Unteachable(15)
Author: Leah Raeder

I stood there feeling like an idiot. There’s nothing between us, I imagined saying. He’s kind of got this big sister crush on me and I’m kind of sleeping with our teacher. Also, I’m kind of drunk.

Hiyam was seventeen but looked mid-twenties: lipstick, heels, cream-colored cocktail dress. She had a sphinx’s face, stony and enigmatic. Her skin was amazing. Burnished bronze. I wasn’t sure of her ethnicity—Turkish? Persian?—but I felt utterly childish in her presence.

“I wanted to talk to you anyway,” she said. “Let’s walk.”

We drifted through the party, stopping occasionally for someone to talk to Hiyam. She listened with a half-smile, her eyes half-lidded. Regal boredom. No one seemed to realize it but me.

“Ever feel like you don’t belong with these people?” Hiyam said.

“Every day of my life.”

She smiled knowingly.

We ended up outside, on a terrace overlooking a pool. This pool was usable, not decorative, and a guy and girl were currently using it to make out madly in the shallows. The house pumped music into the night.

Hiyam produced a pack of cigarettes from somewhere mysterious and offered me one. I shook my head. She leaned on the granite railing.

“Mr. Wilke,” she said, exhaling a serpentine coil of smoke.

Alarm bells. I leaned on the railing too, so I could devote less of my brain to keeping my balance.

Hiyam glanced at me coyly. “You have a crush on him.”

“So do you.”

“He’s super hot.”

I had no idea how I was supposed to react. Should I agree? Was it suspicious if I didn’t? “Yeah, he is.”

“I’d f**k the shit out of him.”

Oh my god. How do I get out of here? “Not interested,” I said. “I’ve got a boyfriend.”

Hiyam’s eyebrows rose. Then she smiled. “In college?”

“Older.”

Her intrigue became genuine appreciation.

“What did you want to talk about?” I said.

She rolled her wrist, scrawling a spiral of smoke in the air. “I heard you can hook people up.”

I was too drunk and unsettled to realize what she meant.

“I’m looking for some coke,” she said bluntly.

Oh.

I opened my mouth, and then it hit me. The reason Hiyam invited us—me—to this stupid party. Because of my druggie mother. Because I could be a supplier. Not because we had one f**king iota in common, not even how we felt about our hot teacher.

My fingernails scraped against granite.

“I don’t deal,” I said.

Hiyam was accustomed to a certain degree of obedience. She didn’t wheedle me. She looked at me icily, took a drag, and said, “Let me know if you change your mind. I can connect you with a lot of interested parties.”

She walked away, trailing smoke.

My nails perched on the stone like bird claws. I thought I’d been reinventing myself, choosing who I wanted to be, but I was so naive. I’d always be my mother’s daughter.

I went back in, looking for Wesley. The dancing crowd no longer seemed charming. They were just a bunch of stupid drunk kids who didn’t know shit about the real world. Who wanted to buy coke with their rich parents’ money while my mom gave blowjobs in her van to supplement our income.

I finally found Wesley outside, smoking one of his clove cigarettes on a bench beside a pool. A bare bulb shivered beneath the water, marbling his face with cyan light.

“These people suck,” I said.

He glanced at me, then off into the shadows. I sat.

“What’s your problem?”

“What’s yours?”

“Hiyam thinks I’m a drug dealer. That’s the only reason she invited us.”

He turned halfway back to me. “Seriously? What a bitch.”

“I don’t know what I expected. We don’t fit in with anyone, anyway.”

I leaned back on my palms, looking at the Milky Way spilling in modest grandeur across the sky. A fountain of stars frothing over, surrounded by a mist of stardust. It looked like raw magic, like the glimmer I’d spy in a shadowy corner where the sun skimmed off invisible particles, reminding me there was a whole hidden world tucked inside this ordinary one. And it was up there every night, offering its mute beauty while we sat here with our heads down, tragically terrestrial. Not until I’d met Evan had I begun to open my eyes and really see this universe I was part of.

“You ever think the reason we’re into filmmaking is because we’re scared to be in front of the camera?” I said.

“No shit, Captain Obvious.”

I smiled. The notes of an acoustic guitar floated into the night, the beginning of “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” We both laughed.

“How wonderfully cliché,” I said.

“And the camera flies in for their close-up,” he said.

I was still smiling at him, but his had fallen. I was so f**king naive. “Close-up for what?”

Wesley kissed me.

Your body sometimes automatically reacts to things, especially when that thing has been building up for a long time, especially when you’re drunk and feeling like the only person who understands you at that moment is the person who was right beside you the whole time. So I kissed him back. I was stunned, and responding on reflex, and very, very slightly curious. Our kiss was gentle, sweet, almost pure. A boy and a girl kissing. I tasted bitter smoke on his lips and the clean metallic vodka we’d drunk.

