CHRISTIAN’S HOUSE WAS A BEIGE BRICK ranch on a block of identical beige brick ranches, the parkways lined with those wimpy little trees the city plants each spring. We followed Kenzie down his gangway toward the drifting smell of cheap beer and the shouts of teenagers, through a small square of neatly mowed backyard, and out into the alley where the garage was packed from wall to wall with about two dozen kids, the door standing open to the warm night. Before we had a chance to even step inside, a burly kid with a patchy brown beard, a backward Cubs hat, and a Kris Bryant jersey blocked us from going any farther.
“Five bucks each,” he said, thrusting a Solo cup in front of us that was already stuffed with money.
“Christian invited us,” Kenzie said importantly.
“So? It’s still five bucks. Or do you think kegs grow on trees?” He smiled, pleased with his display of figurative language.
“Can you break a hundred?” Kenzie sighed, reaching into the pocket of her cutoffs and casually producing a crumpled bill. Her family had no more money than the rest of ours did, but she liked to carry around large bills to give the impression that she was rich. The boy was clearly impressed, though he tried not to show it. He plucked the money from her outstretched hand and made a big production of holding it up to inspect for counterfeit currency while we rolled our eyes at one other. Finally, when he was satisfied, he slowly counted out eighty bucks in change and handed us four Solo cups.
“Wait a second,” Emily piped. “I’m the designated driver. You’re making me pay, too?”
He looked her up and down, assessing her. Finally he said, “Consider it a tax for letting you hang out with us.”
Emily shrank back, embarrassed, while Kenzie reached forward and neatly plucked a five-dollar bill back from the wad in his hand.
“Why don’t you consider this?” she asked, leaning toward him on a jutting hip. “Your sandals are a fashion tragedy, and boys who haven’t finished going through puberty shouldn’t try growing beards. Now where’s the keg?”
“Over there,” he muttered, pointing toward a big bucket near the edge of the garage. While the four of us collapsed into laughter, he sauntered away with his eyes downcast on his generic Birkenstocks and his fingers moving self-consciously across the patches of hair on his chin and cheeks.
We filled our cups with watery light beer and stepped into the close, sweaty air of the party. Most of the space was taken up by a large Ping-Pong table, where a group of Saint Mike’s guys and some girls we didn’t know were playing a raucous game of beer pong. Just past them, in a clearing of space near a bunch of fishing rods, I spotted Darry. He was squatting down over a plastic milk crate, his dark, shiny head cocked to the side, and he was fiddling with a laptop that was connected to a pair of large black speakers. When he saw me, he winked at me—he actually winked at me, like some pervy old man. Except, of course, it didn’t seem quite so pervy coming from him. It felt, I don’t know, sexy. My face went hot.
“Kenzie!” Christian, who was standing at one end of the Ping-Pong table, flagged her down with an eager hand. “Be my beer pong partner?”
“Ugh,” Kenzie whispered to us, rolling her mascara-spiked eyes. “Could he be any more obsessed? Evan is gonna kill him.” But she accepted his invitation with a nod and sashayed over to the table, cozying up beside him as he beamed. The rest of us arranged ourselves against the wall and tried to look cool. Sapphire picked at her nails between slugs of beer while Emily took little sips from a can of Red Bull, her searchlight eyes sweeping across the party and filing the faces and actions of everybody there away in the gossip chamber that was her brain. Meanwhile, I tried to get drunk, hoping that it would help me feel like I fit in, help to loosen the spring inside me that tightened every time I went to parties like this. But the beer tasted so awful that I had trouble keeping it down. The last thing I needed was to puke all over Christian’s family’s collection of fishing rods. So I just sort of stood there and watched as Kenzie played beer pong with her new friends, tossing the little white ball with a graceful flick of her wrist so that it landed perfectly into the Solo cup of the opposing team and she curtsied gracefully to their applause.
