After surfing, we went over to Caro’s so I could give her a ride to the party. “Come up!” she yelled from her balcony, half her head in hot rollers and only one eye completely made up. “I’m not ready yet! Tell David to let you in!”
“Caro’s older brother,” I filled in when Oliver gave me a questioning look. “He’s cool. He’s mostly stoned.”
“Ah,” Oliver said as David opened the door. His eyes were heavy, like a basset hound who desperately needed a nap. “Hey, dudes,” he said to both of us. “Oliver! Cool. Good times.”
Oliver looked at me again but I just brushed past David, grabbing Oliver’s wrist and dragging him behind me. “Hey, David,” I said, then whispered to Oliver, “Hurry, before he starts a conversation.”
“He can have a conversation?” Oliver asked.
We went upstairs to Caro’s room that she shared with her older sister Heather. There was a pile of laundry in the hallway, right next to an empty laundry basket. We stepped around it and went into Caro’s room.
It was always easy to tell Caro’s side of the room: it was organized to an alarming degree. Drew once asked Caro if she used a ruler to make sure everything was at right angles. When she just blinked at him and said, “Obviously,” we became a little worried. But if you shared a room with Heather, you would probably be a complete neatnik, too.
Because Heather, like I said before, is a natural disaster disguised as a human being.
“Welcome to hell!” Caro said cheerfully, waving us in and around a pile of shoes, none of which matched. She gestured to a bottle of hand sanitizer that was on her desk. “Use it if you feel like you have to,” she told us. Oliver was still in the doorway, his eyes wide as he took in the scene. “I know,” Caro said when she saw his face. “It’s a lot to contemplate.”
“It’s like watching two movies at the same time,” he replied.
“Right?” Caro cried. “I mean”—she gestured to Heather’s side of the room, where there was a huge pile of sheets and blankets that presumably hid a bed—“she could have a family of kangaroos under there and I wouldn’t know. If I don’t show up to class next week, just assume that it’s because I’ve been stampeded by kangaroos.”
I gingerly stepped around the shoes and went over to Caro’s side, sitting on the floor next to her desk. (The bed was so neatly made that I was afraid of mussing the hospital corners.) There were pens and pencils lined up in alternating order on her desk and highlighters in ROYGBIV formation in a plastic cup next to them. I didn’t need to open the drawer to know that her Post-it notes were organized in the exact same way.
“So, are you so psyched?” Caro said, heading back to the bathroom. “First school party, Oliver. Get ready for . . . well, nothing really. We just hang out. It’s not like the movies.”
“Can’t wait,” he said. I could tell he was still a little freaked out by the difference between the two bedroom halves and I patted the floor next to me. “It’s safe down here,” I said.
“I’m actually afraid to touch things anywhere,” he whispered, stepping around the shoes. “Do any of those even match?”
“Nope!” Caro called from the bathroom without even looking to see what he was talking about. “If Heather’s limbs weren’t attached to her body, she would just leave them lying around wherever. It’s a little frightening. And she has a driver’s license, so steer clear.”
“No pun intended,” I added, tracing a circle with my fingertip into the worn carpet. The room had been Caro’s older brothers’ before they moved out, and it showed. There were even some Batman stickers on Caro’s bed frame, which she had artfully hidden with pillows.
“I’m counting down the days until one of us moves out of here,” Caro called from the bathroom, then stuck her head out the door and pointed at me. “You plus me plus community college equals apartment.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. Like my mom would ever let me move out. You should hear her speech about how dorms are dangerous because of meningitis. It’s a party-killer.”
“Your mom loves me,” Caro said, ducking back into the bathroom. “Tell her I’ll have hand sanitizer in every room. No one’s getting meningitis, not on my watch.”
Oliver was still making his way through the room and I started to say something when I saw him pick up Caro’s old baby doll. Alice had been around since Caro’s first days on earth and it also showed: there was a skid mark on her nose from where one of Caro’s brothers had used her in a game of catch (and missed); a coffee stain on her cloth arm; and one button eye completely missing, thanks to their old Labrador, Noodle, who apparently had a thing for buttons. Caro never said this, but I knew she put Alice on the bed with her good eye facing Caro’s side of the room, sparing her the indignity of having to spend eternity staring at Heather’s disaster area.
