“Then why can’t you do it with me?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Of course it does,” he says, sitting up and pulling on his socks. “Otherwise you would do it.”
“But I haven’t done it with anyone.” I crawl after him and put my arms around his shoulders. “Please don’t be mad at me. I just can’t do it…today. I’ll do it another day, I promise.”
“That’s what you always say.”
“But this time I mean it.”
“Okay,” he says warningly. “But you can’t expect me to wait much longer.”
He pulls on his jeans and I flop back onto the bed, giggling.
“What’s so funny?” he demands.
I can barely get the words out. “You could always watch a porn video instead. Jugs!”
“How do you know about that?” he asks in a fury.
I cover my face with his pillow. “Haven’t you figured it out? I know everything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Circus Comes to Town
“Two more days,” Walt says, taking a toke on the joint. “Two more days of freedom, and then it’s over.”
“What about the summer?” Maggie asks.
“Ah yes. Maggie’s long summer,” Walt murmurs. “Tanning by the pool, basting herself with baby oil—”
“Putting Sun-In in her hair—”
“You put Sun-In in your hair,” Maggie says, rolling over.
“True,” I concede.
“This is boring.” Lali gets up off the couch. “Bunch of deadheads. Give me a hit of that.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” The Mouse says, handing her the joint.
“Are you sure you want to smoke?” I ask teasingly. “The last time you ate an entire pound of bacon. Remember?”
“It was three strips!” she exclaims. “God, Carrie. Why are you always making things up?”
“Because it’s fun?”
The six of us—Walt, Maggie, The Mouse, Lali, Peter, and I—are hanging out in the old playroom above The Mouse’s garage. It’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re smugly congratulating ourselves on being too cool to bother going out to a party. Not that there’s a party we’d want to go to anyway. There’s a dance for old people at the country club—“Deadly,” according to The Mouse—there’s a movie night at the library—“Middle-brow conservatives who want to pretend they’re intellectuals,” according to Walt—and a fancy dinner party at Cynthia Viande’s where the girls wear long dresses and the boys rent tuxes and they supposedly drink Baby Champs and pretend to be grown-ups. But it’s limited to twenty of Cynthia’s nearest and dearest friends, if you can categorize the two Jens and Donna LaDonna as bosom buddies. None of us have made the cut, with the exception of Peter, who was only asked at the last minute because Cynthia needed an “extra man.” In order to spare Peter this indignity, we decided to gather at The Mouse’s to smoke pot, drink White Russians, and pretend we’re not losers.
“Hey,” Peter says to Maggie, tapping on his bottle of beer. “The extra man needs another brewskie.”
“The extra man can get it himself,” Maggie says, giggling. “Isn’t that what an extra man is for? To do all the extra work?”
“What about an extra woman?” Lali asks, passing the joint to me. “How come no one wants an extra woman?”
“Because an extra woman is a mistress.”