the impression of not knowing she’s being looked at. In certain light she can appear so self-assured that it can be frightening, and one might be very aware of setting her off. At other times she’s very giving, so as to appear almost small, so that friends