Autumn in Phoenix was like the Little-League version of summer: it was hot and dry and generally still miserable, only a little less so. School settled into that monotony where all the days seem the same until the we found ourselves cramming incessantly around mid-October so as not to fail our mid-terms. When we got our grades back, Sean was all straight A's (as usual) and I had, to my surprise, only gotten one C, in Chemistry. When I plopped down the envelope containing the marks on the kitchen table after dinner, Mom was ecstatic and Dad curtly gave me the nod, the one that meant I hadn't screwed up this time (surprising, I know.)
Support Group was chugging along similar to school, with the exception that my apparent progress wasn't as easy to see. I was feeling, well, normal, and even though I experienced the occasional cloudburst, my days seemed to be as sunny as the Arizona autumn so far. I backed myself completely off the antidepressants (though I flushed one down the toilet each day, to keep up with appearances) and Sean and I spent more time together than usual. Quinn and I were also spending a decent amount of time getting smoothies after Group meetings and wandering through Booked Solid with Mr. Spencer trailing behind with interesting stories about this book or that author. It was during one of these outings that Quinn asked me, abruptly though nonchalantly, why I didn't have a girlfriend.
Well that answers that, I thought to myself about wondering whether or not she considered us friends, or more than that. I guess I should have expected her to, I don't know, say something if we were advancing to a different level. I was new to the whole boy-meets-girl thing and I had a lot of learning to do to catch up. I felt like an idiot for hoping, especially since she'd never really dropped any hints. Dumb, really. Bitter kids don't fall in love with each other.
I snorted and hastily slipped a battered Civil-War era tome off the shelf and pretended to be interested in it while my heart worked itself up to a nervous flutter. "I'm not really the desirable type." I said bluntly with a shrug.
"What makes you say that?" I watched Quinn raise her eyebrows at me out of the corner of my eye.
"Anti-social, underachieving nerd who struggles with clinical depression?" I scoffed somewhat cruelly. "Sure, I'll just set up an online dating profile with that as the headliner.
"That's obviously your problem, dummy!" Quinn laughed, smacking me on the shoulder with the book she had in her hands. She immediately rubbed her hand over the cover as to apologize to it, subconsciously. "You don't lead with the bad crap, you have to lure 'em in with false pretenses!"
"Who made you the dating expert?" I asked with a wry smile, sliding the book back and selecting another at random. The conversation was exciting in that boys-talking-about-girls-talking-about-boys sort of way, but I didn't want to appear too interested, lest I come across as, well, creepy or something. Oh, God, I realized suddenly. I'm trying to act cool in front of a girl!
"I've had my fair share of suitors, for your information," She said, batting her eyelashes at me oh-so-demurely. "I think it's time for you to get into the dating game. Maybe it'll take your mind off of things, you can drool and obsess over a girl like 'normal' boys do."
"That might be the one area I'm definitely okay with being abnormal." I sighed, trading the current book for yet another uninteresting volume on the fall of Tsarist Russia. "What are you suggesting I do, go pick a random girl off the sidewalk and just invite her to the fall dance or something?"
"Sorry kid, but you probably can't afford the kind of girls you pick up off of sidewalks in this area," Quinn said with a wink, and I burst out laughing so hard the Mr. Spenser poked his head around the corner to make sure everything was okay. "Do you really have a fall dance at your school?"
"Yeah, it's a Halloween-type deal where you wear costumes and stuff," I said with a grimace. "I've never been before. The only thing worse than watching my peers grinding on the gym floor is seeing them do it while dressed up."
"Aww, come on Sam, you have to live a little!" She said breezily, stowing the book she had been browsing and sliding down into a large armchair that took up most of the end of the aisle. "I think you should go."
"Yeah, right," I scoffed. "I don't feel like playing the pathetic third wheel to Sean and the Barbie Queen.
Quinn's expression clouded visibly, if only just for a moment; I'd told her all about my best friend and his attached-at-the-hip problems with Melissa. "Friends don't give up friends for a piece of tail," she had said, to my amusement. I tried to convince her that I didn't blame him, it was his girlfriend, but she didn't like him anyway and made a face whenever his name came up. "You need to take your own date, then," she said with a shrug.
"Right," I said with a short laugh. "Who's going to go with me? You?" It sounded desperate and hopeful just as soon as it left my mouth.
Quinn rolled her eyes and propped her feet up on the arm of the chair and smirked at me. "This girl right here does not go to school dances," she said matter-of-factly. "Why don't you ask Alice?"
"Alice?" I blinked, confused. I didn't have time to digest the small disappointment that came with Quinn's offhand rejection.
"Alice... from Group." She said, waving her hand in a circle as if to usher me into remembering. Duh. She was the only Alice I knew.
