29

Chad kicks down the footstool of the old recliner and the back snaps up and catapults him out of the chair. He strides across the room like a man full of purpose and grabs the super-sized bag of chips sitting on the dining-room table. He wrenches it open with both fists. A volcano of chips erupts into a stainless-steel bowl. He crumples the bag into a ball and tosses it into a Nerf net above the dining-room door.

There’s a tub of dill pickle dip with a fierce orange sticker on top that says Special and another sticker that says Reduced and another that says Maintain a Safe Distance of Five Metres and another that shows a skull and crossbones, the internationally recognized sign for poison.

I have come to Amber’s music video wrap party too early. I’m supposed to meet Kyle Keating here and he hasn’t arrived yet. This is supposed to be our first date, but I think he’s stood me up.

Here is the awful truth. I was the first to arrive at the party. I am the one and only guest.

It turns out Jordan and Devon are living here, since Chad’s parents left to preach Christianity in China. They left Chad to fend for himself with a freezer full of frozen three-cheese, gluten-free pizzas.

Devon was kicked out of his parents’ house because he refused to go to school. He has been smoking so much weed he’s never not stoned and he’s permanently fried, like forever, and he’s failed everything and now he lives on Chad’s sofa. In fact, they are waiting for someone to arrive with weed, because they’re out.

There are crushed pop cans all over the living room and crumpled chip bags and dishes with dried ketchup swirls piled on every surface. There’s a large pot with the orange remains of Kraft Dinner hardened to the sides, and four spoons. There’s a pile of laundry on one side of the couch.

But there are also three very big flat-screen TVs stationed around the room. There’s a bedsheet tacked to the wall so they can project the music video on four different screens at once.

This is to be the unveiling of Gary Bowen’s great work of art, the project that will be screened at the Young Entrepreneurs’ Exhibition and that Mr. Payne — who has had a sneak preview — says might just be the highlight. I’ve heard it’s already available on iTunes.

But tonight is to be the big unveiling for the rest of us.

Once and for all, we will understand Gary Bowen’s genius.

Here’s what I think it was like before I arrived at the party. Chad and Jordan and Devon were being normal guys. They were talking normal guy talk and maybe farting. Or talking about farting or talking about breasts, but calling them tits, or they were talking about drinking or ollies they have skated, or who has a great half-pipe in their basement, funny things that happened when they were smoking weed, and famous skaters. And they were also in the middle of a chicken nugget fight. There are nuggets all over the floor.

But now they’re all uncomfortable because I’ve showed up for a party, and the party isn’t much of a party.

Nice streamer, I blurt. Someone must have thrown a streamer from one corner of the room and through the chandelier, at which point it plummeted to the floor and rolled over to the opposite corner.

The boys understand that I have opened up the streamer situation as a small-talk opportunity. They struggle to say something about the streamer.

Devon abruptly leaves the room and heads down to the basement. He can’t take it anymore.

There are loud noises coming from down in the basement. Things are crashing, bouncing, tumbling.

I have known Chad and Jordan and Devon since I was at Happy Kids. We all sat on the story carpet and sang “Itsy Bitsy Spider” together, doing the little finger dance. Chad got in trouble for kicking over my Lego castle and had to have a time-out. I think that time-out may never have ended. I don’t think he’s had any time-in ever since.

At Happy Kids we learned about our inside voices and when we were scared or sad or lonely we sometimes used our inside voices even when we were outside. Sometimes we used our outside voices when we were inside if we were angry or when we hit each other or when things were so funny our sides hurt from laughing.

We all slept on the yoga mats for naptime and sang “Baby Beluga” and “Skinnamarink” together.

What I’m saying is, I’ve known these guys my whole life, day in, day out, since the beginning of existence.

But right now these guys are total strangers.

People have been texting about this party for weeks. It was on everybody’s Facebook. Where the hell is Amber? Isn’t this her big moment? The great reveal of the fantastic Gary’s music video?

You went with pink, I say. Chad and Jordan stop what they’re doing and look up at the streamer.

