We had come to the house for the promise of sex. Our arrivals spaced out by a carefully timed thirty minutes so the neighbors wouldn’t notice the Brodersons’ home being flooded by teenagers entering two-by-two, carrying knapsacks and brown paper bags, wearing baseball caps in case anyone reviewed their security footage. We suspected they did because the house was on Summit Avenue. It was the rare rich block where the mansions lay out in the open without fences to huddle behind. The doors were only a few steps from the sidewalk, and they seemed to pulse with the invitation to let yourself in.
I had an invitation from someone who had an invitation. Daniella had been asked to house sit for the Brodersons every weekend in July while they were away in the Faroe Islands. She would tend plants, await deliveries, and feed their cat, whose name she had not bothered to learn. Daniella planned to share the wealth with all of us by opening the doors to anyone who wanted to stay overnight.
“Enter pleasure seekers,” she said, as she answered the Brodersons’s door. She was wearing a silk bathrobe, neon swim trunks, a bikini top.
I was standing on the stoop, holding hands with my boyfriend Alan, both of us dressed nervously in all black. We had been granted the last arrival slot, which I tried not to take personally. I hoped it was because of Alan’s diminished social position in Daniella’s eyes, not my own.
“Priscilla will take your bags up,” she said. Her hair was either sweaty or wet, suggesting some wildness we’d already missed out on.
“Will the fuck not,” Priscilla shouted from somewhere unseen. We stepped inside and saw that the staggeringly long entry hallway stretched towards an open milky light.
“You look good, Alan,” Daniella said, her exclusion of me an unexpected sting. “Have you already started drinking?”
“We came from dinner with my parents,” Alan said. He shrugged in apology. I’d spent the dinner eating fried walleye dipped in tartar sauce, my legs jittering under the table in anticipation of the evening and answering his parents’ questions frankly, with zero effort to charm.
“So wholesome, you two,” Daniella said. “Leave your shoes if you don’t mind. They might be watching us somehow.” She reached out her hand to squeeze mine, with a quick glance of conspiratorial warmth before trailing off towards the kitchen.
I kicked off my shoes into a messy pile of others and set down my backpack, which held a change of underwear, condoms, granola bars, lube. I was with Alan, and constantly trying to extricate myself from Alan. He was the only child of Lutheran ministers. I was his first love and I had told him that he was mine. Alan bent to untie his laces with one hand, his other sweaty and clamped in my own. I tried to release him, but he held on tighter.
“Let go,” I hissed.
◆
I had already tried having sex with Alan at his parents’ house but every room had framed department-store portraits of his blonde family and Alan could never relax. He said he couldn’t get a particular image out of mind, which he described as the look. The look was what his mother would give him if she came home and somehow walked in on us fucking. The look was not just disgust or surprise; it was the curdled remnants of her love.
I told him we could have sex in his bedroom facing the window that overlooked the front lawn. Sex with him behind me so I could see any car that pulled up. We would keep our clothing splayed out and ready to slip on. I would not wear lipstick. We would not muss up our hair.
“No,” he said. “I want to be in the moment. I don’t want to feel anxious.” On occasion, I appreciated his emotional clarity, but not then.
We couldn’t go to mine because I lived with my mother in a one-bedroom apartment, a fact that ashamed me. I also felt ashamed for feeling ashamed, and the two layers had compounded over time, fossilizing into something durable and confusing. My mother had been depressed on-and-off for the two years since my father left her. “Not depressed,” she would say. “Heartsick.” As though heartsick offered some glamor to the proceedings. The proceedings were usually grim. She worked from home and marooned herself on her bed all day, an island of saltines and tissues, hand lotion, Bic pens, and papers. I didn’t know what the papers were about, she just called them her papers and said she needed to sort them. But the papers maintained their chaos over time, and I often came home to find her asleep, hands still arranged on them, as though she was moments away from unlocking their internal order. Alan’s parents must have understood a vague outline of my life because they frequently sent me home with leftovers and told me to keep the tupperware. Either they knew, or that was just what Lutheran ministers did.
“Let me give you the tour,” Daniella said.
The Brodersons’ living room was covered in a plush taupe carpet. Wreaths of silver encircled candles. Brass plating lined the legs of the sofa. Every surface gaudy and glinting with a frenetic energy that I both hated and wanted. Alan and I followed Daniella up the stairs to a hallway with four doors. It felt strange that these people lived in the same city as me, that they pressure-tested the same melons at the grocery store that my mother did.
