The Theatre Party Where It’s Rumored Jessica Lost Her Virginity

They put sunglasses on the dead guy to make him less dead. It was an artistic choice. This was after they propped him up at the cards table by the pool. Some of the younger ones were looking spooked by him, so they threw some chips in front of him and dealt him a hand, but that wasn’t enough, so they got the glasses too. Now he wasn’t dead, and they were cheering at him to raise with those four aces in his hand. Of course, he couldn’t, because he was dead. They laughed and laughed.
It was Jaimie’s idea, mostly. It’s always mostly Jaimie’s idea. Then Alex hops in and the two of them together are an immovable force of sorts, and once the two of them are set everyone – Sarah, Lou, Taylor, everyone – falls in line. They were just high schoolers, after all, and theatre kids at that. Everything was just this big act. For them to practice living in the real world would be like a painter trying to write a poem: an entirely different art form, using tools they’d never considered. I was there too, putting in my ante. My hand was shit though. Probably because they kept stacking the dead guy’s hand with flushes or blushes or whatever.
Nearby, at the firepit, Liam and Bert (twins) were leading a Disney showtune singalong, mostly with freshman, but some older ones joined in too. They were having the party they were supposed to be having, the lot of them, sticking marshmallows into the fire and sitting next to people they think they might love. I looked for Jen and Maya in particular, which I supposed everyone was doing, because it was them and it’d been long enough. They were there, by the cackling flame, underlit, orange, alight. It was warm just looking at them. Only juniors, they had time to do it all, still. I couldn’t tell if they were holding hands, their bodies covered by fire and other bodies, but I hoped they were.
A couple yards from the pit, Sophie, Leyla, and Molly were walking around the outskirt of the pool. You know how it is. One or two of the freshman boys – I think that one’s name is Charlie – sat fawning. The pool-lights illuminated a ring around the water, so the girls looked almost as they did under spotlight. I was used to seeing Sophie like this; only Sophie was really the actress, the other two were pretty, glorified extras who didn’t talk to me. Her swimsuit was teal, two-pieced, and smaller than school regulations would allow, that’s for sure. But this wasn’t a school event. You need look no further than the dead body for confirmation of that. They decided to sit down at the edge of the pool, dangling their feet, talking inaccessibly amongst themselves, waiting for someone to dare, or maybe just enjoying themselves. It was hard to tell. Besides, Leyla had already dated everyone at the party anyway. I really liked Sophie. She was nice in a way no one ever mentioned, which I always thought was the best way to be nice. I would’ve waved if she’d looked at me, and she would’ve waved back.
“Rachel, you bidding?” Jaimie asked, tapping the black metal grating of the table.
“Folding,” I said, and then dropped my hand. Deady had the cards I needed. He bled like a newbie. The body wasn’t very mangled; if it were, I don’t think they’d ever have tried posing him up. You couldn’t even tell how he died. With the glasses on, you might think he was just sleeping. Maybe he was. What does Alex or Jaimie know about listening for a heartbeat? Who could hear breathing over the chatter of the night? Another hand was being dealt.
“What’ll we give him this time?” Alex asked the table.
“Spades,” I said. “You know... so he can dig a grave?” Poor taste or not, it got a laugh and his hand had a straight in spades. I picked up my hand, which was sticky, and ants crawled around inside me as I thought of ways to get clean again.
Chris walked out of the house into the backyard, nodding towards our table, and then joining the campfire. He had been Demetrius in our most recent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so he was kind of a big deal. Not the lead, so not unattainable and pompous, but just a large enough role to make him pretty cool. I thought I wanted Chris to love me, but I wasn’t sure. With Catholic high school boys, it’s like that. Everything’s going really well, maybe getting a little hot, and then suddenly they say something, and you realize they’re a neo-nazi. Because it happens so frequently, sometimes you can just tune it out. Other times you remember that you’re Jewish, and that no amount of Catholic school will take that away from you; it could still be hard, though. It’s hard to know the right way to feel offended, and what to do about it. It was hard for me to know what things meant to me if they didn’t mean anything to anyone else. So, I thought I should probably try and get with Chris, who was now sitting at the fire pit, laughing but not singing.
