Party Read Free

Meet a guy, have a passionate romance during my non-senior senior year?
    Ridiculous.
    Even if there is a guy out there for me somewhere, I’ll never know it.
    This is dumb.
    It’s like I’m
already
dead. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make any sound? If a girl doesn’t speak, if no one knows her name, does she really exist?
    But I have to know. Does anyone know who I am anymore?
    This becomes my new motivation: Go to the party. Walk around. See if anyone, just one person, says my name. Says “Hi!” Says “I had Spanish with you sophomore year.”
    If no one does … then case closed. My high school career, my existence, will be proven invisible.
    I force myself up the stairs built into the cliff face, and down Beachfront to the party. I regret my decision the moment I open the door.
    •    •    •
    Later, I run up Beachfront, away from the party, and sit down on the curb and rest my arms on my knees.
    Stay out all night? Watch the sun rise? Be with my friends?
    Dreams. Ravings, really, from a half-dead woman succumbing to pain meds and disease. Why couldn’t I have figured that out before I stepped foot in that dumb house?
    I open my
Batman: Year One
book again to keep myself from crying.
Maybe it’s all I deserve now
, I read on page one.
Maybe it’s just my time in Hell
.
    I hear ya, Lieutenant Gordon.
    I struggle to read beneath the light of a streetlamp, and at first, I don’t pay any attention to the sirens wailing in the distance. They are background noise to any city of moderate size like Santa Barbara. I do pay attention when three police cars and an ambulance turn onto Beachfront from Shoreline and park in front of the house where the party is still in full swing.
    I wipe my face and watch two cops go toward the house. I’m too far away to see exactly where they go, but they’re headed toward the front door. I see one of the paramedics wave over his partner farther down Beachfront, near the intersection with Shoreline.
    Something’s happened.
    A minute later, two different cops head up the lawn. I stand up, shove my book in my bag, and start walking slowly back toward the house, drawn by morbid curiosity. Suddenly there’s a flood of kids on the front lawn, not running but scattering all the same toward their cars or sitting on the sidewalk.
    I walk until I can see the house in full view again. I wander up to a guy standing by himself near the sidewalk and ask him what happened.
    I wonder if he knows what color my eyes are.
    What grade I was going to be in.
    What my name is.

MORRIGAN
    T ONIGHT IS THE BIGGEST PARTY OF THE YEAR, AND IF MY DAD DOESN’T STOP YELLING , I’ M GOING TO MISS IT .
    This is so stupid.
    What happened was, I just got my first car late last week for my sixteenth birthday. An old powder-blue Super Beetle my dad got from some car dealer friend of his. I had my license, but only by a matter of days. I was still sort of learning to drive the Beetle because it’s a stick, but I’d
obviously passed the test
to get the license in the first place, right?
    So I told my mom I was going to this party, and she gave me twenty bucks for food (more like five for food and fifteen for a little pot, to be purchased on-site from this dude in the dramadepartment who was hosting the party, not that my mom knew that). Ashley and I spent all day today talking on the phone about what we were going to wear; who was going to be there; if we should smoke weed too or just drink; if you
had
to have sex with one guy, who would it be … the usual stuff.
    (Answers: Black cargo shorts, red tank, red Chucks;
everyone
from school; drink first, smoke later; and this guy Ryan from my English class … I mean, if I
had
to. Ashley declined to “speculate on the latter.”)
    What I
told
my mom was, we were, and I quote, “going to this party.” No big, right? What I guess I
should’ve
said is, “I’m driving to this party in my new (old) car.”
    My mistake, because:
    About twenty minutes