“Guest room, guest room, study, bathroom, second bathroom” she said. She pointed at each quickly, as though already bored by the grandeur. “And the master,” she said, and threw the last door open with a flourish.
“What do the Brodersons do?”
“You know, I never thought to ask,” she said. The Brodersons were friends of her parents. “Very rude of me. Should we go through their drawers?”
I wanted to rifle through their underwear and find a hidden box of polaroids. A stash. Some secrets to laugh over with Daniella. But Alan stiffened at the suggestion. “I feel like we’re doing enough trespassing as is,” he said.
“Suit yourselves,” Daniella said. “Take whichever room you two like besides this one.” She laid down across the bed, and propped her head up with one arm.
“Thanks,” Alan said. Alan didn’t especially like Daniella but he had trouble admitting he didn’t like anyone. “She just makes me nervous,” he told me, months before. “I was talking to her once after theater, and we got quiet for a second. And she just goes ‘well, I guess we don’t have anything else to say right now.’ Can you believe that?” I laughed at the story, a sharp knot of admiration in my ribcage for Daniella’s willingness to directly name the absence of feeling.
“I aim to please,” Daniella said. “Now go enjoy the party. I’ll be down in a minute.”
The lamp near the bed cast an orange glow over her face, and her robe fell open onto the bed, revealing the golden curve of one hip bound by the elastic of her swim trunks.
◆
In the kitchen, I talked to Priscilla and Brendan. I felt Alan’s gaze hovering over me. He talked to people too, but he kept his eyes hooked on my mouth, watching my laughter carefully, measuring its weight and sincerity. I shot him a look meant to make him feel embarrassed about his plaintive gaze but he just smiled back at me, uncomprehending. We moved around the room, shifting the arrangements of who was speaking to whom, testing the steadiness of the promises we came in with. The air felt thick with the possibility of a last-minute disruption. All of us wanted it, I think. But we were nice kids–we didn’t want to hurt anyone.
I told my mother I was going to Priscilla’s house for the night, and she didn’t question it. She rarely questioned anything I did because she was too busy trying to keep herself together. She liked hearing about Alan though, and all the things he did to show me he loved me. I saw the way she had loved my father as a kind of illness that earned you no sympathy, no bedside visitors, no rumpled corner-store carnations.
“You have to be aware of imbalances in relationships that show up early on,” she told me. “It’s data you have to interpret and act on.”
My father was living in Rhode Island with a new wife. My mom said I should prepare myself to welcome a new brother or sister into the world at some point soon.
“I never want you to be blindsided like I was,” she said. “It’s just what they do when they remarry. Another chance not to fuck it all up.”
It was impossible to imagine Alan blindsiding me with anything. He texted me when he got a bad grade, described for me the drudgery of Friday night prayer circles, confessed that he didn’t fully believe in God, asked for my opinions on his clothes, his burgeoning facial hair.
“Everyone thinks they’re going to meet all kinds of people in college,” my mother said. “But it’s the same people you met in high school, just richer.”
She said, “When you meet someone who adores you, don’t thumb your nose at that gift.”
Alan wanted to stay together when we would each go away to college in the fall. I could see myself standing outside of the dorms at night, phone pressed to my ear, his voice steadying me against the terror of the new, but another part of me wanted to feel looked at by someone who wouldn’t care if I plagiarized a paper or forgot to call my mother or opened nightstand drawers that didn’t belong to me.
“The incredible nerve, right?” Priscilla said, ending a story I hadn’t really listened to but I nodded anyway.
“Time for outside,” Daniella said suddenly, as though shaking off the conversations we were all in the midst of, and we all followed. Leaving our posts in the kitchen, walking towards the dark leaves that bristled against the screen window. The Brodersons’ backyard had a high wooden fence enclosing a plot of grass bordered by weeds and wildflowers. A bare bulb above their garage cast a spotlight on the lawn, which was wet under my feet. It was like we’d entered some zone that their wealth had forgotten to touch and smooth over. In the middle of the grass stood a massive trampoline where I’d expected a pool to be. A taut black hole of a center, and a rim that was lollipop shiny. Alan ran his hand along it.
“A bit hard, isn’t it?” he said. “Like if one of us fell.”
“Do you want a helmet Alan?” Priscilla said, and a few of us laughed.
Not me, though. Even when my heart was traitorous, I kept my face carefully arranged. It was something Alan admired about me. “I can never tell what you’re thinking,” he would often say, with a smile.
