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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1
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LAINE HAD SMILED at me every day after that afternoon in the library. Every time she did, it was like I’d stolen a piece of heaven. And every day, I wanted more. So much more.
I’d walk past her between third and fourth period in the hustle between class changes, somewhere between the stairwell entrance and the first landing that led to the math hallway. I had Calculus third period and World Cultures fourth. I used to hate that hallway because it smelled like rotten socks, but I walked it every day senior year because it took me past her.
And since that day in the library, she’d noticed I was there.
She would always give me a large smile, and a nod. Sometimes she’d pause for breath if I caught her on the stairs, but we’d never speak. She’d never stop, and I didn’t, either. I knew that right after she saw me, she encountered Evan every day, too. Of course I knew, because I had watched her for so many months, stealing glances in her direction, and looking over my shoulder when I knew something had distracted her.
I lived for that walk. My steps were always lighter and more confident after I saw her. Our eyes would meet, she’d toss me a smile and a lingering glance, I’d smile back, and then we’d both move on to whatever awaited us. And every day that this happened was better than the last one.
Then, one day, she reached out and stopped me on the landing.
“Geoff.” She pulled me over on the landing, but our bodies still constricted the space and interrupted the flow of traffic in the hallway.
“Hey, Laine.” My toes curled in my shoes, and I had to hold myself back from throwing her against the wall and kissing her right then. Just hearing her say my name sent me to another planet.
“Are you having a good day?”
“Sure I am,” I lied. Already that day I had tripped over a shoelace walking to third period, been called “Geoff Megadeth” by some brainless stoner in front of a teacher who didn’t do anything, and received only an 80 percent on my Calculus test—a first.
“So, I have a quick question.” She bit her lip, which she’d glossed in some kind of bright pink goop.
“Shoot.”
Whatever happened next, I wanted this conversation to last forever. I was well aware of all the passing stares we were getting from the rest of the students in the hallway, their looks directed mostly at me in a mixture of confusion and envy. I enjoyed that. Let them look. I had her attention. Me. Not them. Me.
“Are you going tonight?”
“To what?” I feigned ignorance, only to let the conversation drag out.
“To the party later.” She laughed, and pulled herself closer to me. I inhaled a combination of floral perfume, bubblegum lip-gloss, and salty lunchroom grease. Absolute heaven.
Times ten.
“Oh, right.” I shook my head. “No. I have other plans.”
I didn’t add that I planned to head to Mark’s house for a four-way World of Warcraft tournament between the two of us, Josh and Nathan. Nathan said he’d even bring over his dad’s vodka, which had sat untouched in his family’s liquor cabinet as a casualty of his parent’s divorce. This plan sounded more fun than making an appearance as the comic relief at Blake and Bruce’s stoner party in the basement of David’s house.
“Oh.” Her face fell. “It sounds like it’s going to be fun.”
“I’m not invited.”
“Whatever. Of course you are. Aren’t your parents out of town?”
“They are. Gatlinburg.” I could have rolled my eyes, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to look too judgmental about David and my mom’s clichéd choice for a weekend getaway. Even David’s rental of a five-star chalet couldn’t take away the tourist trap feeling I got whenever I thought about the one time I went to Gatlinburg during the summer after tenth grade. Still, most of my classmates vacationed in that town, and I didn’t want to offend Laine if she liked going there, too.
“How long are they going to be there?”
“Till Monday.”
The crowd in the hallway thinned until only a few students walked by us, a signal that the five-minute time change between classes was almost over. It was not the first time in my life that I wished I had Superman powers. It would have been nice to stop time, amongst other things.
“Well, I think I’m going to the party. Evan says he wants to go.”
“Ah. Evan. You remember him this time.”
She lifted her chin. “Remember him? What are you talking about? Of course I remember him.”
“Right . . . um . . . well, that time in the car . . .”
“Oh yeah. That time in the car.”
She shoved her sweater sleeves up her arms, and I saw it: an unmistakable yellow, purple and dark blue bruise wrapped around her forearm. What had done that to her? How long had it been there? I couldn’t look away if I wanted to, because of its sheer size, and its menacing colors. My expression must have said as much, because seconds after she’d pulled up her sleeves she pulled them down again.