“What’s your bid?” Alex asked, one hand on the cards, another on a beer bottle. He was the one making all the cards sticky. Loved that.
“All in,” I said, because I wanted to leave the table. Instead, everyone folded, including the dead guy, and I took the pot. They must have assumed that I would only bet if I’d had better than the straight we’d given him in spades. Anyway, we weren’t playing for real money because no one had any. I was now queen of the plastic tokens. I wondered if there was a movie or something going on inside, or any quiet rooms. I had a text:
Emma (11:10PM): I’m bored
Emma was a freshman who did not like me. She wasn’t at the party because she didn’t like parties. Neither did I, but I thought she might be going so I came anyway. Oops. It was fine. She hardly ever reached out, so it was more than enough. If I responded wrong, she’d leave, though, so I set myself to work. I couldn't respond too quickly either, because it might seem like I had been waiting for her. An eternity later, the queen of the plastic tokens sent this reply:
Me (11:12PM): And?
It was a work of art, if I say so myself. The poker game had come to a halt, because Jaimie had gotten up to go check on what was transpiring in the house, and no one really did anything when he wasn’t around. Alex kept on sipping at his beer – he was a very new drinker, though, which he made obvious in his grimace after each sip. Though he might’ve been overacting, waiting for someone to comment on how we’d never seen him drink before. But Sarah was on her phone and Lou and Taylor were fucking each other with their eyes, and the dead guy was dead.
“How’s the beer?” I asked, thinking, You’re Welcome.
“Hmm?” He asked, adverbially. “Oh, you know, it’s fine. I don’t drink much, you know. You know, I thought it would taste different. It’s kind of interesting, if you think about it.” Per affect, in gesticulating he spilled some on the table and cards, and then smiled like whoops. “Maybe I should slow down. Had more than I thought.” He made no effort to wipe it up. It is tiring and useless to explain to someone they’re being inconsiderate. I have this written in a small notebook titled: Things I’ve learned from my father.
A big splash and Sophie had decided to jump into the pool. I loved Sophie, a little, for jumping in. The campfire-crew stopped singing and looked over, and then some started singing again. Others began to slowly migrate in the way they do at parties. It can feel like a crossroads, like the entirety of the evening would depend on the choice to sit at the pool or around the fire pit. Hang with the singing boys, swim with the cool girls, play poker with the funny kids, or go inside and risk the horrors and love stories that that entails.
Emma (11:20): you right
And then it was a waiting game again. She’d say something more, when she felt like it. It was whatever in the way it always was. I was trying, in my head, to think about her by not thinking about her. Or to not think about her by thinking about her. Excuse me: I was trying to tell myself not to think about her so I could think about her and not feel bad. I looked for Chris, who I could have been in love with, and didn’t see him around the fire, so assumed he went to the pool. Around the poker table, Sarah had disappeared, Alex was staring into his bottle, Lou was rubbing Taylor’s leg in a way he thought I couldn’t see, and the dead guy smiled beneath the sunglasses. I got up in an accidentally conspicuous way (chair falling), and, embarrassed, glanced at the dead guy, who didn’t seem to mind.
I gravitated towards the house: two stories, sliding glass panes on the ground floor. Seeing glass always made me nervous – shattering, breathing it in; I read somewhere once if glass gets in your lungs it never leaves. Like gum. – and it took me a minute or so to wobble the door open, though no one else was trying to get in or out, so it didn’t much matter how long I took. I entered into the kitchen, which smelled different. Someone was heating up pizza rolls in the oven, and someone else had noodles on the stove, and yet the kitchen was empty. A moment of clairvoyance: The house was going to burn down. Then the thought passed. It was more likely that the firepit outside spread than that pizza rolls would be our collective undoing. I wanted to turn the oven and stove off but didn’t. It made me nervous to touch other people’s things like that. They might get upset. Emma would’ve shut them off, probably. I went through the motion of checking my phone for texts, but I would’ve known if she’d texted. Checked anyway, just in case. She hadn’t. I put the phone back in my pocket.
