How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Vic is the second main character in the story. He, like Enn, is 15. He provides a counterpart through which Enn is able to understand himself and the girls better. At the beginning of the story, Vic is confident about his relationship with girls. His refrain throughout the first part of the story is advice to Enn: “You just have to talk to them” (Paragraph 7). Later, he adds, “And that means you got to listen to them, too” (Paragraph 78).

Vic assuredly chooses Stella, the prettiest girl at the party, and he eventually makes his way upstairs with her, likely to get physically intimate with her, until he angrily forces Enn to leave the party with him. He tells Enn, “She wasn’t a…” (Paragraph 129). He adds, “I think there’s a thing. When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, and you wouldn’t be you anymore?” (Paragraph 131). While Gaiman leaves it unclear to the reader exactly what he experienced with Stella, the question mark reveals Vic’s loss of confidence. By the end of the story, Vic has learned he can’t be as sure as he once was about girls. Indeed, he is no longer who he was when the story began.

Stella’s character represents all the girls at the party. She is the one who invites Enn and Vic into the house. According to Enn, “She had golden, wavy hair, and she was very beautiful” (Paragraph 25). Vic claims her, behaving in a proprietary manner, and eventually Stella and Vic head upstairs. Near the end of the story, however, Stella reveals her true self. Vic says, “She wasn’t a…” (Paragraph 129). He doesn’t have the words to say that she wasn’t a human.

Triolet is the third girl Enn meets at the party and the one who has the most lasting effect on him. She describes herself as being “a verse form” (Paragraph 95). Indeed, in literature, a triolet is a poem that has an eight-line stanza with a rhyme scheme of ABaAabAB. Enn describes her as having “a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line” (Paragraph 97), and he compares her looks to those of the masks he and his classmates wore for a school production of Antigone.

She tells the story of her people, how they put everything about themselves into a poem so they would live forever. She says, “You cannot hear a poem without it changing you” (Paragraph 108), and such a change happens to Enn after his interaction with her. She adds, “There are places that we are welcomed […] and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?” (Paragraph 111). She refers here to her people, but the analogy is perhaps to females or to anyone who can change a person by deeply knowing them. She goes on to whisper her people’s poem into Enn’s ear, and he becomes a person who now understands better who the girls at the party are.

The first girl Enn approaches tells him her name is Wain’s Wain and explains this means she comes from and reports back to a being named Wain. She also describes herself as “a second,” which means that she travels while her sisters, who are firsts, stay home.

Enn says she has “hair [that] was so fair it was white, and long, and straight” (Paragraph 36). Most notable is her deformity. The little finger on her left hand splits at the end into two fingertips. She might have been “eliminated” for this feature, but she was allowed to choose to travel instead. Her finger suggests that girls’ appearances don’t reveal all there is to know about them. She compares her people to those at a street carnival in Rio: “golden and tall and insect-eyed and winged” (Paragraph 50), suggesting what we see is not necessarily reality.