I recoiled a little bit with a frown. It wasn't that Alice was gross or anything, it was just that she was a little, well, goth. That, and she was from Support Group; how could I risk bringing someone from the part of me I had hidden so well right to the front doors of my school? I had very little reputation to lose; I just didn't want people asking questions.
Especially Sean.
"Nope," I said confidently. "I don't even want to go to the dance."
"Come on, Alice is cool!" Quinn raised an eyebrow at me, daring me to challenge her.
"She's not the problem!" I replied, flipping steadily through the book in my hands and trying to avoid her gaze.
"Sa-aaam! I'm doing this for you! You need to get out and live more!"
"Live more?"
"Yes. Broaden your horizons." She grinned at me.
"I don't want to."
"You need to." Quinn sat up in the chair and clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture, batting her soft steely eyes at me innocently. "If you won't do it for you, do it for me, ple-eeeeeeeeease!?" She drew out the word a mile long. I sighed.
The battle was lost.
That was precisely how I ended up on Alice's doorstep the following Saturday, half a dozen roses in one sweating palm, a deep blue corsage inside a little plastic box in the other. My dad--amazingly--had agreed to let me borrow his sedan as the chariot for the evening after making me promise that I wouldn't scratch it or attempt to have sex in the backseat (a mortifying thought). Quinn even made me go about it all properly: I had to stop Alice after Group the previous Thursday and ask her like a "proper gentleman" (Quinn's words) and then get the flowers (Quinn's idea) and pick her up at her doorstep precisely one hour before the dance started.
I was a nervous wreck, not because of the date, but because of having to go to a school social event in general. I tried to back out once before I asked Alice and once afterward, but it was no use. Quinn blocked me the first time, and by the second time my parents were aware of the date and Mom was totally beside herself to have a normal son for once; I couldn't take that away from her. So, true to my word, I arrived at Alice's place on the east side of town at a few minutes after six. It was a small house and the neighborhood was a little on the rough side, but I tried not to let it bother me. I had just reached my hand out to knock on the marred wooden door (painted a disgusting shade of green--like someone had thrown up guacamole) when it swung open abruptly and Alice was suddenly ushering me down the sidewalk without looking back. She was dressed like a witch, I guess: black dress, combat boots, heavy one the eyeliner and purple eye-shadow to boot.
"Let's get the hell out of here, my dad just found out I'm leaving the house and he's going ballistic." She grabbed my elbow and began pulling me bodily toward the car.
"Woah, is everything okay?" I asked, resisting a little. The last thing I wanted was Alice's dad tearing me to pieces on their driveway for no sin other than taking his daughter to a dance.
"Oh, yeah, it's fine," Alice said without a hint of sarcasm. "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission, ya know?"
I glanced back cautiously at the door, which stayed closed (thankfully), and shrugged, making my way back to the car. Alice stood in front of her door and looked at me expectantly. "Well? Are you going to open the door for me?"
"Oh. Uh, yeah." I speed-walked back around and pulled the door open, holding it until she pulled her combat boots in with the hem of her black dress. "Sorry," I mumbled as I scooched into the driver's side and started the car.
"That's okay, dude, I'm just busting your balls," Alice said with a wicked cackle. "Quinn told me to make sure you were a, uh, proper gentleman, I think she said."
Sound exactly like her, I thought as we started toward my high school. "Ah," was all I replied, smiling at her weakly and feeling my face go red. I couldn't help but feel like Quinn was on the date too, like some sort of supervisory ghost or something, haunting us to make sure everything went as she thought it should.
"I like your costume," I said after a few minutes of--seriously--the most awkward silence I'd ever had to endure.
Alice looked at me blankly. "What are you talking about?" She asked.
I felt my stomach flip. Oh crap. "It's um, a Halloween dance," I tried to explain without coming across as a total asshole. "The people, uh, they wear costumes."
Alice seemed unfazed by what ninety-nine-point-nine percent of all other girls on the planet would have considered an insult. "Oh. Nah, this is just my good black dress, didn't really have anything else to wear." She looked me up and down before pointing out, "besides, you're not wearing a costume."
Indeed I wasn't; there was no way I was willingly going to add to the humiliation factor of the whole ordeal. I (or my mom, rather) had settled on a deep blue shirt, khaki pants, and a striped tie. Dad spent all of dinner reminiscing about how he had dressed up as David Hasselhoff (or, as Dad called him, "The Hoff") from Baywatch his senior year and ended up making out with three different girls at the same party. Mom chided him but seemed amused, saying that she went as Pamela Anderson herself once in college, but she wouldn't say how effective it had been at luring in Frat boys, and I really didn't need to know anyway.
