Watch Me Disappear

have someone else sober to commiserate with.”
    “Yeah, you know, you never really explained that. I mean, why are you ‘obligated’ to attend?”
    “It comes with the territory,” he says, a response that doesn’t clarify anything for me. He goes on, explaining that he’s been friends with these kids since kindergarten and if he wants to stay friends with them, which apparently he does, then he has to show up at their parties. Besides, he reasons, it’s good to have someone sober to keep an eye on things.
    “Yeah, but why don’t you drink?” I ask.
    “Why don’t you?” he answers.
    We eat our dinners and then head to the party. A few miles from John’s house it starts to rain. We both agree that the party is going to suck.
    When we arrive, John is tending the fire, which is big enough to outlast a few raindrops. There are less people than last time, and they are divided into two groups: One group sits around the fire, and the other group is in a tent someone thought to set up, playing strip poker. The girls seem to be trashed, although the guys don’t seem terribly drunk. One of the girls is down to her bra and panties. Everyone else is still mostly clothed.
    “You just missed Maura and Tina,” John says, when Paul and I walk up to the fire.
    “Not like them to leave a party early,” Paul says.
    “I dunno. They were going to some other party, some kids from East I guess.”
    I remember hearing Maura mention some kid named Jason from East Vo-tech one morning on the way to school.
    We plant ourselves on one of the logs near the fire. Paul, being Paul, talks to everyone. Wherever he goes, he’s always holding court, telling jokes and silly stories. I just sit there, feeling my cotton sweater getting heavier in the rain, feeling my hair clinging to the sides of my face and neck, and wishing I had brought a rain jacket or at least a hair tie.
    “You cold?” Paul asks when we’ve been sitting there a while.
    “A little.”
    He puts an arm around me and hugs me in close to him. “We can go soon,” he says. He turns to John. “Everybody staying here?”
    “I think so.”
    Paul looks around the circle. “Anybody need a ride?”
    A few people shake their heads.
    “Nobody’s driving, right?”
    More head shaking. I think Paul’s protective father act makes him even cuter.
    “Satisfied, old man?” John asks.
    “What do you say?” Paul says to me, squeezing me closer.
    I nod and we head back down the hill. Halfway to the car it starts to pour and we break into a run.
    “I must look like a drowned rat,” I say, back in the car.
    “Yeah, you have a little eye situation going on.” Paul hands me a napkin from the console and I try to dab at the makeup. “Sorry if that was lame,” he says as he carefully drives down the dark, winding driveway.
    “It was fine,” I say. “A little wet.”
    “So I was thinking,” Paul says. “What do you say you go to homecoming with me next week?”
    That one catches me completely off-guard. I have listened to Maura babble on about homecoming the past couple of weeks on our drives to school. She is in a panic about who she should go with. She went with Paul the past three years, and she was wondering if they’d go together again, even though they aren’t dating now. It was through her morning rants that I learned why she and Paul had broken up last year. She said that Paul and his friends all decided that they weren’t going to let girls get in the way of their senior year, so after junior prom they all broke up with their girlfriends. Some kind of “band of brothers” pact they had made. That answered a question that had been on my mind for months: how Maura, Tina, and Jessica—three attractive and popular girls—could be without boyfriends. Only Katherine had a boyfriend, which surprised me since she is by far the bitchiest of the group.
    “We could go with Missy and Wes,” he says.
    I realize I was an idiot to think even for a moment he wanted to go with me. He wants to go with me to be near Missy.
    “Also, I think I can manage to get Hunter to go with us, too. I’m not sure who his date is, but I’m sure they’d go with us,” he says.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can think about it.”
    “It’s just, I think Maura would be pissed,” I say.
    “So what?” he says. “I mean, it’s not like you’re such great pals anyway.”
    “What if Missy and Wes don’t want to go with us?”
    “Then we’ll go without them.”
    I have