by Blake Nelson
I went inside and found my way to the kitchen where the juniors and seniors were. None of my real friends were there. No Claude, Hanna, Petra, Olivia, Logan, or the rest of them. They were obviously somewhere else, doing something much more fun.
I made the best of it. I got a beer. Someone spilled orange juice on my Nikes. Madison was there, freaking out because so many people had shown up. She had no idea what was coming. But I knew. In about an hour every drunk kid on the West Side was going to appear. Madison would be lucky if her house was still standing by the end of the night. Even now people were telling her to call the police. Someone else was reporting that a freshman had passed out in her bathtub. And then two sophomores, wrestling in the living room, broke the coffee table in half. Poor Madison. “This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of party!” she cried, which is what people like her always say.
• • •
I stayed for forty-five minutes. To stay any longer would make me look bad. As I walked back to my car, I heard someone yelling down the street. I looked and saw Antoinette and another girl running hand in hand up the hill toward the party. They ran by me, breathless and laughing. The other girl I knew vaguely. Her name was Kai. She had an even weirder haircut than Antoinette. The two of them were absurdly overdressed. Antoinette wore a fur coat and Kai had sparkly stuff all over her face. Both had bright red lipstick on, which no normal Evergreen girl would ever wear.
They didn’t see me, so I called out, “Antoinette!” She slowed down and stared at me blankly. She was very drunk. They both were. Kai immediately pulled on her arm, dragging her forward.
“The party sucks,” I called after them.
“We don’t care!” yelled Kai into the air.
They continued up the hill. I got in my car.
15
So yeah, junior year, a lot of stuff was different. And not just for me. There were new friendships, new cliques, new couples. One day I was at my locker when I heard a shriek behind me. I turned and here came six-foot-three-inch Austin Wells carrying tiny, slender Grace Anderson slung over his shoulder. “Coming through! Coming through!” he shouted. “Emergency girl removal!” Everyone jumped out of the way, laughing and pointing at Grace, who was also laughing and making faces as she beat her little fists against Austin’s huge back.
Of course, there were rules against carrying people in the hallways. But that didn’t stop Austin. He turned out to be this big, goofy, teddy-bear-type guy. And with Grace being so small and skinny, a lot of carrying went on. But people liked them, you could tell. They became a very popular couple. This gave Grace a new confidence. She’d been so timid and reserved with me, but now she’d run up behind Austin and jump on his back. It became their thing. Everyone loved how much they were in love.
Meanwhile, the rift between Claude and me remained. There wasn’t actual hostility between us, but there wasn’t any communication, either. I would see him in the halls and sometimes we’d exchange a head nod. But that was it. I could follow what was happening in his life through other people. It hadn’t been a great summer for him tennis-wise. He had made it to the finals of the Idaho Junior Championships but had not done well in California or in Washington State, either. He looked different too. Something in his face had changed slightly. He was still very good-looking, but he seemed to have lost some of his Claude swagger. I assumed this was because of the tennis. Getting your ass kicked all up and down the West Coast, that was no fun. It made me glad I had bailed on that.
And then there was Hanna. I didn’t talk to her, either. And yet I didn’t hate her. It was hard to hate Hanna even if you had a good reason, which I did. For the new school year, she’d changed her hair. She had new highlights and her hair was a different shape, curving inward around her neck. She had obviously asked her stylist for a fresh look for junior year. But it looked sort of cheesy, and the next week she had it changed again, more like her old hairstyle but still with the highlights.
Despite hating Petra for talking to Claude, Hanna and Petra had somehow become friends over the summer, while Grace, who mostly hung out with Austin Wells’s friends, had moved away from them both. This made sense in a way. Hanna had really hurt Grace by making out with me at Logan’s party, though that wasn’t how other people saw it. That mess was generally considered my fault, which was true in a way. Though to be honest, it wasn’t a huge topic of conversation. That was summer stuff—ancient history. Nobody cared once school started.
The main thing was how popular Grace and Austin became. People were always talking about them, even more than Hanna and Claude. They were more real in a way. Though Hanna and Claude were pretty real too. That was their dirty little secret: They really were in love. I’m sure from the outside it didn’t look that way. Most people considered them shallow and spoiled (they were often referred to as “Ken and Barbie”). But they really did share everything with each other. That part was never an act.
• • •
As for me, I had no girlfriend and barely any guy friends left. I didn’t even have my older brother to make fun of anymore. That actually became a problem, going home to that big empty house every night. I missed Russell. I’d go shoot baskets in the driveway and think about the epic games we used to play with the neighborhood kids. I was always a better athlete than he was and was the same size as him for many years, though he would still win somehow, often by talking us out of something or changing the rules. At those moments it became obvious he was genuinely smarter than me. But in other ways, he was a total dork. He always liked the worst music. He’d get super into Porsche cars or Rolex watches and he’d rattle off specifications to you, or tell you how incredibly expensive something was, as if that proved beyond a doubt how great it was. I wasn’t like that. Sometimes the plainest thing was the best thing.
