“You don’t need to answer that, Pup,” said Mrs. Douglass, giving him a dignified look and placing a protective hand on his arm.
“Kendra’s right, though,” said another woman, sipping deeply from her glass. “And what’s wrong with it, honestly? I mean, I know, Caroline, she’s your daughter. And she’s only sixteen. But jeez, don’t you guys remember passion?” Her voice had taken on that faraway quality when adults start reminiscing. “The desperation? The not being able to wait even one more second? You’d do it anywhere, anytime you got the chance! The forest preserve. The beach. The hall closet at some party.”
“The laundry room,” sighed Long Nails.
“The last shower on the right in our freshman dorm.” Cheeseball smiled.
“Mm-hmm. Now it’s strictly missionary, under the covers, don’t even bother to take your socks off, if neither one of you has an early meeting in the morning.”
Pup stood there uncomfortably. They had definitely forgotten he was there.
“I do remember that passion,” Mrs. Douglass said, plucking a grape from its stem. “And I get it. But it’s like Missy says, this is my daughter we’re talking about here. And I don’t want to leave them alone together for even five minutes.”
“Five minutes?” Long Nails said. “Hell, it only takes Larry two!” They all began screeching with laughter then, and Pup, seeing his chance, fled toward the basement.
Padding down the carpeted basement stairs, Pup discovered Izzy and Brody squashed up together on one side of the couch and a very surly looking Julissa Jones on the other. Julissa was Izzy’s sort-of friend; they studied together sometimes, but overall Izzy mostly complained about Julissa: how she would quibble with their AP Euro teacher, Mr. Pinski, over half of a percentage point. How she would peek over at your paper to see how you did on tests, and if you did worse than she did, how she would ask you, innocently, what grade you got, just so she could gloat. How she had once stormed out of a study group, declaring, “I can’t even deal with people who don’t understand the underpinnings of the French Revolution.” Julissa’s signature look was a cool pair of green-framed glasses and a rotating collection of snarky graphic tees. For tonight, she had chosen one that read simply
NOPE
in huge letters across the chest. It was a message that perfectly complemented her scowl and her tightly crossed arms.
Technically, when Izzy had invited Pup over to her house, she hadn’t been lying. Technically, four people was a party, at least according to his mother’s definition. But in reality, it was less a party and more like the double date she’d been threatening to arrange. Which in a way was worse than if she’d come right out and asked Pup to chaperone her hookup sessions with Brody. Izzy was trying to distract Pup, to pawn him off on some other girl. On any girl at all, really, because if she’d thought about it for even one minute, she would have realized that Pup Flanagan and Julissa Jones were the world’s most incompatible humans.
Brody, as it turned out, had succeeded in sneaking beer into the basement. Pup was tempted to grab one from the twelve-pack Izzy had hidden underneath their jackets in case Mrs. Douglass came downstairs; after all, everybody else already had a can in hand, and beer, he’d been told, could be very useful at making unbearably awkward situations slightly more bearable. But seeing Luke stumble home with black eyes and ripped shirt collars and puke on his clothes enough times had soured Pup on drinking for good. When Brody offered him a bottle, he waved it away.
“More for me,” Brody said. He shrugged, then belched loudly, causing Izzy to dissolve into giggles, which annoyed Pup because up until seven months ago, he’d never seen Izzy giggle in his life, especially not at disgusting bodily sounds.
They turned back to the television, some reality dating show whose contestants looked only slightly less miserable than Julissa did. Pup sat down next to her, because it was the only open spot left on the couch, prompting Julissa to scrunch herself up in a protective ball as if Pup really was an anglerfish—bulgy eyed, slimy skinned, heinous.
Meanwhile, Izzy and Brody immediately started kissing. Pup pulled out his cracked phone, the crutch he used whenever he wanted to pretend that whatever unpleasant thing that was happening nearby was not happening. But Julissa was a bit more assertive.
“Hey!” She picked up a couch cushion and threw it at the striped blanket they were beginning to pull over themselves. “You perverts need to cool it. There are other people in the room.”
“Sorry.” Izzy pushed the blanket away and sheepishly began fixing her disheveled clothes. “I forgot.” She glanced at Pup, an apology in her eyes. “Do you guys want to play a game or something?”
