There was a lot of pot at the party. The interior of the house reeked of it, from the front foyer with the beat-up welcome mat where two long-haired software engineers leaned casually, smoking a joint and catching a breeze through the screen door, to the kitchen with the tile scuffed with mud from the paws of the three dogs who lived in the house. The kitchen was where six employees of two competing software companies sat, at an old oak table, passing around a champion-sized bong. They would smoke several hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana that night. Six months later their companies would merge. One company would claim it bought the other. Some people would get promoted while others would remain stagnant. Feelings would be hurt. Two college roommates would stop speaking for a decade until their wives forced them to reconnect at another friend’s wedding, and then it was as if they had never parted ways.
Sarah turned to her tablemates and hefted herself upon them. She introduced herself. She got their names. She made eye contact. She pulled her hair out of her face and off her shoulders and pulled it up into a ponytail, and then swung it slightly.
This was a bad move, but she didn’t know it. Her hair looked much better down, but no one had ever told her that, even when she had asked. She had dated her boyfriend throughout high school, and he loved her no matter how her hair looked, which is how he always responded to the question. Her girlfriends had always said, “Who cares? You have a boyfriend, so it doesn’t even matter.”
And now here she was, single, and completely ignorant of the fact that when her hair was up her ears stuck out in an awkward way, and while the rest of her was perfectly lovely, with her moon-shaped face and long, wavy blond hair and pink-blushed cheeks, at that exact moment, with the moonlight breaking through the clouds and outlining the halo of the hair on top of her head and the shape of her ears, she looked like she could have been a circus freak, the Amazing Elephant Girl, one tent over from the Bearded Lady, only one dollar, step right up.
MELANIE DID a cartwheel and slipped in the wet grass. She shrieked. Doug laughed and extended his hand to help her stand. She pulled him down next to her. He yelled. A light went on in a house down the block.
“We’re waking the whole neighborhood,” said Doug.
“Everyone will know we’re having fun,” said Melanie.
“Let them know,” said Doug.
“I am having fun!” yelled Melanie.
TWO OF THE three men ignored Sarah. It wasn’t because of her ears—although that didn’t help—but because they were caught up in planning what they saw as a small revolution, even if it could only be viewed on a computer screen. That left Danny West, a sturdy, dark-haired guy in a baseball cap, who figured: Sure, why not give the girl a little chat? The stutter’s kind of sexy, actually. She’s the only one around anyway, except for that drunk chick talking to Doug, and I think they’re together. Danny had nothing better to do, anyway. He had already contributed his part to the revolution and cashed out early.
Danny West was twenty-four years old and a millionaire. Several times over, in fact, but who’s counting?
He could not stop counting.
He asked her if she liked it in Seattle, and she said, “It’s different than anywhere else I’ve lived. It makes me feel like I could be a better person,” and he liked that answer a lot. She was full of hope, it seemed. Everyone around him had hopes and dreams, and he had already sold his to a guy older than his father.
He didn’t know what to do with himself now.
“And what about you?” asked Sarah. “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” Danny said. “I’m a lazy sack of shit is what I am.”
The two men sitting next to them stopped talking, and one of them said, “Shut up, dude.” The guy laughed like he didn’t mean it, but he really fucking hated Danny West sometimes. Here the rest of the guys who went to school with West were working their tails off trying to come up with something genius that would change everything, make them rich, make them famous, and set them up for life in every way imaginable, and West had already done all that, made it look as easy as looking both ways and crossing a street. But then he’d just checked out, gone to Thailand and India and all the other places they could only dream of going if they could just get the time off, and then he came back sometimes and just hung around, showed up at parties and talked shit like that. He had simply ceased to be tolerable.
“Well, I used to do something,” said Danny. “I invented some software, I started a company, I sold it, and now I’m rich and won’t have to work again for a long time. So I mostly travel now. I just got back from a month in India.”
He took a sip from his plastic cup casually. It was a well-practiced sip. What do you say after that? You just sip instead.
SARAH’S EYES widened, and she looked prettier. He was the kind of man who looked “good on paper” as her mother sometimes said. Sarah had always tossed that phrase around in her head when she heard it, let it travel like a curious bird. To be good on paper meant something entirely different to her. It meant a face that would be beautiful to draw, a face with character: deep lines on a forehead fresh from worry, a nose with a bump on it from a skateboarding accident, or ears, slivers like a partial moon or sturdy soup spoons like hers. Now here was someone who had something different, a brilliant story to tell, and a fantastic life to be led.