“You’re so awesome,” Tara says, then palms the steering wheel and curses as we just miss the light.
“Please.” I wave the air vaguely. I’m feeling pretty good. I’m almost glad Lindsay and I got into a fight this morning.
“Oh, shit, no way.” Courtney beats on my shoulder as a huge Chevy Tahoe, vibrating with bass, pulls up next to us. Even though it’s freezing, all the windows are down: it’s the college guys from La Villa, the ones who checked us out earlier. Who checked me out. They’re laughing and fighting over something in the car—one of them yells, “Mike, you’re a pussy”—pretending not to see us, the way guys do when they’re just dying to look.
“They are so hot,” Tara says, leaning over me to get a clearer view, then ducking quickly back to the wheel.
“You should get their number.”
“Hello? There are four of them.”
“Their numbers, then.”
“Totally.”
“I’m gonna flash them,” I say, and am suddenly thrilled with the perfect, pure simplicity of it: I’m going to do it. So much easier and cleaner than Maybe I should or Won’t we get in trouble? or Oh my God, I could never. Yes. Three letters. I twist around to Courtney. “Do you dare me?”
Her eyes are doing that bug thing again. Tara and Bethany stare at me like I’ve sprouted tentacles.
“You wouldn’t,” Courtney says.
“You can’t,” Tara says.
“I can, I would, and I’m going to.” I roll down the window, and the cold slams me, blots out everything, numbs my whole body so I just feel myself in bits and pieces, an elbow bobbing here, a thigh cramping, fingers tingling. The music pumping from the boys’ car is so loud it makes my ears hurt, but I can’t hear any words or melody, just the rhythm, throbbing, throbbing—so loud it’s not even sound anymore, just vibration, feeling.
“Hey.” At first I can only croak the word out, so I clear my throat and try again. “Hey. Guys.”
The driver swivels his head in my direction. I can hardly focus I’m so keyed up, but in that second I see he’s not that cute, actually—he has kind of crooked teeth and a rhinestone stud in one ear, like he’s a rapper or something—but then he says, “Hey, cutie,” and I see his three friends lean over toward the window to look, one, two, three heads popping up like jacks-in-the-box, like the Whack-a-Mole game at Dave & Buster’s, one, two, three, and I’m lifting my shirt, and there’s a roar and a rushing, singing sound in my ears—laughter? screaming?—and Courtney’s yelling, “Go, go, go.” Then our tires screech, and the car lurches forward, sliding a bit, the wind biting my face, and the smell of scorched rubber and gasoline stinking up the air. My heart sinks slowly back from my throat to my chest, and the warmth and feeling comes back to my body. I roll up the window. I can’t explain the feelings going through me, a rush like you get from laughing too hard or spinning too long in a circle. It’s not exactly happiness, but I’ll take it.
“Priceless! Legendary!” Courtney’s thumping the back of my seat, and Bethany’s just shaking her head and reaching forward to touch me, eyes wide, amazed, like I’m a saint and she’s trying to cure herself of a disease. Tara’s screaming with laughter. She can barely watch the road, her eyes are tearing up so badly. She chokes out, “Did you see their faces? Did you see?” and I realize I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything but the roaring around me, heavy and loud, and it occurs to me that I’m not sure whether this is what it’s like to be really, truly alive or this is what it’s like to be dead, and it strikes me as hilarious. Courtney thumps me one more time, and I see her face rising behind me in the rearview mirror, red as a sun, and I start laughing too, and the four of us laugh all the way back to Ridgeview—over eighteen miles—while the world streaks past us in a smear of blacks and grays, like a bad painting of itself.
We stop at Tara’s house so everyone can change. Tara helps get me into my dress again, and after I slip on the fur shrug and the earrings and let my hair down—which is all wavy from being twisted up in a half-knot all day—I turn to the mirror and my heart actually reindeer-prances in my chest. I look at least twenty-five. I look like somebody else. I close my eyes, remember standing in the bathroom when I was little as the steam from my shower retreated from the mirrors, praying for a transformation. I remember the sick taste of disappointment every time my face reemerged, as plain as it ever was. But this time when I open my eyes it works. There I am: different and gorgeous and not myself.