“Yeah.” Julissa took a swig of her beer. “Like what?”
“Well, I think we have Scrabble. Apples to Apples. And maybe Monopoly.” She started to get up and go over to the shelf where the Douglasses kept their board games.
“No,” Julissa said. “Not a game like that. Like, a party game.”
Brody, who’d been staring with his mouth half open in resting dumb-face, suddenly looked intrigued.
“Yeah,” he said slowly, catching Julissa’s meaning. “A party game.”
“What’s a party game?” Izzy looked genuinely puzzled.
“You know. Seven Minutes in Heaven. Spin the Bottle. That kind of thing.”
“What are we, twelve?”
“Wait, Iz.” Brody had encircled Izzy’s wrist with his thumb and forefinger. Pup hated when he did that. Like Izzy was a little child. Or Brody’s property. “I think it could be kind of fun. What do you think, Flanagan? Spin the Bottle? Are you ready for your first kiss or what?”
Pup flamed red. “I’ve kissed a girl before, asshole.”
“When?”
“None of your business.” He wasn’t lying: He had kissed a girl before. Kelley Spear. When he was twelve. Playing Spin the Bottle. But Brody didn’t need to know this.
“Well, I think it’s a great idea,” Julissa said. She was already arranging herself cross-legged on the floor, draining her beer so they’d have an empty bottle to spin.
“Me too,” Brody said, leaping to the floor in a show of energy he rarely displayed.
“I don’t know,” said Izzy.
“Yeah,” Pup agreed. “We’re not in junior high anymore. My vote is for Scrabble.”
“Mine too.” Izzy shot him a grateful smile.
“Come on, you guys,” Julissa said. “We’ll play one round. And if it gets weird, for anybody, at any time, we’ll have a safe word. If you call out the safe word, game’s over, no questions asked.”
“What’s the safe word?” Izzy had gravitated over to Brody and joined the other two on the floor; it was only Pup still holding out on the couch.
“Let’s pick something from AP Euro,” said Julissa. “AP exams are next week. How about the Defenestration of Prague?”
“The what?”
“It was this incident in 1600s central Europe that led to the Thirty Years’ War.”
Brody and Pup looked at her blankly.
“To defenestrate someone is to throw them out a window.”
“Fine,” Brody said. “Whatever. ‘Defenestrate’ is the safe word. I have another ground rule too. As far as same-sex kissing: I’m open-minded and everything, but I am not kissing Flanagan. But you two girls, if you land on each other, feel free to go for it.” His mouth twisted up into a sleazy grin. Pup noticed a poppy seed wedged between his two front teeth.
Julissa shrugged. “I’m game for whatever.”
“I think I need another beer,” said Izzy.
Brody volunteered to go first. He placed Julissa’s empty beer on the floor and gave it a good spin. It came to a stop pointing directly at Izzy. She smiled and sat up a little straighter.
“Well, this should be easy,” Brody said. He leaned across the circle and shoved his tongue down Izzy’s throat. Pup closed his eyes until it was over.
“Okay,” Julissa said. “My turn.” She spun the bo
ttle. When Izzy saw where it landed, the color drained from her cheeks.
“I guess it’s your lucky day,” Izzy said to Brody. “Two girls in one night.”
“Just like the Today show feared,” said Pup. “A teenage sex party.”
“Yeah,” Izzy joked, though she wasn’t laughing. “And my poor mom is upstairs, drinking wine and discussing Madame Bovary like it’s all under control down here.”
“Pretty sure they’re not discussing Madame Bovary,” Pup said, though no one was paying attention to him.
“Sorry, Iz,” Julissa said, without a hint of actual apology in her voice. “I promise it will just be for a quick second.”
“It’s just part of the game, babe.” Brody leaned over to squeeze Izzy’s shoulder. “Cool?”
“Fine. I guess.” She shook him off and looked away, hugging her knees.
