The phone begins to ring as soon as I get through the door. Jimmy or Mark? It doesn’t matter. I don’t answer it, and he doesn’t leave a message. Whoever he is. I’m not really in the mood to talk to either of them, to anyone. Ever. Again.

 Ten minutes later, as I sit on the toilet, the hem of my dress hanging in the blue water, sobbing, the phone rings again, and the house begins to stir. "It’s two fifteen," my father yells from the bedroom, the kingdom timekeeper. "Answer the God damned phone."

 "If it’s for me, I’m not home," Grace yells back.

 I hate parties and I hate Mark and I hate everything. But most of all I hate the incessant ringing, the trilling of ghost birds with smashing news, hey! I got drunk and grabbed your boyfriend’s package, sorry!

 On the fourth go-round my father himself gets up and answers the phone, standing in the middle of the kitchen in his threadbare BVDs, ranting.

 "It’s two fif-fucking-teen, and I have to be up early. Do you understand?"

 "Dad, I’ll take it."

 He looks at me, his eyes glowing hot orbs of pure sleep deprived rage. "I don’t know how it is at college, but—"

 "Look, you can stand here and yell at me or you can go back to bed, Dad, huh? Just get away."
 His face softens for a moment and I feel sorry, but then he stalks off, muttering something about his daughters and Hell and won’t we just get it then.

 "What do you want?"

 "Listen, I’m sorry, okay?"

 I lay down on the kitchen table, my hem moist and blue around my knees. "Oh, you’d better be sorry," I tell him, wiping away a rivulet of snot. "Are you still over there?"

 "What? Why?"

 I want to know if Jimmy is still there. But of course he isn’t. I was the only person he knew there. So really he didn’t know anyone. "Look. I don’t want to talk to you right now."

 "But Carl—"

 "No. No. Not now."

 "Are you really that mad?"

 "What do you fucking think, am I really that mad?" My voice rises and falls, expanding in my throat, pressing on glands and virgin tongue. Choking mad. "Don’t call back. My dad will kick my ass, all right?"

 "It worked out good, though, huh? It worked out for the best."

 "I hate you." I slam the phone home, hoping the sound would enter Mark’s head and explode it,
sending geysers of steaming brains every which way. Through the nose. Everywhere. It’s a disturbingly comforting thought.

 "Who was that?" Grace pads into the kitchen, her belly protruding comically through her baby-doll nightgown. "Jimmy?"

 I press my face against the cool of the table. "No, Grace, please, leave me alone, okay?"

 "What happened?" She puts a dry hand on my neck and I begin to cry harder, knowing what she would say when I told her. If I told her. If I told her the truth. I could say Jimmy hit me, that he hit Mark and then he hit me. I could tell her that I’d gotten drunk and left with another guy. I could tell her anything.

 But like a moron I tell her the truth.
 

 I don’t even know whose party it was, one of Mark’s old friends from high school, someone in my class, I guess, that I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with the first time. Mark was going with some girl he knew from college. So I was going with Jimmy.

 "Why don’t we just stay here," Jimmy said, his hand resting on my chair rail. "Stay here and get a movie or something. I’m not much of a partier."

 "No." I leaned back, trying to press my back more firmly into his arm. He frowned, bringing one sweet dimple to the surface. "Come on, you come to visit me when? Never. So let’s just do this one thing. Okay? There’s plenty of time for movies later." He was staying all weekend, a coup not easily won from my parents given the circumstances.

 He sighed and brought his arm down, grazing my shoulder with his fingertips. "Whatever. But we’re not staying too long."

 And we didn’t, really. Maybe half an hour. That was all it took.

 There wasn’t much to it, really. A lot of "Carly! I haven’t seen you since high school!" For a reason, dear, for a reason. A lot of drinking. A lot of tongues, wagging, intertwining, tasting. A lot of dark corners.

 "So these are the people you hung out with in school?" He surveyed the scene with a half-cocked eyebrow, lingering too long on a writing lump beneath an afghan on the black leather couch in the living room.

 "No." It was the truth. But the people I did hang out with had even lamer parties, with makeovers and board games and the chance to thumb through an older sister’s Playgirl. "They’re all right, though."

 "Whenever you’re ready," he said, gesturing toward the door with a jerk of his head. He looked like he was having an epileptic seizure.

 But how could we leave, when we had just walked in ten minutes before, when we hadn’t even had a drink? So we waited lamely, suppressed by the beerthick air and low-riding cloud of cigarette haze, for the Fun to Arrive, which it did, with an extra beer in its hand and a vodka-stupid grin on its face.

 "Carly!" Mark slapped my ass with his free hand and pressed the beer in my hand with the other. "I didn’t think you were gonna come, man, I really didn’t! Way to fucking go!"

 Jimmy looked at me warily, as if I had been approached not by an old friend from high school but from the insane asylum, a Randall P. McMurphy to my Chief Bromden. "How’s it going, Mark, where’s your date?"

 "My date?"

 "Yeah." We had to yell over the music—if this don’t make your booty move, your booty must be dead. If this don’t make your booty move—"Your date. The girl from school. Where is she?"

 Mark began to laugh, his face turning bright red. "I fucking lied about having a date, man, I don’t have a date."

 "Carly, there’s something wrong with this guy, I think we’d better—" Jimmy had my wrist between two fingers and was tugging lightly but insistently. I shook him off and turned back to Mark.

 "Why would you lie about something like that, Mark?" He kept laughing, wiping tears away with the back of his hand.

 "He’s just drunk, just leave him alone," Jim said, reaching again for my wrist.

 "And you must be Jimmy," Mark said, extending his hand. Jim shook it limply and looked to me again. "Jimmy Bigdick."