“Alice,” Oliver said.
Caro immediately stuck her head out of the bathroom door, her eyes wide as she looked at me, then Oliver. “You remember Alice?” she asked.
Oliver nodded, carefully smoothing down Alice’s threadbare dress before setting her back down. “You brought her to show-and-tell,” he said, then huffed out a little laugh. “Sorry, I just made things super weird, didn’t I?”
“No, no,” both Caro and I started to say. And he hadn’t, but I still felt a tiny chill run across my arms, like a seven-year-old Oliver had hovered in the doorway for a second and I had only just missed seeing him.
“It’s not weird,” Caro continued. “It’s sweet. Alice appreciates it.”
It’s weird, Oliver mouthed to me as he sat down on the floor. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I whispered back, making room for him. “Don’t worry so much.”
“What happened to her other eye?” Oliver asked, but before I could answer, Caro came back in the room.
“Ems, what are you wearing?”
I looked down at my jeans and top. “This? We just got back from surfing and I already know everyone at this party, so I don’t have to dress to impress.”
Caro gestured to her closet. “Feel free to borrow something. Please.”
I sighed and got up. At least she wasn’t saying anything about my hair, which was still damp with salt water and up in a bun. “Fine. Where’s that sweater you got last week?”
Caro poked her head out of the bathroom again, this time with an eyelash curler clamped around her left eyelashes, and jabbed a finger in the direction of Heather’s bed. “Don’t even talk to me about it,” she muttered.
“What is that?” Oliver suddenly asked.
We turned to look at him as he gestured to Caro’s eye. “Are you, like, plucking out your eyelashes or something?”
I was the first one who started laughing. Caro, out of self-preservation, waited until she had released the curler. “What?” Oliver said, smiling a little like someone who suspected there was a hidden camera nearby. “Is this something I should know?”
“It’s an eyelash curler,” Caro told him. “It makes your eyelashes . . . swoopy.”
“It’s sort of redundant to define ‘eyelash curler,’” I pointed out. “It’s pretty evident what it is from the name.”
Oliver got up and walked over to take it from Caro. He was taller than both of us and in the bathroom doorway, he seemed impossibly large. Didn’t she feel crowded? “This is medieval,” he said, opening and closing it. It looked a lot smaller in his big hand than it had in Caro’s. “You actually use this? What if you blink?”
“You don’t,” Caro and I chorused.
“What if, like, someone slams the door while you’re using it and you blink just because that’s what you do when someone slams the door?”
“Then your eyelid is bald and you have a psychopath living in your house,” I said, taking it back from him and giving it to Caro.
“That is some Game of Thrones–level shit right there,” he said.
“You’ve seriously never seen one of those before,” I said. “How is that possible?”
He shrugged. “Two guys living together for ten years without a mom or sister. You do the math.”
“You had a mom!” Caro called out from the bathroom. I could tell from her voice that she was applying mascara now, blithe and oblivious to Oliver’s small wince. “You just didn’t know where she was!”
Time to intervene.
“Can I borrow that after you?” I yelled to her, examining my nail polish.
“My mascara?”
“Yeah!”
“You’re not supposed to share eye makeup! What if I have pinkeye?”
“It’d be an honor to share pinkeye with you, Caro.”
The tube came flying out of the bathroom a few seconds later.
“Thank you!”
Finally, after Caro had finished her eye makeup and I found a shirt in her dresser (folded as neatly as an envelope, of course), we were ready to go. “What about me?” Oliver teased, holding out his arms. “Now I’m really self-conscious about how straight my eyelashes are.”
I tugged at his shirt and rolled my eyes as we left behind the half-Pollock, half-Mondrian bedroom. “Embrace your uniqueness,” I told him. “And watch out for those shoes.”