Girls are coming, says Chad. He sounds defensive and forlorn. As though he knows nothing about the kinds of things girls require for happiness, but has felt an obligation to learn. He has come up with this. A pink streamer.

Nice, I say. Devon comes stamping up from the basement with a giant disco ball resting in the crook of his neck, one arm curved under it. Devon looks like Atlas carrying his own private planet on his shoulder.

Jordan grabs a ladder from behind the dining-room door and Devon climbs up to the chandelier and attaches the disco ball and fiddles with some wires.

Hit the lights, Devon commands. And I do.

For a minute we are in complete darkness. Then the disco ball starts turning. We are covered in bright ovals of light. A circle moves over Chad’s eyes and cheeks, over Devon’s brown skin, over my face and body and hair, slipping off onto the walls behind us. We are covered in spots that swirl all over.

The swirling circles of light make us instantly happy.

Music! I shout.

Music, Jordan says, slapping his forehead with the flat of his hand. I knew I forgot something!

He puts on Bob Marley.

Wait until you see the fog machine, Devon says. He switches on some colored footlights — red, green, orange, blue — and a box in the corner of the room belches a thick fog that crawls along the floor, changing color as it winds in front of the footlights. Soon it’s up to our knees.

The doorbell rings and maybe twenty-five people come in all at once. Some of them are from Heart, but some are from Gonzaga and Booth, and some of them I don’t even know.

They take off their boots in the porch and they rush into the living room and change the music — Snoop Dogg — and they have beer. One of them has a forty-ouncer of vodka and they are passing it around, putting it on their heads. I’m pressed into the corner talking to Brittany Bishop about glitter nail polish — apparently she has a whole collection — and another thirty or forty people burst into the room.

Suddenly there seem to be more than a hundred people jammed into the dining room alone. The kitchen, the living room — every room seems to have people in it. The staircase.

The smell of pot mixes with the chemical smell of the dry ice from the fog machine. There’s a strobe light and a black light in the living room and everything is juddering and teeth and white clothes are lit like they’ve been washed in radioactive milk.

The doorbell is ringing continuously now, and people are still coming into the house. In the dining room they are pressed shoulder to shoulder, dancing on the spot, just jumping up and down to the beat, pogoing, crashing into each other. The music is very loud and now it’s techno and somebody shouts that there’s a fire in the kitchen.

We hear there was a dish towel on fire and then people are coming out of the kitchen covered in fire-extinguisher foam.

Somebody else has a can of crazy string and people have squiggles of neon string in their hair and all over their clothes.

Even though it’s minus ten outside, it’s sweltering in the house and the windows are open and people are spilling out onto the deck on the second floor, dancing out there under the stars.

Then I see the guy who owns the Sunbird, and Mercy Hanrahan is with him.

She doesn’t notice me. She’s busy taking twenty-dollar bills from people and handing out little packages of coke and pills. The guy is just standing there with his big arms crossed over his chest, casting his glance around the room while she collects the money, and then they leave together.

Brittany Bishop says you can do coke in the upstairs bathroom. There’s lots of it. People are lined up.

Forget trying to get in there to pee, Brittany shouts.

Chad has been shaking a beer with his thumb over the mouth of the bottle and he lets it spray out all over Jordan who is necking with a girl and they don’t even notice.

Then a bunch of people tip over the crystal cabinet with all of Chad’s mother’s crystal wine glasses and fancy china and it smashes and the cabinet is lying face down and people are dancing on the back of it.

I see the shock on Chad’s face. He’s very drunk and he’s holding a bottle of Captain Morgan by his side and he’s weaving and he’s turned into a kid again, looking sort of scared.

I can remember him in the Halloween parade at Bishop Feild dressed as the Lone Ranger, all in white with white vinyl chaps and a cowboy hat that kept falling over his eyes. Chad always got ten out of ten on his spelling and was obsessed with snowy owls. Even his backpack had a snowy owl on it.

He lifts the bottle of rum to his mouth and guzzles it.

