daynight Page 2

  Four p.m. The testing room smelled like the boy’s locker room after a lost football game—a rancid combination of sweat and fear. All the kids took the Test so seriously, to the point of hyperventilating, like they’d have no future if not offered a spot in the program. Actually, a few of the kids mentioned that their parents as much as told them so. I wished they could see the multitude of options on their horizons. When a door closes, a window opens, right?

  The potato-headed man finally summoned me into a cramped, windowed interrogation room off the main room to interview me. ‘Spud’ quickly demanded my attention and rattled off inappropriate question after question about my home, activities, school, friends, personal life, and any obstacles that’d prevent me from participating in their program. My head felt like shards of glass were being thrust inward, fueled by his voice and the harsh fluorescent lights. At first, I answered his questions fully and politely. Until he asked me if I was sexually active. That pushed me over the edge. It wasn’t any of his business. And, a very creepy question to be asked by an old guy who smelled like a perspiration and Old Spice cocktail. He acted like he assumed I was, which wasn’t the case, much to my boyfriend’s dismay.

  I hated confrontation, which was the real reason I’d left iHop that morning. Furthermore, my mom taught me to perfect my ‘fake smile’ poker face early on. “Never let them know what you’re really thinking,” she had implored. But after nine hours of pure nonsense I was done being subjected to a process worse than any college or job application. I stood up, sending my chair flying backwards, and told Mr. Potatohead I didn’t give a crap about his Test, his program, or the scholarship, and that he had a room full of kids who did give a crap to choose from, and that they probably didn’t care that he’s a perverted sexual predator. Or perhaps I didn’t say that last part, but I did think it.

  Everyone stared at me, the thin walls being no barrier for my raised voice. Regret over my outburst assailed me. Most the kids had known me for years and never heard my voice rise other than to shout a cheer at a football game. The man’s wispy lips curled into a smirk and he dismissed me to return to my seat.

  Mr. Potatohead then called in Blake, who chuckled at my tirade. I watched them through the window and doodled unhappy faces on the last test form I’d been asked to complete. Blake looked relaxed, almost chummy with the man, two peas in a pod, but then I noticed his body language change as the conversation progressed. By the end he looked angry, too. Maybe he didn’t like discussing his sex life or lack thereof either. He glanced at me every so often as if I was the subject of their conversation, which made me even more eager to escape.

  Five p.m. First in line at the door, I bolted towards the bright sun I’d been deprived of all day. The hot Santa Ana winds were stronger than usual. I kicked Blake’s skateboard-shaped weapon out of the way as if it could hurt me of its own accord, climbed in my car, and completed the ten minute drive home in seven. I’d hardly have been given an award for good driving, as I nearly hit a student driver in a yellow Beetle when I stretched the length of a yellow light. I entered the house, went straight to my room and scrubbed the effects of the day off in the shower with coconut-infused body wash my parents brought me back from their recent getaway to Hawaii. It took a half hour to fashion my hair into an up-do full of ringlets. Then, I pulled on a light green and gold gown that complemented my like-colored eyes.

  Six p.m. Tristan, Bri and Bri’s boyfriend, Lucas, pulled up in a stretch Hummer limo, complete overkill for our small group. Thrilled to see friendly faces, I ran to give Tristan a hug. He looked nice in his black tux with green and gold cummerbund and tie to match my dress. Unfortunately, his breath stank of vodka, which did not bode well for a happy ending to my day. I smiled anyway and refrained from criticizing him. He placed an orchid on my wrist and I pinned a rose on his tux lapel. The limo ride provided my friends with further opportunity to party, while I abstained and enjoyed the scenery as the limo driver took ‘the long way’ to the restaurant.

  At dinner, Tristan ordered me steak and lobster—his favorite—but I could only eat a few bites. He ate the rest. I felt like I was on trial and my friends were playing part of judge, juror and prosecutor. They interrogated, criticized, and berated me for taking the Test and considering ditching senior year. Besides, the Test was over. I’m the one who had time I wanted back, a backlog of homework, and a lingering headache. My friends continued to taunt me until I left to use the restroom to adjust my makeup, take a few deep breaths, plaster back on my happy face, and return to shift the conversation to a more pleasant topic.

