her earbuds were in, she shouted. Not a good trait for a gossip to have. Secrets had definitely been spilled that way.
I sat on my music stool, which was kitty-corner to the sofa. She knocked her head from side to side.
“NANDAN. HELP.”
She actually wanted me to take out her earbuds.
“NANDAN, I DON’T WANT MY FINGERNAILS ANYWHERE NEAR MY HAIR.”
She swiveled her head, trying to catch the earbud cord between her neck and her shoulder. I grabbed the cord, jerking it from both ears at once.
“Yay,” she said without looking up. “And now . . .”
I paused the show too.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“You mad?”
“At what?”
“Did I emasculate you? Was that emasculating? My mom said today I have a naturally strong personality, and I shouldn’t worry about emasculating men, and I didn’t, until she said that, but now I do.”
Avani was very light skinned: if it wasn’t for her name, you might not even know she was Indian. Her hair was large and so voluminous—much larger than her head—and was a dark, rich black, with the tiniest hint of brown. Her sister once drew a picture of her that was just a stick figure with a river of black hair that trailed down from the head and wrapped, like Lady Godiva’s, around her whole body.
She ran the brush over her pinky toe.
“So what’s up?”
“I don’t know.” I wedged myself into the L of her couch. “Can’t we just hang out?”
“Suuuuuuure we can.”
Dave’s words came into my mind. Tell her your real feelings. “Avani,” I said. “Last year you were always complaining about Lyle Brashear and his parties. You wanted something different. Something better. But this year it’s exactly the same.”
Lyle was the king of last year’s Ninety-Nine. He was Pothan times a thousand: Where Pothan was good-natured and willing to let you have fun, so long as you accepted his dominance, Lyle needed to be in control of everything at all times. The moment Lyle rolled into a party, it’d inevitably become mean and dangerous and, worst of all, completely boring.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “So?”
“Okay, okay, okay,” I said. “This is going to sound so nerdy, but bear with me. . . . There is this thing I call the Ninety-Nine. . . .”
Her pale green eyes drank up my theories, and she listened for ten minutes without laughing as I explained everything, including my theory that Avani and Pothan were in a bitter struggle for the soul of the Ninety-Nine and right now she was losing.
I told her that Pothan stood for noise and mess and outrage and drunkenness. When you spent a night with Pothan, you didn’t remember anything you said, all you remembered was the trail of adventure and destruction. Pothan wasn’t about words—although he could talk when he needed to—he was about that wordless-grunting thing that formed between guys when they came together in a soup of drunkenness and loneliness. He stood for nights that were edgy and dangerous, but also weirdly formless and without expectations.
Avani on the other hand wasn’t any weaker or gentler, but she stood for something different. When you were with Avani, you were always on your guard. Every word counted. Every gesture mattered. Every interaction was watched and commented upon. Avani was all about words. She wanted long, breezy nights when packs of girls stood around, drinking and chatting and gossiping and bonding, while packs of guys were shoved to the edges of the party, simmering, until they figured out how to somehow break into the girl groups. Nights when you maybe hooked up if a guy stepped in and proved himself to you, but when you didn’t need to. Nights when it’d be just as fun and just as cool to end up on your best friend’s bed, debriefing about who had or hadn’t kissed whom.
This wasn’t totally about guys and girls. Carrie was more in Pothan’s camp, for one thing, as the Roman candles had demonstrated, but Carrie was queer, and maybe that made a difference. I wasn’t sure.
Looking at Avani sitting there with her toes splayed out in front of her and the overhead lights catching the faint brown highlights in her black hair, a sense of longing filled my chest. She had something that I wanted so badly.
You could say gender roles weren’t real or didn’t matter, but we still lived in a world where they existed. My heart belonged 100 percent with Avani and with her vision of the world, but she wouldn’t accept me into the fold,