While Toshi was outside humiliating himself in the dark night air, Jay and I catcalled for bears. I laughed until my cheeks were two painful knots on either side of my face. And after Toshi’s ordeal was over, Jay gave him a noogie, rubbing his hair affectionately, until they forgave each other and we were ready to move on.
Toshi, just perceptibly dazed, zipped his fly and smoothed his shirt. “What are we doing tonight?”
It turned out that Jay’s soccer guys were having a party because the goalie’s parents were out of town, and so we walked the three miles there and let ourselves in the front door. My stomach bubbled with nervous energy: we’d never really gone to a party like this before, and though we talked shit about them, that was secretly because we’d never been invited.
The house was two stories with low ceilings and a series of small rooms: den, living, dining, kitchen, laundry…. In one room there were girls from the volleyball team, another held football guys, another had kids dancing. We went to the kitchen and found a couple of beers; Toshi didn’t want one.
“Ladies!” Jay said as he walked back into the den. He drew out the word for a long time, as if it were a lyric.
Some of the girls glanced over at us, but none of them smiled. The air smelled strongly of cotton candy from their perfume, and I wanted to run a hand across the backs of their heads to test the stiffness of their hair. I was still floating inside the fumes of the vodka we’d drank back at New Veronia.
“What’s going on in here?” Jay walked over to the couch and sat on its arm; then he leaned into a blond girl named Myra, sort of falling on her lap, pretending to be drunker than he was. “Hey,” he said, “whoops!” In trying to right himself, he only rubbed up against her more.
Feeling stupid, I stood beside Toshi in the doorway.
“About your mom,” Toshi said. “I can’t believe you’re leaving. Is she remarried? Aren’t you worried that you don’t know her anymore? Like you’ll be living with a stranger?”
“Ashley,” I said as a girl I knew slightly from freshman English class walked down the hallway. No way was I going to stand around at a party and talk to Toshi about my feelings for my mommy. “Hey—what’s new?” I followed her as she made her way toward the kitchen. “It’s Bennet. Remember? We studied The Great Gatsby for basically the whole semester? ‘In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.’” When I’d first read it, that line had struck me with its loneliness, and I’d gone over it and over it as if it were my part in a play. But Ashley didn’t seem impressed by the quote, even though girls were supposed to be into that stuff. “I wish we could go to a party more like that, you know, with champagne.”
“Right,” she said. She stopped just short of the kitchen and people pushed around us. “I remember you: you look exactly the same.”
My toes curled inside their sneakers, and the alcohol-confidence ticking through my veins immediately evaporated. Ashley did not look exactly the same: her tits had gotten bigger and she’d dyed the bottom half of her hair an unnatural red. I felt like I was the only teenager not changing, not growing up, like some freak in the type of movie divorcees watched on weekday afternoons. I sort of wanted to stomp on Ashley’s foot, but I wanted her to like me, too, so I bit my lip instead.
I was just starting to tell Ashley about New Veronia when I heard Jay yelling.
Back in the den, I found Jay standing in a corner, both hands held up and palms out, with three of his soccer teammates standing in front of him.
“Who told you that you were invited, man?” asked the one with his arm around Myra. His name was Mark; he was a forward. I sort of remembered overhearing something about Mark and Myra getting together, that their love was like candy, M&Ms. “Did anyone invite you?”
“It’s a soccer party.” Jay was swelling up in his corner; his muscles were pumping with anger. “I’m on the team.”
“We don’t consider you part of the team,” the goalie said. “After what you did to my little bro. What’s wrong with you, man?”
“But for reals,” Mark said, “get out.”
The three of them started towards Jay, but he moved faster; he broke through their line and was across the threshold.
“And you too, Soppy.” Mark pointed at me. “And your little friend. Out.”
Toshi and I glanced at each other; we had been moving towards the door already. Mark only wanted to yell at us to make our banishment more humiliating. The doorknob stuck a little, which gave everyone three more seconds to laugh at us.
We found Jay panting at the end of the neighbor’s driveway. His pacing around like a caged tiger reminded me of this strange illustration from the bible: “for those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” It took me a long time of looking at the illustration to decide that it was God who’d switched out the men and the tigers to punish the men for thinking that they were superior.
“Those bammers,” Jay said. “Those fucking bammers.”
He’d never talked bad about any of the soccer guys before, it was always they told me this and they did that and their girlfriends are so hot.
“They think they can kick me out when they’re nothing special.”
My body felt numb. Over summer, I’d sort of forgotten that, at school, Jay wasn’t killer at all, because he was definitely the best, the leader, of our crew. But Toshi had been right: we were a group of losers, and being a king of losers still made you a loser. This realization sat, uncomfortably heavy, in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it was dumb, how much I admired Jay, how I sometimes wished that I could be him.
Jay snorted in anger. “Who do they think they are?”
Not even Jay’s team liked him, and his making varsity soccer hadn’t changed that fact at all. “Yeah,” I said, “those bammers.”
“We’re going to get them,” Jay said. “Get them back.”
“But what did you do to that guy’s brother?” Toshi asked.
“Nothing much. Just a little hazing. The kid is a freshman, for fuck’s sake.”
“You hazed him?” Toshi said slowly.
“We were in the shower. All I did was pee on him a little bit. He could clean it right off! We were showering!”
I wrinkled my nose and said, “A freshman is on varsity soccer?”
“He’s not even that good. Only made it because he’s got connections, with his brother on the team. It’s not fair he has someone looking out for him like that. They stick together, you know, in this creepy sort of way.”
As a freshman, Jay hadn’t been able to make varsity soccer; maybe this kid’s success rankled him.
“That Mark is such a taint. Get out, get out,” Jay mocked. “He’s going to get it. Let’s fill some soda bottles with our piss and explode it in the middle of their party.”
And just like that, Jay was back with his plans and his momentum and his energy. Jay’s stupid teammates hadn’t taken the time to get to know the Jay I knew, the one who always thought up the next fun thing. He wasn’t a loser, not really; it was just the crappiness of high school that made him seem like one. Which meant, as Jay’s right hand man, I wasn’t a total social failure, either. Even if we were outside the party, the three of us were outside it together.