Alice and I made casual, disjointed conversation the rest of the way to the school. I discovered that she attended an alternative high school on the north side of the city because she had some kind of learning disability that, frankly, you'd probably never notice. I was glad that Quinn had picked Alice of the three girls we attended Group with because she was actually very easy to get along with. Aside from a deeply obsessive attitude toward Punk bands and infatuation with the color black, Alice was as normal as I could imagine anyone could be. I parked at the back of the lot and opened her door for her, as Quinn would have wanted me to. I actually glanced over my shoulder to see if, for some reason, she was hiding in the bushes watching us for some reason. No, I reminded myself with just the tiniest touch of bitterness, that girl doesn't do school dances.
The thump of the music could be heard halfway across the parking lot. Alice and I walked side by side, but not too close. Kids that I recognized and many that I didn't know at all were meandering toward the double doors of the gym dressed up in all kinds of costumes. Some were interesting, like a very tall, skinny junior who was dressed as a cowboy, spurs and all. Others were just lame; it seemed like most kids who played sports had dressed in some piece of their uniform or another to pass off as "athletes." The Hills kids, of course, were showing up in limousines and were sporting a wide variety of getups that could have costed more than my dad's car.
Most of the girls were taking advantage of the after-hours lack of dress code: sexy nurse, sexy cat, sex cop. I even saw a girl in what looked like a cut-off spacesuit, a sexy astronaut or something. I noticed Alice glared at a lot of those girls as they passed, hanging off the arm of some strapped up jock, giggling and laughing as if they were absolutely carefree. That's probably what's bothering her, I realized, watching her glare down a girl with a skirt so short I had to wonder if her date would be paying her at the end of the night. People like us don't mix well with the worry-not-want-not types. I had long ago given up on being jealous of the kids who never seemed to have any serious problems; it seemed as if Alice hadn't quite gotten over that yet.
"The one benefit of having a bunch of rich pricks attend your school is that they don't hold back at all," I said finally, trying to ease the tension as we reached the doors. Alice shrugged and narrowed her eyes, glancing around apprehensively as if the preppy kids were going to attack her or something. I handed our tickets to an overly-enthusiastic parent volunteer and we stepped inside, immediately immersed in the stench of fog machine, B.O., and raging teenage hormones: it was the classic "school dance" cocktail of unpleasant scents.
While I'd never been to a school dance before, Sean had been to several (and wouldn't shut up about them afterwards) so I knew about what to expect, but I was still blown away by the degree to which wealthy parents will go to entertain their kids. The music was pumping from a huge stage set up at the very back wall, complete with tons of strobe lights and a popular local alternative-rock band that had probably cost a small fortune to hire. The food--oh, god, the food--was a medley of catering from all the local hotspots. They had even managed to get an entire make-your-own-burger table from In-N-Out; I silently wished Melissa, wherever she may have been, good luck in attempting to get Sean to do anything but park himself in front of that table for the whole night.
The main spectacle, however, appeared to be the writhing, sweaty, pheromone-reeking beast that was two hundred half-dressed teenagers grinding up on each other in a massive cloud of fog in the center of the dance floor. Alice took one look and made a face that said everything I was thinking: ugh! We drifted to the drinks table and got some sodas from yet another enthusiastic parent who seemed to be miraculously oblivious as to what was occurring right in front of her. We stood next to each other for several minutes, trying to look anywhere but at the dance floor.
"So this is what a school dance is like," Alice said finally, shouting a little to be heard over the music. It had never occurred to me that other people didn't like to attend these things either.
I nodded my head and it just kind of kept going in time to the music. I noticed a couple kids from some of my classes stare at us as they walked by. Yeah, I said in my head, the weird kid and his goth date are in public. Deal with it. I really tried not to let it bother me, but I felt like I had to defend Alice for some reason; I had already endured years of criticism at their hands and I didn't feel like she deserved the same cruelty. I gave several couples withering looks as the passed by but I don't think anyone could even tell in the strobing lights.
"Hey, do you want to go outside?" Alice shouted at me after about ten more minutes of just standing around at the edge of the obscene moshpit.
"Sure, if you want to!" I yelled back. A breath of fresh air would be a godsend at this point. She nodded vigorously and started making her way toward one of the side-exits, me close behind. The door opened with a bang and suddenly we were out in the waning twilight. It felt like coming up after being underwater for way too long, I found myself gulping air almost desperately. Large gatherings of people weren't the worst thing in the world, but they weren't my favorite, either. Alice wandered over to a concrete bench by the sidewalk and dug a red pack of cigarettes out of her purse. She lit it and took a deep drag, then tapped the ash off on the pole of a large "tobacco free campus" sign. I actually laughed out loud.
"What?" Alice looked at me, puzzled, and sucked in another long drag.
"Nothing." I said, shaking my head but still smiling. Alice looked up at the sign and her eyes widened in surprise.
