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Racetrack was a textbook overthinker— and he’d tell you that himself. Most times, his logic and analysis, the agents and figures and probabilities of a situation, could get in the way of even the most basic human interactions. But on nights like tonight, when he’d had a few too many drinks and a floaty warmth of disassociation hugged around every edge of his brain, gaps widening between him and the here and now, he would relax into the new breathing room in his skull. The blurry space expanding behind his eyelids was a comfort. The world would fall away brick by brick, and what was left was a new understanding of all things, fractured into the simplest of details.
Racetrack thought the way he felt drunk was maybe kinda the way everyone felt drunk. He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. It was just nice.
When Race came to, out of his head and back in the house party, he was halfway through his… undeterminable numbered can of hard seltzer. He was leaning against the wall of the living room. He watched a pool of house guests dancing on the carpet in front of some couches that were littered with people and jackets and empty drink containers.
To his right, a guy leaned on his hand against the wall, head tilted down to talk to the shorter girl, a black-haired Chicana who Race knew from a math class named Smalls, under him. Race thought the guy looked kind of old to be at a college house party. Then again, transfer students were usually older than the average demographic of college kids, so then Racer thought he looked like a transfer student.
The guy looked like a poorly dressed transfer student, Race decided. His skinny jeans looked uncomfortably tight, and the flannel that hung on his shoulders was too big, and his graphic t-shirt had something vaguely sexist on it. It looked like something Race’s ma woulda made him wear when he was in elementary school— a boldly colored shirt that was about video games or girl cooties or both, and a mismatched over-shirt for the chilly autumn mornings.
“Oscar,” Smalls sounded annoyed, folding her arms and rolling her eyes. The guy— Oscar, ostensibly— didn’t seem to notice. He just kept talking.
Race wondered when Smalls was going to leave Oscar and find someone better to talk to.
His feet carried him to another corner of the house, a replenished can in hand, and he found himself in the basement. Rainbow string lights, like the ones Racer would help his dad put up every year after Thanksgiving, were strung on the low ceiling alongside a disco ball, and Race had to duck to avoid hitting his head on them. He did a lap around the room, squeezing around and stepping over people, before finding a seat on the stairs, watching the board game the couch-sitters were playing from afar.
The room’s occupants played their game with too many rules and passed a joint around, and he wondered if he should try it, just this once. The smell was reedy and musty, but Race used to smoke cigars with his dad on the porch when Ma was out of town, so he knew he could handle a gross smoke. Maybe it would make him feel even more spacey than he already did. But that possibility made his stomach turn a little.
Before he could think too hard about it, Davey bounced down the stairs, stepping around Race and turning to squat in front of him.
“Racey,” Dave whined, leaning forward. His head was so close to Race's, their foreheads nearly touched. Race felt his curls shift slightly as Dave’s curls brushed them.
Davey had probably asked him a question, but all Racer could do was look at Dave’s eyes. They were shiny and wide, and his pupils were dilated to hell, but the color was still visible around the edges. Race remembered that they were green sometimes and blue sometimes— they might be hazel, he thought. Under the Christmas lights, in this dusty, smokey, fuzzy basement with the orange rug and the overlapping posters and the sagging shelves of board games and books and movies, he thought they looked blue.
Racetrack thought Dave’s eyes looked kinda like his eyes. He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. It was just nice.
“Yer eyes look like mine,” Race said.
“And your eyes look like mine,” Davey replied.
They looked at each other for a little longer before Dave was done looking at Race, and then he was gone, sitting on top of Katherine on the couch. She squawked about her cards falling out of her hands as he laughed, and Race liked his laugh. Katherine laughed, too, and Race liked her laugh, too. He stood up and made his way back upstairs, and he wondered when he would get to laugh like they did.
At some point, Albert found him in the foyer, stumbling between dancing bodies with an empty can in his hand.
Race hooked his arm around his friend’s and leaned his head on Al’s shoulder. “Albie! ‘M tryin’ to get to the kitchen. Wannanother drink.” The house was rotating sideways, and the lights were pleasing, dim and colorful in the way lamps with scarves tied around them looked.
“Anotha drink, huh?” Al asked, looking him up and down, and Race felt like he was being assessed— and not even in the fun way.
“Yeppers,” Race replied, and he spread a gooey grin across his face. He started blinking up at Al slowly, his lip jutted out in an honest plea.
“Mm, alright,” Albert agreed, pulling his arm out from Race’s grasp and slinging it over his shoulders. The ginger steered them in the direction of the drinks, and Race wondered if Al would always have his back like he had it now, strong in his grasp the way you would hold your favorite book or a bouquet of flowers.
He liked being held by Albie, he decided. Albie was his best friend.
When they got to the kitchen, Race lurched out of the warm hold and carefully stacked his can on top of the other empty cans next to the fridge. He stood back and folded his arms; he had started building a tower a couple cans back, and he was proud of his tower so far. He wondered if he could get it to touch the ceiling.
“Bask in the glory of my tower, gentleman,” Racer exclaimed to no one in particular, with jazz hands gesturing to the pile.
Albert chuffed. “Are all those yours?”
