Prose On Your Tongue

Sam’s house is deep in the suburbs, which forces all of us to keep our voices down and the music low. When I’m invited enthusiastically inside by Bee, I notice that most of the party guests are crowded on the living room couches with bottles of alcohol clutched in their underaged hands; the huge flat screen television is playing some kind of basketball game. Not many people are paying much attention to it, though; they’re chattering delightfully about so many things that I can only pick up bits and pieces of each conversation.

“Guess who just arrived?” Bee chips, tugging me along with her across the living room, where a sitting Patrick, David, and Alex say their hellos, and then straight into the dining room, where a group of guys and a couple of lightly-dressed girls are either drinking, chatting, or tapping away at their phones with a row of chips and salsa dip lining the cluttered table.

Nes and his big head of golden brown hair looks up at me, a bright expression crossing his freckled face. “You actually came,” he says almost incredulously. “Decided you’ll be social for once?”

Before I can say much (not like I’m able to; Nes has this weird way of making me tongue-tied even years into our friendship), Sam pokes himself into the conversation from the other side of the table, standing against a wall with some thick brunette by his side. “Be careful, Nes; his bodyguard will beat you up.” His eyes flicker in the direction of a frowning Bee, who rushes around the table and leaps at Sam.

While everyone looks and shares laughs, Nes stands up from his seat at the head of the dining room and squeezes past Kendall to reach me, patting the middle of my back. “We’re just messin’ — of course you’d come if Bee or Sam invited you.”

“You, too,” I say.

When Nes raises an eyebrow at me, I stumble over my words with, “I’d — I’d come if you asked me to, too.”

I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but we share this uneasy silence for almost two seconds until Bee’s flirtatious screech brings our attention to a wrestling match between Sam and her. And then soon enough everyone from the party is all sitting down, cramming and sharing seats, in the dining room with our phones, playing stupid games like Truth or Dare or Never Would I Ever while waiting for Sam and Patrick to get all the food set up in the kitchen.

“This is the coolest party ever,” Alex says sarcastically in the middle of someone stumbling through a Truth, and a couple of us have a laugh at that. He gives Tom a nudge in between his ribs, leaning over to say, near his face, in what is supposed to be a whisper, but turns out much louder than that, “We should call up Destiny and her girls to see if they can spice things up?”

Some murmurs of agreement rise among our heads, and soon Alex is giggling like an idiot and crouching in the corner of the room with his phone pressed tightly to his ear, blue eyes wide and looking up at a hovering Tom with his index finger to his lips, signaling silence. I look over at Bee to get her attention, wondering who ‘Destiny and her girls’ are, but she’s tilting her head to get a good view into the kitchen, distracted by Sam’s broad back arched over the stove. So I lean back in my seat and shift uncomfortably under this girl named Erica’s butt — someone of whom I’ve only known for a couple of hours, but grew a liking to me — and wait it out, confused, while Alex chats quietly on his phone.

By ten p.m. the girls are here, scantily clad in crop tops and shorts so tiny that the bottom slope of their cheeks are sticking out. It’s hard not to realize they’ve arrived — the four of them stumble in hollering and raising their hands high above their heads, squeaky teenage girl voices piercing through every conversation in the house.

“What’re we cookin’?” one girl with long, violet waves, dark brown roots blatantly sticking out, says as she walks past the dining room, glancing briefly at us before rushing into kitchen to check it out. “Smells great!”

Another girl with straight, raspberry colored hair, her natural blonde entangling with the dye coloring, fixes her baby blue bra through her crop top while slipping effortlessly under the arm of Alex, giving him a smooth, easy kiss on his chin. “Hey,” she breathes lovingly, and they are into one another’s eyes, gleaming and flickering under the dining room lights, and its then that I realize that she’s Destiny.

The other girls at the party seem to die down and sit, cast off by the new arrivals, as the four go from cheek to cheek, guy to guy, greeting them with big, glossy smiles and heavily made-up eyes, ready to pick up the party from its slow, dying pace. One pulls her neon pink mp3 player from under her shirt — like magic — and connects it to something in the living room before poppy, thumping music starts playing. But Sam escapes the heat of the kitchen to tell her to turn it down some, and she complies, just barely cranking the volume the opposite direction.

“Where’s the fuckin’ booze?” the third, with her thick, loose curls that’s been dyed a bright, bleach blonde, hollers over the bass, and, okay, sucks, ‘cause that’s when Nes raises his bright, glassy green-blues from his phone, and it’s like his entire freckled face lights up at the sight of her, that slender, long body glowing as she scans the contents of the dining table for any form of alcohol.

“Right here, baby!” Patrick shimmies out of the kitchen while a few cold beers filling the space in his large, square hands, and all four girls — and a bunch of the guys — make rowdy noises while they scramble to get their share. Raspberry-Colored Hair gives Patrick a slow, languid kiss on his cheek ( and, god, she’s even using tongue) while whispering a seductive thanks, and Patrick’s face turns this impossible shade of red as he nods at her, erratic and shy.

I don’t even notice when, but somehow the wavy-haired, bleach blonde girl ends up next to Nes, playing with his wavy, golden brown head of hair and laughing lightly at something he said as he stares at her with all this wonder, all this hope, like she’ll remain there, permanently, just within his anticipating reach.

---

if you told me just an hour ago

that humans are fleeting

brief

like the brush of a hand against skin

as two faithfuls pass,

i wouldn’t have believed you

because time comes in full circle

and i’ll find you back to me in another

lifetime.