“Have you been in touch with anyone from home?” Jordan asked.
“No,” Jake said. He had his computer set up; he could email Hobby, he supposed, but what could he say in an email? “Are you?”
“No,” Jordan said.
“Really? Not Al Castle? Not Zoe? Not anyone from the paper?”
“No,” Jordan said. “It’s kind of a deal I made with myself. If I called Al or called the paper, a part of me would still be back on Nantucket. And I want to try being here for a while. That’s what I was hoping for for you, too-that you’d be able to be yourself here, without having to cope with the pressures at home.”
“I thought we’d left because of what people were saying.”
“What were people saying?”
Jake’s short black arrived, steaming. He blew across the top, then braced himself for the first sip. It was as bitter as gasoline. It was the kind of liquid that would take the enamel off his teeth; it would have corroded Penny’s vocal cords on contact. But there was something comforting in how awful the coffee tasted. It went with the Steinbeck and Hemingway, and it suited his burned and broken heart, his charred hopes, his exile. The coffee tasted like adulthood, like manhood.
“That the accident was our fault because it was our car. That you didn’t print anything about it in the newspaper because you were trying to cover something up. That Penny was drunk or high.”
Jordan nodded slowly. His hair was a lot grayer now, Jake noticed. He looked old now, whereas at home he had just looked harried and busy. “There was nothing wrong with the car,” Jordan said. “The tox report from the hospital showed no alcohol or other substances in Penny’s system. And I didn’t print anything in the paper because Zoe asked me not to, and as she was Penny’s mother, I decided to honor that request. I don’t think anyone blames us for the accident. I think people have come to terms with the fact that Penny was driving too fast.”
“Demeter,” Jake said.
“What?” Jordan said.
“Demeter said something that upset her.”
“You think?”
“Yes. In the dunes. They went to pee in the dunes, right before we left. And when Penny came back, she was freaking out.”
“About what?”
Jake shrugged. He’d been trying not to think about it. Did it matter, ultimately? Demeter had been shitfaced, and she was so clingy and pathetic and greedy for Penny’s attention that she might easily have said something about Jake; she might have exaggerated the truth. There was one potential source of gossip that stuck out in Jake’s mind: the incident at the cast party after the final performance of Grease.
The party was at Winnie Potts’s house. Winnie Potts had played Rizzo, and like Rizzo, Winnie was wild. Mr. and Mrs. Potts were “cool” parents who left their kids alone in their tricked-out basement with the pool table and the movie screen and the second fridge filled with beer. Everyone in the cast started out drinking Coke and Fanta and eating the pigs in blankets and Swedish meatballs laid out by Mrs. Potts, who then very loudly and definitively announced that she was going upstairs to bed and would not be back down. At that point, Winnie discreetly began opening her father’s beers and pouring them into Solo cups and passing them around. When the music got turned up and it became clear that it had become a drinking party, Penny decided to leave. She could be righteous that way; the other kids called her a goody-goody behind her back. Jake had begged her to stay as they stood together at the bottom of the basement stairs. He kissed her, and she complained that he tasted like beer, and then she pointed out that Winnie was now smoking, which meant that she, Penny, had to leave right that instant.
“That’s right,” Jake said. “Go home and take care of your vocal cords.”
He had intended this as a playful poke-though sure, maybe he was a little angry that she was leaving, maybe he was a little jealous that even though he’d played the male lead, Danny, the only performer whom anyone had cared about hearing was Penny. She had received rousing standing ovations all four nights. Maybe he was a little annoyed that she treated her vocal cords like the Hope Diamond. Penny hissed at him, then stormed up the stairs. Jake looked after her and thought, Should I follow her? But his beer was cold and his favorite song was playing and Winnie Potts called out, “Jake Randolph, get over here!” And so he watched Penny go.
One o’clock in the morning found him still there, the last party guest. He was too drunk to drive home, which was okay because he had twenty bucks for cab fare; all he had to do was call for a ride. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Coach’s Cab, but Coach said it would be twenty minutes.
“Twenty minutes,” Jake told Winnie.
“ ’Kay,” Winnie said. She was lying across the sofa, wearing a pair of cutoff shorts and a white tank top that barely contained her enormous breasts. Winnie Potts’s breasts were a legend at Nantucket High School and probably accounted in no small part for her being cast as Rizzo. Jake knew she hadn’t been dressed in that outfit earlier, but when exactly had she changed? And where had everyone else gone? They’d left, but had they driven, or had some of their parents come down to the Pottses’ basement? Jake lived in fear of his classmates’ parents seeing him drunk. He had a sterling reputation among the faculty and the administrators at school and in the community as a whole, and he wanted to keep it that way.
Winnie said, “Come here.”
“I am here,” Jake said. He was lounging sideways in a club chair.
“To the sofa,” Winnie said. She scooted over a fraction of an inch as if to make room for him, and her breasts bounced a little. Penny’s breasts were like a child’s, almost nonexistent. She complained about this sometimes, but Jake reassured her that he liked her just the way she was. Now, though, he was finding something arousing about the sight of Winnie’s breasts under the skimpy tank top. He could see the outline of her nipples, dark and as big as quarters. Winnie wasn’t as pretty as Penny, nor half as talented, but she had something-a gravelly voice, a sense of humor, a sense of lawlessness-that Jake had always been attracted to. He was attracted to it now. Should he go over to the sofa? If he went to the sofa, he knew what would happen.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’m too drunk to move.”
The next thing he knew, Winnie was rising. She was kneeling down in front of his chair. Her breasts were right there in front of him, they were buoyant. She kissed him on the mouth, then there was tongue, then his hands found her breasts. They were soft. He wasn’t sure what to do with them. He felt Winnie’s hand on his fly, and he was instantly hard, harder than he could remember ever having been before, which he attributed to how wrong this was, how derelict. He pushed Winnie away, he got to his feet and adjusted himself-his dick was throbbing-and he stumbled to the basement stairs. Up and out into the night air, just as the cab pulled in to the driveway. Thank God.
He told no one about this. He played it cool with Winnie, he thought, acting completely normal. She was distant and pissy; he pretended not to notice. Every time he saw her, he was with Penny. At Patrick Loom’s graduation party, she came up to them and said, “So how’s the perfect couple?” in a way that was utterly mocking, but Penny treated this as a compliment and said sweetly, “We’re fine.” Winnie was also at the party at Steps Beach. She was hanging on to Anders Peashway; she was always hanging on to one guy or another, and probably always would be. Jake could hardly have been the first guy to blow her off, yet at Steps Beach she kept giving him a look-which was meant to say what? he wondered. He wanted to know if she’d told anybody about what had happened between them. He was desperately praying that she’d written it off, as he had, as a drunken fiasco best forgotten. But he suspected that Winnie Potts wasn’t the kind of girl who could keep her mouth shut.