The first time Brooke stepped from a taxi wearing a strapless mini-dress and towering high heels, the doorman had hurried over and issued her inside while a throng of equally underdressed young women stood shivering behind a velvet rope.
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Last week she had tried a nightclub where one wall was a live-TV screen. The music pounded inside her and Brooke’s whole body followed. Watching herself in high-def had inspired her to imitate dances she’d seen in videos. The mix ended and—whadda ya know? Her first lover, the senior from Boiceville, bobbed in her face.
Pivoting, Brooke had run away with no intention of returning. But, now of course, her intention had changed.
Only nine o’clock and people crowded the bar. Brooke stood in a corner and watched her loutish ex-lover guzzling beer. Hard to believe—but seven months ago, still in high school, she was still having sex with that jerk-off.
How infuriated Tara had been! When he insulted Brooke, Tara had called him out. Yet despite Brooke not even liking him, she had hopped into his car for silent sex all through May and part of June.
Not April, though: During spring break, he invited her to watch “Palimony” (as had Matthew once but didn’t—stop thinking about him!) The movie opened and the senior had dissed handsome Mr. King. Without a word, Brooke had walked thirteen miles home.
Then six weeks before graduation, the dumbass, who had never acknowledged her and hadn’t broken up with Miriam—Brooke asked her friends—pleaded with her in public. “Please, Brooke, I might never see you again.” His friends gathered behind him calling, “Please, Brooke, please.”
She hadn’t had sex with Matthew yet, just this idiot, and sorry, world, Brooke loved sex. Not Barbie dolls, not hair-bows, or cupcakes; not the frilly, silly nonsense of an idyllic girlhood (as defined by fathers, those ultimate girlhood-experts!) Brooke loved reckless abandon and multiple orgasms—that was her girlhood.
“Brooke! Hey, Brooke!” The senior from Boiceville (now a freshman at Pace) stumbled over. “You look incredible, Brooke. You’re so beautiful but—everybody says that.”
“No, most people say something else.”
“Not me, Brooke. I’ve always said you were beautiful.”
She let that go. They danced to a breakneck mix until he screamed at her, “I gotta sit down.” And—this was a first—“I wanna talk to you.” He took her to Starbuck’s, slurring nonstop compliments.
“In school, people were scared of you, Brooke. You were, like, supernatural.”
“Were you scared?”
“Kind of, Brooke.”
“I’m done with high school,” she said. “I finished early.”
“I finished a year late. But my dad expects…You look as unreal as ever, Brooke.” (Sure, he was drunk, but for someone who had never said her name, now he couldn’t say it enough.)
“If I dress like this, nobody cards me.”
“Really, Brooke? I gotta show three IDs.”
She said, “You look grown up to me,” when really he looked fat. And, not for the first or twentieth time that night, she worried about getting through this. “Remember smoking pot in your car?”
“I’ve got the best ganga, Brooke, at my place downtown.”
The next morning, wearing his Van Halen T-shirt, her tiny dress draped on a chair, she wept into her hands. He tried to hold her but she pushed him away. He still said, “Don’t cry, Brooke. I care about you. I always have.”
“So you say, but I’ve gotta go.”
“Just a second.” He left the room.
She was buttoning her coat when he returned with a pipe packed tight. “Try this; it’s my roommate’s.”
She took the tiniest hit and asked, “What’s in it?”
“Nothing, Brooke. It’s optimum weed.”
She didn’t believe it. He had been lifting the pipe to his mouth but handed it back to her. “Try it again; you’ll see.”
Definitely laced, she thought; and after a few minutes, she fell back on his bed without waking up until Sunday.
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