WE HEARD THE CROWD from a block away. The houses we passed were old and they were big and each one was unique from its neighbor. As we got closer, the streets, driveways, and gravel parking lots became more and more full of cars. They were mostly bangers and junkers—the kinds of cars that college kids buy so they don’t have to worry about backing into fire hydrants. Matty slowed down in front of a dirty beige pickup that had a jumbled mess of tools, coolers, and lawn bags sticking out of the back. A decal along the passenger door said “Home Grown Maintenance.”
“You okay?” Michael asked her. She was looking at the truck and suddenly she was hundreds of miles away.
“Huh?” she said, swallowing and snapping back to us in an instant.
He smiled. “Is the baby kicking?”
“Nope. Everything is okay,” she said. “Here.” She opened her belly with a ripping noise and held out beers for us. “Baby beers!”
“Oh, shit, that reminds me,” Faisal said. He patted around on his coat before reaching behind his back and pulling out an empty Diet Faygo Cream Soda bottle. “Here. It’s bad enough people are going to be smoking around your little bastard.”
She laughed; we cracked our beers and Matty dumped hers into the bottle.
“See, Moses,” Faisal said, “That’s the difference between a third-wheel friend and a load-bearing friend. Gotta pull your weight.”
We rounded the corner, right into the arms of a crowd of college kids mingling on the lawn, porch, and driveway of an old house. They were all laughing and talking and drinking out of plastic cups; it was a sea of flannel and Halloween costumes featuring brightly colored leggings and skinny jeans and facial hair and partially shaved heads.
The thing about small towns—like Guthrie, like Greenfield—is that everybody knows everybody’s story. I know that my mail carrier, Mira Evans, miscarried three times before having her first kid; I know that my seventh-grade math teacher buys weed from my seventh-grade bully.
But here, in the throng of college students, I was nobody.
I was baggageless. I wasn’t Moses Hill and I sure as hell wasn’t Charlie Baltimore’s cousin. It was one of the things I was feeling at camp too. Below the suspicion of new friends and authority figures in shorts, that strange weightlessness in the pit of my stomach was genuine anonymity. And it turned out that there was a whole world of it. It wasn’t just a matter of pretending to be someone else in the face of sad, brokenhearted adults in line at Chicago convenience stores.
We headed for the packed porch. When we hit the wall of college kids, Matty started rubbing her stomach with one hand and massaging the small of her back with the other, groaning just loud enough for people to hear.
The sea of flannel parted.
Matty led us up the stairs to the deepest reaches of the porch. When we got to the back, two guys sitting on the banister immediately got up and gestured toward the rail. The guy closest to us blew smoke out of the side of his lips and waved it frantically away.
“Shit. Sorry. Here, please,” he said. He was dressed like a panda. After craning around and assessing whether or not he could fit his panda-body anywhere, he moved to the other side of the porch next to a wizard with a staff made of beer cans and duct tape.
“We should have worn costumes, guys,” Matty said.
“You’re already in costume,” Michael said to her. “Or just flip that shit around your back and you can be a sexy hunchback.”
“Yeah, but real costumes. I don’t want to be a sexy hunchback.”
“Everything is sexy and dumb,” Faisal said. “Remember when everything wasn’t always sexy and dumb on Halloween? Which also, by the way, is going to be the name of my memoir: ‘Everything Is Sexy and Dumb: The Faisal Al-Aziz story.’”
A hipster in a winter hat and an ugly sweater whistled through his fingers before waving his arms. “All right! Guys! Next up, all the way from Milwaukee, we have The Entertainment. And just a reminder, if you’re here to see Meat Bath, they’re playing in the basement!”
The porch full of people erupted with applause before going silent in anticipation. I followed the rapt eyes of the quiet crowd and found that the band was indistinguishable from the rest of the people. The lead singer sat on the far end of the porch with his acoustic guitar; the woman to his right held a tambourine; the guy to his left cupped a harmonica to his lips. The lead in the middle looked back and forth between them, smiling and nodding, mouthing “One, two, three,” before strumming into the music. The girl shook her instrument every few seconds, rhythmic and melancholic, the notes twinkling out next to the bare chords of the lead. The crowd didn’t murmur.
I’d spent so long listening to classic rock with Charlie that I’d forgotten what it felt like to sway instead of thrash. The music on the porch didn’t need to be cranked up or accompanied by blistering guitar solos.
Instead, there was poetry woven through the muted notes.
I took a long pull from my beer and somewhere, deep in the house, vibrations trembled their way out under our feet.