Russell had the better room of the two of us. Now that he was gone, I would go in there sometimes, to look at things or to steal a pair of socks. As a senior, he’d arranged the room like an office, like my dad’s. He had a big desk and a fancy chair. He would be a good lawyer, that was pretty obvious, though he never expressed that as his objective. That was because Dad told him not to. Dad told him to keep his options open, to go into law only if that’s what he really wanted. But Russell didn’t know what he wanted. Except for money. He knew he wanted that. How else was he going to get all those Porsches and Rolex watches?
16
One night I was in my room, messing around with my brother’s camera, and my phone rang. It was Antoinette.
“Do you wanna go driving?” she said. I could tell she was outside somewhere.
“Driving where?” I asked.
“Just driving, with Kai and me.”
I thought about it a second. I wasn’t doing anything else. “Okay,” I said.
“Where do you live?”
I told her my address. “Can I bring my camera?” I asked.
“Bring anything you want.”
They arrived outside my house ten minutes later. They honked their horn.
I mumbled some explanation to my mother and headed out the front door. I strode down the driveway and crawled into the backseat of Kai’s beige Subaru. Kai was driving. Antoinette was in the front passenger seat. When I closed the door, Kai hit the gas and we screeched away down the street. I said nothing as I tried to protect my camera from Kai’s bouncy driving style.
“Is that new?” said Antoinette, looking back at the camera.
“No. It’s my brother’s.”
“Can you take pictures in the dark?”
“With a flash.”
“Can you buy cigarettes?” said Kai.
“Cigarettes?” I said. “I don’t know. I never tried.”
“We need cigarettes,” said Antoinette.
“What do you need cigarettes for?”
“Uh, like, to smoke?” said Kai.
“We thought, since you’re tall . . . ,” said Antoinette.
“I’m not that tall.”
“People card u
s because we look weird,” said Kai. “Which is so, like, sexist or lookist or whatever.”
“You have to be eighteen,” said Antoinette.
“Will you do it?” said Kai.
I looked out the window of the car. “I can try,” I said.
We pulled into a Safeway. Kai and Antoinette thought this was the best place. I left my camera and went inside. I bought a liter bottle of Cherry Coke, a bag of Sun Chips, a pack of gum, and then asked for two packs of Marlboro Lights. The checkout lady, to my amazement, sold them to me. I thanked her and went out. Back in the car, I tossed the two packs of cigarettes into the front seat. Kai hit the gas and we screeched out of the parking lot.
So then they smoked. And I ate Sun Chips. Nobody really talked. Kai put on the radio and bopped around in her seat as she drove. Antoinette didn’t bop around. She was looking at something on her phone. I watched the two of them. I wondered if they did this every night.
They wanted to go to a place called Command Control. This was an arcade downtown, on a scuzzy block near the bus station. Command Control had pinball machines, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and other games from the past. It was also full of skeevy, downtown, bus-station-type people. Kai and Antoinette showed no fear and walked straight in. I had my camera around my neck and gripped it a little extra tightly as I squeezed in among the leather jackets and homemade tattoos. One guy had two tiny metal studs sticking out of his forehead. I tried to maintain a neutral expression on my face.
Kai wanted to play a game called Street Fight in the Bronx, but it was currently occupied by a huge woman with dyed black hair and pockmarks. So then Kai was freaking out and she sent Antoinette over to the woman to ask how long she was going to be. Antoinette came back and said she was almost done.
So then Kai got to play Street Fight in the Bronx. Antoinette and I walked around and looked at the different games. It was very dark and noisy in there. It smelled like mold and cleaning chemicals. Then Antoinette wanted to go outside and smoke. I followed her out. We sat on the curb of the street, her smoking and me trying to act casual with my four-thousand-dollar camera while bums and criminals and drug dealers hovered around.
“So I heard what happened to you last summer,” said Antoinette.
“Oh yeah?”
“You got seduced by Hanna. Which is how you lost your girlfriend.”
“Oh that,” I said, lifting my camera and focusing on the parking lot sign across the street.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” said Antoinette. “When I saw you at the Garden Center?”
“It was private.”
“So private the whole school knows about it,” said Antoinette.
“It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“How can you say that? You lost your best friend! And your girlfriend. Who now goes out with that lunkhead football player.”
“They’re a good couple, though, don’t you think?”
“I don’t care about people like that,” said Antoinette, smoking.
“Well, neither do I.”
“Really? So you’re not a jock anymore? What are you, then? A photographer?”
I was still looking around through my viewfinder. There were a bunch of people standing outside the Starlight Theater on the next block. I picked out two girls and zoomed in on them. The camera electronically adjusted itself, bringing their faces into focus.
“What are you?” I asked Antoinette.
“Me?” said Antoinette. “I’m just the same. I never change.”
“You’ve got a new friend. Kai.”
“Yes, I do.”
“That’s something different. You had different friends last year.”
“Oh, my ‘suicide friends,’ as you guys called them.”