 "Excuse me?"

 "Jimmy Bigdick!" Mark nudged him with his elbow, nodding toward his groin with an open-mouthed grin.

 "Mark!" I grabbed him by the upper arm, and he looked at me, his eyes thick and gummed. "What are you doing? Would you just shut up?"

 "Jiiiiiiiiimmy Bigdick," he sang, flinging his head from side to side, laughing. Before I could stop him he hoisted himself onto the end table next to the couch, knocking a Precious Moments figurine to the floor. "Come one, come all, see the biggest package in town, it’s Jimmy—"

 "Don’t you dare!" I tugged at his leg and he slapped me. Slapped me! I turned to Jimmy, who had turned to the bottle, downing what remained of the tumbler of gin and Coke I had given him in two gulps. "Would you get the fuck down from there?"

 "Come on, jackass, that’s my mom’s!" Someone, the host, presumably, forced his way through the gathering crowd. His orange shirt with its designer label stamped across the front seemed to shout authority to the people around, who fell silent as he passed them. "That’s my mom’s, man, get down!"

 Mark made his descent slowly, clinging to the boy’s shoulders to steady himself. Jimmy hadn’t let go of my wrist yet, and his pulling became more insistent. "Where you going, Jimmy Bigdick?" Mark asked him, putting his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. "Don’t you want to show everyone your glory stick, come on!"

 And before anyone knew what had happened, before anyone could stop him, he grabbed Jimmy’s crotch, grabbed it and held it through the fabric of his khaki pants and his briefs, and twisted. "Whoo! Big stuff, there, big stuff!"

 Two guys had to keep Jimmy back, and another two carried Mark off into the crowd. I could still hear him hooting halfway through the house.

 The crowd closed around us, and I saw faces I hadn’t seen in forever, faces that belonged to bodies, to hands that had pegged me in dodgeball and stolen my bookbag, to feet that kicked me under desks during story time and I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did, what I had always done when those faces surrounded me. I began to cry.

 I expected laughter, at least a ripple, they were more polite now but they couldn’t have changed. But there was nothing. Nothing but the music and Mark’s cries of Jimmy Bigdick, man, whoo! One girl with two empty glasses clinking together in one hand approached me, her mascara raccooning around her huge eyes. "I can’t believe he did that to your boyfriend," she said, nodding sympathetically.

 "I’m not her God damned boyfriend!" Jimmy yelled at her. She retreated quickly into the crowd, which swayed tentatively to the music, watching us all the while.

 "Look, Jimmy, I’m sorry. It’s not my fault."

 "No." He pushed two dancers out of his way and cut a swath to the door, which I followed quickly before it closed behind us. "I’m fucking tired of this, Carly."

 "Tired of what?" He kept walking toward the car and I grabbed his arm, gripping his sleeve tightly so that he couldn’t shake me off.

 "This whole thing. This whole boyfriend thing. I’m not your boyfriend. I was never your boyfriend."

 "What are you talking about? What about Florida? Huh? What about all that?"

 He ran his fingers through his hair, and flakes of gel came dancing out, swirling gaily in the spotlight above the garage where we stood. "Jesus Christ. We didn’t even kiss. Don’t you think boyfriends and girlfriends kiss?"

 "What about everything else? It’s not just kissing, it’s everything." I could hear it myself, so I knew he could hear it. The pathetic tone. The grasping one.

 "Everybody does that. You do that with your fucking mom, that’s just the way it is! I thought we could just be friends or whatever, but come on. No way. I don’t know what’s wrong with you."

 "Why didn’t you tell me." I began to sniffle and he rolled his eyes, sucking in air sharply. "Every time. I called you my boyfriend. So many times. And you never stopped me."

 "I thought you’d catch on." He said it softly. "I really thought you would. I thought you knew better."

 "Whatever."

 "Look. You’re nice. You’re great. You know I wouldn’t hang out with you if you weren’t—"

 "Oh, shut up." I wheeled around on him, tried to draw myself up to his height. "Shut the fuck up, whatever. I can’t believe you would do this to me."

 "I can’t believe you told that asshole I had a big dick."

 "I didn’t tell him you had a big dick!" The lights came on at the house next door, and a figure came to the window.

 "Exactly how many people did you tell that I was your boyfriend, anyway?"

 "Get away from me."

 "Everyone? Who did you tell? Everyone?"

 "I didn’t tell anyone."

 "Well, forget that. Forget that. I thought you were all right, but I guess not. Huh. I guess not."

 "Jimmy—"

 "Later, Carly." He stalked back into the house, and I didn’t see him again.

 When Mark came out ten minutes later I was still crying, my head in my lap. The light was still on in the house next door, and I knew they were enjoying my suffering, an early morning prelude to the pain they themselves would feel at work the next day. It was good to see someone else suffer for a change, I guess.

 "Where’s Jimmy?"

 "How should I know?"

 "Are you guys leaving?"

 "Not together."

 "What?" He shook his head like a slow motion Saint Bernard, his eyes opened too wide. "What
happened?"

 "Before or after the Jimmy Bigdick incident?"

 "It wasn’t."

 "It wasn’t what, Mark?" He looked at me sympathetically and took my head in his hands, pushing it gently from side to side as if to keep it steady with his own wagging head.

 "Big. Not big at all."

 I pulled myself away and stood up, knocking him from his haunches to his knees. "I can’t believe. You. I can’t believe. I’m getting out of here."

 "What?" He stood up too, hanging on my arm for support.

 "Don’t," I said, prying his hand off my arm. "I can’t believe you, I can’t believe this." He opened his mouth to speak and I pushed him. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.

 "Where are you going?"

 "Where do you think?"

 Home.