“Well, duh, Albie,” Race huffed as he turned to Al, although he couldn’t actually remember drinking that many cans of anything tonight. “Two more ta the ceilin’, methinks!”
“Anotha seltza?” Albert seemed incredulous and surprised and maybe a little disappointed. Race wanted him to put his arm around him and stop seeming those things, but Al continued, “You should drink some whuddah.”
Racer didn’t agree or disagree; he just waited for Al to fish a glass from the cupboard and get water from the sink. The music seeping in from the other end of the house was itching Race’s temples. He could hear the melody and the bassline, but he could also hear the people talking over them and the walls cutting through them and feet squishing them down. It was sort of pleasant in a jarring way.
Jack Kelly waltzed in and shoved a solo cup into Race’s hand, and Race downed it automatically; when Jack Kelly hands you something, you don’t question it. It’s Jack Kelly.
The drink wasn’t as good as the seltzer would have been; it was too sweet, candylike and warm, probably to cover the alcohol taste, or maybe it was liquid candy. Racer thought about those neon squeeze bottles he used to get at the gas station on long road trips as a kid. They were sour and kinda gummy but they were more liquid than solid, and his ma always let him pick two different flavors so he could mix them together if he wanted. He wondered if they tasted any good still, now that he wasn’t small.
When he tuned back into the room, his sugar-rimmed thoughts melting away under his feet, Albert and Jack were arguing about Racer having a good time.
“Let ‘im have a good time!” Jack laughed.
“He’s drunk as a fuckin’ skunk, Jack!” Al seemed a bit flustered, and not as buzzed as Race thought he should be. But they were talking about him, and he didn’t want to be talked about anymore, so he set the solo cup next to his tower and slinked out of the room.
After shuffling around, shouting incongruously into people’s ears when they’d shout incongruously into his, he caught sight of a guy he vaguely recognized but didn’t have a name for. He was a shorter, stalky kind of guy, and he looked like he might be in one of Race’s classes. The guy’s arms looked delicious, and his blue jeans fit him just so, and his face wasn’t too bad, either. Race found a wall to lean on and watched the bicep guy from across the room.
When Biceps walked, he carried himself a certain way. Race couldn’t really describe it, or maybe he was just ogling because the guy was hot, or maybe Albert was right and he was too drunk. Race liked the way Biceps walked, with his left foot and his right foot.
Biceps talked with his hands, these wide calloused things that were tan and looked practiced. The guy wasn’t very animated in his face, except to scowl, maybe. But when he talked, his hands did a lot of heavy lifting, but then, Race realized, his arms looked like they did a lot of heavy lifting, too.
Racer looked down at his own hands, pale and slender. His fingers were long and his fingernails were chewed to the quick. Then he looked back up at Biceps.
Racetrack thought Biceps’s hands looked kinda like his. He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. It was just nice.
It wasn’t long after that thought that Race decided he wanted a closer look at Biceps, and maybe a feel, and maybe a whole night with him, so he walked over and grabbed Biceps by the bicep and pulled him to the rug to dance.
Racer was a good dancer, but he was a ballet and tap dancer, so he wasn’t necessarily a good dancer for house parties. Still, he knew how to find a rhythm, so he bobbed to the music and did his best to stay upright. He wrapped his arms over Biceps’s strong shoulders and laced his fingers into the guy’s hair as he moved to the song. He felt tingly when Biceps quickly fell into step with him, holding Racer’s hips so they moved together.
Biceps leaned forward and brushed his lips against Racer’s cheek, right next to his ear, and Race tried not to drool as he spoke. “Whadda I call ya, pretty boy?”
“Racer,” the blond replied, “or you can call me sweet’eart if you take me home tonight.”
Biceps chuckled, a low rumble Racer felt in his own chest, and he hoped that was a good thing. It felt like a good thing. It lapped over Race like a wave and vibrated him like a cat purring and he decided he wanted to feel it again.
“What should I call you?” Race asked then, because he realized Biceps was probably not his given name.
“Call me Spot,” Biceps— now Spot— replied easily.
Spot pressed an open-mouthed kiss on the bottom corner of Race’s jaw, and Race leaned his head the other way to give Spot more space to work. Race pulled Spot’s shoulders closer and scratched at his scalp and back, and when Spot bit and sucked Race right around his carotid, he laughed like how Katherine and Davey did, bubbly and boozy and dreamy, and then Race leaned down and kissed Spot square on the mouth.
Race didn’t have any real thoughts in his head, but he also had too many thoughts in his head. He thought about Spot’s tongue and how it tasted like mint gum and vodka and felt right, being held between his teeth. He thought about Spot’s hands, the ones that looked kinda like his, and how they slid to hold Race’s ass from inside his jean pockets. He thought about the way the music was misshapen now, warbly and drowned by the blood rushing in his ears, and he thought about how he couldn’t imagine his head floating any higher than it already was. Then, his thoughts wound back to the stud in his arms, who leaned over to his ear again and drawled, deep and gruff, “Sweet’eart, let’s get outta ‘ere.”
As he nodded and kissed Spot again, Racetrack thought about all of the details around him, and he wondered if Spot paid attention to them, too. He didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. It was just nice.