The scene plays out in his mind as he gazes at the image on the screen.
“It’s just not very bluegrass,” Jacob says, trying out different angles in the mirror.
“It is so bluegrass,” says Caleb, batting him on the shoulder. “It’s American-made. How much more Americana can you get?”
“It’s just not really the kind of look that—”
“And you say I’m image-conscious.”
“You know, black guys and hoodies—it’s a whole thing.”
“You’re not that black.”
Jacob does an unconvincing double take. “Excuse me?”
Caleb squints. “Why don’t you just admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“You don’t want to wear it because you think it looks gay.”
“Come on, Cabes…” His nickname for Caleb.
“No, I’m serious, admit it. You’re afraid of looking gay.”
“I don’t feel the need to like present myself as… anything. That doesn’t mean I’m afraid of it.”
“You can’t even say it. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard you use the word.”
“Maybe I don’t like labels.”
“Maybe you don’t like that label…” Caleb crosses his arms and gives Jacob a stern look. “Have you told your parents yet?”
“Cabes…”
“Do they even know that I exist?”
Now’s the time, he thinks—invite him to come up to Maine with you. He’s practically done it for you. Say you’ll introduce him as your boyfriend, tell your parents that you’re… that… and that you’ve known it since you were twelve years old, when you looked at those porn videos you found in the family computer’s browsing history and felt absolutely nothing at the sight of barely legal, heavily made-up girls begging men to take advantage of them. Tell them that your older brother has known the whole time—that he’s the only one you told before you graduated high school, that the reason he was willing to take the fall for your stupid decision to watch porn on the family computer is that he respects how difficult this must be for you and wants you to know that he’s got your back, that he’ll always have your back, no matter what. It’ll warm their hearts to know their sons look out for each other like that. And it’ll let Caleb know that you’re serious about him, serious about this, that it’s not just a summer fling as far as you’re concerned, that he’s not just some groupie, that it’s… yes… it’s love. You’re in love with him. You don’t even have to say the words, not yet, even though you feel them beating at the inside of your sternum, begging to come out. Your chest is bruised from the thump-thump-thumping of your desire to tell him. But you don’t even have to say it. All you have to do is ask him to come up to Maine with you, and then he’ll know. It’s a win-win situation. You can set your whole life in order.
“Well?” says Caleb, his ginger eyebrows raised expectantly.
“It’s just that… I don’t…”
Say it. Say it.
“You don’t what?”
“Uh…” He looks himself over in the mirror again, as though his reflection might carry some secret store of courage that he lacks.
Jacob looks away from the screen, a fresh batch of tears collecting in his eyelids. He closes the browser and opens his messaging app. Matthew isn’t responding to his texts. Of course he isn’t—it must be the middle of the night in Europe.
Clara maybe. It’s worth a shot. He pulls up her name in his contacts and presses on the image of her laughing face, her mouth and nose covered by a bashful hand.
Come on, sis, he thinks, don’t let me down.
Clara is getting a nose job as soon as she goes to college. No question about it. Like the minute she gets there—the nanosecond. In fact, she might out a few weeks early so that it’ll be healed by orientation and her new classmates will never see her like this. She doesn’t care what her parents have to say about it. They won’t be able to stop her at that point. Anyway, they’ll understand once it’s done. They’ll see how great she looks and realize how miserable it must have been to live her whole life with this thing jutting out from the middle of her face. It’s not like she’s planning to go in for some kind of Michael Jackson hack job (may he rest in peace), just a little trim. She doesn’t need a world-class, Next-Top-Model shnozz, just something she can live with, something she can stomach. Unlike this. This. She is like literally sick just looking at it.
The lighting isn’t helping anything. She looks pale, droopy… lumpy. She lifts up her shirt to look at her belly and immediately sucks it in. Oh, God. You’d never guess she’s been putting in twelve hours a week on the volleyball court from those rolls. Hideous. Does Thomas really want to do it with this? Then again, it’s not like he’s Channing Tatum.
That’s an awful thought. Thomas is adorable… sexy, even… and she wouldn’t want to be here, in this cabin, about to do what they’re about to do, with anyone else. (Well, maybe Channing Tatum.)
Clara drops her shirt and looks at her nose again, the mirror beginning to fog over with steam from the shower, circling in on this unsatisfactory mug of hers, droplets of moisture beading on the bulbous end of the enormous protuberance in the middle of her face.
Her nose—is it going to get in the way if she goes down on him? It’s never been a problem for the women in the videos she’s seen (the ones her stupid brothers have sometimes forgotten to erase from their browsing history). But those guys, their things are so big…
Seriously, though, her nose would have to be like six inches for it to be a problem, and the old schnozzola isn’t that long. She knows—she’s measured.
Then again, she’s not exactly sure how long Thomas’s thing is. She’s never actually seen it, only felt it pressing against her through his slacks.
This is silly. She’s getting in her head about it. It’s like on the court. If you get caught up in whether you’re gonna look cool spiking the ball, you’re cooked. You’ve got to keep your head in the game, stay focused on the action, watch the seams on the ball. She learned this from her father.
