Page 5

II

Alice lurches back into her body, the entire pep talk erased by the sudden appearance of another person, the intimacy of it, not the crush of faceless strangers partying beyond, but a single girl sitting alone in the dark.

She’s lounging on the edge of the bed in a silver baby-doll dress, leaning back on her hands, fingers sinking into someone else’s pillowed comforter.

Her legs are crossed and her head’s tipped back, exposing the warm column of her throat.

Her hair is a mane of curls that are probably brown, but look violet from the scarf thrown over the bedside lamp, and Alice’s first thought is that she wishes she could take a picture.

Maybe it’s the way the light carves the other girl up, tracing hollows and points, grazing her thigh where it meets the short silver hem.

And then Alice realizes that the girl’s no longer looking at the ceiling, but at her.

(“You’re staring,” snapped the first girl Alice ever had a crush on, the words sharp enough to sear her cheeks, to make her duck her head even though she hadn’t been, not then, was just daydreaming in the wrong direction.)

Alice is staring now, but she can’t seem to tear her eyes away.

She knows if someone looked at her the way she’s looking at this girl, she’d flinch, but the girl doesn’t, only smiles, revealing a dimple in one cheek.

She rises to her feet, and as she does, the fingers of light seem to bend and follow, like they want to keep touching her. And Alice doesn’t blame them.

The girl walks right toward her, doesn’t stop until she’s close enough for Alice to see that it’s not a trick of the light—her curls are truly violet—close enough to see the freckles dusting the girl’s tan cheeks, close enough to trace the curve of her pomegranate lips, and Alice has the sudden urge to kiss her, and what a consecration that would be, of her new self.

But then the girl’s eyes drift past her and Alice realizes she’s blocking the door to the bathroom.

“Sorry,” she stammers, already forgetting the rules, but the girl only cocks her head as if amused, eyes trailing like fingers up Alice’s front as her voice brushes her cheek.

“For what?”

And Alice is even more flustered now, doesn’t know what to say to that, afraid she’ll somehow make it ten times worse, apologize for the way she was staring, the longing behind it, the almost kiss as well as blocking the door, and then she might as well give up the whole silly game and go back to floor three and hide under the covers reliving every failed second of this night until the end of time.

Instead she steps aside, out of the doorway, and says, “All yours,” and the smile that twitches at the corner of the girl’s mouth makes Alice think it is —that this is in fact her house, her bed, her room Alice is standing in, but the girl just drifts past her into the bathroom, and closes the door without ever turning on the light.

Alice ejects herself from the room.

Decides as she does that what just happened was a minor hiccup, a false start to the game, but by the time she’s halfway down the hall, New Alice is back on track.

The music is loud enough to drown out most of her doubts, and her skin is buzzing from that brief meeting with the violet girl, cheeks warm from the memory of that raking glance, and she probably hadn’t been flirting but even still, the weight of that look was like a shot of vodka, bold and burning in her chest, and that is the problem, she decides—New Alice is too sober.

She sees a boy from her building—floor two or four, she doesn’t know—holding a half-smoked joint, and plucks it from his fingers, takes a drag, and for a moment she is three thousand miles away, sitting on a low stone wall, heels knocking pebbles and mortar loose from the rock while a song loops on her phone and then she exhales, sighing the smoke out into the space between them with her thanks.

The boy leans in, flirtation in his glassy eyes, but New Alice isn’t interested, doesn’t linger, doesn’t hand the joint back, either.

She has laid claim to it, pink lip stains on the tip of the paper, and she turns and takes another draw, smoke trailing behind her as she moves down the crowded hall, and the bodies don’t exactly part but she winds between them, no longer against the flow but with it as she passes through the kitchen, where bottles are lined up like stained-glass panels under the lights.

She reaches for the nicest-looking one and pours herself a shot of amber-colored scotch, throws it back, refills the glass, and when Old Alice whines that she has never had a head for liquor, that she has a paper to finish, that it isn’t smart to drink from open bottles, New Alice downs the second shot, and drops the last of the joint in the dregs of the glass, dousing both the butt and the protest.

One night, she thinks, and the thud in her chest is the steady beating of a clock.

Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. And as the liquor hits, so does the weed, and warmth finally blooms inside her chest, and her head feels light, and this is the secret, isn’t it, she thinks, this is the easiest way to become someone else.

She is out of the kitchen now, the music running its fingers through her hair, the bass like a rope around each bone, and she moves toward it, hand skimming the wall for balance, until she is back to the vivid green paint with its fairy blooms. She leans in, and lets her forehead rest against the wall.

Her wall.

She closes her eyes, cocooned in the noise, until she feels herself sinking into the green paint, the surface going spongy beneath her palms, turning to mallow, swallowing her hands up to the wrist.

Alice jerks back, expecting the wall to hold on to her, but the paint is just paint and she stumbles, shoulders colliding with another body. A hand steadies her, and she knows, somehow she knows before she ever turns, that it’s her.

The violet girl.

And it is.

The sorry is halfway out when the girl smiles, one brow arched as if she’s in on the game, and Alice bites down on the word, turning it into a so, her lips pouting around the shape.

The girl’s hand is still on her shoulder.

It seems quite comfortable there, and the music is too loud to hear anything that’s not a shout, but Alice can read the words on her pomegranate lips.

Dance with me.

If Alice looked around, she’d see it’s not a strange request—everyone is dancing now, this section of the house a bobbing tide of limbs—but Alice doesn’t look at them, because that would mean looking away from the violet girl, with her tinted curls, and high cheekbones, and wide brown eyes.

Brown, the most common color in the world, but there is nothing common about them.

They’re gold at the edges, like some internal light is trying to peek out, but dark at the center, so dark she’d think the pupils were blown wide if she couldn’t see them too, pinpricks despite the party’s muted light.

And Old Alice might have stumbled, might have fumbled this flirtation, but the sheer volume of the music eliminates the need for coy replies or witty comebacks.

All she has to do is nod, and then the girl’s hand is sliding from her shoulder to her shirtfront, fingers tangling in the cotton of her shirt as she pulls Alice closer.

The music is a current, the bass a rolling tide, and they are rising and falling together, and up close the girl doesn’t smell like vanilla, or coconut shampoo, or any of the heavy floral scents that hung in the air earlier that night when the girls in the suite were getting ready.

No, she smells like wet earth and wrought iron and raw sugar.

They don’t so much tangle up as fold together, arm on arm, ribs on ribs, a girl and her shadow, or a shadow and its light, and she’s heard a hundred songs and sayings about how the right person can make the whole world disappear, but the world is still there, raging around them, only it’s background noise, it’s set dressing, and for once in her life she is standing center stage, performing for an audience of one, this violet girl.

“I’m Alice,” she shouts over the music, realizes as the words come out how useless it is; she can’t hear her own voice.

But the other girl seems to. She answers, her own name lost in the swell, and Alice frowns, and shakes her head, and the girl presses in, leans her cheek against Alice’s, and says it again, and the name should be nothing but an exhale tickling her ear, but the music chooses right then to dip, and so she hears it.

Lottie.

And then the girl is ducking her head, curls tickling Alice’s neck, and she feels the kiss as it lands on the bare skin at the open collar of her shirt.

Alice is shivering, hungry for the touch, is about to pull the girl’s face up and kiss her when her ears hum, filling with a noise too loud, too bright, and at first she thinks it’s some kind of frozen note, a song’s protracted beat, but the atonal chord rises above the music and then the music cuts off, and the note remains and she realizes what it is: a smoke alarm.

And everything unravels.

The lights come on, and suddenly the Co-op is just a house, too crowded and too bright, and Alice looks around, but the violet girl is gone, and the bodies she’s been fighting through all night are moving in the same direction now, a tide carrying Alice away, down the hall and out the door and down the steps onto the street.

The night is a hand on the back of her neck, heavy, unwelcome, and she feels dizzy, unmoored, the world gone soft under her feet, her senses knocked off-kilter—like taking a nap in the afternoon and waking to find it’s dark outside, or stepping off one of those moving sidewalks, or lying for too long under the stars on a clear night as they slide around so slow you don’t notice until you stand up again.