Danny punched her shoulder, but he was grinning. “Wait, who sucks again?”
She tossed the cue at him. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m going to get a Coke.”
Drew came up next to me, looking uncommonly cheerful. “We’re getting close with the Red Scare. We just got a whole bunch of parts we bought off the Internet, and I think some of them are even the right ones this time. We almost stayed home to work on it.”
Mrs. Corbett was an antiques dealer, which was a politically correct way of saying that she collected a lot of junk. The twins had been picking through her back stock since they were little, taking apart old toasters and radios, then putting them back together. The Red Scare had been their ongoing project for the last six months. It was a 1950s polygraph machine and didn’t work. I didn’t like to be a pessimist, but despite what Drew said, it was probably never going to work.
A low half wall ran around the outside of the lounge and I leaned against it and looked out over the crowd. On the floor, people were moshing. They slammed into each other, churning in circles, crashing together and pulling apart again. Watching it made me feel tired. I leaned forward so the top of my head rested on the wall and closed my eyes.
“Why did you even come out tonight?” Roswell said from somewhere above me. His voice was almost buried under the music.
I took a long breath and tried to sound at least marginally energetic. “Because it was better than the alternative.”
“Yeah,” Roswell said, but he said it like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.
When I straightened up and looked out over the crowd again, I saw Alice. She was standing with some girls from one of the newer subdivisions.
I leaned my elbows on the half wall and watched her. The light on her face was nice.
Onstage, Dollhouse of Mayhem finished their set, bowing off in a way that was probably supposed to be ironic. The silence when they unplugged their amps was so heavy that it made my teeth hurt. I just concentrated on Alice and the colored lights.
According to Roswell, I had a shot with her. But even if that was true, having a shot was different from knowing how to take it. She was a bright spot at the center of things, while I was destined to spend house parties and school dances standing against the wall with the guys from the Latin club. Except even that wasn’t the right way to describe what I was.
Roswell was in the Latin club, and the debate club, and the honor society. He did things like collecting bottle caps and unusual pens. In his spare time, he built clocks out of various household materials, and it wasn’t the big, defining core of him. He played soccer and rugby and ran in all the school elections. He smiled. He hugged everyone, all the time, and never acted like there was even a chance someone wouldn’t like him. He could do what he wanted, hang out with anyone he wanted to and get away with it. When he talked to girls, even pretty, popular ones like Stephanie Beecham, they smiled and giggled like they couldn’t believe he was actually noticing them. He just took it for granted that everything would be okay, while I found a convenient wall and worked hard at disappearing.
