“Ew,” Jake commented.
“I know,” Sam agreed, still bitter about it.He’dnever gone to sleepaway camp. He’d never so much as gone to day camp, not even the free ones you could sign up for in most cities if you got on the list early enough. “But I just. I don’t know. It felt too lame to donothing, and you’re usually…” Sam paused, and only didn’t say,Out with your actual friends,by the skin of his teeth. “…busy, on the weekends, so. I figured I’d have a few people over.Only those people told people, and those people told people, and now…well.” He gestured out at the yard, and sighed. “Here we are.”
Meditatively, Jake said, “Your parents are going to kill you, you know.”
Sam sighed again. “I know.” He looked wistfully into the windows of the house; he’d never seen them like that before, every one alight, shadows alive and moving in every room, and he never would again. It was nice, in a strange, complicated way. Looking at it made him feel a bit sick and weirdly proud of himself at the same time. “But it really was an accident, and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”
“You could ask them to leave,” Jake suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “Do you think they would?”
“No,” Jake admitted, on a sigh. “They might have a few hours ago, or if they didn’t all think you were some sort of semiprofessional daredevil, but as it is: no. Probably not.”
“Right. So.” Sam shrugged, and cast Jake a slightly hesitant sidelong grin. Lifting his drink, he said, “Might as well enjoy it? Since it’s literally my funeral?”
Jake narrowed his eyes, but then he said, “Oh, give me that.” He tasted it, made a face, and said, “Oh, God, it’s the awful mint Sprite thing; what iswrongwith everyone,” and handed it back to Sam, who took one sip, gagged, and precipitously tipped it out into the hedge. They exchanged a look of utter exasperation with it all: the bad taste of their classmates, and the demands and restrictions of their parents, and the whole unsettling, exhausting experience of being teenagers.
But then Jake said, “Why can’t you tell them the truth, Sam? I don’t understand why you have to act like you’re this other person. Like you’ve done these things you just…haven’t. Wouldn’t it be the same party either way?”
Later, Sam would come to realize that the answer to that question was no. It would have been a different party if he’d been presenting any different version of himself: the honest one, or a different set of lies, or any of the fairly normal spaces in between where most teenagers build some sort of construction or another. Part of what made that night what it waswasSam’s out-of-control reputation, the sense people had that whatever they did, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than whathe’ddo. The fact that he didn’t end up doing much of anything didn’t matter. It was potential that powered the rumor mill, rarely what actually happened.
But Sam hadn’t known that then, so he’d given Jake the best answer he could, which was, “Look: I’ve gone to a lot of schools, okay? And sometimes it’s gone well, and sometimes it’s gone…less well.” He swallowed and thought of elementary school in Euclid, where he made a bad first impression that kept getting worse, and was thus relentlessly bullied by his classmates until his parents, thankfully, moved. “The truth is I’d rather—ugh. I’m just…trying to get through high school. Aren’t we all trying to get through high school?”
Jake’s gaze had sharpened for a moment, then softened. “Yeah,” he’d said. “I guess we are.” He’d tapped his fingers against his thigh for a second and then added, “You know what? You’re right. We should enjoy your funeral. Come on; let’s get a drink.”
Sam could have said, “I don’t drink,” or, more accurately, “I didn’t drink until that sip of foul swill a few minutes ago, and if that’s alcohol, I am all set for the rest of my life. Thank you so much and, very sincerely, yuck.” But he didn’t. He smiled, instead, achingly pleased to be asked, and followed Jake inside.
Inside was a carnival of fascinating horrors.
Jake made them both a drink. He told Sam it was a 7 and 7, although some years later Sam ordered one at an actual bar andwas delivered such a different drink that he’s sure, now, that it must have been something else. He wasn’t watching while Jake put it together, too distracted by the wreck of the kitchen.
