After eating the vanilla ice-cream bar his mother gives him for dessert, he gets up from the table to go to his room, impatient to pack a hit and crash to sleep. Halfway up the stairs, something seems off. He stops midstair, thinks. The knapsack. Where is it? His chest tightens. Did he just leave it at the kitchen table? He bolts down the stairs into the kitchen and tries to act casual as he sails past the table to the kitchen sink. Glass of water, he preemptively mumbles as he scans beneath the table and sees nothing anywhere near where he was sitting. Before getting trapped in conversation, he disappears upstairs and into his room, where he thinks through each beat of the afternoon. He had his knapsack when he and Ethan and Charlie were fucking around and getting high on the Moon. He remembers rushing back and stashing it in the stone shed behind boxes of Ball jars so it was out of sight and off his back while they hurried through the remaining work.
It hits him. IT’S STILL THERE. Behind the box, in the shed, next to the house. The fucking knapsack is still there, and in it his bong, his pot, his learner’s permit, his school ID, and his cash. An army of people will be showing up first thing in the morning to empty that shed and set up the wedding reception. Rick Howland, the caterer, for one, is definitely going to be there before eight, and Luke is up at six most mornings, so even if he thought about beating Rick to the house, Luke would no doubt be walking the property, picking up sticks, and cursing his half-assed workers for doing such a lame job.
Silas sits on his bed and tries to regulate his breathing. He’s crashing from being on his feet and high all afternoon, and he feels like he’s hyperventilating. He balls his fists into the top of his thighs, takes a deep breath, and wishes he could go to sleep. But there is no way around the grim truth: he has to go back. He has to ride back up Wildey Road and down along Indian Pond after everyone in his house — and hopefully by then in June Reid’s house, too — is asleep.
Which is exactly what he does. Three long hours later, after he’s heard the last toilet flush down the hall in his parents’ bathroom. After he’s jerked off twice and slammed a warm Red Bull that he’d forgotten to drink a few days ago. He’s not sure if it’s the caffeine or the adrenaline, but as sleepy as he was before, he’s now awake. He’s ready to get this over with. He steps as softly as he can down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door to where his bike is leaning against the house. He flies down Wildey and Indian Pond and almost overshoots June Reid’s driveway. He skids to a stop, gets off his bike, and throws it in the weeds.
From the road, the house is dark. It is an old, two-story stone house, but the far right section, the oldest, is made of wood, and the only windows in front are on the first floor. People could be awake upstairs and from the road he wouldn’t know. He’d have to sneak down alongside the kitchen before he’d be able to tell. He considers coming from around the back of the house, but thinks about the noise he’d make trudging through the woods to get there. Better to go quietly down the driveway and slip up the side between the kitchen and the stone shed.
The gravel drive crunches beneath his feet even though he is stepping as gently and slowly as possible. It takes what feels like hours to get to the lawn, where his footfalls are nearly silent. By the time he reaches the near corner of the house, he can see a yellow panel of light hitting the stone shed. The kitchen light is on, and by the way it flickers and wobbles, there must be someone in there. FUCK FUCK FUCK, he whispers to himself. He leans against the side of the house and holds the rough wood siding for balance. He cannot go back now. He will inch along the outside and secure a place next to the kitchen window until whoever is in there goes to sleep. He begins to move. What must be a bat flaps the air just above his head, and he collapses to the ground and covers his face. It takes every bit of control he can muster not to scream. He stays down, adjusts his crouch to a seated position, and crab-crawls gradually to a spot out of the light’s path, just to the left of the window. He rests his head against the side of the house and waits. At first no sounds come from inside. The cicadas are everywhere, their sound enormous, but after a while it becomes ambient noise, as elemental and invisible as the dark he is huddled in. Then he hears voices coming from the back of the house. The fucking screened-in porch, he thinks, having forgotten until now that it’s right there, just behind the kitchen at the back of the house. He’s only half the width of the house away. If he sneezes, whoever is in there will hear it. He begins to panic. He’s too exposed, too close. If he attempts to leave now, they will hear him. He tries to control his breathing, but focusing on it makes it sound louder, more erratic. He holds his legs in his arms and squeezes. He is only twenty or so yards from the stone shed where his knapsack is, but it might as well be on the other side of town. He is trapped. There is nothing to do but wait for everyone in the house to go to sleep.
Crouching in the dark, he tries to make out what the voices on the porch are saying. It does not sound like people celebrating the night before a wedding. At the wedding of his oldest sister, Holly, they had a keg on the back porch and everyone stayed up until at least four in the morning. He remembers her fiancé, Andrew, a rich kid from New York whose family has a summerhouse in town, and how he had an eight ball of coke. His buddies from college broke into the pool at Harkness to go skinny-dipping. This was last summer, and Silas’s sisters wouldn’t let him join in. He had to stay at the house watching his parents and uncles get shitfaced and listen to Andrew’s parents fight about who was sober enough to drive home. This scene at June Reid’s is, by comparison, a funeral. He’d seen Lolly around over the years, and she was hot in a rich hippie-chick kind of way, and the guy she was marrying seemed fine, just a bit of a douche bag and a know-it-all. He heard them talking in the lawn earlier that day. Something about flight times and packing bags. It occurs to Silas that Lolly Reid has probably been on over a hundred airplanes and probably to places he’s never heard of. Silas had been on one plane: to Orlando, Florida, with his sisters when he was eleven. Their grandmother met them at the airport, and they spent two days in long lines at Disney World. Silas didn’t think Lolly Reid, even as a kid, was the type to go to Disney World.
The porch door creaks open and he hears footsteps. They are coming around the house. Then he sees a man. It’s Luke. He’s wearing a white Izod shirt and dark pants and walking to the back of the lawn toward the trees. He must be taking a leak, Silas thinks as he watches the white of his shirt hover in the far dark like a ghost. He stays there for what feels like a long time, longer than he’d need to piss. Eventually, he makes his way back toward the house, walking directly toward Silas at first and then veering toward the porch door. The voices kick up but then they seem to move into the kitchen. Faintly, he hears footsteps on the stairs, the water in the second-floor bathroom turn on, and a toilet flush. A door shuts and then the house is quiet.