JEFF MOVED INTO my neighborhood last summer from Red Lion, which feeds Dallastown High so he didn’t have to switch, and I remembered him from freshman year, passing by my locker between 2nd and 3rd periods, close-cropped hair with preppy collared shirts, not the style at the time so maybe that’s why I noticed him. That or the pinkish tint of his cheeks, even in winter, dimples wide with every smile and the brown hair turned blond under the hallway lights. I was out for a run before school started, training for cross-country, when I spotted him in front of his stepfather’s house—back and forth along the lawn with a push mower, shirt removed. He waved at me—I’m not sure why because we never spoke at school, but I panicked and tripped over the bending curb in front of his house, falling face-first for the sidewalk. I reached out in time to keep my skull from cracking on impact, but it took weeks for the wounds to heal where the skin scraped the concrete.
When school started Jeff stopped by my locker, waited a beat and told me, “If there was a diving team here, you’d have to try out. Your form is impeccable.” Then he smiled, his sideways smile beneath blue eyes. We’ve been friends ever since.
“Yo, Cyrus, mon, what you doing?”
This guy in a cowboy hat with a Jamaican accent stops me in Tyler Brower’s uncle’s kitchen.
“Um, what?”
White guy. Cowboy hat. Jamaican accent. I don’t know him.
“I say, what you be doing?” he repeats.
Reggae is blaring over speakers down the hall but it sounds distant. I’m sober, or mostly sober, but I can’t quite focus through the thick haze of smoke floating through the rooms. Cowboy is swaying next to me.
“I’m looking for someone,” I say. “Do you know Jeff Connor?”
Jeff got wasted at the party—multiple shots with old friends from Red Lion—and I needed to piss, upstairs near the bedrooms because the bathroom downstairs was occupied, and now I can’t find him, in and out of rooms filled with people making out, boys and girls who go to my school but I don’t know them—I don’t recognize anyone at the party, through crowded spaces full of strangers with no sign of Jeff. I’m freaking.
“Yah, he be downstairs,” Cowboy says. “He be telling stories ‘bout you mon.”
“What?”
“Dude, you be tripping.”
“I am?”
Cowboy laughs.
“You funny, Cyrus, you funny.”
He waves me through the kitchen, down a set of stairs into the basement, where the walls are paneled with slate gray tiles, like floor coverings tacked along the sheetrock, peeling off from all the humidity or not enough glue or the drifting cloud of weed clogging the room. I spot Jeff through the mist.
“This is the guy, this is THE guy.”
Jeff’s shirt is off and he’s perched on a circular table covered with cards and piles of poker chips for a game no one is playing. A bunch of guys are scattered on beat-up couches around a massive makeshift bong, the Marley loud out of speakers in the ceiling. No woman, no cry.
“We got a band,” Jeff says. “Tell them we got a band.”
He jumps off the table and wraps his arm around my neck. I feel his sweat on my skin.
“Cy, you gotta tell them, they don’t believe me about our band.”
He looks into my eyes like he’s not quite there, more stoned than I’ve ever seen him. His hair is flat, matted down with sweat or water, and I’m having trouble concentrating with the music reverberating. The thick scent of musky skunk permeates the furniture.
“We don’t have a name but we have some good names and I think Cy likes it. Did you guys meet Cyrus? He’s the drummer.”
“Yo, Cyrus,” this red-haired guy shouts, near the bong, an oversized beaker with a pipe-shaped bowl molded into the side. “You want a hit?”
I shake my head and he dips his face over the opening, shaggy clown-wig hair spilling around the glass. The bubbles pop through my head.
“Can someone turn off this faggot music,” this short squat guy says, nearer to Jeff and me.
“Excuse me?”
Cowboy steps forward but bumps against the table and stumbles sideways onto the couch. Everyone laughs at him.
“You’re about as Jamaican as I am,” the homophobe says. “And this shit is killing my buzz.”
‘Whatever, mon,” Cowboy says, then loses the accent. “Marley is my jam.”
“Why don’t you fuckers play?” the red-headed guy calls out.
“Do you want to?” Jeff asks me, backing away.
The sight of his bare chest starts to clear my head. Or distracts me more.
“What?”
“We should play for them,” Jeff says, pushing his face into my face. A wasted smile spreads across his lips.
“We don’t have our instruments.”
He watches me, more confused than anything, reaching out for my Cloud Nothings T-shirt to steady himself. It’s fraying at the edges but I wear it all the time because it’s the first shirt I ever owned with a band’s logo on the front.