The whole house seems to be throbbing, and then there is Amber standing on the living-room table. She kicks the bowl of chips off the table and it flies out into the crowd like a mini flying saucer with a serious malfunction. She has a microphone and she is outrageously drunk.

Amber has been transformed. She must have put on black eyeliner and she must have been crying because there are black patches under her eyes. She’s wearing very red lipstick and a leopard-skin fun-fur skirt and high boots that go all the way up, almost to the top of her legs. The boots have very high heels.

She’s weaving like crazy up there. She could definitely break her ankle. The fog is crawling up the table legs and slithering toward her feet. I can’t help but think of her at the Bursting Boils concert — what? Two months ago? When she was still a serious swimmer. When she was still my friend.

Brittany Bishop shouts in my ear, Amber’s on something pretty bad.

Everybody, I give you the extremely talented Gary Bowen, Amber slurs into the mike. The microphone is too loud and people cover their ears because it hurts. There’s feedback and static and a slicing noise that could puncture every eardrum in the room.

Oops, says Amber. Then Amber throws her arm out toward the bedsheet behind her. Everybody turns toward the bedsheet. For a brief moment, everybody is quiet. Someone has turned off the other music.

And then the screen comes alive with Gary Bowen’s music video. Though it kills me to admit this, the video is fantastic. The music is propulsive and nostalgic and sweet and sexy. There are horns and somebody playing a saw and even a glockenspiel.

There’s a field at night with fireworks and a white limo bumping through the ruts on a dirt road, and then a shot of a hill. Just an empty hill with yellow grass rippling in the wind and then maybe twenty people on stilts cresting the hill.

The stilts must have been Amber’s idea, from when Hank taught us how to walk on them.

Over there, Brittany says, tugging my shirtsleeve and pointing. She makes me tear my eyes away from the video. It’s the guys from Gary Bowen’s basketball team. They’ve all worn their jerseys to the party. They aren’t looking at the video. They’re all looking at their phones at the same time. They’re all standing still, their faces lit by the blue light of their phones, and their heads are bent as if in prayer.

Brittany pushes herself off the wall and heads over in their direction. She jabs her way through the crowd. Everyone has started dancing and Amber is still up on the table, dancing by herself and wobbling dangerously close to the edge while the video plays and she’s sort of singing along. Her shadow is blocking the video and it’s playing all over her face and arms and white lace blouse.

I see Gary, then, and he is trying to get to Amber because he’s furious. The video is running through a second time and nobody seems to be watching it anymore. Somebody switches the music then, right in the middle of the projection, and everybody starts dancing to Kanye West. Gary is screaming his lungs out at Amber to get down.

Get off the table, you fat cow, he shouts.

But Amber is still singing Gary’s song into the microphone with her eyes shut. She’s off-key and screechy.

Tyrone and the girl from the Aquarena, Evelyn, come into the room then. Tyrone is trying to make his way toward me. Evelyn follows. They are holding hands. Tyrone is dragging her through the crowd. Brittany is talking to one of the guys on the basketball team. No, she’s screaming at him.

I see Brittany grab the guy’s phone and she’s heading back over to me. Brittany gets to me before Tyrone and shows me the picture on the phone.

It’s Amber, completely naked. Brittany scrolls up to show the texts.

Pretty hot, right? Now you guys send pictures of your bitches!

Gary has sent Amber’s picture to the whole basketball team.

And that’s when I notice Gary shouldering his way toward the projector, grabbing people by their shirt collars and wrenching them out of his path. He’s at the computer and the desktop screen is projected onto the bedsheet for an instant, and then there is the naked picture of Amber, the picture on the phone in Brittany’s hand larger than life all over the wall behind her for the whole party to see.

All the guys in the room start a whooping noise. They scream for Amber to take it all off, take it all off. She stumbles a little, confused, and her hands are fluttering near her head.

Let’s see those tits, bitch, somebody yells.

Amber reels and she’s about to fall off the table, but she catches her balance and turns around to see what everyone is pointing at on the screen. The image reaches all the way up the wall and part of her forehead is projected on the ceiling. She turns back to look through the crowd, to look for Gary, and she sees him at the projector.

