The Rules of Attraction

SEAN Lauren Hynde was standing with friends on the stairs. She was holding a cup of grain alcohol punch that was being served from a trashcan by this fat girl who was almost naked. Lauren was wearing a toga also (probably because I had mentioned it this afternoon) and it was cut low and her shoulders were brown and smooth and I got a rush, it knocked me out, from seeing that much skin. Suddenly, I wondered if she was a dyke. Standing there with Tony, watching her, her back, her legs, her face, hair, she was talking to some girls — ugly, undistinguished compared to her. Tony kept talking to me about his new sculpture and had no idea I was staring at this girl. He was only wearing underwear and had a mattress strapped to his back. I kept looking up at her and she knew it — she wouldn’t look back, even though I was standing at the bottom of the staircase, directly below her. Centerfolds from porno magazines were glued to the walls everywhere and there was a movie being projected on the ceiling in the living room above the dance floor, but the girls in it were fat and too pale and it wasn’t sexy or anything.

We ended up meeting in the bathroom. Getch was there leaning against the sink, on Ecstasy, and I think she was on it too, and Getch introduced us but we said we already knew each other, but only “sort of” she added. I got her some more punch even though I hated leaving her in the bathroom alone with Getch (but maybe Getch was gay, I was thinking) and I came back and Getch was gone and she was looking at herself in the mirror and I looked too, until she turned around and smiled at me. We talked and I told her I liked her paintings I saw in Gallery 1 last term (I was guessing) and she said “That’s nice,” (even though I really hadn’t seen the paintings, but what the hell — I wanted to get laid) and then we went to the living room and she wanted to dance, but I couldn’t dance very well, so I watched her dance to some song called “Love of the Common People” but then I got nervous that some jerk would start to dance with her if I didn’t step in, so when “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division came on, I moved in. But it wasn’t the Joy Division version, it was someone else and it was popped-up and ruined, but I danced to it anyway since we were flirting like mad and she was so insanely beautiful that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t fucked her before. I was getting too excited to stay at the party, and couldn’t think of a way to slip out. But with perfect timing some dramafag started to go crazy and did this wild solo dance in his underwear when “Dancing with Myself” came on, dominating the entire dance floor. I watched Lauren watch him — she was clapping and drunk and sweating and I gave her a cigarette when Tim and Tony told me they pissed in a Heineken bottle and wanted to give it to Deidre to drink since she was so drunk. I gave them the brush-off after they waved the bottle in front of my face. I couldn’t tell if Lauren had heard them since she was still watching the scrawny little geek jump all over the room, lip-synching — the whole party on the sides screaming and clapping and dancing, someone even threw him a banana and that was when I grabbed her arm and ran, heading out the door, onto the cool dark lawn, leaving the party behind.