“How do you know?” Maggie demands.
“I helped tutor her a couple of years ago. She’s actually kind of funny. And smart.”
“That still doesn’t mean she should be making out with some guy in The Emerald.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s resisting much,” I murmur, stirring my drink.
“Who is that guy?” Lali asks.
“Sebastian Kydd,”The Mouse volunteers.
“I know his name,” Lali sniffs. “But who is he? Really?”
“No one knows,” I say. “He used to go to private school.”
Lali can’t take her eyes off him. Indeed, no one in the bar seems to be able to tear themselves away from the spectacle. But now I’m bored with Sebastian Kydd and his attention-getting antics.
I snap my fingers in Lali’s face to distract her.“Let’s dance.”
Lali and I go to the jukebox and pick out some songs. We’re not regular boozers, so we’re both feeling the giddy effects of being a little bit drunk, when everything seems funny. I pick out my favorite song, “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, and Lali picks “Legs” by ZZ Top. We take to the dance floor. I do a bunch of different dances—the pony, the electric slide, the bump, and the hustle, along with a lot of steps I’ve made up on my own. The music changes and Lali and I start doing this crazy line dance we invented a couple of years ago during a swim meet where you wave your arms in the air and then bend your knees and shake your butt. When we straighten up, Sebastian Kydd is on the dance floor.
He’s a pretty cool dancer, but then, I expected he would be. He dances a little with Lali, and then he turns to me and takes my hand and starts doing the hustle. It’s a dance I’m good at, and at a certain point one of his legs is in-between mine, and I’m kind of grinding my hips, because this, after all, is a legitimate part of the dance.
He says, “Don’t I know you?”
And I say, “Yes, actually you do.”
Then he says, “That’s right. Our mothers are friends.”
“Were friends,” I say. “They both went to Smith.” And then the music ends and we go back to our respective tables.
“That was hilarious.”The Mouse nods approvingly. “You should have seen the look on Donna LaDonna’s face when he was dancing with you.”
“He was dancing with both of us,” Lali corrects her.
“But he was mostly dancing with Carrie.”
“That’s only because Carrie is shorter than I am,” Lali remarks.
“Whatever.”
“Exactly,” I say, and get up to go to the bathroom.
The restroom is at the end of a narrow hall on the other side of the bar. When I come out, Sebastian Kydd is standing next to the door as if he’s waiting to go in. “Hello,” he says. He delivers this in a sort of fakey way, like he’s an actor in a movie, but he’s so good-looking, I decide I don’t mind.
“Hi,” I say cautiously.
He smiles. And then he says something astoundingly ridiculous. “Where have you been my whole life?”
I almost laugh, but he appears to be serious. Several responses run through my head, and finally I settle on: “Excuse me, but aren’t you on a date with someone else?”
“Who says it’s a date? She’s a girl I met at a party.”
“Sure looks like a date to me.”
“We’re having fun,” he says. “For the moment. You still live in the same house?”
“I guess so—”
“Good. I’ll come by and see you sometime.”And he walks away.
This is one of the oddest and most intriguing things that has ever happened to me. And despite the bad-movie-ish quality to the scene, I’m actually hoping he meant what he said.
I go back to the table, full of excitement, but the atmosphere has changed. The Mouse looks bored talking to Lali, and Walt appears glum, while Peter impatiently shakes the ice cubes in his glass. Maggie suddenly decides she wants to leave. “I guess that means I’m going,” Walt says with a sigh.
“I’ll drop you first,” Maggie says. “I’m going to drive Peter home, too. He lives near me.”
We get into our respective vehicles. I’m dying to tell Lali about my encounter with the notorious Sebastian Kydd, but before I can say a word, Lali announces that she’s “kind of mad at The Mouse.”
“Why?”
“Because of what she said. About that guy, Sebastian Kydd. Dancing with you and not me. Couldn’t she see he was dancing with both of us?”
Rule number five: Always agree with your friends, even if it’s at your own expense, so they won’t be upset. “I know,” I say, hating myself. “He was dancing with both of us.”
“And why would he dance with you, anyway?” Lali asks. “Especially when he was with Donna LaDonna?”
“I have no idea.” But then I remember what The Mouse said. Why shouldn’t Sebastian dance with me? Am I so bad? I don’t think so. Maybe he thinks I’m kind of smart and interesting and quirky. Like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.
I dig around in my bag and find one of Maggie’s cigarettes. I light up, inhale briefly, and whoosh the smoke out the window.
“Ha,” I say aloud, for no particular reason.
I’ve had boyfriends before, and frankly, each one was a disappointment.
There was nothing horribly wrong with these boys. It was my fault. I’m kind of a snob when it comes to guys.
So far, the biggest problem with the boys I’ve dated is that they weren’t too smart. And eventually I ended up hating myself for being with them. It scared me, trying to pretend I was something I wasn’t. I could see how easily it could be done, and it made me realize that was what most of the other girls were doing as well—pretending. If you were a girl, you could start pretending in high school and go on pretending your whole life, until, I suppose, you imploded and had a nervous breakdown, which is something that’s happened to a few of the mothers around here. All of a sudden, one day something snaps and they don’t get out of bed for three years.
But I digress. Boyfriends. I’ve had two major ones: Sam, who was a stoner, and Doug, who was on the basketball team. Of the two I liked Sam better. I might have even loved him, but I knew it couldn’t last. Sam was beautiful but dumb. He took woodworking classes, which I had no idea existed until he gave me a wooden box he’d made for Valentine’s Day. Despite his lack of intelligence—or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it—when I was around him I found him so attractive I thought my head would explode. I’d go by his house after school and we’d hang in the basement with his older brothers, listening to Dark Side of the Moon while they passed around a bong. Then Sam and I would go up to his room and make out for hours. Half the time, I worried I shouldn’t be there, that I was wasting precious time engaging in an activity that wouldn’t lead to anything (in other words, I wasn’t using my time “constructively,” as my father would say). But on the other hand, it felt so good I couldn’t leave. My mind would be telling me to get up, go home, study, write stories, advance my life, but my body was like a boneless sea creature incapable of movement on land. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with Sam. It was only endless