“Probably the stuff will explode all over us instead,” Toshi said, sounding kind of butt-hurt.
“You know how to make a bomb?” I asked.
Dry ice was the key ingredient. By the time we came back with some an hour and a half later, the party was in full swing. Jay had made us all drink a bottle of Mountain Dew because he claimed that it made the foulest-smelling piss, and as we walked the last block, my bladder hung low and heavy. Our plan would be the ultimate revenge for those assholes calling me Soppy.
We heard the noise from two houses away: steady drumbeat from a stereo, kids yelling, a bottle breaking against cement.
“We’ll approach from behind,” Jay whispered, though nobody at the party would have heard us even if he’d yelled; they were busy having too much fun. He led us through a soybean field to the backyard of the house, which was demarcated by the end of the crop. We crouched in the darkness at the edge of the stalks; the wind kept pressing the green leaves against my back where my shirt rode up and left my skin uncovered.
Kids were all over the backyard, some leaning against the vinyl siding and smoking cigarettes, some making out on the strip of lawn between the house and shed, some rolling around on the ground acting super wasted. Plastic cups peppered the grass like strange, red flowers.
“Got to be careful with this shit,” Jay said as he opened the package of dry ice. The inch-long cylinders were shrinking, sending their mass into the air as smoke. “Could burn your finger off.” He plucked a soybean leaf and used it as a barrier between his skin and the cylindrical ice cubes, then dropped as many pieces as would fit into the empty Mountain Dew containers. “Now we piss into it, screw on the lid, and throw it right into the middle of them.” He indicated the revelers.
“Then what?” Toshi said.
“Ka-boom! They get piss-bombed.”
Peeing into the soda bottle turned out to be more difficult than I would have thought, mainly because I had to go so bad that it rushed from me in a hard and fast stream rather than an easily managed dribble. The stink was like asparagus mixed with liver.
“Fuck.” Jay was having the same problem, and he’d sprayed on his shoes. Toshi, on the other hand, wasn’t peeing at all.
“Maybe you have to pull back the foreskin,” I told him.
“He’s just nervous,” Jay said. “Don’t want to pee in front of people.”
In a flash, all the times Tosh and I had been in a bathroom together zipped through my memory: Jay was right; Toshi was pee-shy. Now that I thought about it, Toshi had never taken a piss in front of me. My brain throbbed to realize something that I basically must have known for years.
“That’s okay,” Jay said, screwing a cap on his bottle. “I got enough for both of them.”
Once our bottles were full, their contained ecosystems swirling with vaporous white clouds, we each took one and flung them as far as we could towards the house. Jay aimed his for where Mark and Myra were drinking on the steps. It landed close, and when it plopped down, Mark and another soccer guy moved in for a look.
“Oh fuck!” Jay said in an ecstatic whisper. “They’re going to get piss in the face!”
Then one of them reached down and picked up the bomb as if it were a bottle of liquor fallen from heaven.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Jay said.
My heart was clawing its way up my throat when Mark unscrewed the lid, releasing all pressure on our piss bomb. I deflated, and not even watching his nose wrinkle up in disgust after he sniffed the stuff made me feel better.
But then, the other two bombs exploded, one right after the other. The liquid shot up ten feet into the air and then fell back down as acid rain. Girls screamed, people clawed at their pissed-on skin, Mark glared like a bear about to rampage.
And then the three of us were bolting through the soybean field, whooping because, even though it would have been smarter to stay quiet, we couldn’t help ourselves.
The whole walk back home, we told each other the story over and over again. The Mountain Dew containers kept growing bigger, our piss concoction getting nastier, the threat of Mark inching closer. A sort of frenzy took over my body as I flailed my arms, retelling, but I wasn’t alone: Jay and Toshi were flagged on the memory, too.
Jay wrapped his arm around Toshi’s neck and noogied his head. “This guy,” he said, “this guy couldn’t even pee! How’s your bladder doing, huh, Knees? About to explode inside you? Or has it been stretched out enough by now?”
Toshi wriggled out from under Jay’s knuckles. “You won’t laugh once I get sepsis.”
“When they blew up,” Jay said, “Mark had no idea what to do. He would never be able to survive in a war. I bet his dad never even taught him to shoot.”
After Jay peeled off from our group to head back to his house, Tosh and I sobered up. The night air crept through my clothes and chilled my skin, and I tried to remember if Mark had looked directly at us, if he’d seen our outlines against the soybeans. “If we get caught,” I said, “we are so dead.”
“You should pull some kind of big prank right before you leave for Florida.” Toshi’s voice got higher, the way it did when he thought he had a good idea. “Then you’ll hop on the plane, and no one will ever know it was you. Or if they do find out, it won’t matter: you’ll be long gone.”
I hadn’t ever flown on a plane before, but I’d always wanted to try that up-high feeling which would probably paint a gloss over all the small, annoying junk down on earth. “I wonder if my mom already bought me the ticket.” I’d just assumed that I’d have to take the bus down, or maybe my dad would drive me as part of his road trip.
Toshi said, “Sometimes I worry that, if my mom ever picked me up at the airport, I’d have no idea which person she was. I mean, I really might not recognize her. Only sixteen percent of children from divorced households live with their fathers. Sixteen. You’re the only other one I’ve ever met.”
“Whatever,” I said. Toshi had a one-track mind, but at least he’d waited until Jay was gone to get all mushy about our moms. He still smelled like peanuts from his bear-bait dare, and this made him seem smaller and sadder than usual.
“You should ask her about your family medical history. When you get older, the doctors are going to want that.”
“What’s with you?” I said. “It’s no big deal. I’m going away for a little while. I’ll come back; everything will be normal.” Maybe I was starting to feel scared, then, because pretty soon I would have to leave everything familiar, and I stop feeling scared by getting angry. I’d been thinking about my mom for too long, so long that she’d become an idea, and the thought of actually living with this idea disturbed me. “You jealous that my mom didn’t leave the country to get away from me? I don’t need a passport to go see her? I don’t even want to see her. This is all about her; she wants to see me.”
Toshi nodded; you could walk all over him and he’d never get in your face about it. “Jay is right about you,” I said.
Toshi stopped in the middle of the empty road. “The only reason Jay is harder on me than on you is because he cares about me more overall.”
I stood in front of Toshi and stared up into his face, trying to dagger him with my eyes. “What a nice, delusional fantasy world you live in. Get a clue, Toshi. Jay doesn’t really care about you. In fact, this summer, he was talking about kicking you out of our group! He doesn’t want you around anymore, but he puts up with you because you would fall apart if we ditched you.”