“Wait, what’s happening?” Jeff says. His eyes won’t focus.
“We have to go.”
Angela was texting when I was searching for Jeff and I don’t know if she’s already left. She would definitely leave me.
“Nah, Cyrus mon, just stay. We all be chilling,” Cowboy says, up off the couch and over to the bong. I hear footfalls above us, banging around the kitchen.
“We can stay a little longer, right?” Jeff asks, wrapping his arm around my neck again. I close my eyes for a second.
The banging upstairs turns to shouting and someone comes screaming down the steps.
“Cops!”
“Fuck!” the redhead shouts and then everyone is up, shoveling beer cans beneath the cushions and under the couch for some reason. The beaker bong sways on its axis but Cowboy reaches out to keep the glass from shattering.
“I can’t get arrested, Cy,” Jeff says, pulling me close to him, his pupils like pools I could sink beneath. “My stepfather will destroy me.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll get you out.”
We pick up his shirt and follow the crowd up the stairs to the landing, the flashing lights down the hall burning bright through the house. A bunch of girls push past us to the front, but Jeff yanks on my Tee, grabbing the Cloud Nothings until it rips all the way, the left side of my body from my armpit to my waist exposed to the skin. Like Jeff’s naked skin. He points and indicates without words. We need to go out the back.
I follow—well I lead, but it’s him directing—up a short staircase down a back corridor into an empty room with beer bottles strewn and spinning, abandoned mid-drink, the sound of the sirens louder now and the lights brighter from the front of the house. We push into the backyard.
Jeff slips from my grip, hurtling ahead on the slick wet grass but I catch up to him, latching around his waist. There’s an open field to our left, past the street by the house, lit up by floodlights from the police cars, loudspeakers commanding kids to hit the ground.
I don’t know if the Dallastown police are hardcore enough to shoot high school students attending a party but it’s dark behind the house so we veer through the trees into the neighbor’s yard. Jeff leans on me as we run, his breath heavy on my cheek, which would normally excite me but not now, in the neighbor’s backyard chasing shadows toward trees I hope are fleeing students and not the fucking police.
We make our way to the road, away from the lights of the police cars where Angela parked, on the grass of an abandoned house down the street from Tyler Brower’s uncle. We were late to arrive and that was the only spot we could find at the time, fortunate now, but Jeff can’t run any farther—his body hangs on my shoulder, so I jerk him forward in one swift motion, digging deep into reserves built through years of cross-country to drag his body, limp beside me, across the road to my sister’s car.
“Get in,” she says, yanking Jeff up the step and into the Jeep’s backseat with the strength of a thousand men. Or one pissed-off sister.
“He better not puke,” she says after I climb into the front. “You’re paying to get this detailed.”
I nod as she rips the car into reverse, peeling away from the cops quicker than I would have in this situation. I lean back to see if Jeff’s okay, his eyes half-open, the wind from the open roof spinning his hair in the air in feathery ribbons.
“Is he going to puke?” she says, hitting a hard turn to the right at top speed.
“If you keep driving like this.”
“Fuck you, Cyrus.” She hangs a left onto the entry ramp of the highway. I look back to Jeff again.
“Cyrus,” he says, his eyes finding mine.
“You okay?” I say.
“I don’t know, man, this is the weirdest feeling,” he says. “Like everything is fractured, or distant, floating in front of me. And I can see so it’s not my eyes, it’s in my mind which is the most fucked up part about it. It’s like I’m watching myself and I’m watching you and I wish you were here with me, Cy. High with me.”
Angela switches lanes at full speed, shaking her head the whole time.
“He needs to come home with us,” I tell her. “He’s too wasted. His stepfather’s sort of an—”
“—Asshole,” Angela says.
He had a reputation in our neighborhood, even before Jeff.
“Yeah,” I say. “We can’t drop him off in this condition.”
“No,” she says. “I guess not.”
“I appreciate it,” I say, waiting for her to acknowledge, but she’s too busy shouting at an SUV slowing down in the left lane. It’s enough that she waited and is bringing Jeff home with us. With me.
I turn to tell him what’s happening but he’s asleep now, eyes closed and the tufted hair spreading in the breeze. He’s never stayed over my house before, which isn’t that surprising because we’re not little kids and he only lives a couple blocks away, but sometimes when I’m falling asleep in my bed, I dream that he’s with me in my bedroom, squeezed onto the mattress beside me.
Sometimes it’s all I think about.