Our friends settled themselves onto the grass, pulled out cigarettes and weed and flasks. I sat next to Brendan and Jasmine. Alan sat purposefully away from me. I’d gotten pissed at him once–“quit following me around at parties. I feel like I’ve got you collared”–and he had listened, a dutiful student of my whims. I watched Priscilla pull Daniella onto the trampoline, fingers leashed around her wrist.
Up high, Priscilla stood unsteady, arms folded tight over her breasts while Daniella began to jump in wide circles around her. We all paused our conversations to watch them–her movement getting higher and more intense until it seemed she might throw herself on Priscilla, causing her to fall backwards, head spilling blood on the shiny rim.
I stood up from my spot. “I’m coming up,” my voice said. Priscilla climbed down in embarrassed relief. Once up there, I felt all their eyes from below. Beady, swimming, animal eyes flashing out from within a hedge.
Daniella stood facing me. “I’ll jump first, you follow.”
Our jumps created a see-saw that thrust each of us further into the air. My eyesight leveled with the top of the kitchen window, the fence, then over the fence. From below me, I saw Alan’s face slip into fear. But I shook my eyes off his. Raised my arms above, threw my head back, a strange whinnying howl escaping from my mouth.
“That’s the spirit, right there,” Daniella said across from me, her legs splayed out and airborne, her hair a black smear against the green layers of the yard. She howled back at me. Our cries drifted on the currents of the warm air, entering through the backdoors of the homes of the friends of our parents’ friends, who would feel temporarily unsteady and concerned, unsure of what they had heard.
◆
After the trampoline, Daniella led me to the Brodersons’ room, carrying both of our glasses. She cracked the window, which overlooked the roof of the house, the front lawn, the mansions across the street.
“Follow me?” she said. I was not used to her voice lifting upwards on a question. Her hesitancy felt exciting, like I suddenly had the power to disappoint her by saying no.
I climbed out the window after her, placing my hand in hers to steady myself. We were not high off the ground, but I felt my lungs tighten at the angle of our feet against the shingles. We sat down quickly, nestling against a sturdy ledge. I wanted to point out the moon, which was in full, showy display, but decided against it.
“Are you and Alan going to be doing anything new tonight?” she said. An eyebrow raised. She had been asking me questions like this for the three years I’d known her.
“I haven’t decided,” I said. I don’t know why I lied. I wanted her to think there was the possibility I would change my mind, that I was a kind of malleable person who didn’t adhere to meaningless plans.
“Have you two done it before?”
“Basically yes,” I said. “But not really, no.” It felt colder on the roof than it had on the trampoline and I wrapped my arms around my bare knees.
“I haven’t either,” she said. “I was hoping I might find someone at this party, but somehow I ended up inviting all couples.”
I didn’t believe her. She’d had sex with people, we were all sure of it, but who those people were we didn’t know. Shadowy figures far removed from our basement den fumblings. She made wine in her parents’ attic out of clementines and didn’t apologize for the fruit flies that peppered the viscous liquid she distributed in emptied out hairspray bottles for secret, public consumption. “Just texture,” she would say. “Protein.”
I told her I was sorry, that it must feel strange being alone with a bunch of couples.
She shrugged. “I don’t mind so much. I like making my friends happy.”
“You’re so good at it,” I said.
“Thanks. But what to do with such a worthless talent?” She looked young to me then, younger than I felt.
“You’ve really never?” I said.
“Not so much,” she said to me. “But I don’t feel built like everyone else in that way anyway.” She smiled at me then, like she was offering me something delicate. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted to offer something back.
I thought about a memory from childhood of looking at science magazines for kids, the ones with the finely sketched drawings of animals. I started telling her about it before I could stop myself— a dark, woodland scene, a blurry moon in one corner of the page that illuminated an owl with talons outstretched. On the ground, a mouse was trying to get away. I laid down flat on my belly. Even alone in my bedroom, it felt important to conceal the action of what I wanted to do. The mouse looked smooth and wonderfully round. I became the owl. I imagined myself with talons, in hot pursuit, wanting to sink myself into it.
“But even though I was the owl, I was also the mouse,” I told her. “Like, running along the forest floor at the same time.” I kept my eyes fixed on a window in a house across the street as I spoke, too afraid to look at her and find her laughing or silently disgusted.
I described willing my body to speed along with my mind, to catch up with the story I was constructing. Eventually the distance between the owl (who was me) and the mouse (who was also, confusingly, me) narrowed until I felt the tips of my claws brushing the mouse’s fur, and my back bristled with the mouse. When it was over, the magazine was still there spread open, but it no longer seemed an image of twitchy, dark beauty but something shameful I would be blamed for having seen.