  Nine-thirty p.m. The tacky ‘love makes the world go round’ dance decorations disappeared from view as I was pushed deeper into the mosh pit. Tristan was grinding his drunken body against mine and thrusting his garlic-butter-alcohol infused tongue down my throat, deep enough that I could feel vomit rise. It disturbed me that he picked that day to journey to the bottom of the bottle. I bet my taking the cursed Test drove him to do it, and wondered if the possibility of me leaving him or besting him had him tweaked, but I didn’t ask.

  Ten-thirty p.m. The dance got too crowded, so we headed to an after party at Bailey Goodington’s, a spoiled, wild, fellow cheerleader who lived in a ten thousand plus square foot castle in the Ranch. The spread of food and alcohol could’ve beat out most wedding receptions. Tristan and Lucas dove into a game of beer pong, while Bri hit the champagne in earnest. I grabbed a closed soda bottle and avoided any alcoholic additives. My bloodletting earlier had me still feeling queasy. I didn’t trust I’d be able to keep my cool under the influence. No one else did. Plus, I’d promised my parents to stay sober and be a good girl. They’d check compliance by home breathalyzer. Failure meant consequences. Painful ones.

  The other girls on my cheer squad performed a new number in dresses and heels, which I captured on phone video and uploaded while waiting for the bathroom. Tristan was so wasted he attempted to undress me in front of the entire line. “Ha ha, sweetheart, you wish,” I told him. He signed me “no worries, forgive me,” one of the many endearing things we’d learned in the sign language class we took together, and then he left with Lucas to find another drink.

  Eleven-thirty p.m. I found Bri and a dozen other girls fighting over who’d make the best vampire bait. Back and forth, they shouted out ridiculous lures for hot-bodied bloodsuckers before downing shots of tequila. Bailey, our party host, mocked me for saying I didn’t find the thought of being with a cold, hard, dead guy the least bit interesting, since apparently if the guy’s a cold, hard, hot, dead guy it’s worth it. She’d never been very discriminating, so I left in search for a higher concentration of working brain cells.

  Twelve forty a.m. Classmate after classmate accosted me with slurred speech, inappropriate advances, and unstable drinks. What had been amusing at stage one of their inebriation—the flirty, uninhibited conversations—quickly got old by stage three or four when my friends started making some poor choices. Anna and Sadie stripped Gina Barton down to her underwear and body-painted her with sundae toppings on what was clearly a Goodington family heirloom Oriental carpet. Brooke, poster child for teen abstinence, hooked up with Ben, class sexual indiscriminate, and made haste to the master. Naive freshman Leila Sundry, Blake’s sister, ended her table dance early as she puked the supposed non-alcoholic punch all over the male audience that fed it to her.

  Stale beer, Doritos-filled vomit, and a nasty mixture of perfume and extreme body odor made for a seriously repelling combination. OK, it was time for me to leave. Past time to leave. City curfew had been in force for hours and the Rancho Santa Fe cops would be trolling for inebriated teens, with a long history of deaths recorded on the dangerous, windy roads.

  Despite my determination to exit, I couldn’t find Tristan, Bri, or Lucas. Our limo had left an hour prior, our reserved time depleted. In my search for my friends I avoided the upstairs and the soft porn displays I’d find there. Drunken girls filled the kitchen, forcing food down in a feeble effort to s
ober up before they got in their cars. Hookups abounded in the pool house, and similarly, the family room, rec room, dining room, office, library, craft room, media room had couples paired in every dark nook and cranny.

  I started asking everyone I encountered. “Have you seen Tristan or Briella?” Dozens of shrugs and negative responses from people who likely didn’t remember their own names, so I gave up and sat down on the plush hall carpet. Perhaps if I stayed put, they’d find me. I admired the impressionist artwork on the brown faux-painted walls for a while. That got old and I buried my head in my knees. Couldn’t someone, anyone, help me?

