New Year's Eve (6 page)

(Gary's mother had said, “Those little rat tails are bad enough in back of the head, Gary, where at least they blend into the sweater. She wears hers in front. It's—it's weird, Gary.”

“I know, Mom, this is my year for weird.”

Gary's mother sighed. She was a woman who collected teddy bears and did cross stitch. Weird was beyond her ken. She said, “Are you sure you can't go out with Beth Rose again?”)

Gwynnie's dress was white, too. The fabric of the dress was hidden in huge feathery petals: she looked bird-like, but the bird was no robin or wren. Gwynnie resembled an albino vulture. She had acquired from somewhere a black feather boa, nearly fifteen feet long. She wrapped the slender boa around her neck and circled her shoulders and let it droop down around each wrist, and still the ends trailed on the floor and caught under Gary's feet.

It looked like some dead thing the vulture had caught and would shortly have for supper.

Gwynnie frowned at the thickly carpeted foyer. She dragged Gary to the wooden dance floor, where her spike heels would click loudly when she walked.

Actually,
stalked
was a better word.

The ordinary conventional kids moved out of Gwynnie's way. Gary wondered what Gwynnie would do next.

She began dancing.

There was no music.

Gwynnie, however, had never required the basics.

She twirled her boa like beads, flapper style, and danced with one heel on and one heel off. The white knot of hair poked straight up at the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling. An astonished middle-aged waiter walked past, almost dropping his tray of drinks. In his lapel buttonhole he wore a red carnation. Gwynnie plucked the carnation out of the hole and stuck it into the top of her knot.

The red carnation sat there like a prisoner in a tower.

The waiter was a little afraid of Gwynnie and did not try to get it back.

Gary began laughing inside himself. He took her waist and right hand, thrust their clasped hands far ahead of them and led her in a combination tango-foxtrot-polka. They lurched quite a bit, because Gwynnie's height changed four inches depending on which foot she put first.

There was still no music.

Close to them stood a girl in a classic light-pink gown with a neckline that revealed nothing, a string of pearls at her throat, and a single pink rose pinned to her shoulder. Her slippers were satin dyed to match the gown, and her hair was permed in gentle waves. She was the very picture of a conventional young woman.

For several minutes she gaped at Gary and Gwynnie.

Then she looked at her date, and he looked at her, and she said, “Well? Let's get with it!”

And they began dancing behind Gary and Gwynnie, imitating every move, including the lurch. The boy took his white handkerchief out of his breast pocket, knotted it up and held it in his fist at the back of his girl's head. “Your topknot,” he explained.

“Never start a New Year without one,” she agreed.

They tangoed across the room.

The waiter who had lost his carnation decided it was going to be a long time till dawn.

A
DOLESCENCE FOR CHRISTOPHER VANN
had not been an easy ride.

High school—yes. He had been champion at everything he touched: captain of a winning football team, boyfriend of the most beautiful girl, high honors student.

He was the first from Westerly in years to be accepted into Harvard and Christopher went planning to show Harvard a thing or two.

There was nobody in Cambridge who had
not
been brilliant, successful, and perfect. The amount of studying he had done in high school was not enough even to
pass
his courses, let alone shine. He was not a good enough athlete to make the teams and all his roommates were smarter. A whole lot smarter.

Within a few days Christopher was into all-night beer parties. It didn't take long before Christopher thought the reason for college was to get drunk. To take girls out in the style that pleased him took more money than he had. He began borrowing from everybody.

Before long he was failing classes. His roommates felt nothing but contempt for him. He was hung over much of the time. Once he asked a girl out, and she laughed and walked away. The year passed in a horrifying series of social and academic failures.

On the day he truly ran out of money, he stole what he needed from the girlfriend of his roommate. And that was so easy to do, he did it three more times. He got a kick out of thinking that the only thing he had learned to do well at his ivy school was steal. It was funny … right up to the moment his roommate caught him.

It wasn't easy, coming home a failure.

For months he lay around staring at the ceiling. He was moving faster toward being an alcoholic than getting a job. He parents, bitterly humiliated that their only child was kicked out of Harvard, yelled at Christopher, and he screamed back, and things got worse and worse.

He might have ended up in the gutter, except one day the previous summer, Emily Edmundson needed a ride and he happened to be there. He was a little drunk at the time. Or maybe very drunk. Definitely out of touch. Because he scared Emily enough that she jumped out of his car at an intersection and fled.

When it was happening, his only worry was that somebody would hit his beautiful car.

Later, sober, he had a lot more to worry about.

Emily … physically afraid of him … how could that be? He was the kind of guy that girls had crushes on, and flirted with, and yearned for.

Every night for weeks he saw Emily again in his mind: trembling fingers reaching for the seatbelt he had purposely hooked to make it hard to undo, her other hand ripping open the door. Her skirt flared up: pale green, with tiny silver dots. It was a graceful exit: she stepped out and started running without losing her balance or anything.

Christopher was the one who had lost his balance.

He was horrified to find how hard it was to back off the drinking.

He got a job.

Most days he managed to get home and have a Pepsi instead of stopping at a bar.

Now and then he saw Emily. She always pretended she didn't see Christopher, and she always walked a little faster.

It was New Year's Eve. A year and a half since he had left Harvard in shame.

Christopher had a strong sense of the calendar turning. A new year, he would think. He wanted to prove he was a new person, too. His failures would not be repeated.

He would kind of like to prove that to Emily.

But how?

If he cornered her, she'd probably yell for the police or something.

So when Molly Nelmes ran into Christopher downtown, and they went to a movie together, and she told him about the big New Year's Eve ball, he thought, I want to do that! I want to be a kid again and dance the New Year in!

“I'm twenty,” he said, almost shyly. “I guess I can't go.”

“You can go with me,” said Molly, batting her eyes at him, and he was delighted. He had gone out with her during the past year, in his drunken stage, and as he recalled she had been a lot of fun.

Tonight Christopher buttoned up his dress shirt and put on his tuxedo. It fit him again. Last year he had gained weight from all that beer; fat and disgusting at nineteen? Yuck. He hated being nervous. But there was a lot at stake.

He had to launch the New Year the right way.

No drugs.

No drinks.

No fighting.

No fists.

Emily would be there. Would the boyfriend let him within twenty paces? What was he going to say, anyway?

His hands were sweaty, and he couldn't remember where he'd left his car keys. Out of the refrigerator, he took the corsage for Molly. She said her dress was green, which reminded him of the simple cotton gown Emily had been wearing that night: soft mint, with soft folds. He had bought the most feminine bouquet he could think of: baby's breath and ferns and stephanotis: creamy white, heavily scented bridal flowers.

Okay, he thought, nodding, happy about the flowers.

Okay, it's going to be good.

George was not wearing his cummerbund.

“I checked you before we went out the door!” Kip wailed. “How could that have slipped by me, George?”

George hunched down in the back seat next to Beth Rose. “It felt funny,” he said apologetically. “It was wide. It stuck up higher than a belt does and it cramped my ribs.”

“You mean you left your cummerbund behind on
purpose
?” Kip said. She whirled in the front seat to glare at him. Visibility was low, however. There were ten dinosaurs in the way. Kip divided them, ducked between two tyrannosaurus rexes in gold Mylar, and faced George squarely with her toughest frown. “That beautiful black satin cummerbund, you
purposely
left at home? Just as you
purposely
sent Beth
dinosaurs
when any normal human being would send
flowers
?”

“I didn't think anybody would notice,” George said.

“How could you think nobody would notice ten Mylar dinosaurs?” said Mike, driving too fast.

“You're driving too fast,” Kip said.

“Listen!” Mike shouted. “I have no rear view mirror because it's full of shiny pterodactyls! Any speed is too fast!”

Beth tried to rein in her herd of dinosaurs by tightening on the strings. She already had a lap full, though, and there really was no way to clear the air of dinosaurs except by opening the windows and letting them fly into the night. I can hear it now, she thought. Look, dear, there's a flock of dinosaurs outside the window.

“Why did you bring them anyway, Beth?” Mike said. He rolled down the driver's window, stuck his head out to check traffic on his left, and made a big, big deal over the three flakes of snow that landed on his face. “I mean, you could just have left the stupid balloons at home.”

“Nobody ever sent me a dinosaur bouquet before,” Beth said.

“Maybe your luck will hold,” Mike said grimly. “Maybe after tonight nobody will again.”

George ran his fingers through his hair. George had had a buzz not too long ago, but he was growing it out. Eventually he would have nice curls. Now, however, he had bumps. The haircut was so bad that it didn't even appear to be his hair with the bumps: he looked as if his skull was misshapen.

Great, Beth thought. We're a matched pair. I'm bald with doorknob ears, and his skull is bumpy.

It wasn't just the cummerbund that had been bothering George: the shirt wasn't so comfortable either. He had untucked it When Kip demanded to know what had happened to the cummerbund, George explained that he had let Jamie wear it.

“Jamie?” Kip screamed. “Jamie will use it to mop up popsicle drippings!”

“I had to make it up to him about not going to a formal dance like you and me,” George said.

“That's if I let you come!” Kip stormed. “George, you cannot go to The Hadley. You don't even look like a person.”

Beth couldn't stand it and intervened. “You look excellent, George. Relaxed. Casual. I like it.”

George beamed at her. “Good. Can I take off my jacket, too?”

“No!” his sister shouted. “You have to behave like a
person
tonight, George!”

Mike just drove, fingers tight on the wheel.

When nobody was yelling, the car was full of peculiar noises: the metallic rub of the Mylar balloons, static from a radio station not quite tuned in, the windshield wipers' ceaseless clicking. Mike's car was fairly old, and he didn't care enough about it to care for it properly: it rattled, squeaked, banged, and whined.

“I don't care if it is my senior year,” Kip said, “I'm moving out of town. This Saturday night is going to be so humiliating I cannot possibly return to school on January second.”

You're
humiliated? Beth Rose thought. I'm the one carrying the dinosaurs. “George,” she said, noticing for the first time, “what shoes are you wearing?” Her voice must have given Kip a clue, because Kip undid her seat-belt, crouched on her knees and leaned all the way over her seat to peer down at George's feet. “George!” she screamed. “You're wearing moccasins.”

“Boat shoes,” George corrected. “I always wear 'em, Kip.”

Beth closed her eyes.

Kip got a grip on herself. “George,” she whispered, “this is a formal ball. You and I polished your dress shoes not an hour ago. They were shining. They were just right. Why did you take those lovely black shoes off?”

George hunched down to avoid his sister's wrath. “They were tight,” he said.

Now Mike was laughing. He was trying to control it, and he had succeeded in controlling about fifty percent of his laughter, so that what came out were little bubbly gasps, as if he had indigestion.

“If you think I am associating with you at this dance,” Kip said coldly, “you are wrong, George.”

“Just because I'm wearing boat shoes?”

Beth thought that was a perfectly good reason not to associate with George. Unfortunately, she was George's date.

Beth Rose could just imagine what Gary was going to think when she walked in with an armload of dinosaurs and George: boat shoes flapping, shirttails hanging, skull bumpy. And what other defects would be revealed in the bright lights of The Hadley?

Gary always looked perfect. He prided himself on it. Whether he was wearing a pullover sweater with cords, or jeans and an old jacket, or a tuxedo for a ball, he would look perfect. He was that kind of person. Not only did he like clothing, but clothing liked him.

“George shouldn't be going to a New Year's Eve ball,” Mike said, laughing for real now. He spoke exclusively to Kip, as if the two in the back seat were deaf. “He should go play miniature golf or something.”

Mike was right. George would fit in at Hole Four on a miniature golf range: driving his orange ball through the Dutch windmill and heading on past the clown's mouth.