And then: Why was I in the house again? My mother says I have senior moments sometimes, where I just forget things I was doing. People always say I’m somewhere else. Like, off in my head. I don’t know. I used to call it thinking. People got mad at me when I called it that. I was looking for Chris. Walking through the house during a post-closing-night-theatre-kid party was always dangerous. You hear stories. Who would’ve thought Jess would give Andrew a handjob in Sarah’s parents’ bed? Or that Leyla was snorting coke in the bathroom at Taylor’s? I never understood where people got all these drugs, but every time there’s a party there’s a new drug story and a new sex story. Often the two were related.
I bravely opened the door to a group of heads I vaguely recognized, poking out from under a long blanket on a couch. Some of them might have been dating, some of them might not have – I knew some of their names, I think, it was hard to tell in the light – and whose hands were where underneath that blanket was anyone’s guess. A movie was playing across from the couch; from the musical cues you could tell it was a horror movie, and from the acting you could tell it was a bad one. No one had really noticed me enter, nor did they acknowledge me as I walked through the room to get to the other side, which opened into a hallway. Wood floors and oh was that a text?
Emma (11:50): Does the party suck?
A small bubble formed around me in the mode of exuberance. Sorry: I was happy. Maybe giddy. Not in the cringe, fake way that people pretend to be sometimes, but like the real way. Like – explosions. Fireworks, that’s the term people say. Maybe explosions was more accurate though.
Me (11:51): How’d you know I’m at the party? Could be doing anything tonight
I was getting cocky with the texting game, I’ll admit it. I wanted to tease, push a little, feel loved. Then I found myself in a walk-in-closet. Sliding my phone back in my pocket I struggled to remind myself what I was doing, and then I bumped into Chris.
“Oh, hey,” I said, in the casual way befitting an accidental bump-in.
“What’re you doin’ in there?” He asked.
“Searching for my phone,” I said without missing a beat.
“Yeah, it has a little sticker on the back, of a bird on fire.” The phone was squarely in my back pocket of course. “Would you help me look for it? I might’ve left it anywhere, I’ve kinda been all over and I don’t really remember when I might’ve lost it.” He smiled, looked like a dork, but a cute dork. Really helped him pull off Demetrius; most people play him as an asshole the entire show and then suddenly he’s great, but Chris made him a bit of a goofball throughout. It was hard to hate him.
“A bird on fire – like a phoenix?” He asked. He already had his head in the game. I nodded. “Well, let us away then.” I laughed for him there. We set off: Back along the hallway, back through the dark movie room, back through the kitchen (were those pizza rolls burning?), into a dining room, into a parlor (now places I’d never been), upstairs into a bedroom, then another, then another. With each one, a tentative knock preceded a pubescent “come in,” and some couple or other would be half thrown together on the bed.
“Have any of you seen Rach’s phone?” My Demetrius would ask.
“No,” They would say. Rinse, repeat, like a scene rehearsed. Each time, I stood at the door, hands together low on my stomach, needling together in fits of worry. By the second time, I started biting my lip, and by the third you could see tears in my eyes if you looked. After the third failed attempt, I put a hand to my face and cried:
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without my phone!”
“Hey, hey, we’ll find it,” he said, hand on my shoulder.
“C’mon we haven’t tried everywhere yet.” Into the master bedroom we went. By some miracle, unoccupied. Perhaps the fairies were looking out for me after all. It had that kind of air to it – the parent’s bedroom of a friend you sort of know was like a mystical forest in a lot of ways. A sense of trespassing and liberation. I, for the first time, wondered where his parents might be. “Do you think you left it here?”
