The Lifeboat Clique (3 page)

Me: I think I'm getting really nervous because I'm abusing myself while pretending to talk in your voice.

SB (high voice):
Then can I paw at the butterflies in your stomach?

Finally I was finished. I gazed into the mirror. I looked good. As good as I was going to look. My brown hair, although not a particular flashy color, was looking extra-shiny tonight. I had what were considered delicate features,
with a nice jawline and eyebrows that never needed plucking because they were born behaving themselves. And my nose was a perfect size and shape—at least, it had been, until Abigail punched me in the face. Now I imagined one nostril was slightly deformed. Probably all in my head—just part of the trauma of the memory.

And what made me think I could show up at the party of my greatest enemy and she wouldn't throw me out? I had no idea. And yet I took the chance. I opened the window and slid out and fell into some bushes, and I was free. It took a few minutes to extricate myself and pull the leaves from my hair and check to make sure the branches hadn't ripped my shirt. Sonny Boy gazed down from the window at me, his eyes glowing bright in the moonlight. Had he the power to lug his litter box to the window and dump its contents on my freshly blow-dried head, he would have. That is the kind of cat he was.

I crept over to the garage, opened the door as quietly as I could, and started up my mother's Subaru. She had given me a spare set of keys so I could drive myself to work.

I think we've already established that I was a terrible person.

I took Santa Monica Boulevard west to the Pacific Coast Highway. The window in the back of my mother's Subaru had some kind of electrical short in it, and she was
going to fix it but used the money for a Robert Pathway seminar instead; and now the wind whistled through that space and made a moaning, disappointed sound as I drove sneakily up the coast toward Malibu.

I let down my window so I could feel the ocean breeze. The water itself was flat and calm. I passed Sunset and Topanga and many Realtor offices and seafood restaurants and surf shops before I finally entered Malibu, which was lined on the ocean side by narrow wooden houses right next to one another, where people could walk out in back and stroll down the twenty-two inches of viable sand between high and low tides.

The night was particularly clear, and the stars were bright overhead. The moon at three-quarters. I had overheard the address of the party house by lurking around the popular girls in the locker room before gym class and then used the internet to track down the location. According to Zillow, the Abigail-blessed party house had lingered empty on the market for the past eleven months at 2.4 million dollars—enough to buy a mile of bait shops in South Carolina but not enough to make a splash in California real estate.

I was a bit of a real estate freak. Not just because my mother worked in a Realtor's office but because lonely people need a hobby, and that's what I picked, along with
my other two hobbies: watching the Discovery Channel and grooving alone to Just Dance 4 on Wii, my movements imitating that of a giraffe floundering in a vat of gelatin.

Zillow had displayed interiors of the house. The owner had staged it with tacky furnishings and even a baby grand piano. It was the perfect house for a group of entitled teenagers to destroy. I felt sorry for the owner, but not sorry enough to turn around.

When I was almost to Cross Creek I took a right and drove up a short road, and there it was, on a small bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean itself. Cars were parked tight all along the road, so I had to walk a bit.

I was wearing a pair of skinny jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, a light sweater, Converse sneakers, and an eternity scarf, and thought I looked reasonably attractive. I saw windows lit and heard the faint sounds of music. Something quirky and contemporary and subdued. Abigail was no dummy. Loud music made neighbors mad. And mad neighbors called police. And police were even less welcome at parties than me.

I stopped and straightened my shirt. Stopped again and smoothed my hair. Stopped again and just stopped. My armpits were sweating. What if a special black light had
been installed in the doorway to pick up the telltale armpit sweat of the uninvited loser? And what if some loud buzzer went off, and everyone froze and stared at me just before a wild purse-dog hired just for the occasion buried its tiny fangs in my ankles as a subtle hint for me to go?

My feet wouldn't move. There was nothing wrong with a change of heart, right? I could just turn around right now and backtrack all the way up to my window and crawl into my bedroom, and no one would be the wiser.

But I would be the same, and I'd had a brief, wild hope of being different. And that hope, like an insane Pomeranian, had buried its teeth in my soul and wouldn't let go.

