19

I heard him leave his room around three o’clock in the morning. Sleep was nowhere near me. I was full of alcohol, young blood, hormones, and stupid ideas about the world.

Earlier in the night, just after Ryan had gone to bed, I went to the kitchen and emptied the contents of the blender into a plastic cup and took this to my bedroom. It was three inches’ worth of melted daiquiri. I’d been doing this for over a year now, wait for my parents to have their fill and become loopy and weary and inattentive. I’d swipe the bottom few inches of whatever they had been sipping on, transfer it to a different cup, and take it to my bedroom. Or if I was certain that it wouldn’t be noticed, I would pour myself a glass of wine straight from the bottle, as I had done the night before, when Kimmy caught me. I was still learning how much I dared drink before I got too stupid or too sick.

That night, the melted daiquiri was so sugary and thick with pulp that I couldn’t detect the amount of alcohol, but it must have been at least a few ounces of rum. Soon the drink was gone and the room was spinning. I held a trash can between my bare sweating thighs in case it all came back up. After a few minutes, the early blast and intensity of the buzz had passed, as had the nausea, but I was still wide awake, hot as blazes, mind zooming, each thought like a thunderclap. I tried to adjust the air conditioning in my room to cool it down, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. When I heard Ryan leave his room, I figured he was going to the kitchen for a snack, so I listened for his return. I knew it was him because our bedrooms shared a wall. I waited two minutes. Five minutes. Ten.

I didn’t hear my mother leave her bedroom because it was at the other end of the hall, although I imagine she left her room shortly after he left his. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. As the minutes passed and Ryan did not return to his room, my curiosity and courage multiplied. It occurred to me as I lay there in bed, short of breath, my cheeks hot, that perhaps he was waiting for me. Perhaps I would not have to wait until tomorrow night to find out if I was to be an unkissed, untouched girl. Perhaps, I thought, Ryan was silently summoning me from elsewhere in the house. He was too timid to come for me directly, but he had intended for me to hear him leave his room, and was now waiting for me to come find him. See, this was the sort of thing I read about in my books—this was the sort of miracle that could exist for a girl like me, who had never been kissed.