Lost Between Houses Read Free Page B

here.”
    “Then go stand somewhere else. Gosh, I forgot the party hats.”
    My face nearly fell off.
    “I’m kidding,” she said softly, like it offended her I could even think that.
    “You better relax, Simon,” my brother said. “This is supposed to be a party.”
    I went upstairs and left her to it. I took a shower, dried my hair under her hairnet, something that made it just right. Sort of puffy but in a natural way. I mean no one was going to mistake me for Troy Donahue but I knew that going in. I put on a pair of crisp black slacks, a shirt and a blue sweater. Brought out my eyes, my mother always said. I put on the old man’s deodorant,Old Spice, but I already had my shirt on, so I had to undo a couple of buttons and squeeze it in there. I was worried about wrecking my hair by moving around too much. I brushed my teeth, gargled till I gagged.
    “Jesus, Simon,” Harper said through the bathroom door, “What the fuck’s going on in there?”
    I heard my mother yell from downstairs where she was not minding her own business.
    “Harper. Language.”
    “Oh yeah,” he said over the balcony, “like he’s never heard those words before.”
    “That’s not the point,” she said. Not mad or anything. Just sure.
    He let it go, which was good because he had about one more smart-ass remark left before she got pissed off.
    A couple of pals turned up before the official beginning. They were all dressed up, you could smell them, soap and deodorant and shampoo. We were all pretty excited and being around each other, what with a whole party ahead of us, it was intoxicating. But right through this, like out of nowhere, I had the weirdest thought, the kind that makes you think you belong in a booby hatch. I imagined my mother walking into my bedroom, all drained of colour, and saying, “Something terrible has happened to your father, you have to cancel the party.”
    I dream this shit up just to torture myself. Sometimes I think it’s because I’ve got bad, black flecks in my blood and every so often they pass through my brain. I read a story once about a guy whose wife was having a baby. He was right there in the delivery room with her, and all he could think of was the Nazis throwing babies into ovens. And I remember thinking, that’s fucked up,boy, that’s really fucked up. There’s a million other things that guy ought to be thinking about. So there I was, the party’s just starting and I’m thinking about Nazis and babies and my dad dying. Fortunately some more people turned up at the door.
    My mother disappeared like she’d promised and left me with the whole downstairs.
    Around nine-thirty I looked around and I realized that even if nobody else came, I was still home free. There must have been a vacuum that Friday night, and everybody decided to do one thing, like those lemmings all deciding every ten years or so to throw themselves off a cliff. People hung around in the kitchen, in the living room, even in the foyer. They went to the fridge, they took stuff, they acted like they’d been there a hundred times before. It was great. In fact, I had to flush a couple of them out of the basement. They were getting ready for something serious down there.
    There was this guy from New York, he was a boarder at school. Usually those guys are all queers, everybody knows that, but this guy was sort of cool, he had wonderful shirts, pink ones and yellow ones, he wore them under his school blazer. Come to think of it, he looked like one of those guys who reads
Playboy,
you know,
What kind of man reads
Playboy? He had that kind of sophistication. He asked me if I’d let him play the records. It’d give him something to do besides sitting on the couch, looking like a goof. Course he got to meet everybody that way, everybody being an expert on what you should play at a party.
    Dorian Bradshaw and some of the guys from the Catholic school hung around in the driveway, leaning against the old man’s car and drinking.