Emerald is one of the few bars in town with—according to my father—a reputation for being full of shady characters: i.e. alcoholics, divorcées, and drug addicts. I’ve only been three times, and each time I looked around desperately for these so-called degenerates but was never able to spot any patrons that fit the bill. In fact, I was the one who looked suspicious—I was shaking like a Slinky, terrified that someone was going to ask for my ID and, when I couldn’t produce it, call the police.
But that was last year. This year I’ll be seventeen. Maggie and The Mouse are nearly eighteen, and Walt is already legal, so they can’t kick him out.
Lali and I find Walt and The Mouse and they want to go too. We troop out to Maggie’s car, where she and Peter are deep in conversation. I find this slightly irritating, although I don’t know why. We decide that Maggie will drive Walt to The Emerald, while The Mouse will take Peter, and I’ll go with Lali.
Thanks to Lali’s speedy driving, we’re the first to arrive. We park the truck as far away from the building as possible in order to avoid detection. “Okay, this is weird,” I say, while we wait. “Did you notice how Maggie and Peter were having some big discussion? It’s very strange, especially since Walt says he and Maggie are having problems.”
“Like that’s a surprise.” Lali snorts.“My father thinks Walt is gay.”
“Your father thinks everyone is gay. Including Jimmy Carter. Anyway, [A-Z]alt can’t be gay. He’s been with Maggie for two years. And I know they definitely do more than make out because he told me.”
“A guy can have sex with a woman and still be gay,” Lali insists. “Remember Ms. Crutchins?”
“Poor Ms. Crutchins,” I sigh, conceding the argument. She was our English teacher last year. She was about forty years old and she’d never been married and then she met “a wonderful man” and couldn’t stop talking about him, and after three months they got married. But then, one month later, she announced to the class that she’d annulled her marriage. The rumor was that her husband turned out to be gay. Ms. Crutchins never came right out and admitted it, but she would let revealing tidbits drop, like, “There are just some things a woman can’t live with.” And after that, Ms. Crutchins, who was always full of life and passionate about English literature, seemed to shrink right into herself like a deflated balloon.
The Mouse pulls up next to us in a green Gremlin, followed by the Cadillac. It’s terrible what they say about women drivers, but Maggie really is bad. As she’s trying to park the car, she runs the front tires over the curb. She gets out of the car, looks at the tires, and shrugs.
Then we all do our best to stroll casually into The Emerald, which isn’t really seedy at all—at least not to look at. It has red leather banquettes and a small dance floor with a disco ball, and a hostess with bleached blond hair who appears to be the definition of the word “blousy.”
“Table for six?” she asks, like we’re all absolutely old enough to drink.
We pile into a banquette. When the waitress comes over, I order a Singapore Sling. Whenever I’m in a bar I always try to order the most exotic drink on the menu. A Singapore Sling has several different kinds of alcohol in it, including something called “Galliano,” and it comes with a maraschino cherry and an umbrella. Then Peter, who’s ordered a whiskey on the rocks, looks at my drink and laughs. “Not too obvious,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” I ask innocently, sipping my cocktail through a straw.
“That you’re underage. Only someone who’s underage orders a drink with an umbrella and fruit. And a straw,” he adds.
“Yeah, but then I get to take the umbrella home. And what do you get to take home besides a hangover?”
The Mouse and Walt think this is pretty funny, and decide to only order umbrella drinks for the rest of the night.
Maggie, who usually drinks White Russians, orders a whiskey on the rocks, instead. This confirms that something is definitely going on between Maggie and Peter. If Maggie likes a guy, she does the same thing he does. Drinks the same drink, wears the same clothes, suddenly becomes interested in the same sports he likes, even if they’re totally wacky, like whitewater rafting. All through sophomore year, before Maggie and Walt started going out, Maggie liked this weird boy who went whitewater rafting every weekend in the fall. I can’t tell you how many hours I had to spend freezing on top of a rock, waiting for him to pass by in his canoe. Okay—I knew it wasn’t really a canoe, it was a kayak, but I insisted on calling it a canoe just to annoy Maggie for making me freeze my butt off.
And then the door of The Emerald swings open and for a moment, everyone forgets about who’s drinking what.
Standing by the hostess are Donna LaDonna and Sebastian Kydd. Donna has her hand on his neck, and after he holds up two fingers, she puts her other hand on his face, turns his head, and starts kissing him.
After about ten seconds of this excessive display of affection, Maggie can’t take it anymore. “Gross,” she exclaims. “Donna is such a slut. I can’t believe it.”
“She’s not so bad,” Peter counters.
“How do you know?” Maggie demands.
“I helped tutor her a couple of years ago. She’s actually kind of funny. And smart.”
“That still doesn’t mean she should be making out with some guy in The Emerald.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s resisting much,” I murmur, stirring my drink.
“Who is that guy?” Lali asks.
“Sebastian Kydd,”The Mouse volunteers.
“I know his name,” Lali sniffs. “But who is he? Really?”
“No one knows,” I say. “He used to go to private school.”
Lali can’t take her eyes off him. Indeed, no one in the bar seems to be able to tear themselves away from the spectacle. But now I’m bored with Sebastian Kydd and his attention-getting antics.
I snap my fingers in Lali’s face to distract her.“Let’s dance.”
Lali and I go to the jukebox and pick out some songs. We’re not regular boozers, so we’re both feeling the giddy effects of being a little bit drunk, when everything seems funny. I pick out my favorite song, “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge, and Lali picks “Legs” by ZZ Top. We take to the dance floor. I do a bunch of different dances—the pony, the electric slide, the bump, and the hustle, along with a lot of steps I’ve made up on my own. The music changes and Lali and I start doing this crazy line dance we invented a couple of years ago during a swim meet where you wave your arms in the air and then bend your knees and shake your butt. When we straighten up, Sebastian Kydd is on the dance floor.
He’s a pretty cool dancer, but then, I expected he would be. He dances a little with Lali, and then he turns to me and takes my hand and starts doing the hustle. It’s a dance I’m good at, and at a certain point one of his legs is in-between mine, and I’m kind of grinding my hips, because this, after all, is a legitimate part of the dance.
He says, “Don’t I know you?”
And I say, “Yes, actually you do.”
Then
