The Party on Olympus
by Tristan Hay Lee
The party started at eleven, and everybody wanted to go. Marshall, one of the elite few who had received a formal invitation, grazed his hair with gel and cleared his throat. There was a droning, molasses melody trickling in from the other room, and his parents were sitting by the fireplace in leather chairs, toasting the night, clinking glasses of red wine, being wonderful.
“Marsh?” his father said, as he laced his boots. “Don’t stay out too long.”
“Call if you need a ride,” his mother added.
He nodded. It was warm in their house, and he wasn’t looking forward to the smell of the brass doorknob on his hands. He hefted his backpack, tensed at the sound of sloshing, of glass clashing, within. If either of them noticed, they kept it to themselves. They had always been considerate that way; they did their best to preserve his dignity.
It was snowing outside. There was wind. It stung.
The party was always going. It was passed on from house to house, like an Olympic torch. Tonight it was at Reid’s place and there was an ambience to it, a pulsating light from the inside out, flashlight shining through skin. Marshall wondered if the act of doorbell-ringing was as unnerving for others as it was for him.
“Marsh!” Hands were clasped. Boys ushered him in, frantic, and slammed the door behind him. There was the indecipherable, inimitable trill of girls, too, somewhere in the peripherals of his soundscape. They were always floating around in his head. He suddenly remembered the bottles in his bag, and placed them onto the table with the rest of the provisions. A drink was pushed into his hand. Marshall took an obligatory sip of his cup, anticipating regression. That was what he needed to get through these carnivals: a lie, something to ground him here, a girl to chase after, a fire in his throat.
“Are you listening, Marsh? Or are you already wasted?” Laughter. He blinked and refocused on Reid, whose jeans had been artfully ripped at the knees. There were about three boys hunched around them, spectating a similar gaggle at the opposite end of the room.
“Those girls are from Humberside, Marsh. Here, we can flip a coin for the white jeans.” Oh, the white jeans. She was perfect. She was the territory of an oyster sorority who knew she was the pearl. Listlessly, Marshall nodded and the coin winked once. He won. Reid was sour. But Reid accompanied him anyway—hell, he even gave the introductions.
“This is Marsh. He goes to Northern, so…” He had missed the beginning of the joke; still, laughter. Canned, the perfect length. He played his part, took it calmly, flashed a grimace, and the angel’s teeth were luminous. They were the colour of her jeans. Eventually, the angel detached herself from her gaggle and together they receded to the kitchen, where Marshall grabbed two more beers and she trailed up Reid’s staircase with a genius, conspicuous subtlety.
“Attaboy, Marsh!” A masculine cheer rose
boisterously as Marshall climbed up after her.
The angel sunk onto Reid’s bed and spread her arms, preserving the illusion that she was floating. He touched her hair, to see if she was real.
“What are you doing?” Now look what he’d done, the idiot.
She tilted her neck and he buried himself in her, sunk his hands into her skin. She had sprayed herself with something that smelled like vanilla, or green apple, or some kind of flower. It burned his lungs. It continued like this, a painful, clumsy dance in the harsh light, because the other alternative was darkness. His heart was stuck in a boxing match, and his breathing was heavy, and somewhere along the way he had cried for her to stop because he just couldn’t take it anymore. The angel had stopped, like he had asked. Her lip was puckered—in what? Indignation? Fragility?—and there was a glimmer of translucent lip gloss on his hand. He rolled off her, lying back so the lights on the ceiling singed a hole through his head.
He tried to tell her, without it sounding banal, that it was not her fault. She didn’t say a thing. Her breathing was soft, and so was every part of her. But there was no reason to continue. In a year, Marshall would be gone, and now he was certain that he would leave everything behind. A horrible aching loneliness swelled in him. He wondered what he came for every time he dragged himself out of the warmth of his home, from the miracle of his parents, into baggy pants with rolled cuffs and Adidas which soaked in the snow, through doors which churned him into a hazy landscape of writhing bodies hooting with maniacal intensity, the unaccountable, glorified façade of youth—and suddenly knew. He had been seeking that evasive, ubiquitous thing which could no longer be shaken off, which he now carried inarticulately from his dreams into his waking hours: a longing for potency, anything, anything substantial which he could call his own.
Oh, but the girls. Seeing the angel peering at him through her blackened lashes, Marshall felt the ache intensify. She glistened like an icicle, almost transparent. She was a veneer, she was his distraction from that truth, and she didn’t even know it. Say something, Marshall. He began placating her, told her that it wasn’t her, it was more that—how should he put this—that they were colluding to pump out another experience, some worldliness, a title, a slap on the back, a place in the circle. It was a cyclical poem, an archetypal experience in which the angels and the saviors were both expendable and coalesced through mindlessness. They had become a faceless, mythical code… I’m not making sense anymore, am I?
He didn’t listen to her response. Her voice was insubstantial as feathers. It lilted like a ski hill, like the bridge of her nose. If he thought too hard about her, Marshall knew he would give in. He’d apologize, dismiss himself, blame the liquor. He wanted her, but he knew what would transpire afterward. She would prove herself. He would prove himself. They would part to flaunt it, this fever. Lying there across Reid’s crinkling duvet, even with the faint stench of soccer practice from the hamper, Marshall could feel his fingers picking at the canvas of the celebration. The angels and saviors toasted downstairs with their customary brilliance, and he could scrape them away with a scratch of the nail.
Save her. Let her see that he had it. The girl might have been a year younger, or two. Let her know so she can search for it, too. Slowly, Marshall sat up, pulling her with him. He pressed his forehead to hers. They were both breathing, and he hoped she wasn’t worrying about her breath, or her stomach as she hunched forward, or the cracks in her foundation or the flakes in her hair. With boiling eyes, he lowered his head, still pressed against her, and he choked, became ragged.
We don’t have to be angels.
He hoped that was enough. He hoped she could see his mortality, so she would know that it existed. Slowly, he disengaged, praying from the recesses of his jangled nerves that something had been conveyed tonight worth everything he had just renounced. He made it to the door.
“Wait!” She had one tremulous arm outstretched, was half off the bed. In apprehension, he waited. But instead of salvaging the pretence of their tryst, she closed the gap in frantic strides and collapsed onto her knees, brimming with his sadness, both arms latched around his torso. Marshall crumpled into her, a sob wrenching violently from his chest, and breathed, and breathed, and breathed…
Later, as they were leaving, he touched her hair and knew that she was real.
“Hey!” Swathed in light and music, Reid turned his head, noticed the squeal of metal, and, after a minute of deliberation, flung the door open. He squinted into the darkness beyond.
“Luke!” He shouldered the boy next to him when it became apparent that his voice was inaudible over the party.
“Was that Marsh?” December air seeped into the party, cooling sweat.
“With the white jeans,” Luke confirmed, peering through the door.
“He ditched?” Reid’s voice was filled with hurt. Luke had already sauntered away. Somebody yelled at him to shut the door, so Reid stepped onto the porch and sealed off the thrumming light from the bitter street. Abruptly, the pulsing bass was his only connection to the festivity within. His halo of light extinguished. Piercing air pervaded the gloom, and the cold twinkling lights twining through the neighbor’s trees seemed remarkably distant. Reid wrapped his arms around his own chest and allowed himself to shiver. The figures were still visible against the grey snow, receding into nothingness at the end of the avenue, shrouding themselves.
“Marsh!” Reid yelled hoarsely. “Hey, MARSH! Get back here! Where you going?” But Marshall was already out of earshot, striding bracingly through the blizzard, luminous, bursting, spilling light, hastening with inextinguishable feet to an unseen destination.