“Hmm?” I asked. I hadn’t been paying attention. “Oh, yeah, probably around here somewhere.” My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Oops,” I said aloud, but thought I’d only said it in my head, so after a beat where he didn’t say anything I said, again, “Oops.” I pulled out my phone. Of course, it was Emma.
Emma (12:20): Fuck off. Saw you on Charlie’s Snapchat story. I don’t stalk u
I laughed a desperate, gut-wrenching laugh at that. It was cute. C’mon, it was cute. I took a minute to think of a reply, sitting down on the king-sized bed, still chuckling, a little, uncontrollably. Finally, I decided on:
Me (12:24): Yeah, party sucks.
And then I frowned at that, after sending. Didn’t leave her much to respond to.
Me (12:25): Would suck less if you were here
And then uh-oh, couldn’t leave that one unaccompanied, so:
Me (12:25): Why didn’t you come?
I looked back up and Chris was staring at me.
“Hi,” I said. “Sorry about that – important stuff. Where were we?”
“Hi?” He said back. “We were just looking for your phone.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Found it.” I held up the phone as if he hadn’t been staring at me and the phone for the past five minutes. An unbearable amount of time passed. “Crazy, huh?”
“Uh-huh.” I was suddenly feeling kind of exhausted, and a bit bothered by him. I felt like talking about Emma, but not to him. I didn’t feel much like going for it. Then he said, hands fretting like mine were a few minutes back, “Hey I’ve been meaning to ask – do you know if Sophie is seeing anyone?”
This made me determined, in a way it probably shouldn’t have. Maybe I just didn’t want to see him with Sophie. Maybe I wanted to see him with me. Maybe I wanted to see me with someone, and he was closest. In any case, I said:
“You know, through Athens I am thought as fair as she.” He smirked at that, his goofy lovable one and I thought about how I could actually love him if I tried hard enough, and then he could love me too.
Demetrius: “I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.”
We both laughed at that little line, or maybe we were laughing at how quickly he pulled it from memory, or maybe we were laughing at how he delivered it exactly how he had in the show, or maybe we were laughing at the silliness of unrequited love, or maybe we were laughing at something else altogether. I had never realized how much laughing I did on a daily basis, how often I didn’t know what I was laughing at. Then, another moment of clairvoyance: Why doesn’t anyone love me? It was a moment where I suddenly needed to remind myself to breath. It was like a moment when the marshmallow catches fire. I was the marshmallow, I think. Maybe I was the fire. I wasn’t laughing anymore. He still was, a little, but it was thinning with time. He was still waiting for an answer and probably figured that the laugh would last him until I answered.
“Yeah, I think she’s not, I mean, not seeing anyone. That I know of. We don’t talk that much.” I said all of this, but I was somewhere else. I don’t know where I was. At some point, Chris wasn’t there anymore. I vaguely remember saying all of these words: No, go, it’s fine, I’m fine, yeah, just tired. But I don’t know when or in what order, or what they might have been in response to. I was alone in the room, eventually, and stayed there for a long time.
Emma (1:00): Gross
With great difficulty, I emerged from the forest of the bedroom. There was a party going on, or something, and I was part of it. I walked back outside to see Chris at the poolside with Sophie. I marked this down without emotion. No one was singing showtunes anymore, but people were cuddled around the fire, playing Truth or Dare, because of course they were. I looked around for Jaimie or Alex or Sarah or Lou or Taylor or Sophie or Chris or Leyla or Jen or Maya or Molly or Liam or Bert or Charlie or anyone who wasn’t next to someone already, anyone who I could sit next to and talk to them and say what had just happened in the way it had happened and what it meant. The dead guy was still at the poker table, alone, and I decided to sit with him.
I noticed, for what felt like the first time but couldn’t have been, that he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He had been a person wearing a Hawaiian shirt only a few hours before, and now he wasn’t that anymore. The sunglasses really completed the look. His hair had been blonde and cropped-close, kind of in a surfer way, but maybe I just wanted him to be a surfer. He could be my cute, dead surfer boyfriend who loved me for the night. I wondered if I put my head in my hands how long it would take for someone to walk over, or if I might just be seen as another corpse filling out the table. Besides, I didn’t really want that at all.
