It was. There were bottles and cans everywhere, and I could see a corner by the television where someone had spilled an entire can of beer and hadn’t even tried to clean it up. My head was totally pounding and my entire body felt fuzzy.
I decided I’d never have another party.
“Where were you?” my friend Maggie said from the corner of the couch where she was curled up, her head in Josh Waverly’s lap. Josh was fooling around with his phone. There were a few other kids around, most of them sipping what was left of the beer or sleeping or watching MTV on low volume.
I saw Brandon Fitzsimmons sitting on the floor, his back against a wall, his phone in his lap. He was still wasted, his eyes staring out at nothing. Alice wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“I fell asleep,” I said, picking up a few bottles to take to the kitchen. “Y’all are gonna have to leave or help me clean up.”
As I headed for the trash, I heard a yelp from Josh Waverly.
“Are you serious, dude?!”
I carefully placed the bottles on top of the mountain of bottles already in the trash can and headed back into the living room. Josh was looking at his phone and then looked across the room at Brandon, who had half a grin pasted on his face. He shot his eyebrows up twice, real quick.
Josh asked something again about Brandon being serious.
Brandon shot his eyebrows up twice again and grinned all the way this time.
“What the hell?” Maggie said, and she reached up from Josh’s lap and grabbed his phone to see what had caught Josh’s attention. Then she called Brandon a pervert.
“What are you freaking out about?” I asked, and I glanced over Josh’s shoulder at the text that had just arrived from Brandon.
tommy and me banged alice franklin upstairs.
That was all it said. Seven words that would change everything.
I read the text from Brandon again.
tommy and me banged alice franklin upstairs.
“Who went first?” Josh asked with a snort, and for a second I thought Josh was grossed out, but then he grinned at Brandon like Brandon had just thrown him a touchdown pass.
“Dude! Like you even have to ask?” Brandon answered, holding both his arms out wide like he was preparing to accept all the praise he had coming to him.
Maggie rolled her eyes and she pulled out her phone to start texting. All of Healy High would know what was up by sunrise.
By the time school started a few weeks later, it was all everyone talked about. How Alice Franklin slept with two guys in one night in my guest bedroom. Two guys in one HOUR. The thought of it was enough to make me want to puke. Honestly, what kind of girl does that?
I just kept picturing her at the party, sitting in Brandon’s lap and looking all perfect, and I kept picturing her standing there next to Brandon as he read from my diary, her skinny, cute body with the amazing boobs and butt. She was probably totally enjoying making fun of me when Brandon found the notebook. I could picture her making him read it out loud. And then she actually pretended to be sorry when I walked in. She even picked it up off the floor and gave it back to me.
And then she went and did it with two dudes in one night.
Seriously. Here’s a girl who messes around with a guy when that guy is on again with another girl, and here’s a girl who sleeps with two guys in one night, and here’s a girl who messes around with random dudes at the pool. I mean, it’s like she’s just this insult to girls.
And even though she acted like nothing was up, how could she NOT have known everyone was talking about her behind her back? I mean, even the incoming freshmen knew what went down.
Dude, did you hear about that junior girl Alice and the two guys at that party?
That junior girl Alice slept with Brandon Fitzsimmons and that other guy this summer.
OMG that Alice Franklin girl is so slutty!
Even the adults started talking about it. One Saturday when we were on the way home from another Weight Watchers meeting, my mom turned to me when we were at a stoplight and all of a sudden asked, “I keep hearing these stories about Alice Franklin. Are they true?”
“That girl is a total slut,” I said.
My mom gripped the wheel and told me not to use that word, but then she started asking me all these questions, and I told her what I could. I thought my mom was going to be really pissed that all this went down in our house, but you could tell she was way more interested in what everybody was saying about Alice and did Alice’s mom know and blah blah blah.
At the Weight Watchers meeting she’d gained two pounds, so maybe she just wanted to take her mind off everything with some super crazy gossip, but I had a feeling my mom would have been interested even if she hadn’t gained weight.
And then Brandon Fitzsimmons died.
The news that Brandon died spread faster than the news about Alice, and the news that he crashed his car because Alice was sending him gross texts spread even faster than that. Nobody knew what the texts said exactly, but we figured they were disgusting and they were desperate, and of course they had to be both of those things because they were coming from Alice Franklin, who didn’t come to school for a week after the news got out about what she had done.
Healy High freaked out after Brandon died—everyone was crying in the hallways and the English teachers tried to get us to write about our emotions and everyone wore ribbons with the school colors for, I don’t know, a week. They brought in grief counselors, and the next game against Dominion was, like, mandatory attendance for the entire town. They hung a banner reading “BRANDON FITZSIMMONS * HEALY HIGH TIGER FOREVER” at the front entrance of the stadium, and Brandon’s parents came out onto the field during halftime and announced the Brandon Fitzsimmons Scholarship Fund, and Josh Waverly was in his uniform on the sidelines even though he couldn’t play yet. Even the players from Dominion bowed their heads during the moment of silence, and it was almost like they let us win. That they knew how bad it would look if we lost to them.
Alice came back to school eventually, of course.
It was weird how we were all sort of connected after Brandon died—the ribbons with the school colors, the moment of silence at the all-school assembly, the stories in the paper that people cut out and put up in their lockers. Even after all of that sort of calmed down, people still needed something to hang on to. I mean, things were kinda back to normal—the cafeteria ladies asked us if we wanted a fruit cup or a yogurt, the janitors dumped the pink powder on top of people’s puke, the teachers gave out their boring homework assignments and their pop quizzes about nothing we’ll ever actually need in real life—but I think people needed something that made them feel, I don’t know … like we were all still in it together.