Right. Dad. That’s exactly who she wants to be thinking about right now…
A light knock at the bathroom door. It opens a sliver. “Are you decent?” says Thomas.
“Do you want me to be?”
He peeks his head in and looks a bit disappointed when he finds her still clothed. “Your phone was vibrating. I think it’s your brother.”
“I’m sure it’s not important.”
Thomas nods, a curl of brown hair bouncing on his brow, his left lip corner rising. He swallows. His Adam’s apple does a little dance. “You want me to get in the shower with you?”
“Ewww, no way,” she says, then, “Sorry. I don’t mean you, it’s just the showers at the camp were super cold, so I didn’t really wash yesterday. I’m totally ripe.”
O. M. G. Why would she even say that to him? That’s the way you talk to your teammates, not the guy you’re about to hop into bed with. Now all he’s going to be thinking about is rotting fruit. Black-speckled bananas, cantaloupes caving in… bruised kiwis…
Thomas laughs. “All right,” he says. “I guess I’ll put some music on.” He goes back out to the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Clara turns back to the mirror. It’s fogged over now, so she no longer has to look at herself. Thank. God.
This is it. On the other end of this shower lies the thing she’s been putting off all summer. Why has she waited, and made Thomas wait (though, to his credit, he’s been totally patient)? For that matter, why do it now?
No particular reason, just a feeling. She wasn’t ready before, and now she is. At least, she thinks she is. Is she?
Come on, you’re a senior. A lot of girls do it in middle school.
Right. No big thing. Just go for it.
Her shirt is now damp with steam. She takes in a lungful of the humid air and starts to get undressed.
Jacob looks at the sleeve of the hoodie. The indigo fabric is darkened to midnight
blue by the beer he spilled on himself just before coming into the bathroom, not the only or the worst blemish the garment has picked up in the last 30 hours. He hasn’t taken the thing off since he left the store, opting to buy the shirt in lieu of asking Caleb to come up to Maine with him, accepting his fashion advice in place of telling him how he really feels.
He was still wearing the shirt last night when he got on-stage for a jam at Nectar’s, and when they went to an after-party at a house rented by some kids from UVM who had a seven-foot-tall bong you had to stand on a table to hit. He was wearing it when he puked in the second-floor toilet, and when he passed out on the floor of someone’s bedroom. He was wearing it when he awoke late in the morning, when he combed the whole house looking for Caleb but couldn’t find him, and when he stumbled to a diner down the street for some stomach-buffering grease and quickening caffeine.
He was wearing the hoodie when he got the text from Caleb.
When he opened the attached image.
When his heart broke.
Jacob pulls the front of the shirt up to his nose. Beneath the booze and the weed, it smells like Caleb—like clothes fresh off the rack—how, no matter how long and hard they’ve been partying, Caleb always has the scent of something that’s never been worn.
He should have known from the beginning. That first night, back in Turkey, Texas, Caleb had been getting messages from some dude all night, rolling his eyes and letting out exasperated sighs. It should have been obvious what was going on. He was leaving someone else for Jacob, just like he’s now left Jacob for someone else. No apologies. No explanations. It should have been obvious that this is his M.O.
Jacob tears open the zipper of the hoodie and yanks it off. He hurls it against the wall to the side of the toilet. Fuck this. Fuck Vermont, fuck Caleb, and sure as hell fuck this stupid hoodie that Caleb made him buy.
Someone knocks at the door to the stall.
“Just a second,” Jacob calls.
“Hey man, are you all right?”
“Yeah… I’m fine. Just give me a second.”
“You need me to call you a cab?” Jacob glances through the slit of the door. Ah, shit. It’s one of the bartenders. He’s totally gonna get kicked out of the place, if not arrested. That would be a stellar way to end this shit-fest of a day.
“No, no… I’m okay. Really.” He scrambles to his feet and opens the door. The bartender is an athletic guy with an un-ironic mustache. He’s kind of cute.
Do not go there.
“Good as new,” he says, giving the bartender a smile. The bartender smiles back, and Jacob can’t help but notice how his teeth gleam, even in the harsh light of the men’s room.
“What are they?” Clara asks, looking at the pair of tiny white pills sitting out on the nightstand, beside the box of Trojan condoms.
“What do you think?”
“Are those…”
“Pure Molly,” says Thomas. “MDMA, ecstasy, whatever you want to call it.”
“Wow.”
“Does that freak you out?”
“No.” She can tell that the tone of her voice isn’t convincing. “I mean, maybe a little.”
“We don’t have to do it,” he says. “I just thought you might want to try.”
She touches one of the pills, just with a fingertip, barely making contact. She feels a spasm of excitement, not so much from the thought of the drug’s effects, but the intoxicating allure of the forbidden. She’s been this close to something illegal only once before, when her friend Madison lifted a pair of earrings from the Gap and didn’t tell her until afterwards. She and Madison didn’t stay friends for long after that. It’s wild enough that she’s even here with Thomas, alone at his parents’ cabin, without the presence of narcotics. She’s never done anything like this. That’s what made it so easy to convince her parents that the retreat went a day longer than it did. They’d have no reason not to believe her. They didn’t even question it. This is the trust that seventeen years of excellent grades, better behavior, and perfect attendance have earned her, a trust her brothers—especially Jacob—have never enjoyed. Her parents don’t question anything she does.