Me (1:11): Did you know I’m Jewish? Did I ever tell you that?
My hands dropped my phone onto the table and started tapping out a little panicked beat. This was a bad idea, a bad move. I looked over at Chris and Sophie and something shot through me and I didn’t know what it was, but my legs were shaking, my vision blurred a little. I tried to blink it out, and began wiping at my eyes, but I didn’t think I was crying. I looked away, over to the fire pit where Jen and Maya were cozied up together and I wanted to feel something like joy, and just didn’t.
Me (1:13): Yeah, I’m Jewish, like my mother is Jewish
She didn’t care, she didn’t care, she didn’t care, and I knew this and said this to myself as I typed this out and sent it anyway. She wouldn’t respond, probably she wouldn’t. There was no one else to say these things to.
Me (1:15): I hate my dog.
Me (1:15): That’s not true
Me(1:16): I just I don’t love my dog
Me (1:16): Is there something wrong with me?
Me (1:16): Everyone else loves their dog
Me (1:16): I just can’t
Me(1:17): I just
Me (1:17): Is there something wrong
Emma (1:17): Are you drunk?
Me (1:17): I want to I just
Me (1:18): No I’m not drunk
Me (1:18): I’m Jewish and I don’t love my dog.
This all seemed immediately important for her to know. If I couldn’t get it out it would explode out of me. I was trying to tell her something I couldn’t tell her; in the only way I couldn’t tell her. It didn’t make sense, I knew, and it also needed to. There was so much she needed to know about me, everything, and she needed to know in this instant, where I couldn’t scream it to her, as much as I wanted to, to fall at her knees or lift her up high and tell her all of these things that I was that no one in the world could have known. I wanted to be beautiful for her in a desperate act of taking, like fire, like the dead man sitting next to me: to be beautiful because it is beautiful to take something from death without dying or becoming beautiful. Maybe that’s why life is beautiful. I wanted to tell her that. Or something. I wanted to tell her life was beautiful and that I was beautiful.
Me (1:20): I have this desire
Emma (1:20): Are u okay?
Me (1:20): to write essays sexily
Me (1:21): you know what I mean?
Me (1:21): Like, with a lollipop or cigarette in my mouth.
Me (1:21): I don’t know
I could have gone on with it forever. What were all of the things I’ve never told anyone? Things that no one should ever need to know. My childhood crushes, the tests I failed, hobbies, interests – how little did people know about me anyway? How much did I know?
Me (1:23): Hey I love you
Me (1:50): Do you love me?
Emma (2:00): What the fuck? What are you on?
Me (2:14): You didn’t say no
Emma (2:15): Fuck off
Emma (2:30): Leave me alone, I’m going to bed. Text me tomorrow.
By this time, the dead guy smelled very bad, and they couldn’t move him very well because he’d gone all rigid. Everyone was moving inside anyway, to cuddle up with their newfound loves or just to sleep like normal people. I took the sunglasses off of Deady. He didn’t need them, and I wanted to hide the fact that I was crying. I would tell Emma, tomorrow, that I was crying, and she would call me a baby.
Chris and Sophie looked happy together, whenever I saw them, if only for the rest of the night. Nobody could find Jen and Maya after 2 in the morning. Liam and Bert (twins) spent the night trying to get people to stay up with them, to head down to the beach nearby or drive around. Leyla and Molly ended up talking with the freshman boys all night, and no one knows how that ended except for them. People say Jess and Andrew fucked for the first time that night, but I don’t believe it. Jaimie and Alex, as always, did their thing. Lou and Taylor broke up. Sarah was found asleep, phone in her hand, and I couldn’t blame her for that. I myself had plans to reread my text conversations until I fell asleep. Or, failing that, to watch the sunrise from somewhere nice. As for the dead guy: