His eyes skip dizzily along the labels affixed to the various trays, chafing dishes, bowls, and plates—some of the most iconic restaurants in the city are represented. The spread is so high-end that it’s a little difficult to parse when compared to most of the guests. Ben’s imagination, never brilliant with things like fashion, had fallen short here as well, but he’d envisioned complicated, impressive costumes, or ones that left him shaking his head at their wit. Mostly, instead, the other guests are dressed like him, or in costumes they clearly purchased hastily at some point in the last ten years. There are, in fairness, a few people in more elaborate getups, but all of those seem to be surrounded by a team of hangers-on aggressively filming them; Ben writes them off as influencers and does his best to avoid them.
He gets a drink. He sips his drink. He finds himself, as he usually does, drifting over to one corner of the party, to lean against a wall and observe other people having fun.
It’s not what he should do, of course—he should get out there, mingle, introduce himself,participate—but this, above anything else, has always been Ben’s problem. It’s why he’s never made any friends in New York, or taken anything out of those stupid networking events: Ben is not built to network. The people who do well at those things are like those phone board operators they used to have in the forties, charting every new connection and flipping between them with ease, calmly managing dozens of conversations at once. Ben is more like an answering machine, happily receiving incoming transmissionsbut not designed to make even one outgoing call on his own, let alone dozens of them.
He always ends up feeling it most acutely in moments like this, entirely alone in a room full of people; it would be easier, probably, if he didn’t. In this, he realizes, his expression twisting into a slightly wry smile, he’s like Pete, telling himself it will be a disaster so aggressively that it becomes one. It’s just that knowing that doesn’t help.
Ben is seriously considering the merits of slipping back out before he can run into anyone he knows, when, from his left, he hears: “Kid! There you are!”
Ben bites down on a groan, swallows it, turns; Rick is there, of course, and dressed, horribly, as a fish. After a second, Ben realizes that it’s not just a fish costume—he is dressed as one of those mechanical singing bass that swept the nation as a craze when Ben was a kid.
“If you start singing, I’m walking away,” Ben warns, his tongue slightly looser from the booze. “I mean it; I don’t care who you are.”
Rick laughs. “You’re always a riot; thanks for coming. Come on—I want to introduce you to some of my friends.”
The next twenty-five minutes pass in a haze. Ben meets chefs and critics and executive producers, two celebrities whose books he’s read, restaurant owners, a wholesale distributor who moves citrus across half the country. This last is Rick’s juice hookup, and Ben ends up in a conversation about the intricacies of breeding and growing oranges for flavor, which becomes a conversation about marketing and branding the resulting product, which becomes a discussion of Larry’s plans to fly out to a farm in Ohio next week to source apples for a new product. The interaction goes on for so long that eventually Rick wanders off to seek entertainment elsewhere. Ben’s surprised to find,when he turns around and realizes he’s alone, that he misses Rick a little, had appreciated the company, the introductions.
The thought that he might be growing genuinely fond of Rick is too horrible to contemplate, so he turns back out to face the party, scanning the crowd for familiar faces. There’s Adina, who looks occupied in conversation with a stranger—there’s Ezra, who doesn’t look occupied at all, but if Ben’s honest, he’s looking for?—
—there. Pete is standing near the door, only his head visible over the crowd, laughing at something. Ben throws back the last of his drink, for all it’s mostly melted ice by now, sets the cup down, and makes a beeline for him.
He’s confident, for the first three-quarters of the walk. He’s feeling good. He’s riding on some nice liquid courage; he’s met an incredible number of fascinating, influential people; he’s not dressed wildly incorrectly for the circumstances. Everything is coming up Ben, and that means it’s the perfect time to say hi to Pete, be calm and witty and not at all awkward or weird, and thenleavebefore his atypically successful impression of human socialization can crumble. That way, he can leave the best possible impression behind, as people always want to do with their friends, acquaintances, colleagues, business associates, and other contacts about whom they have absolutely no romantic feelings at all.
But when he’s nearly reached Pete—when it’s already too late to turn back without being spotted in the middle of a crouching, awkward retreat—Ben stops, frozen, a deer convinced that if it blinks hard enough, it will stop seeing the headlights. But, in spite of enough attempts that his eyes go a little dry, the vision before him simply does not clear.