I took a deep breath and walked up to the house.

THE DOOR WAS UNLOCKED. I PUSHED IT OPEN AND FOUND
that the poor bastard who owned the house must have had good insulation, because the music was turned up loud. Kids were drinking and talking and making out all around me.

The house was huge. The bad artwork looked expensive, and the floors were marble.

I wandered into the living room, then the kitchen, with its clean, steel lines and center island and perfectly stained cabinets. More kids were in there, some already drunk, all of them in clusters.

Croix was nowhere in sight.

Sienna Martin was lounging by the refrigerator, her hair swept back in a ponytail. She wore a long shirt, a pair of black leggings, and short boots. She had added clunky power bracelets and a bubble necklace. Her eyelids were in crazy peacock hues. She was smoking an e-cigarette.

She took a long drag and then expelled the nicotine vapor. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as you. Crashing a house whose owner suffers from the delusion that it should sell at twice its value.”

The tip of her e-cigarette glowed blue. “You're always saying things like that.”

“Things like what?”

“Big things you have to think about to understand. Why don't you just talk normal?” She looked over at her sidekick, high-strung simpleton Hayley Amherst, who drove a Mercedes. “Hey,” she said to Hayley. “Look who's here.” She had that tone of voice that meant “Look who's here who's not invited.”

Hayley was dressed like a cover model from
Teen Vogue Idiot
. She slithered over and looked me up and down.

“Why would you want to be here?” she asked. “I mean, who do you think is going to talk to you? Why should anyone talk to you when no one here is your friend? I'm not being a bitch or anything. I'm just telling the truth and honestly I'd really like to know, because everywhere I go
I'm invited, so I've never been someone like you, I'm just saying.”

Hayley liked to talk in a spray of words that always reminded me of the aggressive mist of Finesse Extra Hold aerosol that Abigail once used in a desperate attempt to keep her springy hair in place.

“What was the question again?” I asked.

Sienna was there to helpfully translate word-spray into bitch-stick. “What would make you come to a party where you aren't invited?”

I didn't like the way this was going. “I was actually paid to do a strip show here. Where's my pole?”

Hayley nodded as if that made sense. Sienna just stared at me and blew some secondhand vapor my way.

“Why would you want to hang around with us? Don't you have any friends?” Sienna asked.

“I have a ton of friends, especially if you count friendly carbs and friendly bacteria.”

Sienna kept up the blank-bitch stare while Hayley cocked her head slightly.

I moved over to the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, and tried to open it, but it wasn't a twist top. So I just stood there trying to pry off the cap with my thumb. They were still looking at me like I needed to further explain myself, or beg for their mercy, or ask for a razor blade so I could
start cutting myself, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. I thought it was somewhat funny, in a sad way, that I actually was at a party and actually talking to people but that the subject of our conversation was how crazy I was to think I belonged there. Sonny Boy would have said in his high voice:
“Well, now you've done it, dipshit.”

I felt a presence in the room and looked over. There was dear Abigail, head intruder herself, wearing jeans, a T-shirt under a rumpled sweater, and a pair of cowboy boots, because her reinvention of herself had never quite reached her clothes. Her hair was sprayed down hard, the camouflage was chalky over her freckles, and she had evidently been plucking her eyebrows and penciling them in too heavy, giving her a slightly deranged look.

She looked me up and down. “Well, well, well,” she said in her fake Texas accent. It came out sounding like
Way-ull, Way-ull, Way-ull
. “Have we got a trespasser here?”

A knot of anxiety was growing inside me. The last thing I wanted was a confrontation with my former best friend.

“All of us are trespassers,” I said.

“Oooh,” said Abigail. “Good one. Knee slapper.”

I was starting to feel like it was a very, very bad idea to come to this party.

“Where's your video camera?” Abigail asked. Some
people have inside jokes. We had an inside worst-memory-in-the-world.

“Decided not to bring it,” I said.

“You know what happened last time!” Hayley piped up.

Abigail gave her a withering look, and she made a squeaking sound and took a gulp of her beer.

“Is she allowed to be here?” Sienna asked. “Shouldn't you throw her out?”

