“Ok,” I tell Dani. “We’ll follow you.”
On the way, I turn around, waiting for Cricket and Kurt to stop kissing. “What are you guys drinking back there?”
“Nothing…” Cricket laughs.
“Cricket…” I warn. “What is it.”
“Hey guys, let’s not get me arrested, ok?” Alex says.
“No worries, dude. It’s just some Jager. It’s hiding in my pocket.”
So Cricket’s drinking. That would explain the goofy behavior, plus the fact that she was all ready to go to the party instead of her original plan. I look at Alex apologetically.
“It’s ok,” Alex replies. “Just keep it under control.”
I’m slightly uncomfortable with the idea of alcohol being in the car, but I go along with it because Alex is sort of in charge. Once we get to the party, we can relax. And I am actually looking forward to spending a few minutes alone with him. I smile warmly at him, and he takes my hand with a wink. “Beautiful,” he mouths.
My heart flutters.
We follow Zach to a house on the outskirts of town, and it’s all lit up like Christmas. I’m thinking…is this guy’s parents home? There are roughly twenty cars lining the street. It looks like this could be fun, but I’m nervous about Cricket and Kurt. “Are you guys taking that stuff in?”
Kurt sputters out something like a chuckle and an exasperated sigh. Alex looks annoyed. We all sit there for a few minutes, waiting for some resolution. “Let’s just go,” Alex says, getting out.
“Hey, it’s no biggie,” Kurt stammers, obviously feeling the effects of the alcohol already. Cricket is giggling like a four year old.
Alex takes my hand firmly. “Come on sweetie,” he says, leading me inside. Cricket and Kurt linger back and I don’t even know if they follow us in, because once we get inside, the party is in full swing and there are people everywhere. I spot Dani by the fireplace and she waves me over. Zach is standing next to her with a relaxed, happy grin. Dani takes my arm and leads me away. “I have questions, Miss Turner…” I glance at Alex to see if he’s ok, but he and Zach are talking football, so I follow Dani out through the kitchen and out to the deck, where a few people are gathered around a keg of beer.
“Beer?” Dani asks.
She hands me a cup. I haven’t really thought about it, but it might make me less nervous. Although I would be in serious trouble if my parents knew. What can it hurt? “Ok. Hey congratulations again…on Homecoming. You looked great tonight.”
She hugs some guy at the keg and flips her hair while he takes the cups and fills them. “Thanks.” She swings her hips and takes a healthy swig of her drink. “So, what’s the story with you and Alex anyway?”
I feel myself blushing as I take the drink. “Well…we danced. He kissed me…. What’s to tell?” I say teasingly.
“Oooh, girl! Alex is such a sweetie! I love that! So are you going out now?”
“I think so…I mean, yeah. He wants to.”
“And do you?”
“I do.” Crazy words, coming out of my mouth. I mean, who would have thought? Alex and me?
Dani squeals and hugs me. “I’m so happy for you guys! He really is a great guy.”
I look at the frothy surface of the drink, wondering what Alex would think if he saw me drinking. Then, I take a gulp.
I have no idea what I’m doing, and my face must be screaming my inexperience, because I cough and look at Dani with a snicker.
“OMG…is this your first time?” She asks.
I nod. “Yep. And this stuff isn’t exactly tasty.”
“No, but after a while, you won’t care!” Dani whirls around and grabs a random guy around the neck. “Hey, you! I haven’t seen you in like, forever!”
I hang around for a few minutes while they flirt and then I get bored and go back inside to find Alex. To my surprise, Zach is standing in the kitchen. “Hey, Tess.”
“Dani’s outside,” I reply, wondering how he would react if he knew she was flirting with some guy.
“Hey, can I talk to you for a second?”
I force down another gulp of my beer and nod. “Ok,” I say, looking around, wondering if he means here, or outside.
“Come on,” he says, going out the side door, opposite the deck.
He stops and it’s dark. I take another drink, absently, and he says, “You’re drinking.”