We heard the arrival of Evan Munro and his teammates before we actually saw them. They’d destroyed Notre Dame 31–0, and Evan had thrown for a career-high 365 yards. They came careening down the alley—Josh Gonzalez, Derrick Dunn, and a guy who was known only as Sully—in Sully’s beat-up Chrysler convertible, wearing their jerseys, chanting the Saint Mike’s fight song and waving white-and-green flags. It was like they were throwing a parade for themselves, and everybody at the party went nuts. Sully came screeching to a stop in the middle of the alley and they all hopped out, 1980s-movie style, without opening the car doors. As soon as Christian saw them, I could see the conflicted look on his face: excited that the coolest kids in his class had shown up at his party, disappointed that Kenzie, who he thought he might have a shot with, had now detached herself from his side and was jumping into Evan’s arms, wrapping her long, tan legs around his waist and pouring her beer directly into his open mouth.
Seeing how everyone was now distracted, I took advantage of the moment and stepped out into the alley to dump out the warm remains of my own beer. When I returned to my station against the wall, Darry was once again squatting before the speakers, laptop balanced on his knees, and finally the music kicked on, guitar chords as familiar to me as the sound of my father’s voice.
In the day we sweat it out on the streets
of a runaway American dream,
At night we ride through mansions
of glory in suicide machines
It was the opening lines of “Born to Run,” and suddenly, I was transported away from this party, even away from Darry, who was smiling at me now over the glow of the laptop, and I was remembering a late-summer night like this one, up on the shores of Crooked Lake, with all of us: Stevie Junior, Aunt Col and Uncle Jimbo, Aunt Kathy and one of her weird hipster boyfriends, Mom and Dad and me sitting on the pontoon boat that was docked, bobbing, in the harbor, and in the middle of the lake the fireworks were exploding against a black sky, reflecting in trembling mirrors of light on the surface of the water, and my dad turned on his portable boom box, while I perched on his lap in perfect happiness, hoping that the song would never end.
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
I felt my stomach go sour, detached myself from the wall, stumbled past Darry and the fishing rods, past the beer pong table, out into the dark alley, and found a spot between a trash can and the neighbor’s backyard. I leaned over the chain-link fence, waiting to puke. But the cooling night air calmed my nausea, and instead of vomit, what came instead were tears. I didn’t know that I was going to cry—the sadness had come from somewhere deep inside of me, from a place I thought I had buried because I knew better than to dwell on pointless scenes from the past.
“Hey. You okay?”
The dark figure coming toward me was carrying a giant garbage bag full of crushed cups and empty cans. He stepped beneath the streetlight and I saw those copper eyes and died a little inside now that I realized my new crush had found me crouching behind a trash can like some complete head case.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “It was sort of hot in there.”
Darry smiled and adjusted the clanging bag over his shoulder.
“Open the lid for me?”
I lifted the top of the blue recycling bin and he heaved the bag inside.
“Hey,” he said, closing the lid and looking at me, his face pale and serious. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you’d like it if I played your song.”
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. “It just reminds me of something, that’s all.”
“What does it remind you of?”
“My dad.”
“Oh. Did he die?”
I was sort of thrown off by this question. People weren’t supposed to go around asking you this sort of stuff directly. They were supposed to say something vague, change the subject, and then Google your name later in the privacy of their own homes.
“No.”
He waited a second, expecting me to elaborate, but I didn’t. Sergeant Stephen Boychuck was a conversation topic that, for the past two years, I had declared officially off limits—even for tall boys with golden eyes who thought “Born to Run” was the greatest rock song ever made. I took the opportunity of the awkward silence to dig a tin of Altoids from my bag. I offered him one, and he took it.
“Thanks.” His fingers, warm, brushed my palm.
Just then, a crash came from inside the garage, a beer bottle smashed to pieces, and two blond boys locked in some sort of wresting stance came tumbling out into the alley, fists flailing, while the rest of the party followed, yelling encouragement.
“Oh, shit.” Darry shifted his gaze to the boys as they fell onto the pavement and proceeded to pummel each other. “Those are the O’Donnell twins. They do this every weekend. Hey, Wendy, I should get your—”
“Cops!” someone screamed, just as the warning blat! of a siren ripped through the night and the alley lit up in flashing swirls of blue and red. Kids began streaming from the garage like ants from a kicked anthill, tossing their beer cups and scattering down the alley, over fences, and through yards.
“Shit!” Darry said again, grabbing my hand. “Come on!”
He braced his arms on the top of the gate behind the garbage cans and launched himself into a neighbor’s yard, then turned around and held out his hand while I hooked my feet into the laths of the fence. As I toppled over the edge he caught me, his body a wall of summer heat, still smelling faintly of the soap I’d first noticed when he’d stirred the air around me in the ticket line at Saint Mike’s. I felt dizzy, unsure of whether it was the siren lights flashing through the yard, pitching it from red to blue to dark again, or being there with him, so close that his sweat was dampening my clothes. We took off running hand in hand, hopping the low chain-link fences that bordered identical squares of Chicago backyards, our hearts pumping with that glorious mix of adrenaline and fear where you know you might get caught but you think you probably won’t and your night is unfolding into a story that will be worth telling Monday morning at school. We kept running at full speed, even when the sirens had long disappeared and our legs ached and the whispers and drunken laughter of the other running, hiding kids had faded away. We kept running for so long that I started to think that maybe this is what we’d wanted all along—to be alone together—and finally, after we’d hopped our hundredth fence and I could feel the blood on my heels rubbed raw against the backs of my espadrilles, I stopped in front of a wall of high bushes threaded with browning lilacs and pulled Darry to a halt by the back of his shirt.
“You can slow down now,” I gasped. “I’m pretty sure we’re in the clear.”
“Sorry,” Darry laughed, leaning with his hands against his knees and wiping the sweat off his forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt. “It’s just that my dad’s a cop. If I got caught, the arresting officers would tell him they caught me drinking, and he’d kick my ass.”
I nodded, grateful that I was still catching my breath so that I didn’t have to respond. After all, my dad was once a cop, too.
I slumped down into the grass, my back pressed up against the vines, and he sat next to me.
“Hey,” he said, turning to me, and before I could say “hey” back, he was leaning over to kiss me. I guess he isn’t big on small talk, I thought, as his tongue wormed its way into my mouth.
A word about kissing: I secretly think it’s overrated. It’s not like I’m frigid or anything. I think cuddling, for example, is adorable. And hugging is like crack for the soul. But kissing? The tongues, the drool, the paranoia about bad breath? No, thanks. My theory is that the only reason people kiss is because if your mouth is occupied, you don’t have to talk. And who wants to chitchat when they’re touching another person’s body for the first time? That would be incredibly awkward. Which is why you never see old married couples making out. They still hug. They still hold hands. And if I had to guess, they still probably have sex (ew). They’ve just dropped the drooling, pawing makeout sessions, because when you’ve been smelling someone’s farts for decades, awkward silences are no longer much of a concern.
I know what you’re going to say: if you kiss the right person, you’re supposed to feel electrified. Weak in the knees. Dizzy. And maybe that’s true. But the thing is, I knew I was attracted to Darry. I wanted to touch his hair and feel the soft skin of his neck and the worn cotton of his Saint Mike’s Wrestling T-shirt. I wanted him to kiss me. But then when he did, my mind went to the same place it always went every time I’d kissed a boy: I wondered when it was going to be over. So when a floodlight snapped on and the owner of the house stepped onto the deck and yelled, “Hey! What do you kids think you’re doing back there?” I was embarrassed and startled, but not really all that disappointed.
Maybe the next time he kissed me, I thought, as he grabbed my hand and we went flying back over fences and through manicured yards, then I’d feel something. Because that was the other weird part about kissing: even though I didn’t enjoy it, I still wanted to do it again.
As we climbed our last fence and emerged back into the world hand in hand, I saw that we were standing by the train tracks, at the place were Tiffany and Sandy’s whitewashed crosses stood still and crooked beside the railroad ties.
“My dad told me that when they died,” Darry said, stooping down to pick an empty Cheetos bag from the tangle of carnations someone had left there, “their bodies were so messed up that their parents had to identify them by their high heels.”
“There’s this painting of Our Lady of Lourdes in the hallway at ASH,” I said. “Legend has it that she wept for a week after they died.”
“You really believe that?”
“Well, I mean, I don’t know. Afterward, the janitor found a leaky air-conditioning unit on the floor just above the painting. But still. The timing kind of creeps me out.”
“All right,” he said, “if you believe that, then I’ve got another one for you.”
“Okay.”