And that's what made Sienna such a bitch. She wasn't content to be unfriendly. She just had to take it to the next level. And what was it to Sienna that I was there? No one was supposed to be there.

I almost said that Croix had invited me. Then I decided I wasn't going to give them the pleasure. Ironically enough, this would be the second time Abigail threw me out of a party. And if I was made to leave before I got to see Croix, if this dream died right here, then I was going to pull Sienna's ponytail really hard before I left. Give it a kamikaze yank and watch her eyes bulge out. I could almost feel her salon-slickened ponytail grasped in my palm like a pelted salamander.

Do it,
I thought, now glaring at Abigail.
Go ahead, Texas witch.

Abigail shrugged. “Whatever,” she said. “I just think
it's kinda sad that you want to come to a party where no one wants you around.”

I wanted to respond, “I think it's kind of sad you think that fake Texas accent is cool,” but I said nothing. Tried to feel nothing, but that was impossible.

And that was it. Sienna and Hayley shrugged too because they were obedient robots. They lost interest in me and went back to talking. Abigail turned her back to me, and there I was. At the party but not of the party. Allowed to stay but completely unwelcome.

“This is the best party ever,”
Sonny Boy said sarcastically in my ear.
“Well done, loser.”

I left the kitchen and wandered through the living room, which was furnished tastelessly—lots of fake gold inlay and faux French art. The beer bottles strewn everywhere and people making out on the couch could only have added to such tacky decor. I decided that since Croix wasn't here and no one else seemed interested in talking to me, I'd give myself a lonely little tour of the house, maybe read some books from the bookshelf, and stare out the window and pretend I was a friendless, invisible old lady just waiting to kick the bucket, like I would be in about sixty years.

I wandered down the dark hallway. The walls were
lined with paintings of people from another century. They looked rich and pissed off, like they had somehow anticipated this night while sitting for their portraits. The hallway still had a new-house smell, and I wondered if anyone had ever lived here.

I found a bathroom and went inside. It had two vanity sinks and was bigger than my entire bedroom. A cocker spaniel could have done laps in the Jacuzzi tub. The track lighting and fixtures were tasteful, and the marble floor had subtle flecks of silver. It was surprising to find such a stylish bathroom in such a tacky house, but the trusty purple shag bath mat was there as a reminder that the exception proved the rule.

I sat down cross-legged on the bath mat and closed my eyes. This wasn't so bad. You don't necessarily have to be with other people to have fun at a party. The bathroom had a pleasant, just-cleaned smell even after all these months. It was sad, in a way. This house, for all its splendor, had a lonely, hopeful vibe to it. Just wanting to be wanted.

I was meditating on this when someone pounded on the door. The doorknob turned and then jiggled.

“Hey!” a muffled voice called. “Let us in! Emergency!”

I jumped up and unlocked the door. It burst open, and in came Sienna, supporting a very wasted Madison Cutler,
whom I hadn't seen yet, possibly because she was off somewhere getting drunk enough to look like she did now, which was a hot mess.

“Get out of the way!” Sienna ordered, and I stood aside but didn't leave, because I had nothing else to do while I waited for Croix to appear, and watching a drunk bitch taking care of a drunker bitch was better than the mother-gorilla-and-her-young videos on the Discovery Channel.

“Hey!” Madison mumbled, smiling at me, and I realized she had reached the point of drunkenness where snob functions begin to shut down. Possibly twice the legal limit, I estimated. “How's it going, Phoenix?”

“Denver,” I said.

Madison's eyes went big and her hand flew to her mouth, and Sienna hustled her over to the toilet, where Madison collapsed and began heaving her guts out as her friend held back her hair.

“Nice,” I said before I could stop myself.

Sienna's head snapped back. “What do you mean, nice? She's very sick.”

“I think you mean, drunk.”

“At least she was invited to this party. At least she wasn't pathetic enough to come uninvited.”

“Yes, her dignity is an inspiration to us all.”