Ben is dressed as ketchup; Pete is dressed as a hot dog.
There is a long, cringing moment in which Ben has seen Pete, but Pete has not seen Ben, in which Ben experiences a series ofemotions he most closely associates with middle school. Panic and embarrassment vie for first spot, but hot on their heels is the deranged but undeniable spike of terror that somehow everyone at this party, Pete included, will take a look at their unintentional matching outfits and decide, through some power of collective consciousness that everyone but Ben possesses, that Ben’s costume choice is in fact a frightening, stalker-esque declaration of affection. He thinks, for an unsettling but very real second, that he might scream from the sheer stress, which would add to the overall Halloween vibes.
But then Pete turns his head and catches sight of Ben. He’s already starting to smile even as he meets Ben’s gaze, but when his eyes flick down over the ketchup outfit, they widen, then crinkle decidedly at the corners. He laughs, shaking his head, and then says, “Well, we gotta find mustard, I think. Start a band.”
“If you have musical talents you haven’t shared with me, now is the time,” Ben’s mouth says, while Ben’s brain is still busy trying to veer off the expressway to Panic Town. “Given the givens of Miranda, it might genuinely save my job at some point if I can throw you in front of the camera and make you play ‘Wonderwall.’”
Pete grins, rolling his eyes. “Well, it’s me, so if Ididhave any musical talent, I’m sure I’d lose track of it the minute we started rolling. But no, no skills to think of; I just think it would be funny to be in a band called the Hot Dogs.”
“Oh, and now you’reheadlining,” Ben says, tutting in a mocking impression of annoyance. “Didn’t even ask about it or anything; I see how it is. The fame’s gone to your head… We’re all second banana to you now, is that it?”
“You’re the one who decided to be a condiment,” Pete says loftily. “It’s not my fault you’re not reaching for your true potential—oh, Chris, hey.” This last is in a slightly different tone,mellower, less amused, to someone approaching from the left, blocked from Ben’s view by someone unhelpfully tall. “I thought the drink line would take longer than that to get through.”
“Oh, I cut to the front,” says—well, the muscular, tanned, bleached-blond vision of a man who steps out from behind a cluster of people has got to be Chris. Ben blinks, taking in his costume: a seventies-style disco outfit fully done in gold lamé, a pair of chunky platform heels, and absolutely no shirt. He’s pulling it off, which is actually the worst thing about it, and Ben’s trying to bite down on a queasy smile before he fully processes what’s making his stomach flip.
Then Chris passes Pete his drink and throws an easy arm over his shoulder, and: Oh. Suddenly, Ben’s processing.
“You know you shouldn’t do that kind of thing,” Pete says, frowning. “It’s rude, for one thing, and?—”
“Yes, yes, and it’ll make you look bad, and I get you into trouble whenever you take me out, Iknow,” Chris says, rolling his eyes. “Stop nagging—you’re the one who’s being rude. You haven’t even introduced me yet. Who is…this?”
He inclines his head pointedly at Ben, the expression on his face suggesting he’d rather be looking at a pile of elephant dung, or a moldy slice of cheesecake. Pete seems to shake himself slightly, says, “Oh, right, sorry. This is Ben Blumenthal, the amazing video editor I’ve been working with?—”
“On those viral videos, you mean?” Chris says. He raises an eyebrow at Ben, his gaze cool, assessing. “Those are…fine, I guess. And the costume that matches Pete’s—did you plan that, or are you just a creepy stalker? Maybe not so great with the old appropriate boundaries?”
“Chris!” Pete snaps, flushing bright red and breaking out from under his arm to glare at him. “Of course he’s not astalker. We were literally, one second ago, addressing you being rude.They’re just costumes! I’m wearing this because it’s the only costume I own, and I’m sure Ben didn’t plan to?—”
“You’re not such a good judge of these things, though, are you?” Chris says, reaching out to tap very lightly on Pete’s temple. “You have a blind spot for?—”
“I have a blind spot foryou,” Pete growls, visibly uncomfortable now. Ben can relate. “Because if I was smart, I wouldn’t take you anywhere, because then you couldn’t embarrass me?—”
“Keep an eye on you?—”