“Yeah, Dani gave it to me.” I’m not sure what to say. Is he drinking too? I feel stupid, so I set the cup down on a table. “It kinda sucks anyway.”
“Tess.” He looks at me intently. “It’s ok. Everyone tries it.”
“Yeah, well that doesn’t make it taste good.”
“Indeed.” He looks away, briefly, as if thinking what to say next. “Where did you say Dani was?”
Hanging out with some guy on the back deck. How do I answer this question? “She’s out back somewhere….” Neutral.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out the other day, talking about hanging out when we were kids.”
“No problem. I just don’t remember a lot of things.”
He leans on the railing, gazes at the sky, lit up with a million stars. “Do you know where to find Saturn?”
“No,” I admit, moving closer to him, intrigued. “Where is it?”
“This time of year, it’s in the west,” he says, pointing. “There, the brightest star. It’s yellowish. If we had even a basic telescope, you could probably see the rings.”
“You know a lot about astronomy?”
Zach sighs. “Not really…my dad was into it…among other things.”
“Were you close to him?”
“My father was a fascinating man. I go visit him all the time… I mean—his grave. That’s what my mom and I were doing at the cemetery Saturday.”
Next thing I know, Alex is by my side, going on about constellations, his arm around my waist. Zach nods in approval and Alex says to me, “Having a drink are you?”
Crap. “Yeah, Dani gave it to me.”
“Let’s go inside,” he replies, rubbing my back. “I want you to check something out.”
In the kitchen, I toss my cup in the trash can, and we go out to the living room. Some guy with a beanie is standing at a laptop with a mixer connected to it. The beanie covers half his face and has eye-holes cut into it. I’m thinking he looks ridiculous, but Alex starts bobbing his head to the music. The DJ is blending short tracks into one continuous uninterrupted song, and there are small groups of people gathered around the speakers. The sounds coming from the speakers are distorted patterns of overwhelming bass.
“What is this?” I ask.
“They call it dirty bass…it’s dub step.” Alex replies.
I have to admit, with the lights low, the black lights turning everyone’s clothes to fluorescent patches in the dark, the strange, distorted sounds…it is all sort of exciting, and somehow relaxing at the same time.
Alex takes my hand. “Come on.”
What? We’re actually going to dance to this stuff? I picture us looking like robotic mannequins or something, not natural at all. Instead, he takes me to a loveseat away from the crowd and we sit down.
He scoots closer to me and puts his arm around my shoulder. His other hand comes up and caresses my chin. “Do you like it?”
Incredibly, I do, as odd as it is. “Yeah, I think so.”
He smiles in approval and kisses me briefly, then whispers in my ear. “You’re mine, aren’t you?”
There he goes with that whispering thing again. A shiver dribbles down my back. My answer it to kiss him back, longer than before. He leans back with slight surprise, then pulls me up and I am sitting on his lap, leaning against the other end of the loveseat. We sit there for several minutes, me swinging my feet up and down to the music, occasionally laying my head on his shoulder. He rakes his fingers through my hair, over and over. I lose all track of time. Eventually, the music starts to get lower and slower, and the crowd has thinned out.
It suddenly hits me that I have to be home by midnight. “Crap, what time is it?”
“Time for the princess to go home before the carriage turns back into a pumpkin,” Alex replies.
Princess? That’s a first. “Your uncle might not like it if you brought back his Hummer that way.”
Alex laughs and kisses my forehead. “True dat.”
We somehow manage to round up Cricket (who is visibly intoxicated) and Kurt, finding them on the swing set in the backyard. Cricket giggles all the way to the car, and Kurt is singing Jason Mraz songs way too loudly.
“Don’t quit your day job, Kurt,” Alex teases.
Cricket hoots and playfully punches Alex in the arm. “Stop it. He’s adorable!”
“Adorable and pitchy,” Alex scoffs. “Just kiddin’ buddy.” Kurt just sings louder.