“So. The party,” she said, in an obvious attempt to distract me.
“What happened?” I asked. “How’d you get that mark?”
She hesitated and took a step backward. “Anyway. Yeah. So. I guess maybe I’ll see you later?”
“But what about the—”
“At the party? Maybe you’ll be there?”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know,” I replied, as disappointment and confusion started to creep through my toes and make its way up my legs. “Later.”
Then she turned, and bounded down the steps. I stood on the landing and watched her disappear. I didn’t move until the bell sounded, and I knew I was late to class for the first time in almost twelve years of school.
I sat on Mark’s checkered blue bedspread and stared at the flat screen TV hanging across the room on his wall. Months before, he’d yanked $3,000 out of his summer job savings account and spent it on upgrades and contraptions he found on eBay and Amazon, not stopping until he had two gaming systems, a crate full of accessories, and enough wires to transform his entire wall into a nerd’s wet dream. He called it The Wall, and the whole setup looked awesome. I had to admit that.
“Get it . . . what are you . . . this . . . I’ve got this . . . yes . . . he’s dead . . . Boom! That’s how you do it!” The latest round of grunts from Mark sounded like some sort of half-assed war charge.
He and Nathan battled endlessly for top score on World of Warcraft. This latest fight had gone on for two hours, and whoever lost had to drink whatever liquor remained in a red Solo brand cup that sat between the two of them like a threat. The vodka from Nathan’s dad’s liquor cabinet turned out to be cookie-dough flavored specialty vodka with a Russian label. It tasted like farts mixed in gasoline. I took one shot and refused to drink any more, but everyone else didn’t seem to mind the awful taste.
“So, the party’s happening now?” Josh asked. He stretched out face up on the bed, sounding bored.
“Yep.”
“How many people did they invite again?”
“Not enough. They didn’t invite us.” I laughed.
“I kinda wish they had,” Josh said.
“They’re trolls,” I replied.
He chuckled. “Tell me something I don’t know. But I do wish they’d stop leaving us out.”
A lot of the time, I looked at the calendar on my phone and counted the days until I could leave the twins and our boring town in suburbia behind. Two million people lived in Greater Cincinnati—probably more than that, if you counted the fringes of Dayton, OH. There had to be more to life than a small town where everyone was rich, warm, comfortable, and focused on beating each other for scholarships, grades, state championship football titles, and awards given out by the local newspapers. It all just resembled a boring game—one I didn’t want to play anymore.
“You know—” Josh ran his tongue along his front teeth, “—we could show up.”
“Show up?”
“And crash the party.” He looked over at me. “It’s your house. There’s nothin’ stoppin’ us.”
Josh liked to drop the “g” from his words when he drank.
I rolled my eyes. “They’ll stop us.”
“’Nd do what? Kick us out? Call the fuckin’ cops? Start some kind of fight?” He also liked to switch up his voice and cuss a lot, so that he sounded tough. Trouble was that Josh wasn’t tough. Not really. A long scar decorated his shin from the one time he’d gotten into a fight after school in the second grade, but for most his life, Josh shrank from conflict. He talked big, but he never followed through.
“Yeah. Call the cops. Exactly,” I replied.
“I’m not scared.” He paused. “Not scared at all. We should go the fuck over there.”
“Come on,” I said. “You don’t mean that.”
“What if I do?”
“It’s not worth it. No reason to make things worse. They’re already horrible enough—”
“Whatever. We should still go over there.” Josh rose up and blocked my view of Mark and Nathan, both still shaking and shouting as they started the final push to win the level. With their energy level, this could go on for hours.
“I bet Laine will be there,” Josh said.
“She probably will.” No need to add the insider knowledge that I had confirming the fact.
“I saw her the other day with Evan out in the parking lot. I don’t think they’re very happy.”
“Why would I care about that?” I took special care with my voice to make sure I sounded disinterested. Then I bit the inside of my cheek and hoped he believed it.
“Because you’ve had a crush on her since seventh grade.”
Fuck. Time to think of a lie. Something. Anything.
“I don’t have a crush on her. I don’t.”
“Oh, so you’ve all the sudden stopped liking her?”
“Yep.” I popped my jaw and kept my eyes on the ceiling. If he couldn’t meet my eyes, he wouldn’t see the truth. Right?