Then my eyes opened, and reality came rushing back. I pushed him away.

Girl: shocked, bewildered. Boy: hopeful, anxious.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he said, breathing fast. “I’ve wanted—I thought—”

Neither of us were really looking at each other.

“Oh, god. Wesley—I’m with someone.”

“Who? That guy you’re sneaking around with?”

Now our eyes met.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.

He laughed, not nicely. “I wouldn’t, huh? You act like you’re so mature, but you’re doing something you have to hide from everyone. Maybe I’m not as mature as you, but I know that’s f**ked up.”

I felt cold inside. “Don’t judge me. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I stood and took a few aimless steps away, needing space. He followed.

“You know I’m your friend, right? Why don’t you trust me?”

I whirled around. “Because of this. Because I had no f**king idea you were going to kiss me.”

“You kissed me back.”

“Oh my god. This is way too high school for me.”

“God, you’re stuck up.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“No, f**k you, Maise. Why are you hiding all this shit from me and then acting like you’re my friend?”

“I am your friend, you idiot.”

At some point we’d progressed to yelling. My voice rang across the night. Shadows stirred, faces turning.

Wesley was close, looming over me. He lowered his voice. “Then who the hell is he?”

I shook my head.

“Why are you so ashamed of him? Who is he?”

“None of your f**king business,” I spat.

Wesley laughed again. “You know, I should’ve listened the first time we met. You really meant it. You don’t want friends.”

He stalked off into the dark.

There’s only one thing to do when your sole friend abandons you at a party full of people you hate.

Get shitfaced.

I found the Grey Goose guy and gave him another twenty for the rest of a bottle, grabbed a cup of punch for a chaser, sat in the manicured grass beside a pool, and started drinking with steely determination.

Fucking Wesley. Ruining a good thing.

Idiot boys, never content with friendship.

Fucking cokehead Hiyam.

It occurred to me after five or seven shots that I no longer had a ride home. I couldn’t call Siobhan, even though she’d probably sympathize. I took out my phone and instead of calling a cab, I looked at photos. Evan had taken one of me running into the rain. Dark doorframe, bright silver rectangle of water coming down like tinsel, a girl I barely recognized throwing her arms wide to the sky.

He answered on the second ring. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I lay back in the grass, my limbs all loose string. “I’m really drunk. I’m sorry for calling.”

“Don’t be sorry. Where are you?”

“Beverly Hills.”

I pictured him frowning. “What?”

“My ride left. I’m stranded in paradise.” I was very drunk. I knew this in a detached, clinical way, as if observing my body from behind glass. “Everyone hates me, Evan. Hiyam just wants drugs, Wesley wants to f**k me. My mom wants—she wants me to not exist. I can’t give them anything they want.”

His voice came through the phone like a warm breath on the side of my face. “Listen to me. It’s okay. I’ll come get you. Tell me where you are.”

By the time he got there I’d had three more shots and was temporarily happy again. I stood up and then immediately sat down, not prepared for gravity.

“When did everything get so heavy?” I said, but with fewer consonants than it needed to be intelligible.

Evan looked at the empty bottle with alarm. “Did you drink all of that yourself?”

“No. I think.”

He started to lift me beneath the arms and a shadow wandered toward us from the bright blur of the house.

“Is she okay?” a small voice said.

It was Britt, from my history class. I hadn’t even talked to her the whole night. I really was a stuck-up bitch.

“I think so,” Evan said. “I’ll take her home.”

Once I was standing, I felt a million times worse. I leaned into him, arms around his waist for balance. The ground kept wanting to flip up and tumble me into the sky.

“Mr. Wilke,” Britt said.

She handed him my phone.

He thanked her and said good night.

“Shit,” I said as he walked me toward the gate. “She knows. They’re all gonna know.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay. They’ll take your job, they’ll take my—” I couldn’t think of what they’d take from me. Unknown privileges, vanishing in an instant.

“It’s okay, Maise. If they know, they know. We’ll deal with it. I’m going to make sure you get home safe.”

“This is how it ends,” I said mournfully. “I blew it. I’m a f**king idiot.”

“You’re not a f**king idiot,” he said, squeezing my shoulders. “But you should probably stop talking about it.”

I made it to his car in a sort of dream sequence, moments not fully connected to each other. Images jumbled in a flotsam in my head: my fevered forehead on the blessedly cool window; trying to tell him my address unsuccessfully until he found it in my phone. That detached part of me watched with loathing. Child, it said. If you were trying to prove how unready you are for this, congrats. You nailed it.