We Are Totally Normal - Rahul Kanakia

1

THE MUSIC IN THE CAR was so loud that my teeth vibrated. I couldn’t hear words, just a raw, brutal wall of noise. I didn’t cover my ears, since you shouldn’t ever show that kind of weakness around Pothan and Ken, but half an hour into the ride I leaned forward and shouted: “Are we going to the lake house?”

“What?” Pothan yelled.

I reached for the volume knob, but Ken swatted my hand.

“Are we going to the lake house?” I shouted.

“What?”

“Are we going to the lake house?”

“What?”

This went on absurdly long, until I realized Pothan was toying with me. I slapped the back of his head, and he jerked the car into the next lane.

“Holy shit!” I yelped.

“Don’t mess with the driver.”

“You did that on purpose.”

Ken sat quietly in the front passenger seat, his face lit up with a sideways smile. Ken had really dense eyebrows and a broad neck. His arms and shoulders were huge, but his legs were puny, and Pothan loved to call him chicken legs. Ken always said legs didn’t matter; girls didn’t go for legs, but I was sure he regretted his gym choices—he never, under any circumstances, wore shorts. The problem was that if he suddenly added a leg day to his workout, everyone would know Pothan had gotten to him.

When they missed the exit for the lake house, I was like, What the fuck?, but Pothan pretended not to notice.

“Hey, where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Umm, didn’t Avani say to meet at the lake house?”

“Nandan, this is an intervention. You cannot keep trying to hang out with her.”

Part of me wanted to force Ken and Pothan to let me out and let me make my own way to the lake house. But if I showed up by myself, empty-handed, without a party in tow, it wouldn’t be fun: it’d be stilted and awkward.

I wasn’t like Pothan. I didn’t have that indefinable extra something that marked a person as a leader. A party isn’t an end in itself; a party is just a container for exciting things. It’s a place where you bring together lots of people and heat them up and see what will happen. But in order to experience the magic and grandeur of a party, you need to hang around the right people. My presence brought nothing extra to a party, and I’d resigned myself to this. I was a follower.

We ended up at the beach, in Santa Cruz, where Pothan and Ken made me gulp down a forty before letting me out of the car. I was ambling across the boardwalk, grinning goofily, when Pothan jabbed my side and said to look for a rebound girl.

I rubbed the sore spot on my rib and looked for an opening to hit him back, but he was already out of arm’s reach.

“Avani made you lazy,” Pothan said. “She was a decent start, but you got lucky, bro. Admit it, you got lucky.”

“I freely admit she was out of my league,” I said.

“Nobody’s out of your league, dude. That attitude is exactly the problem. You act like you’re not good enough, and the problem is that doesn’t work. If you’re not confident, most girls can smell that, and they stay away.”

We ate hot dogs at a table on the edge of the boardwalk. To our left, tourists spilled out of a Ripley’s, and on our right, the ocean was lit by the setting sun.

A dozen feet away, a group of three girls burst into laughter. I fought to catch the nearest girl’s eye, and she smiled back with that nervous, automatic smile that’s a girl’s first defense against a strange guy.

“Should we talk to them?” I said.

“Who?” Pothan said. “Them?” He jabbed a thumb at the trio, and over his shoulder I saw them notice his gesture. “No. Of course not.”

Ken looked up from his phone. “The blind spot should be pretty good today.” They were talking about the part of the beach, out past the rocks, that you couldn’t see from the boardwalk.

“Yep. The blind spot,” Pothan said.

I compacted all my food trash into a ketchup-covered ball and tossed it into the garbage can. The eyes of the girls tracked us. Ken tossed a brutal “Hey” in their direction, but we were gone before they could respond.

“Uhh, maybe I don’t understand the plan here,” I said.

“Dude,” Ken said. “You’re gonna hook up today. Those girls? They would’ve laughed and smiled and maybe followed you online, but here and now nothing would’ve happened.”

Pothan clapped a hand