Cars parked crooked on every square inch of grass and had started bleeding out onto the side of the highway by the time I got there. The whole place looked like a Scrabble board, with all those blocks spelling words like “underage” and “drunk tank.” Though the law would have to show at some point or another, the deputies were usually civil about giving kids a good start on a night they’d never remember. Besides that, I kind of hoped those squad cars would pull up any minute and get a damn fine look at my face. That would have to be as strong an alibi as any.
I was already half lit off a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s that Daddy wouldn’t miss from the liquor cabinet, seeing as it was still months from cold season. Between those menthol schnapps and a half a roach I’d found in the truck ashtray, I was well on my way when I dropped a white Xanax bar onto my tongue and swallowed.
There were kids spilling out into the yard, most of them too drunk to stand upright as they made out with friends they’d grown up with and confessed love that would fizzle by dawn. I hoped she was there. I hoped that somewhere in the crowd Maggie was there and that she’d be happy to see me. I couldn’t have cared less about the rest of the faces. It didn’t matter if any of those old chums were alive or thrown out on some bluff for the buzzards to pick apart.
The inside of the house was ransacked and any dignity that had ever resided there had called it a night. Charlie Mitchell’s parents would undoubtedly wring his big-ass Adam’s apple plumb flat whenever they came home, and maybe that’s why he was running around picking up empties and filling black trash bags with the clock just a hair past one. That poor boy was sweating, beads forming under that bright red hair just as fast as he could wipe. He did a double take when he caught me standing in the doorway. His eyes swelled for a second as if I’d just dropped a shit on a night that was already piled high and steaming.
I scanned the room filled with faces that I’d known all my life, but it was different now. When I was sleeping in the back of the classroom and even a few months after I’d dropped out, those kids had looked at me like some sort of hero, like I was doing things and going places that they’d always dreamt about but never had the guts to say aloud. Not anymore. Now they recognized me for what I am, I guess. Trash. Trash that wouldn’t have known a fucking thing about them if it weren’t for Facebook.
Blane Cowen was the first to speak to me. He came stumbling up on gimp legs and that top half of him circling around just a few degrees short of full orbit. His curled mess of hair was coming off his head in every which way and he blinked slow, made it look like he was drunker than Cooter Brown and barely able to talk when he said hello.
“What’s up, Jacob?” Blane dragged out my name as if it were hieroglyphs.
“Not shit. What about you?”
“I’m fucked-up, man! Drinking. Smoking. I’m fucked-up!”
I laughed a little bit. Playing along with that kid’s game was almost enough to make me forget where I’d just come from for a minute or two. “I hear you, buddy.”
“All right, man.” Blane seemed to sense that the type of attention he warranted wasn’t anything I could give. “Well, it was good seeing you, man! Hit me up sometime. We’ll go burn one.”
I didn’t respond but watched Blane stumble away till he got in the center of the room. That was the place he’d always wanted to be, right there in the center of things. Only no one was watching. He turned his head every which way and with eyes held half closed, he waited to catch anyone looking. When a couple folks got to noticing, Blane fell stiff as a board face-first into the couch. The ones who were watching snickered, and old Blane started grunting and mumbling things that didn’t make a lick of sense. He was destined for Hollywood.
I made my way through a crowded hall where rap music blasted family pictures into angles on the walls. Most of the kids didn’t even notice me passing, but the ones who did lifted Dixie cups filled with warm beer to their lips so that they wouldn’t have to speak. I don’t know what it was about being gone for two years, not spending every waking hour next to those sons of bitches, but they looked at me nowadays like saying hello would throw their whole universe off-kilter.
Along an island bar in the kitchen the popular guys were throwing beer pong, while the girls with crushes stood near wondering if any of those boys were lit enough to consider putting their panties on the ceiling fan. What they didn’t know was that those types of guys were too worried about impressing one another to concentrate on important shit like pussy. Those guys were too busy chugging beers and trying to memorize rap lyrics to pay attention to what girl had that fuck-me look in her eyes. Still, I knew if Maggie was at the house, she’d be somewhere close by. The guys splashing Ping-Pong balls into Dixie cups of suds had ridden Avery Hooper’s coattails to get to that table, and I was certain she was there somewhere with him.
