Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [84]
“Woo hoo!” Jeremy yells from down below, and I notice Tim moving in his seat and John clapping. It all starts to seem kind of amusing, and I find myself swiveling my hips into Tube Top as she swivels hers back into mine. Someone turns the music up even louder as Tube Top moves in closer to me. The next thing I know, we’re full-on dirty dancing. And she must be the one in the Patrick Swayze role because she starts moving forward into me and I have no choice but to move back as we sort of grind our hips into one another.
And, while I still don’t think I have a lesbian bone in my body, Truth or Dare kiss be damned, something about dancing on the bar at the Roosevelt with a Paris Hilton wannabe feels oddly exciting. It’s less about being turned on and more about letting myself go. I surrender to the music, and manage to almost forget where I am. This is why I liked doing drugs, I think, as Tube Top and I swivel and gyrate. They gave me a break from this busy head of mine. The self-consciousness that usually seems like an intrinsic part of my DNA evaporates completely as I keep dancing, suddenly dripping in sweat.
A flashbulb goes off, a few more girls jump up on the bar, and when I look around the club, I notice that most of the people are now dancing—even, shockingly, Tim and John. The attention seems to be totally off me and Tube Top, who’s now dancing with her original friend again. Jeremy walks up to the bar, snapping his fingers from side to side, looking like he’s concentrating really hard on the finger snap.
“That Ketel One really went to your head, didn’t it?” he yells up to me.
I look at him as I keep dancing and smile. “It sure did!” I yell back.
23
“I can’t imagine doing all of that sober,” Stephanie says, as she takes the cup of coffee I offer her. She’s stopped by to bring me a copy of the New York Post, which happens to contain a picture of me and Tube Top (the daughter of some famous photographer and his supermodel wife, as it turns out) dancing on the bar—along with a story about our secret affair. “Stone, who goes by the moniker ‘Party Girl,’ after the highly publicized column she writes for Chat, has been seeing the nineteen-year-old Crossroads grad for some time,” Stephanie reads. “‘Amelia may claim to be straight,’ says a close friend of the comely columnist, ‘but it’s all a front. She’s as gay as can be.’”
Stephanie tosses the paper onto my Shabby Chic coffee table and takes a generous gulp of coffee. “I love it,” she says. “You know you’ve made it when the gay rumors start.”
I pick up the paper and slide it into a folder that contains the other press I’ve received. “Come on, you know you haven’t really made it until people start saying you’re a Scientologist.”
Stephanie laughs and puts her coffee down. “It’s just hard for me to picture you dirty dancing with a scantily clad prepubescent when you’re stone cold sober. I mean, how do you do it—just pretend you’re drunk?”
I think about how I used to drink and do drugs to escape how I felt, even though it never really worked—if anything, partying only exacerbated my loneliness or discomfort. At Pledges they say that it’s important to create a life so comfortable that you don’t need to escape, and I guess that’s what’s happening to me—the sort of self-conscious, occasionally shy daytime personality I’ve always had is mixing with my wild-while-intoxicated nighttime persona. I don’t need what other people need to help them let loose anymore, I think, deciding that such a skill is so rare that it should almost be considered a superpower.
Out loud I say, “I don’t know. Maybe I was experiencing a kind of ‘natural high’?”
I make a quote mark gesture around the phrase because it’s just the sort of expression Stephanie and I would have mocked not too long ago, but I secretly love the idea of it. I can get natural highs while other people need chemical ones, I think before I remember that Tommy used to say if you feel better than people,