Every Friday (or Fraturday, or in my time zone, Frunday), Crow, Caiti, Gabe, and I post a short fiction piece prompted by a chosen rule/theme. It is up to you, fair readers, to guess what common rule/theme our fictions share. Read mine after the jump. It’s kind of a long one. Like 3 pages.

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The mirror regarded me objectively. Oily hair, oily skin, wrinkled T-shirt — it all added up to someone completely unprepared to slide into a room full of people and pretend to know all the same things they did. I didn’t know anything in the cache of social savoir-faire that they took for granted.

On the bus on the way there, I studied the trees and tried to keep track of the number of dogs we passed. Somehow I figured that if my brain were empty and unworried when I buzzed up, some instinct would kick in and I would be able to glide by gracefully as any of them. Or at least my ears would not be ringing with self-doubt.

As soon as I pressed the button next to his name, I realized I had no idea what to say. Should I say my name? Or ask for his? Or should I say something totally cool and suave? — None of it would have mattered, because the door buzzed and I pushed through without having to say a word. I followed the sound of voices to the fourth floor and felt unpleasantly out of breath and probably red in the face. Still hidden from view in the stairwell, I steeled myself for the plunge into the unknown.

The door was open. The room was half full. Everyone was talking in groups of three or four, and everyone had a glass full of something. A few people looked vaguely familiar. Of course they were all dressed better than I was, in crisp shirts and short dresses and nice shoes. My sneakers were so infantile by comparison. The girls next to the doorway were laughing about something. Both of them had long, wavy hair and were taller than I was.

“Hey, you made it.”

A surge of something sent a cool zap through my veins. I turned to him with a controlled smile. “Hey,” I said. “Yeah, I, um… I’m here.”

He grinned. The sleeves of his plaid shirt were rolled to his elbows. “You want a drink?”

“Sure. Okay.” Was I supposed to request something? “What do you have?”

“Lemme think,” he said easily. I noticed some lint was caught in his eyelashes. “We got some beer, of course, and some punch, some wine…”

“Wine,” I blurted and blushed. It seemed the most consumable and elegant of the options given. Surely the punch had something strong in it. Wasn’t that usually how it was done? But beer might have been more conventional. I noticed most people had beer cans in hand.

“Red or white?”

“Red,” I chose arbitrarily. I would dislike the taste of whatever I got, but I would be so uncomfortable throughout the evening that I would attempt escape from conversation by sipping from the glass in hand, pretending like it was something useful to do and forgetting all the time how bad and bitter it tasted. He handed me a full glass.

“Thanks.”

He didn’t say anything, just nodded. I tasted it and knew that my face betrayed my repulsion but I tried to make it seem like I was just looking around the room and taking things in thoughtfully. “This is a nice ap-apartment,” I stammered.

He was about to say something but another guy tapped him on the shoulder to ask him a question, and they began a jovial conversation. I felt awkward, standing there just watching them talk. I would have to move. But I couldn’t just wander away. A furtive glance around the room confirmed that everybody else was involved in conversations too. I slowly walked over to the plates of finger food on a long table by the window, hoping to look a little bored and not lonely. Somehow looking bored was preferable to anything else. As though I had someplace else to be. I sat on the couch, slowly eating a kind of paste on a cracker. The mirror across the room reflected my bored expression. No, I did look lonely, but it was unavoidable. The couch was so big and I was on the very left side of it. Another once-over of the room. Still no potential interlocutors.

I picked up a book on the coffee table and flipped through it slowly, knowing I would have to make it last until he came around again and deigned to talk to me. The book was a collection of photographs of small children in either Africa or India, I wasn’t really sure, maybe both. Maybe Latin America? Their big eyes and distended stomachs made me feel both sad and callous.

About fifty photos in, he sat down next to me. “Hey,” he said.

I pretended like I was so involved in the book that it took me a few seconds to register who he was. “Oh,” I said, “hey.” Should I comment on the party, I wondered, or the good wine, or ask a relevant question? I ran a hand through my hair and immediately began to worry about whether it was noticeably oily. I watched his eyes to make sure they didn’t flicker up to my scalp.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“Yeah,” I answered enthusiastically but knowing I looked totally pathetic. I regretted coming here. “Just, uh…” We both looked at the book in my lap. It was opened to a picture of a child begging in the street.

