The house was lit up like a Christmas tree, every window blazing, silhouettes flitting and a babble of voices pouring out, and for a moment I couldn’t take it in: had something terrible happened, was someone dying, had the house tilted and sideslipped and tossed up some gay long-gone party, if I stepped onto the lawn would I tumble straight into 1910? Then the gate clanged shut behind me and Abby threw the French doors open, calling, “Lexie!” and came running down the grass, long white skirt streaming.
“I was keeping an eye out for you,” she said. She was breathless and flushed, eyes sparkling and her hair starting to come loose from its clips; she had obviously been drinking. “We’re being decadent. Rafe and Justin made this punch stuff with cognac and rum and I don’t know what else is in it but it’s lethal, and nobody has tutorials or anything tomorrow so fuck it, we’re not going into college, we’re staying up drinking and making eejits of ourselves till we all fall over. Sound good?”
“Sounds brilliant,” I said. My voice came out strange, dislocated-it was taking me a while to pull myself together and catch up-but Abby didn’t seem to notice.
“You think? See, at first I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Rafe and Justin were already making the punch-Rafe set some kind of booze on fire, on purpose, like-and they yelled at me for always worrying about everything. And, I mean, at least for once they’re not bitching at each other, right? So I figured what the hell, we need it. After the last few days-God, after the last few weeks. We’ve all been turning into crazy people, did you realize that? That thing the other night, with the rock and the fight and… Jesus.”
Something crossed her face, a dark flicker, but before I could place it, it had vanished and the reckless, tipsy gaiety was back. “So I figure, if we go completely nuts for tonight and get everything out of our systems, then maybe we can all chill out and go back to normal. What do you think?”
Being this drunk made her seem much younger. Somewhere in Frank’s bomber-paced war-game mind she and her three best friends were being lined up and inspected, one by one, inch by inch; he was evaluating them, cool as a surgeon or a torturer, deciding where to make the first test cut, where to insert the first delicate probe. “I would love that,” I said. “God, I’d love that.”
“We started without you,” Abby said, rearing back on her heels to inspect me anxiously. “You don’t mind, do you? That we didn’t wait for you?”
“Course not,” I said. “As long as there’s some left.” Far behind her, shadows crisscrossed on the living-room wall; Rafe bent with a glass in one hand and his hair gold as a mirage against the dark curtains, and Josephine Baker poured out through the open windows, sweet and scratchy and beckoning: “Mon ręve c’était vous…” In all my life I had seldom wanted anything as wildly as I wanted to be in there, get this gun and this phone off me, drink and dance until a fuse blew in my brain and there was nothing left in the world except the music and the blaze of lights and the four of them surrounding me, laughing, dazzling, untouchable.
“Well, of course there’s some left. What do you think we are?” She caught my wrist and headed back towards the house, pulling me behind her, twisting her skirt up off the grass with her free hand. “You have to help me with Daniel. He’s got this big glass, but he’s sipping it. Tonight isn’t about sipping. He’s supposed to be swigging. I mean, I know he’s getting enough into him to do some good, because he went off into this whole long speech about the labyrinth and the Minotaur and something with Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, so he’s not sober. But still.”
“Well, come on, then,” I said, laughing-I couldn’t wait to see Daniel really hammered-“what are we waiting for?” and we raced up the lawn together and swept into the kitchen hand in hand.
Justin was at the kitchen table, with a ladle in one hand and a glass in the other, bending over a big fruit bowl full of something red and dangerous-looking. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he told us. “You’re like a pair of little wood nymphs, so you are.”
“They are lovely,” Daniel said, smiling at us from the doorway. “Give them some punch, so they’ll think we’re lovely too.”
“We always think you’re lovely,” Abby told him, grabbing a glass from the table. “But we need punch anyway. Lexie needs lots of punch, so she can catch up.”
“I’m lovely too!” Rafe shouted from the sitting room, over Josephine. “Come in here and tell me I’m lovely!”
“You’re lovely!” Abby and I yelled at the top of our lungs, and Justin pushed a glass into my hand and we all headed into the sitting room, kicking off our shoes in the hall and licking off the punch that splashed onto our wrists and laughing.
