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“But that was just a name. Just pretend.”
Maybe it was. But still, that whole day, being with Willem, being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I’ve been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I’d never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find that door.
“It didn’t feel pretend,” I tell Melanie.
Melanie arranges her face in sympathy. “Oh, sweetie. It’s because you were all hopped up on the fumes of infatuation. And Paris. But people don’t change overnight. Especially you. You’re Allyson. You’re so solid. It’s one of the things I love about you—how reliably you are.”
I want to protest. What about transformations? What about the reinvention she’s always going on about? Are those only reserved for her? Is there a different standard for me?
“You know what you need? Some Ani DeFranco.” She pulls out her iPhone and shoves the buds in my ears, and as Ani goes on about finding your voice and making it heard, I feel so frustrated with myself. Like I want to pull my skin wide open and step out of it. I scrape my feet against the hot cement floor and sigh, wishing there was someone I could explain this to. Someone who might understand what I’m feeling.
And for one small second, I do imagine the person I could talk to, about finding this door, and losing it. He would understand.
But that’s the one door that needs to stay shut.
Eighteen
Somehow, using the same we’re-adults-you-have-to-treat-us-that-way argument from the Beer Dinner, plus promising to hire a hotel-approved taxi for the entire night, Melanie and I manage to procure parental permission to go to that New Year’s Eve party. It’s being held on a narrow crescent of sand, all lit up with tiki torches, and at ten o’clock, it’s already slamming. There is a low stage on which the touted Mexican reggae band will play, though right now a d.j. is playing techno.
There are several giant piles of discarded shoes. Melanie tosses off her bright-orange flip-flops. I hesitate before taking off my less conspicuous black leather sandals, hoping I’ll find them again, because if I lose anything else, I swear I will never hear the end of it.
“Quite the bacchanal,” Melanie says approvingly, nodding to the guys in swim trunks holding bottles of tequila by the neck, the girls in sarongs with their hair freshly cornrowed. There are even actual Mexicans here, the guys smartly dressed in sheer white shirts, hair slicked back, and the girls in fancy party dresses, cut up to there, legs long and brown.
“Dance first or drink first?”
I don’t want to dance. So I say drink. We line up at the packed bar. Behind us is a group of French-speaking people, which makes me do a double take. There’s hardly anyone but Americans at our hotel, but of course people from everywhere come to Mexico.
“Here.” Melanie shoves a drink into my hand. It’s in a hollowed-out piece of pineapple. I take a sniff. It smells like suntan lotion. It is sweet and warm and burns slightly going down. “Good girl.”
I think of Ms. Foley. “Don’t call me that.”
“Bad girl.”
“I’m not that either.”
She looks peeved. “Nothing girl.”
We drink our drinks in silence, taking in the growing party. “Let’s dance,” Melanie says, yanking me toward the ring of sand that has been allocated as the dance floor.
I shake my head. “Maybe later.”
And there’s that sigh again. “Are you going to be like this all night?”
“Like what?” I think of what she called me on the tour—adventure averse—and what she said at the pool. “So like me? I thought that’s what you loved about me.”
“What is your problem? You’ve had a stick up your ass this whole trip! It’s not my fault your mom is Study-Hall Nazi.”
“No, but it is your fault for making me feel like crap because I don’t want to dance. I hate techno. I have always hated techno, so you should know that, what with me being so reliably me.”
“Fine. Why don’t you be reliably you and sit on the sidelines while I dance.”
“Fine.”
She leaves me on the perimeter of the circle and goes off and just starts dancing with random people. First she dances with some guy with dreadlocks and then turns and dances with a girl with super-short hair. She seems to be having a fine time out there, swirling, twirling, and it strikes me that if I didn’t already know her, she would no longer be someone I would know.
I watch her for at least twenty minutes. In between the monotonous techno songs, she talks to other people, laughs. After a half hour, I’m getting a headache. I try to catch her eye, but I eventually give up and slip away.
The party stretches all the way down the curve of the water—and into it—where a bunch of people are skinny-dipping in the moonlit sea. A little way’s farther down, it gets more mellow, with a bonfire and people around it playing guitar. I plant myself a few feet away from the bonfire, close enough to feel its heat and hear the crackle of wood. I dig my feet into the sand; the top layer is cool, but underneath it’s still warm from the day’s sunshine.
