When the call came for Darius, he was staring at Marcy Lungstrom’s breasts, round, fleshy, heavy as honeydews, and listening to her laugh at a stupid joke. Her giggle was the exact opposite of what she carried on her chest. It was light and fluffy and Darius wanted nothing more than for Marcy to be balanced on his lap now, giggling away, rather than comfortably splayed on Jesse Traynor’s lap, his hands gripping her waist just mere inches below those gorgeous, overflowing boobs. They weren’t a couple, Jesse and Marcy, and thank God for that. It was just that Jesse had a way of being in the right place when Marcy needed a seat, always had his hand on the fridge when Marcy wanted a beer. Darius was really starting to hate his best friend with his perfect timing.
Darius, Marcy, and Jesse, along with Jesse’s older brother Jasper and some of his buddies from the car dealership and Marcy’s lackey Elin, were sitting in Jasper’s poorly lit, run-down condo, drinking and passing a joint around. Darius casually skipped the bud each time it came to him. He wondered if anyone noticed, or if the rest of them—including Elin—were too engrossed in Marcy’s every movement, the way her curves cut through space, to even look his way. The girl had an ass like a peach on steroids. Why he had to think of Marcy’s body as the parts of a fruit salad he couldn’t comprehend. He hated fruit, but she was a chick that called to mind fresh produce. Their crew had been meeting up like this every day after work and Darius felt himself sliding off a precipice, spending time with Jasper and his cronies, versions of himself in a few years if he didn’t get his act together. Even desiring the fleshy, bawdy Marcy, a bad girl in training, was symbolic of his poor choices. He ought to break away, even thought to ask Rachel for some big-sister advice, but every time he saw Marcy’s name on the group text confirming plans, he found himself back on Jasper’s ratty green couch with the ketchup stains just to be in her presence.
He felt a ringing in his pocket and knew it was probably his mother calling. All his friends texted, using shorthand and abbreviations and emojis to communicate, sometimes when they were in the same room. For some reason, it was easier to ask what everyone wanted to do after school over text than to call, fishing for the right words while on the other end of the phone you could hear your friend’s bored impatience. Darius stepped a few feet away from his friends to take the call, happy for the interruption since a bulge was forming in his pants and there was nothing like his mother’s shriek to cool his engine.
“What’s up?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant in case Marcy was in earshot. He knew he was in hot water at home, having not touched any of the college crap his mother piled on his desk or cracked open his SAT prep book (a fall retake was definitely in order after he earned a score hovering near 1000 in the spring). And he hadn’t even told his parents that he’d lost his job lifeguarding at the town pool after getting caught on his cell phone from the chair. He’d pulled it from his bathing suit thinking the vibration might be a text from Marcy, but it was a damn CNN alert about a forest fire. His parents would freak out when they found out he’d been canned, which wouldn’t be long, considering his father was the editor of the local paper and knew every crumb of homegrown gossip.
“Hi, honey. I’m calling with exciting news,” his mother said, uncharacteristically not inquiring about his whereabouts. Their conversations typically started with an inquisition: Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? His father had certainly schooled his mother well in the five Ws. “I think you will be excited to hear that we’re all going on a family trip. With Grandma and Grandpa Feldman.”
“We are?” he asked, surprised by his mother’s enthusiasm. His parents thought he couldn’t hear them muttering to each other from the front seat of the car or from behind the closed door of their bathroom, but he had ears like a hound dog, especially when it came to family intrigue.
“Yes. We’re taking a cruise to the Caribbean and it leaves next week. So you’ll need to tell your boss you can’t work the last week of summer. I hope he won’t be too upset. Just blame it on me if he is.”
Darius felt the familiar pit materializing in his stomach, the three vodka cranberries he’d downed (only because Marcy had mixed them) now working their way back up his intestines. He never wanted the lifeguarding job to begin with. He wanted to work at the skate shop, next door to where Marcy worked at the ice cream store, but couldn’t even get an interview. He was a clown on a board. The only things skater about him were his haircut, his clothes, and the music he listened to—all things that could be bought. Attempting any trick on the half-pipe, he was as ungraceful and heavy on his feet as a sumo wrestler walking a tightrope. Instead, Jesse got the job, which paid much better than the lifeguarding gig and afforded him the chance to time his breaks with Marcy’s.
“Um, okay,” he choked out, wondering if he could somehow cover up his firing by burying it under the early departure. “And I promise to work on my college stuff tonight.”
“You know what? Don’t even worry about that for now. We’ll figure it out.”