“I didn’t call them that.”
“Your friends did.”
“What happened to Bennett?” I asked.
“We broke up.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It ran its course. It was mostly a sex thing anyway.”
I stared through my viewfinder. The two girls outside the Starlight were also smoking cigarettes.
“Have you had sex yet, Gavin?” asked Antoinette.
“No,” I said.
“You better get on that,” she said. “You don’t want to be the last virgin at Evergreen High School.”
“I won’t be.”
“Oh yeah? You got someone lined up?”
I ignored this. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” I asked.
“Ha-ha,” she said, putting her cigarette out on the curb. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
• • •
Back in the Subaru, Kai hit the car in front of us as she tried to leave her parking spot. She hit it pretty hard. There was a crunch.
“Shit,” she said.
“Kai!” said Antoinette.
Kai quickly shifted into reverse. “It’s their own fault they parked too close!”
She pulled back and hit the car behind her. “Shit!” she said again.
“Stop hitting the other cars!” said Antoinette.
“I’m not trying to hit them!”
“Hurry. Someone might come.”
Kai pulled forward and hit the car in front of us again.
“I can’t believe this,” said Antoinette.
“What!?” said Kai. Finally she maneuvered out of the parking spot. She hit the gas and the Subaru screeched into the street.
“Can you drive by the front of that theater?” I asked Kai when we stopped at the light.
“Why?” said Kai.
“I wanna take a picture of those two girls.”
“Gavin’s a photographer now,” explained Antoinette.
Kai looked at the theater. “You want to take a picture of those girls?” said Kai. “They’re not even cute.”
But when the light turned green, she did it, swerving into the closer lane and pulling up in front of the theater.
When I saw that she was cooperating, I lowered my window. I moved back away from it so I wouldn’t be too obvious.
Kai pulled the car right up against the curb and stopped.
The girls were perfectly framed beneath the marquee of the theater. It was a great shot: the two of them, in their hipster clothes, looking bored, looking cool. It was perfect. I clicked off a half-dozen shots.
“Hey, girls,” called Kai out her window. The two girls stopped their conversation and looked at us. I clicked off several more shots.
“What’s up?” said Kai.
The girls sneered at her once and went back to their conversation.
“Oh, another thing,” Kai said to them. “You’re ugly.”
One of the girls flipped us off. Kai hit the gas. The car screeched into the street. For a moment nobody said anything. Then we all burst out laughing.
17
The next day, in the cafeteria at lunch, I had my usual problem of where to sit. At the beginning of the year I had avoided Claude and Hanna’s table completely. But then sometimes if there were a lot of people sitting with them I’d sit there too, off to one side. If Logan was there, I could always sit next to him. But if Claude and Hanna were sitting alone, or with one or two other people, I usually went elsewhere. Not that I would be shunned or anything. Nobody was antagonistic toward me. It was just awkward.
That day, though, before I looked to see where Claude and Hanna were, I looked for Antoinette and Kai. I’d never eaten with them, but maybe I should. We could talk about our crazy night. Of course they probably didn’t think it was that crazy. They probably did stuff like that all the time.
But then, as I stood scanning the tables, I remembered that Antoinette never came to the cafeteria. That was one of her things back in her “suicide friends” days. She had gotten an actual note from her mother to be excused from ever eating lunch there. Some of her other suicide friends had done the same. They had claimed that the cafeteria was “shaming” and made you feel bad about yourself if you didn’t h
ave the right clothes or friends or whatever.
I’d assumed that was bullshit at the time. But it was kind of true in a way. That huge, noisy room was not a fun place when your social position was in question. Lunch had always been one of my favorite parts of school. But not so much now.
• • •
That night, at home before bed, my dad called me into his office upstairs. He was sitting at his desk, doing something on his computer. He still had on his shirt and tie from work.
I came in and sat in the armchair. He continued to do whatever he was doing. It took a while. Finally he sent off an e-mail and sat back and considered me for several seconds.
“Your mother said your clothes smelled of cigarette smoke last night.”
I was caught off guard by this.
“Oh, uh . . . yeah,” I said. “I was in a car with some people . . . who were smoking.”
“Which people?”
“These girls from school. I don’t know them very well.”
“Why were you in a car with them?”
I shrugged. “I just was.”
My father stared at me. He sat forward. “Since she smelled the cigarette smoke, your mother looked through the pockets of your coat. She found a receipt for two packs of Marlboro Lights.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Those weren’t for me. Those were for the girls.”
My dad pursed his lips. “A year ago you were a state-ranked tennis player. And now you’re smoking cigarettes?”
“Dad, I don’t smoke. It was these two girls from school. I’m not even friends with them.”
My father watched me without listening. “It’s not necessary to explain,” he said.
“But it is. Because I didn’t smoke those—”
“I don’t care,” he said with that quiet power he can muster in his voice. My lawyer dad was very good at talking, arguing, making you feel inferior, making you feel like an idiot. “Your life is your own now,” he said. “Do you understand that?”