Smoke hung heavy on the far side of the room and the brass chandelier overhead set the smoke aglow around a small table. I could see Avery sitting with his back to the window. He said something I was too far away to hear and I caught a glimpse of Maggie. She rocked back in the chair beside him, her head tilted with blond curls trailing, and laughed. Though she smiled as if she were having a good time, it was obvious she didn’t belong. Most of us born here would die here, never having seen anything further away than Pigeon Forge, but not her. When we were nine or ten years old and first learning cursive, she spent hours upon hours memorizing every curve of her name. “All famous people have to sign autographs,” she’d said. I couldn’t even remember the twists and turns of x’s and z’s. Lot of folks set their eyes on the distance at one point or another, but in time those eyes drew back. Maggie’s never had. The biggest difference between her and other dreamers was that she was determined enough and smart enough to will it into existence. It had always been obvious Maggie was only passing through.
Part of me was hesitant to even walk over, but the other ninety-eight percent had Xanax pumping any anxiety that ever existed into oblivion. Avery Hooper was the type of guy that every time he looked at you, you just wanted to haul off and hit him in the fucking mouth. He’d grown his hair long, and tufts of that brown hair rolled out over his ears and curled back toward the ceiling. A tight string of thick wooden beads, one of those necklaces from shit-town novelty shops in shit-town places like Gatlinburg, was fitted around his neck. It was that college look, that I-smoke-weed-and-kick-Hacky-Sacks kind of look, that was spread all over that son of a bitch, and I hated him for it.
I shuffled past the pong game and past the line of girls who had just enough baby fat left to make them vulnerable. When I got to the table, she saw me. Maggie looked up with those silvery blue eyes, and where I’d hoped to find welcome, I thought I spotted some sort of fear. She glanced down at the table and then up to me with eyes getting wider. There was a plate there, one of those floral-pattern plates that parents keep well into silver anniversaries, on the table. And there was powder on that plate, chunky powder flickering like glass shards and cut into lines in that yellow light. I looked at her again and saw a straw in the hand she used to push her hair back behind her ears. Then there was this rage that started building inside of me. There was this anger that washed all of the haze left from reefer and alcohol and ladder bars out of me and left nothing more than a need to break every last bone in that motherfucker’s body. Right then, there wasn’t a thought that could’ve calmed any of it down, and so I went with it.
“You snort any of that shit?” I looked Maggie dead in her eyes, and I could see she was scared.
“Who the fuck are you talking to? Ain’t none of your goddamn business, Jake!”
My eyes flicked over to that mouth that shouldn’t have been talking but was, that mouth that just might shoot me over the edge. Avery’s eyes were lit up like firecrackers and his jaw had been put into motion. “Did you give her that shit?”
“Fuck you, Jake. I suggest you go find some other place to be a fucking hero, because nobody wants you here. There ain’t a goddamn soul that wants anything to do with your sorry ass, especially not Maggie.”
I could hear the music playing, but all the noise of folks talking and hollering had shut quiet. I could feel their eyes pressing into the back of my skull, and those eyes went to pressing so hard until they were pushing me forward. Before I knew it, I was moving too fast to stop and I was into him.
That first punch sent a red mist hanging on air and the blood started pouring and I could see it in his eyes, I could see it in there even as I was hitting him, that he’d never been in a fight and wanted it to end. But that next fist came and split his head against the window, and glass went haywire, and I kept forward. My hands were on him now, and I had him out of his chair and onto the floor and I was braining him, his skull just cracking as it bounced off the tile into another line of knuckles.
It was when his eyes started fading and that wide-eyed rabid look had turned stupefied there on the floor that I got my wits about me. Something came over me, something screaming that anything more would kill him, and it held my fist still as the moon there above him. I stood up, and I could feel those eyes pressing into the back of me, but it was a different kind of pressing now, a feeling like those eyes belonged to kids who weren’t ready to see something like this.
When I got up, I looked at Maggie. I looked at that plate and the place she’d set the straw. I looked at that shit she’d been just seconds away from snorting up her nose, just seconds away from a glue trap that would’ve held her to this place and this life just like me. She was staring at my hands, skin torn, blood of him and me spread across those flattened knuckles. And she just kept staring at my hands while that pile of shit gasped and puddled on the floor.