"Shit! Sorry," she apologized quickly, grinding out her cigarette carefully and tossing the stub in the trash can. "We don't have those at Jefferson; pretty much everyone smokes."
"Welcome to suburbia," I said with a shrug, sitting down on the bench next to her, but not too close.
"You know, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be," she sighed, kicking her boot-clad feet back and forth, looking up at the darkening sky. Phoenix was big, but not big enough that you couldn't see a few stars blinking down from space. It was odd seeing such an innocent pose from the hardcore goth girl. "At least it got me out of the house for the night."
"Speaking of," I ventured cautiously, remembering our hasty exit with some apprehension, "your dad isn't going to, like, murder me or something, will he?"
Alice laughed. Well, it was halfway between a laugh and a scoff. "No worries, dude. He'll be long passed out by the time we get back." She mimed drinking out of a bottle. I nodded dumbly; she said it so casually, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It might actually be, for her, I realized with a twist of my stomach. It suddenly made a lot more sense why Alice was in Group with us.
We only had another minute or two of comfortable silence on the bench before the door we had escaped from banged open and the night was suddenly filled with loud voices and obnoxious laughing. Alice stiffened noticeably. I wished we were invisible as a small group of people began making their way across the grass toward us.I thought we had escaped their scrutiny until the absolute last voice I wanted to hear at that moment pipped up, shrill and slurred:
"Oh. My. Go-oooood. What a-aaare you even weari-iiiing?"
It was followed by:
"Holy crap, Sam? Is that you?"
My stomach did a flip-flop as Sean detached himself from the gaggle, towing a very unsteady, very loud Melissa by the elbow. He took a long look at Alice, who remained expressionless, and then looked back at me, as if lost for words. It was Alice who eventually broke the silence. "That girl is, like, really drunk," she said plainly, pointing at Sean's girlfriend. For someone with an alcoholic parent, she even sounded a little impressed.
"I'm not drunk, bish, I'm jus' been drinking!" Melissa declared loudly, sending the whole group behind into peals of laughter. "Your dress is so-oooo ugly!" she continued, waving a hand wildly. Sean caught her hand and held it tightly, looking mortified.
"It's her first time drinking," he said apologetically. "I'm really, really sorry about this."
"It's fine," Alice said, putting on a fake smile. What was it with everyone and fake smiles? "She looks like she's not all that pleasant when she's sober, at least she has an excuse."
Sean went defensive almost instantly and I did the one thing you never do when someone insults your best friend's girlfriend: I laughed. I knew immediately that I shouldn't have, but Alice's assertion was, at least to me, totally accurate. Sean glared at me and I shut my mouth, but the damage had been done.
"I'm going to drive her home," he said shortly, leading her backward. "Maybe I'll see you around Sam. Your girlfriend here seems like a real gem, wherever the hell you picked her up from." With that he dragged a protesting Melissa back toward the parking lot. I felt a knot tighten in my throat and I buried my face in my hands. Not only was he going to demand to know where she came from, but I had violated the one part of out "bro code" that he was always asking me not to: don't mess with the girlfriend.
"They seemed nice," Alice said offhandedly, shaking her head. She dug another cigarette out of her purse and lit up, ignoring the sign once again.
"That was my best friend," I said dully, suddenly wishing that Quinn hadn't made me go one this stupid date. It wasn't Alice's fault that she had defended herself, but I felt all the progress that Sean and I seemed to have made slip through my fingers like sun-baked desert sand.
"Hmm," was all she responded, and the smell of cigarette smoke washed over me, making me grimace. "Does this make me your girlfriend?" She asked suddenly, cocking her head at me.
"I don't think so," I replied hastily, alarmed. "It was just a dance."
"Ah." Another pause. "So, do you wanna make out?"
"Uh, what?" I must have looked at her like she had gone absolutely insane. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah," she chirped, putting out the second cigarette and applying some lip balm. "You bought the tickets, that's how it goes, right?"
"Um, thanks," I said, trying to sound like I meant it, "but I should probably take you home now."
"Alright," she said, unphased, and we both stood up.
What a night, I said to myself, shaking my head slowly as we crossed the parking lot in the general direction of where I had parked. I'm never letting Quinn do this to me again.
I was, without a doubt, going to call her right when I got home and let her know just how badly she had screwed up my life. Knowing her, she'd just laugh and tell me that it was good for me, or something like that. Was it good for me? Probably not. Alice was humming along to the radio as we pulled out of the parking lot a few minutes later and I rolled the windows down, smiling to myself But, I realized as she turned the music up and the wind began whipping across my face, I seemed to actually beenjoying myself for the first time in a very long while.
I guess I had Quinn to thank for that in some mad, twisted sort of way. 644Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxdgBsTegFR
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