“I like that,” she said when I’d finished, after an excruciating pause. “It’s a very sexy nature story.” She flicked her finger against my knee, as if to break the spell.
I wanted to tell her that nothing was wrong with her, or that if it was, it was the same thing wrong with me.
“You should be with someone who makes you feel like that,” she said. “Does Alan?”
I laughed. “What do you think?”
◆
A month before, my mother had started texting my dad again. He was the one who told me. I didn’t want my mother to be that kind of woman, but when I looked at her phone, I saw a string of texts to my father, insistent and fragmented and looping in on themselves with humiliating need.
“I hate to do this, but could you talk to her for me kiddo?” my dad said during a phone call. “I don’t know who else to ask.”
“He could ask literally anyone else,” Alan shouted when I told him about the request. I had never seen him so thrillingly angry.
I did talk to my mother. I asked her to stop texting my dad and she agreed. A week later, I came home from school and found her face-down on her bed. Her feet extended out from under the quilt, marbled blue with veins. I walked to the bed and touched one foot, scared to find her skin cold. But she startled and turned over and I snuck back out quietly.
After leaving the roof, I felt woozy, out of breath. Walking through the Brodersons’ hallways and down the stairs, I found everything newly charged. Little scenes and conversations and objects seemed poised to topple, invert, reveal their secret underbelly. Alan was still on the lawn, and I tucked myself into the cradle his body made for me on the grass, my back against his stomach. He had the worn softness of a basement sofa.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” Alan said. A few couples had already disappeared.
“Not yet,” I told him. “Soon.”
I was trying to imagine, as I often did then, what sex would be like with Alan. He had made me a series of drawings for my birthday that year — still lifes from the future, he called them. A tidy stack of them on thick cardstock, tied with twine. Drawings of a plastic cup holding two toothbrushes, two pairs of feet nestled together and propped on a coffee table, two sets of keys hanging from a rack. He was an excellent artist, the lines expressive and alive. But the images–their parallel objects sidled together in a queasy vision of domestic harmony–made me sad. I told him I loved the gift and would frame each one, but I hadn’t yet. I kept them hidden under sweatpants and sports bras where I didn’t have to look at them. My gift to him was a small flask.
“I don’t really drink,” he said.
“But you might someday,” I said, ever hopeful.
On the lawn, Daniella suggested we all head in.
I used Alan’s arm as leverage to stand, and the five or six of us stragglers followed her back into the house, up the stairs. She paused in front of one of the closed bedroom doors and leaned her head against it to listen in. The sounds from behind the door weren’t audible to us, but she smiled and then kept walking to the Brodersons’ master bedroom. She walked directly to the closet and started pulling out items and tossing them onto the bed.
I asked what she was doing.
“Inventory,” she said. “I thought we might try on some new selves for the night.”
I pulled myself away from Alan and picked up something soft and sheer, mint green, with little bows around the neckline.
“Good,” Daniella nodded at me. For Angie, she selected a blazer with shoulder pads. For Brendan, a checked button down. Around me, my friends began picking up clothing and pulling their own off. The removal of our clothing was silent and quick. We were all in our underwear for a brief minute and then we were armored again by the Brodersons’ nicest outfits. Their Sunday best, their pit-stained silks, their embarrassing forays into other now discarded identities. Alan stood back, watching the scene, but not joining us, until Daniella handed him a caftan in midnight-blue velvet. She looked at him with a smirk, a dare. He pulled off his black t-shirt. I felt my body lift towards the sight of his naked skin, the line of hair so rudely interrupted by his boxers. In the caftan he looked ridiculous and powerful. Daniella had swapped the silk bathrobe for a plum smoking jacket over her swim trunks and bikini top. She surveyed us.
“You all look wonderful,” she said, and held her glass out for us to toast.
“You’re so fucking weird,” Brendan said to her lovingly. We stood talking for a few minutes, posed around the bedroom.
I asked Angie about her plans for the rest of the summer, trying to cast us into the future and away from the moment. Around me, I heard talk of final grades, lifeguarding jobs, cabin parties. Quiet, stilted talk. Stalling.
Daniella had crossed the room to stand next to me, and she turned to me then, interrupting Angie’s monologue. “I hope you sleep well tonight,” she said.
“Thanks. You too.”
She squeezed my hand, then turned to face the whole room. She told us she wanted to be alone. “Goodnight sweet friends,” she said.