“Dude, I’m your friend. Your best friend. I see the way you stare at her. You did it again today at lunch.”
“I don’t stare at her. I don’t!” Those last words sounded like a lie, even to me.
“Nice. So. You do care.” Josh poked me in the back. “Anyway. Seemed like the argument between Laine and Evan was pretty intense.”
“Laine’s hot,” said Mark, sounding like a zombie. Josh flipped his head in Mark’s direction, but Mark didn’t turn around. Instead, the game got louder as Mark and Nathan started another shooting sequence.
“She is hot,” Josh admitted as he turned back to me. “More than hot. Didn’t she book a new modeling job?”
“I don’t know,” I lied again. “I guess.”
“Yep, something with Macy’s,” Josh said. “Probably got it since she modeled in Paris last summer,” Josh said.
“She did not.”
“She did. I saw it on Twitter.”
“Like Twitter is believable. People say fake shit on Twitter all the time. Like all the times people say some celebrity died, and they didn’t.”
“Whatever. I have 1500 fuckin’ followers.” Josh liked to remind people of this statistic. He kept track of it the way some people kept track of stock prices, and he checked his phone every afternoon after class just so he could see his number rise and fall. “How many do you have?”
I sighed. “Twenty. But I never tweet.”
“Exactly.” He said this as if he’d just made a case-winning argument in court. “Trust me. I saw it there.”
“You have 1500 followers because you followed all those people first, and then they were nice and followed you back. Do you even know who half those people are?”
“What I’m sayin’ is that I have a lot of sources. Get information from everywhere.”
“Look, not all those people are legit sources.”
He dismissed me with a wave. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth.”
“Why the fuck are we arguing about your Twitter followers, Josh?”
“You can think whatever you want,” Josh replied. “I’m just sayin’ I tapped a broad range of people for my information. That’s how I know that shit is real.”
I shook my head, but didn’t try to further correct him. Laine did pick up the occasional modeling job, but only regionally, and the furthest away she’d ever modeled was for a job in Chicago. She booked mostly print, and some small runway for a few designers in town—one of whom had a studio in Milford, and liked to design dresses for beauty queens. Again, I knew all of this just from Facebook stalking, the best and worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. Maybe I would do some more of that over the weekend.
Couldn’t hurt. And yes, I was a little bit obsessed. Okay, a lot.
“That’s it.” Josh stood up from the bed. “We’re goin’ over there. Now. Right now. No more fuckin’ waitn’.”
I glanced from him to foot of the bed, where Mark and Nathan continued to battle. Josh followed my eyes, and then poked me in the shoulder.
“Do you really want to stay here and watch them play while all we do is drink?”
“No.” I shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Good. At least our lives aren’t going to be totally stupid this weekend.” He grabbed my arm, pulled me up off the bed, and propelled me to the door without another glance at our video gaming friends.
We heard the music before we got to the house. It rocked through the brick, shook the window glass, and sounded like a mix of rap and techno spun by a Hollywood DJ. My stepbrothers must have put the music on full blast with the sound system they got for Christmas. That thing had enormous speakers.
I had to park at the end of the street because a purple truck and silver 1999 Ford Mustang occupied the two parking spots in the driveway, and a thick sea of luxury sixteenth birthday presents, including souped-up trucks, designer SUVs and custom imports lined the rest of Ammunition Ridge.
“Well, we know your brothers are popular,” Josh said. “Really popular.”
He slammed the passenger door shut and put his gloved hands up to his mouth to cover his face from the cold.
“Stepbrothers,” I corrected him.
“Okay. Stepbrothers,” he said from behind the glove. “Jesus Christ, it’s fuckin’ freezin’. It’s like, negative ten around here.”
The snow crunched under our feet as we walked up the concrete path to the house. When we got within ten feet, Josh hesitated, as if he wanted to go around the back of the house and head in through the patio just off the kitchen. I shook my head.
“We’ll go in the front door.” I already had my key out, and I popped open the door a second later.
Just like the music, a roar of laughter and conversations I couldn’t place filtered through the house to the front door. Josh and I walked through the foyer, past the living room, by the winding open staircase, and into the large kitchen. From there, we only had to open a white door and head down about fifteen steps to find the party.