I said get off the table, you fat cow, Gary shouts.

I trusted you, she says into the mike. But her voice sounds small.

Tyrone has finally made it through the crowd. He’s grabbing me, saying, Come on, we have to get out of here. The cops are coming. They’ll arrest me if they find me here. Somebody gave them my name about the graffiti. Flannery, come on.

You go, I say.

Come on, he says. I’m afraid you’ll get trampled.

I can’t leave Amber, I shout. For a second Tyrone stands absolutely still, looking up at Amber and the projection. He looks back at the doorway. And then he starts fighting his way through the crowd toward Amber.

I’ll get her, he shouts over his shoulder.

Amber turns back to look at herself, then starts backing away from the projection. She has covered her mouth with one hand.

And that’s when we hear the deck.

It’s a high-pitched wrenching. The wood cracking and nails screaming as they’re torn from the house and the screams of all the people on the deck. The deck is coming away from the house and for a brief moment it seems to sway on its struts like the whole deck is on walking stilts and it’s going to walk all those stoned, drunken, dancing people across the city and over the Southside Hills and far away into the sky and the stars.

Then it crashes through the maple trees tossing forty-three teenagers out of it as it falls.

Cops, someone yells. Cops! We can hear the sirens on the street.

Everyone in the house is rushing toward the back door. People are climbing out all the ground-floor windows.

Amber whirls around to face us again and there is no Amber. Whatever drugs she has taken, or whatever Gary might have slipped in her drink, she isn’t Amber anymore. She is searching the crowd for Gary and she sees him.

Fat fucking cow, he’s shouting over and over.

Amber suddenly tears her shirt open. Buttons go flying. And she wriggles out of it and whips it around in circles over her head and tosses it.

I’m screaming at her, No, Amber. Get down. Amber, I’m here. I’m here.

Then she rips down one bra strap and then the other and pulls the bra down to her waist so it hangs there. She’s just standing there half-naked, not moving, with the picture of her naked on the wall behind her, and she falls face forward onto the floor.

Get her, Brittany says. She’ll be trampled. But I am already pushing through the crowd. And that’s when I see Kyle Keating. He’s moving against the crowd trying to get to Amber too.

Somehow Kyle and Tyrone get to her first. Brittany sweeps the cans and booze bottles off the dining-room table and the boys lay her down on it.

She’s out cold. Tyrone takes off his jean jacket and covers her with it.

She’s in shock, Kyle says. Get her into the recovery position. We need an ambulance. He’s already punching 911 into his phone.

Brittany turns away and has disappeared into the crowd. Then I see the naked picture of Amber come down and I glance at the projector, and Brittany has the computer and she’s shoving it into her army surplus bag.

Amber’s eyes are rolled back in her head and I can only see white slits. She is clammy.

Wake her up, I keep saying. Wake her up, wake her up. And for a minute her eyes do flutter open and she looks at me. She is looking into my eyes and I have her hand and I’m squeezing her hand.

Flannery, she says. Did you like the video? Isn’t it great?

But her eyes roll back in her head again.

Then the ambulance attendants arrive and Kyle tells them her breathing is slow and he tells them her pulse and one of them writes down everything Kyle tells them on a clipboard. Then they load her onto the stretcher.

Kids who have been injured on the deck are also being loaded onto stretchers. I am shaking and crying and Kyle is holding my hand.

Chad has passed out in the corner of the living room. Kyle runs upstairs and comes back with a pillow and a bunch of blankets and we put Chad in the recovery position and go to find our coats. I can’t figure out where Tyrone and Evelyn have gone.

There is still a huge pile of boots in the porch. People must have taken off in their stocking feet. My boots are gone, but I borrow another pair that fit. And we step out onto the sidewalk.

It’s only two in the morning. There are broken bottles all over the sidewalk. The glass glitters under the streetlight. The snow is falling in tatters. Kyle throws an arm around me, and he walks me home in the snow.