Alan and I walked out of the room together, my hand slipping into the pocket of his caftan.
◆
Alan laid down on top of me under the covers of the Brodersons’ guest bed. I still had on the mint nightie. I thought about what Mrs. Broderson might have done with these stupid little bows brushing against her clavicles and how every piece of clothing my mother owned must be stained by some memory of something she’d done with my father. How every time she got dressed, she was encasing herself in fabric that had carried the before-version of herself that my father had loved or claimed to love.
“Are you really okay?” Alan asked me for the fifth time before starting to move his body. His mouth was open wide enough that I could see the blinding white of his molars, his stippled pink tongue, the oily creases of his eyelids.
“Look at me,” I said, and slapped him gently on the back. He looked down at me and kept moving and it hurt but felt good too and I let my mind go wherever it wanted and where it wanted to go was toward a vision of my mother in bed under a weighted blanket, her sight winnowed to the dark folds of fabric blocking out the daylight creeping in from the curtains. I tried to think of Alan’s hot breath and warm skin on me as a gift, even though it was not exactly the breath and the body I wanted. Still, it was a body that wanted mine. I reached over to turn off the lamp, enclosing us in black. I kissed him and tried to forget blue-veined feet, skin cells on the nightie, golden hipbones, the owl’s talons and the bodies of the people I called friends, moving in unison with my own through the thin membranes of the walls.
Then I saw the door open. Hallway light rushed in and a silhouette stood there, staring down at us, arm stretched out and still holding the doorknob. I froze and considered screaming out, even though I had no real reason to be scared, but Alan kept moving, and the figure in the doorway made no movement to enter. Alan’s eyes opened briefly but he didn’t seem to register that we weren’t fully alone. Just as quickly, the figure —Daniella, I was sure of it—turned and left.
After Alan came, I laid on my back and asked him to touch me the way I touched myself. I conjured the image of Daniella in the doorway from minutes before, staring down at our bodies, except in my mind she started talking, directing Alan about what to do, how to touch me, how to stop touching me until I begged him to start again. I channeled her voice and Alan obeyed and then I was off running along the forest floor. Dark and loamy, my heart hot and frantic in my chest. After a little while, I came too. Alan was relieved and sweaty and he held me close to him before falling asleep.
An hour or so later, I got up and walked to the Brodersons’ bedroom. Daniella had left the door open and the bedside lamp on. She was sprawled out and asleep, her legs straddling the comforter, still in her swim trunks. I climbed into the bed and laid my head on the pillow facing hers. Her lips were dry and a pool of spit had formed beside her open mouth. She opened her eyes and didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Hi,” she said. “You came back.”
I didn’t know what she meant exactly, but I nodded.
“Was it what you wanted?”
I told her yes. “Everything I wanted.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. She reached out and brushed my cheek with her hand before falling back asleep.
I didn’t sleep but I stayed in the bed next to her, watching her face and trying to picture her dreams. Whether they were like mine, or how they might be different.
I waited until the sun broke through the windows of the room to get up and sneak down the stairs. I found my shoes unmoved by the door and left, eating the granola bar I’d packed on the long walk home.
◆
Later I would hear people tell stories about losing their virginity and I would think of Danni, not Alan. I wondered if she went to each room that night, checking in on the progress of each couple, a gentle visitor, startling us into awareness of the enormity of those moments, which later would seem like nothing. Or maybe she had just visited me.
I know everything major that’s happened to Alan since then. Or at least everything he has shared with the world: degrees, promotions, a trip to Bali, a breakdown detailed in a shockingly transparent post. A house, a wife, children that seem to continue arriving, an ever-widening circle.
I looked for Danni online too, but could never find anything. She lived out West somewhere people said, or on an island now. She was a homesteader or a carpenter or an anthropologist in Ottawa. When I finally found her, it was on a baby registry website. Her child was due in June with someone named Alex she lived with in Boise. I put a number of the items into my shopping cart–nursing bibs, ice gel teething keys, Aquaphor healing ointment, a slim snacking chair. An item mysteriously called “White Hot Baby Spoons.” The words felt poisonously alien to me; I was still years away from having my own daughter. I imagined all her wildness snuffed out or tucked away. Or maybe it was still there, channeled into something that looked contained and domestic from the outside but thrummed with life within.
I checked out anonymously and wrote a generic message, but didn’t sign my name. I imagined Danni opening the package on her couch in Boise, the disorientation of an anonymous gift, the thrill of getting what she needed.