Sam had only been outside for ten minutes, and the kitchen had been fine when he left it, setting aside whatever tragedy had befallen the sink. But while he was away, conditions had deteriorated. It had at least emptied of people, but the window over the sink was broken, a still-lit joint next to its now-misaligned frame, smoking gently inside a ceramic flower Luce had made in art class. The freezerwasn’tbroken, at least as far as Sam could tell, but it might as well have been: the door was hanging wide open and it had been stripped entirely bare, nothing left within but shelves and a few popsicle stains.
This was a mystery: Where had it all gone? Surely they hadn’t eaten it all—some of it was raw meat, for God’s sake—but Sam didn’t get a chance to investigate. He’d caught sight of the stove, on which a pot full of something that he suspected had once been ramen was beginning to smoke. He pulled it off the heat, then turned off the burner, then noticed that one of the cabinet doors was fully off one of its hinges and barely clinging to the other, as though having recently survived a bear attack.
“God, Aunt Deb is right: People are animals,” Sam muttered under his breath. She’d been saying it for years, any time they were out to dinner, or at a store, and someone behaved badly; it always made his mother roll her eyes.
“These people, anyway,” Jake said brightly, coming up next to Sam and pressing a glass into his hand. “You should take this; you’re going to need it.”
Then he dragged Sam into the dining room, where Sam immediately solved the mystery of what had happened to the contents of the freezer.
The dining table, which normally sat in the center of the room, had been pushed up against one wall. Ranged upon it wasa collection of teenagers, some sitting, some sprawling, some standing. They were all yelling—cheering, really—for the group standing in front of the table. That merry band had a laundry basket filled with the contents of the freezer, and they appeared to be taking turns sliding them as hard as possible, one by one, across the hardwood floor. The goal, as far as Sam could tell, was to make the item explode impressively against the opposite wall. And it was, Sam had to give it to them, fairly impressive how much they’d changed its color in such a short amount of time.
On the other hand: “I can’t believe both of my parents are going to prison for life,” Sam said, mournfully and under his breath, to Jake. He took a long sip of his drink, which he didn’t like, but it seemed like the thing to do. At least it wasn’t the peppermint lime nightmare.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jake said back, equally low. “There was a party like this at Jasper Collinwood’s house last year, while his parents were in Barbados for a second honeymoon, and his mom is Judge Collinwood, so. They might just get a slap on the wrist for murdering you in cold blood.”
“Comforting,” Sam said, dry, and Jake grinned at him and shrugged.
“I live to please,” he said, with a little bow, and then turned when someone called, “Jake! Bro! I thought that was you—come on! We’re spinning out here, and you gotta defend your title!”
Sam, resigned, braced himself for It to happen. Jake was one person when it was just the two of them, hanging out behind the hedge or in one of their houses, or even during the occasional moment they caught together at school, when fate was kind or Sam was skipping class. But the minute one of his friends interrupted them, the minute he had to start putting on The Jake Thompson Show, he was as remote from Sam as someone who lived on another planet, instead of the house behind his own.Sam had become used to it. It didn’t bother him very much, so long as he didn’t think about it.
Except that night Jake had rolled his eyes, and groaned, and said, “God. Sam, have you ever done a wine spin?” Then he’d taken Sam by the wrist and dragged him outside. Sam had not ever done a wine spin, and looking back from the clearer vantage point of adulthood, he’s pretty sure no one evershoulddo one. The wine spin is not, as a concept, a good idea.
But he still watched in horrified fascination as Jake sat down in an office chair—Sam’s father’s leather office chair, Sam realized with a distant but very real pang of terror—and someone held what appeared to be a plastic bag full of red liquid over his head. It was, Sam surmised from context clues after a moment, what came inside one of those huge, cheap boxes of wine. There was a spigot on the end, which Jake made a great show of wiping off with his sleeve and then placed in his mouth.
Someone flicked the spigot, and someone else started spinning the chair, and the person holding the bag ran to keep up as Jake chugged with the impressive but also frankly upsetting ease of someone who had done this before. The crowd began to chant, “Wine spins! Wine spins! Wine spins!”