“How many people do you think are down there?” Josh shoved his gloves in his pocket, took off his jacket, and hung it on a hook near the breakfast nook. He didn’t ask if he should, because he knew that he could. In fact, he was the only person at Heritage High who had ever seen my bedroom.
I shrugged, then dropped my own scarf, jacket, and gloves over the back of one the chairs at the breakfast nook table. “Maybe seventy-five.”
“Can the basement fit that many people?”
“This is the basement we’re talking about. It covers this whole house.”
We both stood there for a few more minutes, listening. The laughter stayed loud, and the music didn’t switch away from rap with a strong bass line. Whoever was downstairs was having a good time. No, a great time. They might even have been having one of the best parties of senior year, and the thought made me cringe.
I always stood on the outskirts of everything while everyone else had a better time than me. The popular guys had it so easy. They got chicks just by blinking. They laughed their way through high school, smoking pot, drinking, and somehow getting away with everything. They acted like nothing bothered them while I struggled to find words to say to a girl.
And now, here I stood, eighteen years’ old, and intimidated by a house party. In. My. Own. House. What kind of bullshit was that?
I looked Josh in the eye. “You ready?”
“To what? Just go down there?”
“What? You’re scared now? You’re the one who insisted we crash this thing.”
“Well, yeah, but that was before—” He broke off, and rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand.
“Before what?” My head tilted. All I had to do was keep up a brave act, even though inside I wanted to turn around and drive back to the World of Warcraft party. Maybe if I acted like I didn’t care, I wouldn’t, in the end.
“There are just going to be so many people down there.”
“Yeah.” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “They invited, like, the whole senior class. Probably the whole school.”
Blake and Bruce had a way of doing things in a grand way, a part of their constant quest to ascend to the top of the Heritage High social heap. Judging by the sounds coming from downstairs, their efforts this time might have worked quite well.
I lifted my hand to open the basement door.
“Wait.” Now Josh’s voice turned high pitched, and some color faded from his face. “What are we going to do once we get down there?”
I thought about it. “Act like they invited us?”
“That won’t work.”
“Pretend like one of them got an urgent phone call?”
“Come on, Geoff. This has to be good. Really fuckin’ good.”
“I don’t know.” I sighed. “You’re the one who had this bright idea. You figure it out.”
Josh’s thin lips twisted back and forth. Then, after a moment, his eyes widened. “Okay. I’ve got it.” He turned and his eyes swept over the kitchen, looking for something. “Where does your dad—I mean, David—keep his liquor? Like, the good liquor.”
“In a cabinet in the dining room.”
“Why don’t we get some and bring it down to the party?”
“He’ll notice.” I leaned my back up against the island as I considered his idea. “Yeah. David would definitely notice.”
“Hmm. We could bring them all pizza.”
I shook my head. “No way. We’ll just go down there, and act like we’re supposed to be there.”
“That’s going to piss them all off.”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
“Are you sure we should?”
“What are you talking about? You’re the one who had this idea. Now you’re going to back out?”
“Well, I mean—”
“Dude, whatever.”
With a flourish, I pulled open the door and led Josh down the steps. I got a good look at the basement about halfway down the staircase, and I stopped on the third step from the end. Josh bumped into me as I did. By then, the conversation and laughter from the party had died, and only the deafening beat from a Kanye West song remained. More than fifty people stared at me, smelling like a stew of marijuana, incense, and stale pizza. I saw faces from the senior and junior class, most of them the popular and the beautiful people of Heritage. Open bottles of liquor littered the coffee table in the small living room area to my right, and still more of those bottles lay in a haphazard mess on the bar. Blunts painted a small table that sat just below the dartboard on the far wall. One girl had her shirt off and stood next a group of boys in her bra.
Wild party.
There was no doubting that one. Damn, I wished I’d been invited to this, but once again I’d been left out. The popular kids got everything they wanted, and I hated them even more for it in that moment. Assholes. Squinting at the silent group, I wondered for a second if I might get a contact high from all the pot. Might be kind of nice if I did.
“Don’t mind me.”
“What the fuck are you doing?’ Bruce’s voce resonated over Kanye West. He sat in between a couple of junior girls on the leather couch in the far end of the room. One girl had curly black hair, a nose ring, and breasts that threatened to tumble out of her V-neck sweater as she leered at me from the crook of his right arm.