“Did you know that if you come here at midnight when there’s a full moon, and you say their names out loud, the streetlights explode?”
“I never heard that one.” I looked up at the streetlamp above us, which beamed a halo of white light onto the street. The moon, I noticed with some relief, was only a sliver in the clear September sky. “Do you believe that?”
“Not really,” he said, then turned and smiled at me so that my heart squeezed a little tighter. “But maybe we should try it for ourselves sometime.”
“I don’t really feel like disturbing the dead, if it’s okay with you.”
“My grandma used to say that we shouldn’t fear the dead—it’s the living we should be afraid of.”
This made me shiver.
“Hey,” he said suddenly. “You ever gonna answer my question?”
“What question?”
“The one I asked about your dad.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yeah.”
“He lives in Nebraska. And I haven’t seen him in a while. So I was just thinking about him, that’s all.”
“Oh,” he said. “Now I get it. I mean, it sucks that you don’t get to see him much, but trust me, there’s an upside to it. My parents tried the whole let’s-get-divorced-but-live-in-the-same-neighborhood-for-our-kids’-sake thing. It’s weird how, now that I have two houses, I feel like I have less than one. And it seems like whatever I need at Mom’s house, I left at Dad’s. And vice versa. I leave my history book at my dad’s house literally every Sunday. My teacher is starting to think it’s bullshit.”
“No.” I shook my head. “My parents aren’t divorced. They’re . . .”
I looked down the empty train tracks to where they disappeared into the hazy Chicago skyline. If this was going to go anywhere, he would eventually have to find out somehow.
“My last name,” I said “is Boychuck.”
I saw a tremor, the tiniest frowny movement, in the corner of his smile. His fingers slackened in mine.
“Boychuck as in Sergeant Stephen Boychuck?”
I nodded. “Is that a problem?”
“No, not a problem,” he said quickly, but something in his voice had gone cold. He let go of my hand.
“Good.” I smiled, trying to fake our way back to flirty. “Because, you know, I’m not like him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Darry cleared his throat.
“No, I don’t think that,” he said. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “So, which way to your house?”
I pointed down the sidewalk. “Just a couple blocks that way.”
“Are you okay to get home by yourself?” He pulled out his phone and held its glowing shape to me. “It’s getting late. I gotta get going. My mom is going to kill me enough as it is.”
“Sure,” I said quickly. “It’s no problem.”
We stood there across from each other before the crosses of the dead ASH girls. “So,” I said, “should I give you my phone number or something?”
Darry’s hand hovered over his cell.
“The thing is,” he said finally, “my dad just made commander.” He looked at me, waiting for me, I guess, to tell him that I understood. But the words were jammed up at the base of my throat, and I couldn’t say anything. “I mean,” he continued, “it’s not that I care, but I think it would look bad. For my dad. If, you know, you and me were hanging out. Because, you know, people still—cops, I mean—he made the whole department look bad. You know?”
I nodded woodenly. My eyes burned, but I blinked fiercely until the tears went away. It’s not that I was, like, in love with Darry. I’d only known him for a couple hours! But here it was again, this curse that would trail me all my life. The curse that struck every time someone figured out who I was.
“You understand, right?”
“Totally. It’s cool.” My heart had dried up like salt, but my two years of popularity had skilled me in the art of pretending to be happy. I smiled. Never let them know how much you care, and then they can’t hurt you. This was my Aunt Colleen’s advice in the days after my father’s arrest when reporters were camped out on the lawn and #boychuck was trending on Twitter. I stood on the sidewalk, trying so hard not to care, and watched Darry disappear around the corner, the piney smell of his skin still hanging on my clothes.
When I got home, I was so close to calling Alexis Nichols. I’d long ago erased her number from my phone, but of course I still knew it by heart—she had been my best friend for nine years, after all. I knew that she would give me good advice, and more importantly, that she would listen. She wouldn’t say something like, “you’re so much hotter than he is anyway,” or “Who cares? Just find someone else!” or “Are you seriously upset by this? You met the dude once, psycho,” all of which were pieces of advice I’d heard Kenzie dole out to our brokenhearted friends at one time or another. Alexis would understand that it wasn’t even about Darry at all. She would understand everything.
Which was exactly why I’d abandoned her.