  When I finally looked up I saw a startlingly striking face with dark hair, blue eyes, and a five o’clock shadow sitting across from me. He wore a black suit, white on white pinstriped shirt, and a yellow power tie. Man he was drop-dead gorgeous. Why hadn’t someone lured him into a dark corner?

  “Hey, I’m Ethan,” he said. “You look kind of bummed. Can I help?” he said in a deep, alluring voice. I liked him already, just for reading my mind and knowing I needed assistance. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He shifted uncomfortably, as if he wasn’t quite certain he wanted to be there.

  It took me a moment to compose myself, disarmed by his out-of-context presence and stunningly unique and quite beautiful eyes. They were a deep sapphire blue, but sparkled with topaz-colored specks and framed by dark, curly lashes. His dark-brown hair was cut above the ear, but on the long side, disheveled, and had a slight wave. That combined with the stubble along his perfectly carved jaw line made for sheer perfection.

  “It’s just this entire day. I’m done with it,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you. It’s pretty late,” he said. “So why are you still here?”

  “I can’t find my boyfriend,Tristan. Or my best friend, Briella. And everyone’s had so much to drink that I’m not getting a lot of help locating them,” I said.

  “Your best friend and boyfriend—they ditched you?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Bri’s been my best friend for ten years. And, Tristan and I have been dating for a year. But, I did something that really upset him today, so he was drunk by the time he picked me up for the dance and it’s gone downhill from there,” I said.

  “Do tell,” he’d said, his smile spreading from the right side of his mouth to his left. “I love a story about a rotten day.”

  “Why’s that?” I said, returning his smile. “You like to see strange girls miserable?”

  “Hardly. It’s a matter of perspective. If your day sucked enough, it’ll make mine seem tolerable,” he said, laughing, although his laugh had a nervous twitch to it. Hot guy with a sense of humor and a tinge of shyness. As if he needed more appeal.

  ”Why was your day sucky?” I asked.

  “Hmmm. My parents and uncle want to control every aspect of my life, including who I date. I got forced into doing a ridiculous job that I didn’t want to do. And, then I saw some stuff tonight that I never wanted to see. Your turn,” he said. I wonder what he saw tonight that bugged him? Maybe he toured the upstairs by mistake. Or maybe he got a glimpse of the whole body painting on the Oriental carpet incident.

  I needed to talk things through with someone, so I unloaded about the SCI Test and how terrible I felt for letting down my friends. Given how well he listened and how supportive he was, it was the one time I’d regretted being tied down to Tristan. But, I’d have never acted on it. Despite how much I wanted to. If I had to rate how attractive Ethan was on a scale of one to a hundred, I’d give him a billion. No guy’s ever had such a strong effect on me, and it wasn’t just because of his looks. The only way I could describe it is that he felt right—as if he were the finishing touch on my masterpiece I didn’t know was missing.

  Ethan was sweet. Flirty. Sober. Soft-spoken. Shy. Kind. Smart. And he gave me a serious case of the butterflies. Talking to him was effortless and made me happier than I’d been in months. He asked me about my life and interests for what seemed like hours, even though the conversation lasted less than forty minutes.

  Mid-way through our discussion he shifted over to sit directly next to me. So close that we rubbed shoulders. “Let me see your hands,” he said. “I’m a bit of an expert on life lines.”

  “Are you? Where do you pick up such a skill? Did they cover that in Bad Pickup Lines 101?” I asked with a chuckle. He took my hands in his and ran his fingers along my palms, which sent shock waves through my body and made my heart race. His fingers were long and soft, silky almost.

  “I must have missed that class. To be honest, I’ve never had occasion to, uh, use a pickup line,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I learned palm reading from my mom. She’s a little quirky. I don’t believe in any of this life line stuff, of course, but if I did, this would show that you’ll have a long and happy life full of passion with the man of your dreams, and that you’ll have a whole host of children.” He pointed out the various lines that were supposed to validate his theory. So, if I considered Ethan to be dreamy, did that mean I got to have his host of children?

  “You’ve never used a pickup line?” I ask. He gave me a puzzled look. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? You probably have to fight girls off with a stick.” I cringed and then blushed, not having meant to say that last bit aloud.

