“Okay, maybe, we’ll just have to see. Go get cleaned up and come back down here. We need to get on the computer and have some clothes FedEx’ed overnight—we gotta get you out of your cult, or missionary, or whatever clothes.”
He came back downstairs a little while later and we watched reruns of some old show we thought was hysterical when we were kids but seemed kind of stupid now. We laughed anyway. Then we went online and I ordered a bunch of clothes for him so he wouldn’t look like a complete geek when he started his senior year. After a while he yawned and said goodnight, Bo followed him up the stairs and I cut off the TV.
I wandered around the house and finally grabbed a joint and some Ambien out of my room. I stepped into the bathroom and looked into Danny’s room, he was snoring and Bo was curled up at his feet. I went out to the backyard and sprawled out on a lounge chair, looking up at the stars and hearing all the frogs and crickets and shit that I didn’t hear at school.
I thought about how everyone seemed to have an opinion about where I should go from here, what I should do this summer and where it would take me. Spence, David, Danny, Mom, Paul, Pete, Billy, Jeremy—all seemed to be tugging me in different directions. It didn’t really seem fair for them to put all these choices in front of me with no warning. It was overwhelming, it seemed kind of selfish for them to expect me to figure all of this out without disappointing somebody. I always resented being put in the position that made me the decision maker, I liked to follow and see where I ended up.
So, I could stay here and reconnect with my family and friends, and I was a little intrigued by the whole Billy/Pete deal. I could go back to school and gain internship hours like the last few summers, being a counselor at the sports camps and coaching some kids one-on-one. David wanted me to get into the whole political thing in New Orleans, and even though I like the idea of hanging out with him I wasn’t sure if the whole politics thing was really for me. Maybe I would spend some time with Jeremy and Ernie, visit some gay clubs and see if I liked that scene. I was nervous about the whole coming out issue, there were a lot of people who seemed to already have it figured out but I wasn’t sure about confirming things with everybody, and I knew there were going to be the Dannys out there who wouldn’t or couldn’t accept me. Another option seemed to be just to say fuck it all, maybe go to Jamaica or Europe or whatever and avoid all of this shit, all of these demands on me, until the fall.
I was just stumped, I had no idea which way to go. And I still had my senior year, or years, at Hawthorne to get through. The Ambien was starting to kick in and I dozed off and dreamt about all of these scenarios and some of them felt like nightmares.
Sunday, 6am
When I woke up at sunrise I was stiff from sleeping in the lounge chair, my head was pounding, and there were several plump dead mosquitos scattered over me. There were so many dead insects on me that I began to wonder about just how toxic my blood had become.
I grabbed my phone off the deck and noticed the texts were dwindling down. Most of my friends from Hawthorne had probably gotten into their summer routines, they were all probably like me—too busy with their own lives to stay in touch with me all summer. There were a couple of texts from Billy wanting to know if I wanted to play golf with him this week—I kept those. Pete sent me one asking me if I wanted to have dinner with him and the family sometime—I set a reminder to call him back. Paul sent me a message telling me about some fishing trip in Wyoming or wherever that he wanted to take Spence and me on this summer—I forwarded that to Spence to see what he thought. Jeremy sent me a message saying they were making a trip to go club hopping next weekend—I set a reminder for that one, too. The director of the summer programs at school sent me one asking if I was coming back to work this summer—another reminder set. My Dad sent me a message asking me to come to DC sometime—deleted it. Mom sent me a message begging me to stay here and spend time with the family and Maria and Vince—replied and told her we’d talk about it Thursday. There was a message from one of the Zach’s in the frat telling me that two guys in suits who may or may not have been some kind of federal agents came by the house asking for me—deleted and I shuddered a little bit about that one. Messages from my mom’s friends in Cali—asking if I was interested in doing some modeling, working as a personal trainer, being on Big Brother, being on Survivor, doing an interview in People with my Mom, doing an interview with a free-lance writer about my Dad blowing the campaign and whatnot—all of them deleted.
Expending all that energy made my head pound even harder and I remembered I had some codeine upstairs. I went inside and I thought about waking Danny up to see if he wanted to lift some weights in the basement or go for a run, something to snap me out of the stress of all these decisions I was expected to make. I decided to just go upstairs and get in my bed instead.
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