“Geoff Megadeth,” Monica said, from inside the crowd of guys gathered near a couple of empty cans of cheap beer on the bar. Laine stood next to her in a pair of dark jeans, but I didn’t let myself acknowledge anything about. If I did, I might lose focus on what I wanted to do next.
“That’s me,” I said in their direction. God, that nickname was so uncreative. You’d think they might come up with something better. Couldn’t they get over that, and move on to something else?
“What do you want?” Bruce asked again.
“Well, this is a party, right?” I reached out to a table next to the steps, grabbed a beer, and popped open the can. “I love parties.”
“You’re not invited.”
A few murmurs spun through the crowd. Some people giggled. Others gawked at Josh and me. A few looked uncomfortable and some stepped backward, as if to give the showdown between Bruce and me more space. Everyone knew life inside Heritage High meant being a part of a hierarchy, just like I did. Blake and Bruce enjoyed the comforts of pseudo friendships with people they thought mattered while Josh, Nathan, Mark and I swam along the bottom next to the band geeks, computer freaks and poor kids. A fight between the two circles always made for good entertainment.
“Sure I’m invited,” I told Bruce after a few seconds of stalemate. “This is my house.”
He stood up from the couch and took a purposeful step toward me. “Get the fuck out of here, Geoff.”
“I’m not going to—”
“Get the fuck out of here, now.”
“Come on,” I said locking my eyes with his as I took I sip of the beer. It tasted like sour water, and I wanted to spit it out, but I didn’t. “You don’t mean that.”
“This isn’t a party for you, or assholes like you.”
“Come on, Blake,” Bruce said, but he shut up when Blake shot him a glare.
“You weren’t invited, asswipe.” His voice grew louder, until it made Kanye West sound like a whining child. “And if you’ll go on ahead and leave—”
My laughter cut him off. He took another step toward me.
“Seriously, you aren’t invited. And you know not to come in the basement. What the fuck do you want, Geoff?”
“Oh nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know—the neighbor was complaining.” I switched my attention to the rest of the crowd. “About the loud music.”
Bruce crossed his arms and gave me one of those looks that told me he didn’t buy what I was selling. I had to try harder. A lot harder.
“I think they called the cops.” I glanced back at Josh, looking for someone to back me up on my lie. He nodded in agreement. “Yeah. They did. Said they could hear the music in their kitchen.”
“Which neighbor?”
“The Andersons. Mrs. Anderson.” I looked down at my watch. “That was about fifteen minutes ago. I think—well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops showed up soon. She was really pissed. Like, really pissed.”
“I didn’t think she was home.” Bruce sounded skeptical.
“I took the call,” I told him, making sure I didn’t waver on my lie. “Didn’t I, Josh?”
Josh answered my question with an emphatic nod.
Bruce still didn’t seem convinced. “You don’t—”
“I tried to stop her from calling,” I said. “But I don’t think she wanted to listen to me.”
“Shit,” Evan said from the back of the room. “I gotta—I can’t get arrested again. I don’t want to risk my scholarship.”
“I should leave, too,” a brunette junior girl who was sitting on the large leather chair near the sofa, said. “I can’t get arrested again—” She stood up and brushed pizza crumbs and marijuana off her skirt. “Oh my God. I really should go.”
“Wait.” Blake held up his hand from his place by the stereo. He turned the volume down. “We don’t know she called. Geoff could just be lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
Bruce’s lips twisted. “I bet you are, you little piss ant.”
“Do you really want to find out?” I asked.
“I don’t,” said the junior girl as she pulled on her puffy red Columbia jacket. “I really don’t.”
“Yeah, I’m leaving, too,” said a girl right beside her. “Where did I put my coat?”
“Where did I put my shirt?” asked the girl in the bra. She began searching the room for it, and I had to bite back a grin. Her boobs looked kind of funny as they bounced around in black lace.
“Goddamn it,” Bruce muttered.
Once I heard that, I full on smiled. Nothing could break up a party like the threat of the cops. It was funny, really, how easy it was to do it. They were all lemmings—all followers.
“Nice work,” Josh said under his breath.