  “Something like that,” he chuckled.

  In an effort to change the subject, I grabbed his hand and turned it over. “And what do your lines say?”

  “That my mom taught me how to get a pretty girl to hold my hand?” he joked, the nervous twitch in his laugh appearing again. I bit my lip as he looked up at me through his impossibly long lashes. Why couldn’t I have met this guy a year ago? Of course, Tristan had been sweet and kind at first, too.

  “I thought you were beating girls off with a stick, not having to get pointers from your mom,” I said with a flirty smirk. He grinned from the right side of his mouth again. Wow. Sexy.

  He took a deep breath before saying, “Sorry, I hope I didn’t offend you in my lame effort to continue to make conversation.” He paused a long moment. I watched as he rubbed his fingers along his thumb in a fidgety manner and then said, “So, is it a forever kind of thing with your boyfriend?”

  “Uh, well, I mean, I don’t know,” I’d replied, tripping over my words. “I’m seventeen. I’m not thinking about forever quite yet.”

  “Really? I’m surprised. I guess that I think you just know if you’re meant to be with someone. Or that a person should after a year,” he said, a sober look on his face, as he did the whole hand fidgeting thing again. He was right and I knew the answer, but didn’t feel comfortable dissing Tristan with a guy I was so attracted to.

  “So you’re telling me that you can tell off the bat if a girl you meet is perfect enough to spend a lifetime with? You believe in the whole love at first sight thing?” I asked, turning his question back at him, a little curious if he had a ‘forever someone’ since I was starting to think there was something to the whole love at first meet thing myself.

  “Definitely. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’ve found my better half,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “I’m not sure I’ll ever recover after meeting her. Over the course of our very first conversation I went from being an avowed bachelor to wanting marriage, kids, growing old together, the works...” Not fair. Of course. The good ones are always taken.

  “So, are you going to marry her? Did she feel the same way when she met you? The whole thing’s so romantic,” I said. And so unfair, I thought to myself. Because over the course of my conversation with Ethan, I went from being Tristan’s girlfriend and not thinking about forever, to imagining marrying Ethan, having his kids, and growing old together. But, Ethan was already planning that life with someone else.

  “Hmmm,” he said as he stared into my eyes in such close proximity that I could smell the hint of cinnamon on his breath. “I surely hope so on both fronts, but I guess I’ll have to wait and find out.”

  “Lucky girl
,” I said, meaning to say it under my breath, but he obviously heard it and I turned crimson.

  “On the contrary. I’d be the lucky one,” he said before taking another deep breath. I watched as his eyelashes fluttered as he thought about the girl. Then he checked his watch, the moment having turned quite awkward. “Perhaps I better help you find your friends. What do they look like?” To be honest, I’d completely forgotten that I was at a party, had come with my boyfriend, and had been searching for him. I flushed an embarrassed red and then gave him detailed descriptions of Bri and Tristan. His face went dark as I finished.

  “Maybe it’d be better if I gave you a ride home. I think I saw them and they were in pretty bad shape. You might want to let them sleep it off and talk to them tomorrow,” he said. I paused because I was tempted to accept the ride and avoid dealing with my drunken friends. Plus, I’d have loved to spend more time with Ethan.

  “Where were they?” I said, jumping up and realizing that I’d never leave Tristan and Bri behind without making sure they were okay. Ethan hesitated and then stood. Stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth for a while. Stared at his feet. He mumbled his response.

  “Last I saw they were in the game room down the hall and to the left… back of the basement,” he said, biting the side of his lip and giving me a look of sheer pity.

  “Thanks. I should go deal with them… mop up their puke or whatever,” I’d said, but hesitated when Ethan spoke again. I wasn’t ready for our conversation to end, but felt guilty about talking to him, especially after I’d been thinking of having his babies after just meeting him.

  “Yeah, of course. I shouldn’t have kept you so long. It was selfish of me, but I can’t help it. It was really, really nice to meet you. Would you mind if I took your picture to remember you by?” he said. “You look… out of this world.” Me, otherworldly? Hardly. Him? Definitely.