The First Time

Sophmore year

"You have the weirdest taste in music."

Alex was on my bed, painting her toes. Her taste in music could easily be summed up by anything played and killed on Pop stations: Overproduced, synthesized, and lacking of any originality, whatsoever. But I never needed Alex's approval  when it came to my music. Music has been the only thing I'm ever sure about.

I laughed evasively and continued studying while Alex retreated from her position on my bed, ambling across my carpet with wet, hot pink toes. After she shifted through her bag, she finally secured a pack of cigarettes. And yes, Alex was the only person our age I knew who actually smoked cigarettes—although most of our friends would pretend they did after drinking at parties all night. And don't even get me started on the vapers: We get it. You vape.

"If you insist on doing that, light the candle and open the window. My Dad will be home any sec and I'm not sure he's going to be all for the smell of acetone and nicotine."

"Relax, Mom. I know the drill."

I just rolled my eyes and tossed my homework aside in favor of a magazine. Fashion was something I literally had to study—like algebra or chemistry—as if pouring over pictures and studying the trends would give me the intuitiveness of fashion I naturally lacked. Alex though, could make a paper-bag look haute, and I left it up to her to pick out my Fall Ball dress. Skeptical as I was when she handed me a burnt-orange, one shouldered shift dress through the dressing room curtain at Nordstrom's last week, when I tried it on, it didn't look boxy at all. In fact, I almost felt like it made me look different. Beautiful. Thankfully, Alex always did our makeup and hair before dances—she stated you could learn anything you needed to via YouTube tutorials —so I was pretty much guaranteed to have a bona-fide Cinderella moment.

"Holy shit," Alex said, turning me back into a pumpkin and ripping me away from my dance fantasies. Somewhere outside, I heard the quiet purring of an engine, then two car doors slamming shut. She was perched on my windowsill like a vulture, the sun outside starting to shift from an autumn-lit orange to a purpley black. After taking a drag from her cigarette, she said "Ben Stanley got pretty hot. Where does he go to school again? B.U?"

"Not sure."

"It's really kind of a shame he comes from such a family of pure-blooded freaks."

"Pure-blooded?"

"Well, yeah,'" Alex said, carefully leaning over the window sill to ash her cigarette. "You've got your full-fledged type of freaks—like the Stanleys, no debate—and you've got your normal people, with a just a little bit of bad breeding. You know, like you, Garrity."

I just glanced at her, and she was smiling—her kohl lined eyes flashing playfully. Plus, knowing she was a card-carryinging member of the modern  family--she had a step-dad and twin brothers a decade younger than her--I knew her thinly veiled jab at my mommy issues was harmless. "Hey, I have no problem with that. I'll proudly wave my freak flag high," I  lifted my hand to sway my invisible flag in an imaginary gust of wind. Alex chuckled, then suddenly hopped down from the window sill, putting her cigarette out on the full can of Diet Coke on my desk.

"Oh God,' she said, carefully slipping her feet into a pair of my flip-flops; I could almost see the thought distended from her topknot. "I have a brilliant idea." She walked back over to my window, where she leaned over the edge. "Hey, Stanley, hold up. I'll be right down."

Before I blinked, she was halfway out of my bedroom . I swallowed a bad feeling that tasted like repentance: metallic and salty. It was no secret that Alex didn't like Lana—for what reason, no one really knew. Except maybe Alison, who had alluded to the fact that the two had been friends in the past. Any shadow of  friendship they'd ostensibly had was easily forgotten or ignored: Lana was the constant target of Alex's maltreatment—the figurative cigarette butt of a lot of her jokes. And it didn't help that the Stanley's lived across the street from me.

"Are you coming?" Her signature evil grin confirmed that whatever her plan was, it wasn't any good. I busied myself by re-opening my algebra book, and wrote both of our names on top.

"Somebody's got to finish our homework."

"And we all know not to leave that up to me," Alex replied, leaving my room with a fading scent of nail polish mingled against the smolder of her cigarette.

I tried my best to focus on the quadratic equations in front of me: The one thing I appreciated about math even though it was a language as foreign to me as Parseltongue was that no matter how many variables and unknown answers there were in an equation, if you followed the formulas step by step, there'd always be a concrete, definite solution. There's something that's so reassuring about knowing that all of your answers are hidden right there.

Several minutes later, Alex was back in my room, re-lighting the cigarette she'd only taken a couple of drags out of, blowing perfects rings of smoke out my window.

"What was that all about?" I asked, flipping to the back of the textbook to see if the answer to the odd number problem of our homework was correct—it was. I wasn't sure if I even wanted to know.

"Oh, you'll see." She smiled slowly, her criminal grin immortalizing all the features that were screaming at me to proceed with caution, to take a step back.

I didn't though. Not even a little.