“Oh, I forgot I left this out,” he said. “Not a great party book, right?”

I gave a small laugh.

“You, um… do that thing for Ropert yet?” he asked, a half-smile tugging teasingly at his mouth.

“No, I haven’t — haven’t read any of the articles yet, at all,” I replied.

He sat back and relaxed his posture a little. “Yeah, me either. They’re so boring,” he groaned. “Right?”

“Yeah.” I hoped that I had more in common with him than this complaint, one we’d already made to each other. Commiseration often passed for conversation on campus, I had noticed, but it was an emptiness, a drain of worthless words, and I didn’t want to talk this way with him. But what else was there to say? My eyes caught his in the mirror across from us and we stared for a second before we both looked away.

“Didn’t want to bring anyone?” he asked.

“What?”

“To the party. Didn’t want to bring anybody with you? I guess I probably left that out,” he said, “when I was talking to you in the hall earlier today.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize I was supposed—”

“No,” he interrupted, smiling with a sort of downturned mouth. “You didn’t have to, I just, you know, I mean, I was just asking for the sake of conversation.”

He sounded like he was trying to sound like he was trying hard to talk to me. I swallowed. “Well, I thought it would be a smaller… party… I guess,” I said.

“It’s pretty small,” he countered. “I mean, it’s not a frat party, right?” He took a sip from his beer can. “You want anything else to drink?”

I shook my head. My wine glass was still full.

“All right, well… I’m gonna go… say hey to Julia.”

My abdomen was cramping. Or maybe it was just a bad stomachache. I felt like my body was being overdramatic but I still felt a little breathless, like the shame of my multiple faux pas had begun to overoxygenate my blood. Did he think I would come with a date? I watched some more people walk in, a group of friends. No wonder everyone else in the room was talking in twos and threes and fours, they all came together, not alone and nervous like I did. They all knew what they were drinking and liked it, they could wear their hair messy and look great, they could mingle, how I hated that word, but they could mingle easily and literally float from friend to friend. They all had a certain panache that I lacked. It was precisely because I knew I lacked it that I lacked it. Ignorance is not bliss; it is confidence.

This was intolerable. Had I stayed long enough to somehow spin this into a good thing, in my own mind? Could I label this a triumph? I’d only been there for forty minutes. But I had come, and it was courageous, for me, and I had talked to him twice, in fact he had approached me both times to initiate conversation. I had elegantly drunk some red wine and I had learned about the impoverished children of Haiti. Yes, I had gone to a party in someone’s apartment. What’s more, he invited me to it. And he had seemed friendly and receptive in both conversations.

He was in the kitchen, talking with Julia, a pretty girl I knew from freshman year. He was smiling at her in a way he’d never smiled at me, and probably never would smile at me. It was hard not to feel a little resentful. I knew nothing would happen between us, but I must have had some hope, because I’d come out here. I decided not to say goodbye, but rather fetched my jacket and stepped out the door silently.

I paused in the stairwell, wondering if I was doing the right thing. I could still go back inside if I wanted. He had a lot of people over, but he would probably talk to me once or twice more. The voices from the party drifted into the hallway. Conversations mingled and I couldn’t really make anything out.

“Do you want some more beer?”

“I haven’t seen her since last semester.”

“Who was that guy who just left?”

“I think she’s abroad in, like, Brazil?”

“Oh, he’s Trevor’s friend, I think.”

“Let’s get some more beer.”

“I didn’t know she took Portuguese.”

“Kind of a creep. Who comes to a party to read?”

“She doesn’t. The program’s in English.”

“Yeah, seriously. So you think Trevor and Julia are hooking up?”

“What’s in the punch?”

“Why would you go to a different country to speak English? That’s stupid.”

“I know, but whatever, because hot Brazilian guys.”

“I’ll have some punch, thanks.”

I figured I’d done enough in one evening and I might as well go home. It took a lot of guts to come here, I told myself, and I smiled. It was a small victory. It was. Even though my brain was full of doubts about whether I looked ugly or sounded stupid to him or was totally out of place, I was still proud of myself, and I had no regrets.
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Scoot, scoot, off you go to read the stories of Crow, Caiti, and Gabe. Oh, but first, please leave a comment on what you thought of the story, or a stab at the rule, or a suggestion for dinner this week.