Wildlife Read Free Page B

”
    “Hmmm, so if I substitute
party
for
woods
… I’m already feeling less ambivalent about it.”
    He smiled, said good-bye, and left, so it was just me on the screen holding up my good-bye hand and contemplating the most immediate essential fact of life: what to wear.
    I finished packing and had time to try on five or six variations of “very casual” for the party. A last-minute invitee can’t look like she’s tried too hard.
    That party is how I came to kiss Ben Capaldi, the most popular boy in our grade, someone I never thought even had me on his map. What am I talking about? I know I was never on his map. I was never in the same
room
as his map.
    “Maps” were on my brain because I’d been worrying about getting lost, aware that I have no sense of direction and was about to be in the zero-landmark, everything-looks-the-same-to-a-city-girl, no-buildings, no-signposts, map-dependent… wilderness.

4
    sunday 7 october
    All packed. Every item ticked.
    Ask sadness, How about staying here, sadness?
    I know. Dumb question.
    Sadness packed.
    Bags zipped.
    Compose reassuring demeanor for last dinner at home before camp.
    Small smile.

5
    Parties are uncomfortable events for me. I do want to get invited. If I’m not invited, I feel sad, and it is horrible hearing befores and afters you’ve had nothing to do with. Smiling and pretending dog-eared experience is enough. But when I am invited to a party, I straightaway start dreading it.
    As soon as I’m confronted with shrieking, giggling,drinking, loud music, random hookups, uninhibited dancing—I feel glum. I don’t have fun. I’m not “fun.” I’m serious. I’m responsible. I worry about my friends getting drunk, getting their drinks spiked, getting hurt, getting messy, getting used, getting pregnant, getting sexually transmitted diseases, and drowning in their own vomit.
    On top of that I
never
know what to wear.
    And I don’t like drinking, but I have to pretend to drink, so I at least appear to be “fun,” and to be having “fun.”
    I used to like dancing until a boy—Billy Gardiner—told me I looked like a spastic tarantula. So now I can only dance if it’s crowded enough and dark enough that nobody can see me.
    So a typical party for me usually involves trying unsuccessfully to talk to people who are drunk, hanging around the food, speaking to the parents, visiting the bathroom, hoping that by the time I come out more people I know have arrived, not dancing, finding a kitchen or garden through-road position to prop so I get passing traffic conversation, and later on patrolling to check that my friends are okay to get home. Holly says I’m more like a party monitor than a guest.
    But post-billboard, the script for this party ran differently. For starters, some people looked at me rather than around me when I arrived.
    After Holly’s “hiiiiiiieee mwah mwah,” she pulled me into a huddle with Gab and Ava, and started making a bigdeal out of the billboard thing. Usually it would make me uncomfortable being the center of attention, but because I’d told Holly everything and she’d had three cranberry vodkas, it was more like she was the center of attention, which suited us both just fine.
    Hours later when Ben Capaldi, apparently off his face, staggered into focal range and said (to me!), “Your pulchritude defies belief,” I was—speechless. I may have lifted one sober eyebrow. I’ve perfected the one-eyebrow lift in the mirror, never in a million years thinking I’d get to use it in a social situation. I smiled and turned away. I could not think of one thing to say. But as my heart flipped like a hooked fish, I was wondering if a girl like me had
ever
turned away from a boy like Ben.
    Was it wrong to feel a little thrill when I caught his look of surprise? This handsome boy? This boy the whole world loves? It might have looked like muscle-flexing on my part, turning away like that, but it was unadorned panic. A