“Have you done it before?”
“Sure,” says Thomas, “a couple of times.”
“How come you never told me that?”
“I don’t know… I didn’t want you to think that I’m like a casual drug user or a burnout or something. I don’t do this stuff to party. It’s more like an exploration.”
“What kind of exploration?”
“Of your mind. This little pill…” he picks one up “… it connects you with all of creation. It’s the kind of experience the sages talk about.”
“Wow,” says Clara, intrigued but not altogether clear on how this fits into her picture of the evening. It’s all a little heavy. She was imagining candles, chocolate-covered strawberries, maybe—maybe—a sip of wine or whiskey. But nothing like this. She feels the goose bumps rising beneath her gym shorts. Oh God, she’s getting nervous. Next, her face will go all flush. That’ll really set the mood. If she starts sweating, Thomas might need to get high to get into it.
“It’s unlike anything you ever tried,” he says.
“Well, yeah, because I haven’t tried anything.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you—”
“No, it’s cool,” she says.
“I shouldn’t have brought them.”
“It’s fine. Really. I was just surprised. Let me think about it, okay?”
Thomas rises from the bed and moves close to her. “And what do you want to do while you’re thinking about it?”
“I don’t know… I guess we could watch TV.”
“The TV’s all the way out in the living room.”
“Nuts.”
He brushes his lips against her neck. Now the goose bumps are everywhere.
“I guess we’ll just have to keep each other entertained,” he says. He kisses her, and any worry she has about her nose, her belly, or any other part of her body goes out the window.
The Friday night revelry on Church Street feels hostile to Jacob, meant to mock and malign him, point out his flaws, his desperation, his loneliness.
He wanders down the pedestrian thoroughfare, weaving through throngs of hollering bros and girls in push-up bras, past blazing lights from bars and clubs blasting rock & roll and house music, the signs up over the retail stores still lit long after they’ve closed. The city has gotten so gentrified, so corporatized, it’s just fucking gross. Not that he ever had a chance to see it in its pure state. Burlington was bought and sold by the time he was in middle school. But he’s heard stories about the way the place used to be: the real deal of counterculture and folk, sitting on a hill rolling down to the banks of Lake Champlain. He’d give anything, he thinks, to catch a glimpse of that, a time before all this chintzy, Adweek nonsense took over everything, a time when you could hope to have an authentic American experience, rather than the ersatz bullshit that’s been marketed to his generation their whole lives. What he wouldn’t give to have grown up when his parents did, to see what they had seen.
America is over, man. And Americana? Shit. You could lose your whole arm down the toilet trying to chase after that one. What is he even grasping at with the music that he plays? What, like picking up a banjo means you’re connected to something real and true? No dice. He and his friends are trying to revive something that’s in its third or fourth stage of decomposition. It’s hopeless. They can play the notes and sing the words, but it’ll never be the real deal. It’ll never get them anywhere near the real, actual roots of it. Everything’s a reprint these days, a digital facsimile. Like the art you see up in cheap motel rooms. And love? Forget about it. His problem isn’t that he’s lost Caleb, it’s that he thought something like that could be legit in the first place.
His will be the first generation that doesn’t know how to love. He wants to shout it out, post it to every social media platform he can find
. When millions of late-stage millennials wake up and realize that they never knew how to care and be cared about, he wants it documented that he was the first one to call it.
Some bro with a crew cut, shirt emblazoned with a ginormous Ralph Lauren emblem, bumps into Jacob’s shoulder.
“Watch where you’re going!” the guy says. The two dudes with him are singing the wrong words to a Bob Dylan song.
“Asshole,” Jacob mutters.
The guy wheels around. “What did you say?”
Jacob keeps walking.
“What the fuck did you say to me?” The guy is following him. Jacob turns around and stares at the guy. He’s not that tall, but he’s solidly built. A football or rugby player maybe, with his two clones a couple steps behind him ready to back him up. Jacob knows that his skinny ass is no match for any one of them, much less the trio. He’s gotten knocked around enough by his older brother’s lacrosse buddies to know that physical confrontations aren’t his forte. Then again, at a time like this, who really gives a fuck?
“What the fuck did you say?” the guy repeats, stepping up to Jacob.
“What do you think I said?” says Jacob, squaring off with the guy.
“I think you called me an asshole.”
“No, no, no… I didn’t call you an asshole.” He nods at one of the other guys. “Your friend’s the asshole—you’re clearly the pussy in this arrangement.”
Jacob is laid out on the walkway before he even realizes what’s happened, his left ear ringing, his vision cloudy. By the time he gathers himself together enough to stand, the three dudes have taken off, swallowed by the crowd.
Thomas is flying high. His pupils are dilated, and he’s sort of rolling his body parts over every surface in the room, gazing at things with an intense interest that Clara does not share.
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