I loop my arm in Alex’s and he opens the door for me. “You got both your shoes on?” He asks. It takes me a minute to remember the Cinderella reference, and I chuckle. “I do.”
He leans in before closing my door. “Good,” he says, kissing me. “Princesses need both their shoes.”
Zach
On Monday at school, two things happen that have me fighting to grasp that whole negative capability thing in my brain. First, as I pull into the parking lot, my normal spot is taken, so I sidle around for a few moments and find another spot two rows over. This fact, in itself, is not really all that significant. But what happens next will set the tone for the rest of the day, and, indeed, will most likely impact the rest of the story, as well.
It is a simple image, nothing to be inferred or perceived by a random observer, nothing important to anyone but me.
Dani is leaning over, her arms on an open car window. She has tight jeans on with something glittery on the pockets. It is a blue four door Impala, parked near the first row. She shimmies her hips, as if seized by a moment of inexplicable giddiness. I cannot see the person who she is speaking to. After a minute or two, she stands up, still blocking my view, and flips her hair over her right shoulder, then she twirls her fingers, waves, and heads toward the school entrance.
Ironically, there is a Fun song on the radio at that very moment, the words taunting me:
So go on, go on if you were thinking that the worst is yet to come.
I gravitate to the words, ingest them, feeling a sudden pang of shock, as if I’ve taken a healthy swig of a drink, fully expecting sweet tea, and it ends up being lemonade. A moment of disoriented surprise…as if the world suddenly tilted, for a split second, and then righted itself.
After a few seconds of trying to process what I’ve just seen, I realize that the person in the vehicle will most likely be getting out of the car, and that it might make sense to see who it is.
It’s John Davis, my teammate, and the guy who had the party on Homecoming night. Suddenly, a few things seem to add up. Dani was all gung ho to go to the party, number one. Further, he was filling drinks from the keg on the back deck, and Dani seemed to spend a lot of time out there. I assumed it was because she wanted to drink beer. But, maybe there was more to that.
And now to the next thing that sends my mind into overload. As I walk down the hall to my first class, Alex has Tess virtually pinned against a row of lockers, his face buried in her hair. I walk past, trying not to look more than once—because, once is enough. I am aware that Alex and Tess were dancing close at Homecoming. I am also aware that they came to the party with Cricket in tow. Indeed, when Tess and I were standing on the side deck talking, Alex wandered through and casually intervened. In fact, I noticed that he put his arm around her and took her inside. It didn’t register at the time, but now it’s clear.
Alex and Tess are together. Alex. Tess.
And so the seed of doubt is sewn. Sewn, buried, and covered up with fresh dirt.
By third hour—English—I am pretty much annoyed. Even the girl who sits next to me, Lacey Wade, with whom I normally share a casual banter, notices it.
“What’s up yours today anyway?”
“Huh?” I busy myself with flipping pages in my textbook.
“You’re missing something.”
“And what would that be?” I ask, finding the poem we’re supposed to have read over the weekend (Really? Homecoming weekend?). I try to speed read it. The poem is “Acquainted With The Night” by Robert Frost.
“You want the abbreviated version?” She asks.
“Sure.”
“The lonely, depressed narrator walks all around at night, looking for something to make him happy. But he never finds it.”
I glance over the poem again. “Hmm. Makes sense. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Now what’s up with you? Why are you so grumpy?”
“I dunno, probably just tired after the crazy weekend. Did you have fun at the game and stuff?”
“Yes, but there’s still something you’re not telling me. But that’s ok.”
About that time, the teacher, Miss Collins, comes in and starts rambling about Frost’s life. It gets boring real quick, so, intrigued by the subject of the poem, as told in Lacey’s abbreviated version, I start to read it through. Incidentally, I can totally see myself walking around the streets at night in my grumpiness, especially the way I feel right now.
When I get to the end of the poem, something strikes a chord, when the narrator stops to admire a lighted clock:
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
How can time be “neither wrong nor right”? My first thought is that the clock is broken. A broken clock, after all, is right at least twice a day, and wrong the rest of the time. The clock, it would seem, has stopped.
Or, perhaps…time itself has stopped, for the narrator, who has stopped to look at the beauty of a simple timepiece. Just then, I hear my name and realize Miss Collins is asking me to tell her what I think the poem is about. Crap. Then, it hits me. Is this my father talking? Because it sounds like nothing I would dream up. Ever.
I blurt out, “Either the clock is broken, or time has stopped, for the narrator, who in all his searching, finds that there are moments in life when things are neither wrong nor right. They just are what they are.” Seriously, Dad?
She nods in approval. “Very insightful, Zach. To that, I would add that the narrator accepts his loneliness as one of those ‘moments.’ It is all part of human experience, and it will pass, as all moments do.” Well, ok.
I was making a vague connection in my mind just then to something my father said in one of his last messages…something about not finding truth in a scientific construct or measurement. It would appear that not even a clock—seemingly the most simple, reliable mechanism, is completely accurate.
“So he doesn’t find it,” Lacey pipes in. “The answer to his loneliness?”
Miss Collins raises an eyebrow, clearly pleased by the direction the discussion is taking. “What do you think?”
Another student joins in. “Well, he must enjoy walking around like that or he wouldn’t do it. So I’d say yes.”
“Ah, but he says that he is merely ‘acquainted with the night.’ That’s rather superficial, is it not?” Miss Collins challenges us.
A few nods of agreement and some muffled comments. Lacey says, “An acquaintance isn’t a real relationship, which is what a lonely person would need, right?”
“Exactly,” Miss Collins agrees. “So, to your original question. Does he find the answer—the remedy—for his loneliness?”
Someone mutters, “No, but he sure likes clocks.” A wave of snickers ensues.
“Right,” Miss Collins replies. “And it represents a moment of escape, from whatever loneliness he feels. A moment of pure experience that cannot be explained in emotional terms. It is connection—not to another person, but to himself. And if you connect with yourself, how can you truly be lonely?”
After class, I rush out and head to my locker. L
acey follows me and stops to talk. “So that was pretty deep, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I fiddle with my combination, stuff some books in and take some out. “I actually got it.”
“Me too.” She smiles, looks at me tentatively. “You ok?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” I shrug.
“Where’s Dani?”
“How should I know?” I realize there is a hint of distaste in my voice, and she picks up on it right away.
“Are you guys having problems?”
“Not really.”
“Zach, what’s up? You always tell me stuff.”
It’s almost time for class, so I tell her to meet me after school and we’ll talk. She seems excited about the idea, nods in agreement, and takes off down the hallway with a wave, telling me she’ll talk to me soon. I close my locker a bit too hard and head to class, still wondering why Dani hasn’t tracked me down yet. We usually always talk before class.
Throughout the day, my thoughts tumble from the image of Dani leaning in that car window, to Tess and Alex dancing close, then hugging next to the lockers, to Fun’s idea of “the worst is yet to come” to the white chrysanthemums at my father’s grave, to —believe it or not—that blasted Robert Frost poem. I can’t get the thing out of my head. And on top of everything else, by the end of the day, I’m pretty much convinced that I am going mad. I mean, what normal person would have such a range of random thoughts going through his head during the course of a day?
As I stand next to my locker waiting to meet Lacey, it occurs to me that it might be sort of cool to go back in time and meet some famous person—Robert Frost, for example. I mean, ask him what on earth he was thinking. I’d be sure to get an “A” on my next English paper. I have to smile at the thought. And, I make a mental note to ask my father, in my next message, if he’d ever considered doing such a thing—going back in time to talk to someone like that—or if he even did do that. I find myself getting excited at the thought of hearing the details, and that’s when I decide, yet again, that I am losing it. What high school football player gives a rat’s about meeting Robert Frost? About hearing if his father’s time travels filled him with invaluable insight from intellectuals and poets? Insanity. And yet, still intriguing.
Surfacing (Spark Saga) Page 13