Julissa dropped to all fours and crawled across the circle toward Brody. Pup couldn’t see too well because Julissa’s butt was in his face, but Izzy, who was sitting next to Brody, had a full view if she chose to look. Instead, she kept her eyes trained on her knees while Julissa put her hands on the carpet in front of Brody’s crossed legs, inclined her face, leaned in slowly, and kissed him on the lips. She kept her promise, and only kissed him for a second. But it was a long second.
“That wasn’t so bad, babe,” Brody was saying now, his mouth glistening with Julissa’s lip gloss. “Was it?”
Izzy ignored him and picked up the bottle. “Now it’s my turn,” she said, and gave the bottle a vicious spin as Brody began to chant. “Ju-liss-a! Ju-liss-a!”
But it didn’t land on Julissa, as Brody had hoped.
It landed on Pup.
“Well, we are best friends,” Izzy said, raising an eyebrow at him and laughing a little nervously. “Not a big deal, right?”
Pup forced himself to laugh, too. “Not at all,” he managed to mumble.
So here it was: the moment he had been dreaming of since that November afternoon back in freshman year. But he had never wanted it like this. Being forced into it, with two other laughing sets of eyes watching, as if it were all some elaborate joke.
Izzy took another sip of beer and licked her lips. She paused a moment, setting her jaw. Once, in the cafeteria, Pup had dared her to squirt a whole packet of mayonnaise into her mouth. She had taken the dare, and the look on her face before she squeezed was the same look on her face now.
“Ready?”
Pup nodded. He couldn’t speak.
Izzy put her beer down, brushed her hair back from her eyes, and leaned across the circle. She kneeled in front of Pup, put a hand on each of his shoulders, and kissed him, gently, on the lips. It was one second, two seconds, three. It was freshman year sitting next to her for the first time at the Pity Party; it was sophomore year homecoming, her showing up at his house in a yellow dress, pinning a matching boutonniere to his hand-me-down blazer that had once belonged to Patrick; it was the beginning of junior year just before she’d met Brody and changed and forgotten him; it was her French braids and her freckle-dusted shoulders, her marble-white skin, the mole on the divot of her collarbone, her laughter, the seaweed smell of her hair that summer weekend he’d spent up at her grandpa’s cottage on Fox Lake.
She pulled away and sat back on her heels. She looked at his face, in his eyes, and finally saw clearly the thing she had missed for nearly three years. And Pup knew, by the pitying look on her face as this understanding dawned on her, that no matter how much he wished it were different, he and Izzy Douglass would never be anything more than friends.
“Dude,” Brody said, bursting into laughter, “your face is so red I think your zits are blushing.”
“Defenestrate,” whispered Izzy.
Line:
a mark made by a pointed object; a moving point
8
SUNDAYS IN THE FLANAGAN HOUSEHOLD always began and ended in the same way. In the morning, Pup’s mom went around the house trying to get somebody to go to mass with her, and everybody made some excuse as to why they couldn’t. Exasperated and huffy, Judy Flanagan would eventually give up and go slamming out the door in her white dress flats and matching purse, muttering about the state of her family’s souls, with Pup’s dad calling after her from the couch: “Pray for us, hun!” An hour or so later she came home in a much better mood, filled with the holy word of god and the neighborhood gossip she’d picked up in the vestibule after the service, and started making sauce.
In the evening, all the siblings came over, along with their spouses and kids, for Sunday dinner. Pup’s mother always made the same thing: ten pounds of spaghetti Bolognese, a tossed salad in the gigantic wooden bowl she’d gotten from her great-aunt as a wedding gift, and about twelve loaves of garlic bread. The Flanagans weren’t Italian, but pasta was the cheapest food you could get to feed a small army of offspring. Plus, Pup’s mom had learned how to make the sauce from her childhood neighbor, Mrs. Tagliaferri, who’d grown up in the Apennine mountains of northern Italy and, so the story went, had hired Pup’s teenage mom one summer to help slaughter chickens in her backyard coop, paying her not with money but with recipes.
