Free Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin Page A

said.
    “Yes,” she agreed happily. “So finish the pink one already. They have something blue too. Embrace the rainbow.”
    “I’m going to take a shower,” the girl in the mask announced unexpectedly and wandered off, walking on tiptoe, her long black hair slapping against her back.
    I looked after her.
    “Does she live here?” I asked.
    “No. This is Hamlet’s place. She wants to be his girlfriend, I suspect. Who doesn’t, though? But he is trouble. And if you’re not going to drink that, pass it over.”
    The folksy hurly-burly had given way to an Oriental whine, and a boy in an ankle-length caftan spread his arms wide and twirled about the room, keening loudly.
    “Lisa, who are all these people? And what’s with the music?”
    “It’s eclectic,” she said, unperturbed, and gave her cup an energetic shake; a few ice cubes leapt out and somersaulted in the air before plunking back with a green splash. “And I told you already, they’re in my theater class. You really should leave your library cubicle more often.”
    For a while we watched the crowd, most of them dressed in black, the rest decked out in some outlandish garb, a few wearing masks. The lights were turned down low, but what little could be seen of the apartment—a flea-market couch, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, shelves made of crates—created a contrast I found unpleasant, as if all present here were trapped in a simple, one-dimensional story and were striving frantically, almost shrilly, to clown their way out in order to inhabit a more interesting one.
    Someone thrust a potted geranium at me in passing.
    “Enjoy,” he said with a beatific smile.
    Feline whiskers, I saw, were scrawled across his cheeks with an orange marker.
    I set the pot on a nearby crate and poured my untouched pink drink into it.
    “Lisa, I’m going back to the dorm,” I said. “I’m bored. And I’m not dressed for this anyway.”
    “One day, you know,” my roommate sang out, “one day you’ll look back at your youth and regret all the things you haven’t done. Talk of years wasted! Here you are, almost twenty years old, and have you ever been drunk? No. Have you ever had a proper boyfriend? No. Have you ever even—”
    Quickly I interrupted, “It’s too loud, I can’t hear anything, I’ll see you later.”
    I wound my way toward the doorway, swerving widely so as not to step on a python that slumbered in a woven basket in the middle of the floor, skirting some commotion; people were beginning to drag the furniture against the walls. Past the living room, the kitchen was deserted; a wet trail of bare footprints glistened across the entire length of its white linoleum floor. I followed the footprints into the hallway, in time to see a bare-legged girl, her face hidden by a soaked tangle of long, dark hair, her shoulders heaving with sobs, being draped in an oversize trench coat and gently pushed across the threshold by a tall, thin man.
    The man closed the apartment door behind her and turned, and saw me.
    Embarrassed to have witnessed something private and unpleasant, I squeezed past him with my face averted. In the hallwaymirror, my awkward double in blue jeans and a checkered button-down shirt, her hair pulled back in an unfashionable ponytail, her face bare of any feminine artifice save a careless swipe of gloss across her lips, prodded the lock.
    “Leaving already?” his voice asked softly at my back.
    “I have a paper due on Monday.”
    “That’s a pity. You are easily the most fascinating person here.”
    I looked up at him for the first time. He stood watching me, leaning with casual elegance against the wall, dressed in a cardigan of gray cashmere, his face pale and vivid and arresting in its fierce intelligence, a gray cat draped around his shoulders. Behind him, framed by the two doorways, I could see the dim rectangle of the party room, now freed of its couch and armchairs; just then, a conga line of slender girls was undulating across