Darius shook his head involuntarily, his mother’s laissez-faire attitude conversely making him anxious. He wanted her to lay off him most of the time, but now he just wished she would act like herself, even if that meant being overbearing and nosy. Something was definitely off with her, which was why he’d answered her call to begin with. Just a few weeks earlier, Darius had invited over some of his high school friends to hang out on a Sunday. His father was at work and his mother said she was spending the day at their neighbor’s country club. Rachel was at work, even though it was a weekend, because she was treating her internship at the law firm as though she was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the place couldn’t run without her. Still, Darius was nervous that any one of his family members might show up unexpectedly, so he’d led the crew up to the attic where they could drink their gin and Cokes with impunity. He hadn’t been to the cobwebbed, dank room since his days of playing hide-and-seek with Rachel and he couldn’t fathom that anyone else had been up there recently either. He took a flashlight with him, doubtful that the ancient bulb on a string had any juice left, and was the first to enter the room, his friends laughing like goofballs behind him. He nearly dropped the flashlight when the light spilled into the room.
There had to be nearly a hundred shopping bags of different sizes, shapes, and colors covering every inch of free space in the attic. Mountains of packages, piles of crap, all in this clandestine location with its sloped ceiling six feet tall at the highest point, smelling of mothballs and mildew. He inched closer, no longer hearing the voices and cackles of his friends and even—as had never happened to him before—forgetting that Marcy was mere inches behind him. He peeked inside a few of the bags, lifted contents, fished out receipts. His mother’s name was on the first one, then the second, then the third. Quickly he went rabid, tearing through all the bags while his friends looked on in confusion until he told them all to just start drinking without him, knowing in a few minutes they would be draped in the blur of heavy-duty buzzes and wouldn’t question what he was doing and why his attic looked like a cross between a garage sale and Santa’s workshop. The bags were filled with the most motley assortment of stuff he’d ever seen—clothing, appliances, sneakers in all sizes, journals, cookbooks, gardening tools, camera equipment, costumes. He studied the receipts more closely. They were all dated within the past year. They all said “Elise Connelly.” The only differences were the last four digits of the credit card numbers printed on the white slips. There must have been twenty different numerical combinations, meaning his mother had a hell of a lot of plastic to swipe.
His first thought was to drive over to Rachel’s office and tell her what he’d uncovered. But she’d brush him off if he showed up unannounced, embarrassed by her unshorn, sloppy brother with the dirty Vans and chin pubes, as she called his attempt at a goatee. She had been such a bitch to him all summer.
So instead of running to his sister, Darius had sunk into the weight of one of the shopping bags, this one filled with a football-themed comforter. It was the type of thing his father might have gotten for him when he was eight and still thought his boy would be a jock like his old man. He decided the best course of action was to do nothing and say nothing. Notwithstanding his decision to stay quiet for the time being, he knew with total certainty that he had stumbled upon an ugly secret of his mother’s. He just wasn’t sure how bad it was. Didn’t want to know either. His mind was cloudy enough just navigating his social life, remembering to take his lifeguard tank top every day so his parents wouldn’t be suspicious, and memorizing different sixteen-letter words he’d never think about again after he retook the SATs.
Now, a month later, his mother was telling him, all rosy and bright, that they were going on a trip with the grandparents he knew she had issues with. And that he shouldn’t bother working on the college applications that both his parents had been dogging him about since June. Strange things were afoot in the Connelly household. Even his father, the straightest arrow, was being dodgy. He’d closed his office door several times when he’d heard Darius approaching. He assumed his dad was looking at porn—Jesse’s dad was an addict—but maybe it was something more nefarious. Perhaps he’d find out on the boat. There’d be nothing else to do and he needed some way to distract himself while he endured five Marcy-less days.
“All right,” he said to his mother, looking over at his friends. The joint was smoked by now to the bit and he relaxed a little. For some reason he had it in his head that once he took a puff of marijuana, he’d no longer be standing on the precipice, he’d be firmly planted on the dark side. Maybe it was all the stories he’d heard growing up about Uncle Freddy. “That sounds cool.”
“You’re going to share a cabin with Rachel,” his mom added. “Should be fun.”
“Sharing with Rachel?” he said, forcing a groan. The truth was that he didn’t mind at all. He wanted the face time with his sister, to put himself so squarely in front of her that she couldn’t pretend he didn’t exist. She’d see that he did in fact need to shave, that he could be considerate in close quarters, that he read every night before bed—real stuff, like Vonnegut and Kerouac. He wanted her to observe his neatness and his rigorous personal hygiene regimen, because earlier in the summer she’d walked into the bathroom and caught him sniffing his belly button lint. She made a huge fuss about it and of course he’d denied it, even though it had been true, but it was only to make sure he was cleaning in there thoroughly enough.
“Well, you two will just have to deal. Grandma and Grandpa are paying for this trip and I can’t very well demand you have separate rooms. I hope and expect you will both be on your best behavior on this trip.”
“Whatever,” he said, noticing Marcy staring intently at Jesse as he regaled the group with some idiotic story that was probably made up. “I gotta go.”
“Darius?” his mother said, sounding like she didn’t want to let him go.
“Yeah?”
“I bought you some new socks and shorts. Also school supplies.”
“Okay, Mom,” he said, feeling a sickness he was certain was unrelated to the vodka come over him.