The dining room in Pup’s house was filled almost wall-to-wall with a giant wooden slab of a table lined with long benches that, if you really crammed, could fit everyone in the family except for a handful of the youngest kids, who ate their dinners in adults’ laps or at a card table in the kitchen. It was a tight squeeze, but nobody minded, because the Flanagans were the type of family who believed in togetherness. All twenty-five of the Flanagan children and grandchildren lived within the same pizza delivery zone, a two-mile radius that fanned out around the central point of their house. This meant that in Flanland—which was what Carrie had nicknamed their neighborhood way back when she’d first started dating Luke—you were expected to spend a lot of time with your family, whether you wanted to or not. Pup never understood why people got all paranoid about drones and government surveillance. That was his normal life. Dozens of pale blue eyes, all the same shade and sprung from the same gene pool, followed him wherever he went. One time, he’d been walking down the street and sneezed, and his brother-in-law Mike called out “Bless you, Pup!” from a passing car. The first and only time he’d ever tried smoking a cigarette, standing in the alley behind the 7-Eleven with his buddies Robbie and Jeremy and a pack of Kool Milds stolen from Jeremy’s aunt, Pup barely had a chance to take his first-ever puff before his sister Mary had whizzed by on her bike and, without even slowing down, reached out and plucked it from his mouth.
Sunday dinners were the cornerstone of Flanland life. Work schedules and vacations were planned around them. Pup’s sister Noreen had famously shown up to Sunday dinner one day after giving birth to her third child. These meals were loud, they were chaotic, and they were sacred. If you were going to miss one, you had better have a good reason—and in his almost seventeen years of life, Pup never had. But on the Sunday after Izzy’s “party,” Luke, without sending out so much as a vague explanatory text, didn’t show up.
His absence was noticed by all, but openly discussed by none. It was not brought up except in whispered one-on-one conversations between the siblings and spouses as they helped set the table or corralled their children: Anybody seen Luke? Somebody call him. Maybe he’s studying. He’s got the bar exam coming up in, what, six weeks? Yeah, and I’ll be glad when it’s over. He has been so prickly lately. You can’t talk to him about anything. Poor Carrie, having to put up with him for all these years. Hey, somebody text her—she’ll know where he is. No, she works at the restaurant on Sundays. Quiet, quiet—here comes Mom.
Throughout the meal, the family stuck to its favorite feel-good topic: the glorious achievements of Pup’s nephew, Declan. Declan was Pup’s oldest sister Jeanine’s oldest son, and he was actually older than Pup by two months and five days. They were in the same grade at Lincoln, though few people ever connected the two of them, and why would they? Declan was effortlessly athletic, smart,
handsome, and popular. Not only that, scouts from several prestigious universities were already recruiting Dec to play college basketball. He’d been a starter on Lincoln’s varsity team since freshman year, when Pup had warmed the bench for the B team before being cut during sophomore JV tryouts. Declan had received a brand-new car for his sixteenth birthday, while Pup was lucky if his parents let him borrow their boat-length sedan to drive three blocks to the gas station for the occasional Snickers bar. One of Declan’s favorite things to do when he saw Pup in the hallways at school was to call out, “Hey, Uncle Pup!” which always got a laugh from his teammates and hot girlfriend, Muriel. It made Pup furious, but there was nothing he could do about it, because he was Declan’s uncle, ridiculous as it seemed.
That Sunday, Jeanine took the floor as soon as the pasta was doled out. “I hate to brag about my kids,” she began, which, as everyone in the family knew, was her standard line before she started bragging about her kids, “but as you know, we’ve always told Dec that he’s a scholar-athlete, and not an athlete-scholar. Academics always come first. And clearly, he’s been listening.”
“Mom,” Declan protested weakly, but he knew it was pointless because once Jeanine got going there was no stopping her.
The rest of the family waited politely as she looked around the massive table filled with plates heaped with steaming spaghetti, and made sure everyone was paying attention before she unfurled her news.
“We received a call from Georgetown University on Friday,” Jeanine said finally, smiling adoringly at her oldest son. “Dec? Do you want to tell them?”
“Mom,” Dec said. “Come on.” Pup rolled his eyes across the table at Annemarie. She winked back at him. They weren’t fooled: Declan liked to play the humility card, but they both knew he was loving this.
“Go on!” chirped Jeanine. “If you can’t brag to your family, who can you brag to?”
Across the table, Annemarie caught Pup’s eye and mouthed, Everybody.
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