Fast forward to the next Friday, and I was joined by a cluster of girls in Alex's basement. Dance music was booming with a heavy bass from the stereo; girls were painting each other's nails and gossiping around in a semicircle, drinking the mocktails that Mrs. Lopes had made us. Several curling wands and straightening irons were plugged in and heating up, propped carefully against the legs of a coffee table to prevent them from forming crop circles of burn marks on the carpet—a mistake Mrs. Lopes had still yet to forgive us for after semi-formal.

And as always, Alex was doing hair and makeup, with Alison assisting like some kind of apprentice. A makeup trunk that looked more like a suitcase was open, filled to the brim with high-end goodies from Sephora. She had had everything from blushes in rosy pinks to sunny peaches, to eye shadows ranging from neutrals to neon. Brushes and pink Beautyblenders lay dampened and scattered around like discarded paint brushes from a seasoned artist. I had yet to go to look in a mirror to make sure she didn't go overboard with the brow pencil again. I definitely wanted to wear my inside eyebrows to the dance.

Alex was in the middle of doing a smoky eye on Kat Morgan when the beat of two feet ascending the stairs indicated that someone else was joining us. Fully expecting to see Mrs. Lopes at the bottom of the stairs with another round of Pina Coladas, I was consumed with a jolt of shock to see it was actually Lana who was the late arrival to our party—a whole two hours after the rest of us arrived. Lana came prepared, already dressed in a black sequined Maxi dress with a hopeful smile plastered on her blank canvas of a face.

A quiet hush struck everyone right in the throats, so there was a minute of pure noiselessness as the stereo crafted an impromptu moment of silence as the track that was playing ended. "Oh great, you came," said Alex in a voice that was swollen with insincerity so sweet, I almost thought it would dissolve like crystallized sugar under a stream of scalding water. "Help yourself to a drink. I just have to finish up with Kat and take these curlers out of my hair, and then I'll start your makeup."

Lana shot a glance at the drinks and and a strange look take over face. Instead of obliging, she took a rigid seat on the sectional.

We all sort of looked at Alex for some kind of explanation, but she just continued blending a dark eyeshadow over the lid of Kat's closed eye—whose open one was darting curiously back and forth between Lana' sequined silhouette and Alex's poker-face. Choking down the bitter taste of that feeling I didn't recognize quite yet as preemptive regret, I picked up my orange dress I'd laid out on a corner of a sectional, and fled to the bathroom. I really didn't want to see what was about to happen, but also, I had no courage to change it's course; to press my high-heeled shoes on the brakes of whatever Alex was planning. To spare Lana the mortification that was inevitably coming her way.

Here's the thing about shame: You wear it like a mask. It starts out as clay—muddy and moldable—softening at the touch of fingertips, only to harden and become as indestructible as stone.

When I entered the school cafeteria forty minutes later—which was transformed with twinkling lights hung tautly across linoleum trees and hundreds of teas lights illuminating carved pumpkins like flames—I knew that my makeup was perfect. I knew that my hair was hanging as straight and silky as a cashmere scarf. And although I had a circle of friends around me, arms and hips swaying, glossed lips singing along to the music, one image kept replaying in my mind. Over and over, like a bad scratch on a record that skips right at the catchy bridge of a song.

When I had left the bathroom back at Alex's, Lana was in the makeup chair and Alex was swirling a blush brush over her high cheekbones. Alison was turned away, covering her mouth, but that didn't stop the callous laugh from trickling out of her eyes. When I got close enough to actually see the pair of them, I then grasped what was apparently so funny: Alex had painted each of her cheeks neon red with blush, two perfect geometrically shaped circles. Worse, Lana's eyes were shaded with an unwearable shade of blue—electric in the worst kind of way.

"And now for the finishing touch," Alex said, picking up a tube of lipstick. She painted on a shade of orange over Lana's bow-shaped lips—a shade more fitting for a street sign than against the soft backdrop of girl's skin. "Oops," she deadpanned, streaking the lipstick outside the lines of her mouth and onto her cheek. That's when they couldn't keep it in any longer:  Surrounding me, their concealed laughter spilled out collectively, and Lana just looked at some imaginary point in the distance, her face painted like she belonged in a circus act, the elegant skirt of her dress deserving to be twirled around and around.

So shortly thereafter at the Fall Ball, it's that one image—the only image—that stuck with me the night of the dance, even after all of the filtered pictures were posted on Instagram and Snapchat. Even though I knew my dress was gorgeous, and the DJ was playing music that wasn't too awful, arms, legs, and hips dancing all around me,  I could only see the tears that smudged Lana's face: Blue and red watery welts she tried to wash off hurriedly in the bathroom as everybody left.

The funny thing was, even though I knew my face looked flawless thanks to Alex, it was me, dancing there with all of them in that crowded cafeteria, who felt like I  was wearing the mask of a clown.