Madison heaved again, and Sienna shouted, “Get out
of here!” Her eyes were on fire, and her teeth were bared, so I supposed our conversation was over and it was time to move on. Just before I shut the door behind me, Madison's hand came up and grabbed Sienna's ponytail, perhaps mistaking it for the toilet handle, and yanked it down hard, and I was given the pleasure of seeing Sienna's wild-eyed silent scream.

I decided that moment was worth the whole party and wondered if I should just leave. It hadn't been a terrible party, by pariah standards, and maybe I should quit while I was ahead. But something stubborn in me—something that refused to believe this was a fluke or a trap—made me decide to stay a while longer.

Once when I was very young, my family took a trip to Portland. When it was time to go home, we took off from the Portland airport, the sky cloudy overhead. The plane rose up through the clouds, and suddenly I could see the blue sky and the yellow sun above us, and the clouds were now a blanket below the plane. There was a whole new world up there. And I guess that's what I think of all stories. We believe we know the limits of them and then we find out there's another story lying right on top of them. In my mind, which was stupid, I thought there was another, brighter story going on at this very moment, and I just hadn't broken through yet. So, instead of heading to
the door, I went into one of the bedrooms.

Big mistake. Some naked monster made of two horndogs was humping itself on a four-poster bed.

The boy part of the monster rose up, his eyes wild.

“Get out of here!” he shouted.

“With pleasure!” I screamed, and beat a hasty retreat.

I decided that each bedroom probably contained a similar scene, because the first thing that high school kids have to do at a party is soil a stranger's bed. It's a beautiful ritual, like a Japanese tea ceremony.

I decided to see what was upstairs. Maybe blue sky and a yellow sun.

The second floor was one big den and wet bar bordered by giant windows that looked down on the ocean, and was even more hideously furnished than the downstairs. Trevor Dunlap was drumming on the bar with a pair of empty beer bottles, gently enough not to break the bottles, hard enough to make the most obnoxious sound in the world. I knew he played drums in a band, but apparently he was going solo tonight. He wasn't talking to anyone, just gazing out straight ahead, nodding to the beat of his hellish racket.

A giant, never-ending sofa with leopard print and cabriole legs wound around the room, playing host to various people drinking and laughing. A group of guys
surrounded a pool table whose felt covering was the color of those molten lakes you see in fantasy movies. A suit of armor stood by the bar as though it were waiting to check IDs. An ugly zebra rug covered the floor. A baby grand piano sat near a narrow set of stairs that led to the rooftop. The winding staircase, I had to admit, looked cool. It rose in a very tight spiral to the ceiling, where a small door had been placed. I thought about going up to the roof and looking at the stars or down at the sea, but I was afraid of interrupting some act of frantic humping, and I couldn't take that sight again. Still clutching my unopened beer, I took a seat on one of the sofas.

There I sat, holding my warming beer. All around me the party progressed, with people getting louder and rowdier, and guys shoving and roughhousing each other and screaming playful bro-insults. At some point, I heard the beer bottle drumsticks stop clinking and looked back to see Trevor smoking something that was not an e-cigarette, his hair hanging down in his face.

I was not even important enough to be challenged again. No doubt Sienna was giving clumsy, unnecessary CPR to her passed-out best friend in the first-floor bathroom, and Hayley was talking and talking, and Abigail was surveying her kingdom or breaking a window or whatever she did for fun these days.

Croix was still nowhere in sight.

I decided I was going to sit there with my beer and my invisible cat and outlast all of them. From what I heard, the coolest kids always stay to the end of the party because they don't care the most, and their parents are the most high on something and therefore the most permissive. I was going to be one of those kids tonight, clinging on to the good times around me like a barnacle.

I had just formulated this plan when something awful happened. Something that I did not realize was awful right away.

Audrey Curtis suddenly appeared in a blue dress and silver flats, with a purse that somehow matched both in a way that I could not have figured out if I had a million years and a team of physicists to help me.

“Hey, Denver!” she said, and I could not believe she knew my name. But I suppose it's like what they say about God, that no lowly sparrow falls without his knowledge, and no loser fluttered the halls outside of Audrey's sphere of awareness. Perhaps I'd even been the subject of her prayers before she turned off her Tiffany lamp and fell asleep under a coverlet made of angel socks.