Adam Somebody's House

skokie It was already August, and Rainey was still thirteen. She had heard about a party that night, one town over, across the canal from where she lived with her mother in an L-shaped ranch house bordered by feral gardens. Adam Gordon, a guy Rainey didn't know but who was known to the group of skaters with whom she'd been spending her time, was rumored to be having an all-nighter while his parents were in Europe. This was a scenario she was familiar with from the movies her father took her to see, in which crazy, terrible acts of destruction happened in a house—a pizza on the turntable! Mother's ballgowns in the pool!—but by the end of the movie the damage was almost entirely undone, dissolved like the components of a distressing dream but leaving behind some crack, some tear in the fabric of things that symbolized a loss of innocence, aka wisdom. You could not get at the wisdom without the cracking or tearing, it was buried underneath normal life. These movies were always about boys, she had noticed; they offered little to no practical advice to a girl seeking adventure or experience or wisdom. It was hard to imagine the kind of real-life parents who would let a teenage boy stay home alone for any length of time. Had they not seen the movies? If only Rainey's mother were that cool, neglectful, trusting, or idiotic, her life would be so much easier, she thought. Or—just to dream a little harder—if only they were rich, which seemed to make such parenting traits not only possible but the benign evidence of a naïve but 1 radically nonjudgmental love. Rainey's father, who lived two L stops away, just across the Chicago border, was that naïve, that nonjudgmental, but was suffering for it; blindsided a few years back by his wife's petition for divorce, he lived alone in a four-story walkup with mice and roaches and the smells of greasy meat and bugspray and understood nothing, did not wish to understand or participate in a life that could turn against you so abruptly. He wanted only to go to the movies, and rent them on videocassette, sometimes two or three a night, and that's what he did. Rainey had never been to an unchaperoned party, though she’d been hanging around all summer long at Fountain Square, the plaza downtown where skater boys hung out practicing their ollies and grinds, and girls hung out smoking Camels and watching the boys, or painting their nails green or blue or black and then trailing their hands in the cold water from the fountains that ran in cement troughs through the plaza, to harden the polish. Sometimes they panhandled and were shocked and delighted when grown-ups actually stopped and gave them money. Often it was a black person who would stop and Rainey felt guilty about that, unless they said something religious like “God Bless.” Then whether they were black or white her contempt would momentarily eclipse the guilt. When they'd collected enough they would go get pizza. Sometimes a group of them would end up back at someone’s house while their parents were still at work, watching Repo Man or Suburbia on VHS, and smoking pot if anyone had some, or raiding the liquor cabinet if they didn’t. Her mother worked long shifts at the hospital, and slept heavily on the living room couch when she got home, and Rainey was able to get away with quite a lot more than other girls did, mostly, she thought, because she had gotten an 2 early start at things it wouldn’t occur to her mother to worry about until much later. By the time her mother talked to her about birth control, for instance, in her sophomore year, she had already been on the pill and then gone off it, had already sworn off sex with men for a while. But this was still the summer before high school; in her mind she was an adult trapped in a child’s body. Except it wasn't a child's body anymore. It had small breasts, jutting hips, a menstrual cycle. This body, she hoped, would be her passport to all the places she wanted to go, if she could figure out how to properly wield it, maneuver it. It wasn't a temple, like the principal at school had told her last year when she was sent to his office for dress code violations, it wasn't any sort of place. It was a tool like a sail or a wedge. It was particles displacing other particles, something to hold out in front of her to navigate the visible world that had little to do with her actual, private, mysterious, floating self, though they were obviously connected, at times, by a network of nerves and sensors and inconvenient emotions she was just now learning to control through applied chemistry. If balding Mr. Russo in his polyester suit had been a wise man instead of a middle school principal he might have leaned back in his chair (instead of leaning in close where she could smell the cheese on his breath) and said Oh, Rainey, what is it that you want? And she might have replied I want to be really old and at the end of life looking back, I want to have already done everything so I can die happy. She would not have been able to tell him why she thought having done everything would make her happy or why “everything” consisted mainly of drugs and sex and petty crime and not, for instance, hang-gliding, embroidery, or computer science, but she was busily going 3 through the motions, collecting experiences and checking them off from an invisible, ever-growing list. Adam Gordon's party was in Skokie, a suburb twice removed from Chicago, far from any train lines. It took an hour to walk there from her best friend Shella’s house where her mother had dropped her off for an invented slumber party. Usually her mother drove away quickly enough that she could just duck around to the backyard and walk down the alley, but this time she sat there in her little white Honda, idling at the curb as if waiting for Rainey to be let in. Rainey never knew when she'd be caught in a lie; she could not read her mother's thoughts though she was often convinced her mother could easily grasp her own and was just choosing to let certain things go because it was exhausting not to. Did she suspect deception now, or was she just sitting there, not even watching or waiting, just breathing in the first few moments of the daughterless evening? Rainey went to the side door, rang the bell, and put on a little show of greeting Shella’s mother. Then, stepping up onto the stoop and letting the screen door slam against her butt, she jammed her body into the narrow space between the two doors, hoping it appeared from the street as if she had passed smoothly and unhindered through the doorway and into the house. A grainy spiderweb covered the small rectangular window inches from her face but its weaver was nowhere to be seen. How embarrassing it would be to be caught by her mother. Her plan would be dragged out of her, the bare bones of it, anyway, and she would be punished, made less free. She would be exposed, scrutinized, questioned. Her lie, she reasoned, was mainly one of terminology. “Slumber party” and “all-nighter” were 4 simply different points spread along the same continuum, and not even that far apart, though she knew her mother would not see it that way. The slumber party was a sort of training ground for the all-nighter, a girls-only affair safely guarded by indulgent parents positioned somewhere in the house, keeping a low profile to give the girls the illusion of autonomy. Sometimes a parent would bring a tray of cookies and then disappear, as if leaving an offering for some famously angry god in need of appeasement. The slumber party in the wee hours became a place for sharing pornography, vodka and sex toys stolen from the caches of parents or older siblings, a place to make out with other girls as a way of practicing technique or even penetrating each other in the dark, two girls zipped into one sleeping bag, in preparation for the hoped-for thing. It had been a long time since Rainey had been to a slumber party and she felt a sudden piercing nostalgia for them. Through the web, through the window, she saw coats hanging on pegs, one of which was Shella's rabbit fur jacket she had always coveted. For a moment she wished she could go inside the house and wrap herself in the jacket, turn on the air conditioning and the TV, not go through with her plan to go to the party where Jason and Dmitri would be. It wasn't as if they were expecting her; if she skipped the party she would only be disappointing herself. In the comic books she used to read there were characters who could melt through doors by changing the chemical structures of their bodies to become the wood of the door and then rearrange into flesh on the other side. She'd wished for this and other superpowers before, but tried to put those wishes, like her fear of the missing spider, out of her mind.

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