Sam found himself wanting to chant, “Your liver! Your liver! Your liver!” He was aware that it was not at all in line with the reputation that led to this entire calamitous evening in the first place, so he kept it to himself.
It was around this point that a small mental package finally made its way to the central chamber of Sam’s brain, appearing only after it had survived an arduous journey. It was a battered, beaten thing, torn and stained and marked with something that looked like a footprint, and stuck with notices that said things like,Please! For the love of God! Someone get this up to the control room!It contained a single piece of paper, which contained a single sentence, which read:
Perhaps, on reflection, there might be some unfortunate consequences to telling so many people so many lies.
The reality of the party—the enormity of the mistake—washed over him like a mudslide, sweeping him away in the debris that remained over the first floor of the house. What was he going todo? What was he going tosay? His parents were getting back in two days; he couldn’t possibly clean it all up in time. God, there had been an assembly atschoolabout that party at Jasper Collinwood’s house. Could he get a professional crew in, maybe, to clean it? But where would he get the money? Maybe Deb would help him? But ugh, no, she’d probably think it wasfunnythat the house got wrecked, and anyway he hadn’t seen her since that Yom Kippur his parents hosted last year, where she and Mara had that blowout fight.
Abruptly but profoundly, he started to feel like he was going to be sick, not sure if it was from nerves or the very drink he’d been sipping, and he stumbled away from the crowd and down the porch steps with Jake still spinning under the bagged wine. Under any other circumstance Sam would have stayed and kept an eye on him, but he couldn’t bear it anymore, this swimming mass of almost-strangers who were looking at him but seeing someone else. What had felt good, early in the night, the nods and acknowledgement of his fellow classmates, abruptly felt twisted, horrible. Each one ratcheted up his sense of guilt another notch.
That wretched walk around to the side of the house seemed to take an age. He was so panicked, so upset, that he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. The whole night up until that point he’d been at a sort of automatic remove, not yet ready to face the reality before him. He’d run through every possible punishment he could think of: being grounded for a year; having his laptop run over by a semi-truck; being forced to babysitevery day until the triplets turned eighteen; having his bedroom moved to the unfinished section of the basement; being left for the summer on top of a mountain with a tent and crate of protein bars to meditate upon his crimes. But it hadn’t even occurred to him that that night—the damage, and the expense, and the fight Sam and his parents had about it, and the way they’d all been with one another, after—would be the penultimate stair on a flight he’d never noticing himself descending, one that led to him being told, in no uncertain terms, that he’d have to finish high school in someone else’s house.
He’d been pretty freaked out all the same. He’d gone and sat on the dilapidated, half-rotted wooden bench on the left edge of the property line, which had been there when they moved in and which David and Mara had never quite managed to bother removing, and put his head between his knees, laced his fingers behind his neck. Firmly, and exclusively, and over and over again, he thought:Don’t vomit, Sam. Do. Not. Vomit.
After an interminable age that was probably, in retrospect, about ten minutes, someone said, “Sam? You okay?”
Sam looked up and it was Jake, looking remarkably sober for having been Wine Spun, and holding a bottle of water. He passed it to Sam, who took it gratefully, taking a few desperate swigs as Jake folded neatly down next to him on the bench.
“Not really,” Sam admitted, as he wiped his mouth and attempted to pass the bottle back. Jake refused it, indicating that Sam should keep it, and Sam tried to smile; based on Jake’s returned expression, it didn’t go very well. “It’s kind of all…hitting me? How bad it is?”
“That makes sense,” Jake said, sanguine. “It is, I’m sorry to say,verybad.”
Sam laughed, not with much humor. “You don’t want to maybe sugarcoat it for me a little bit?”
“I don’t think you’ll enjoy that,” Jake said, “but sure, we can try it.” He adopted an affected, old-Hollywood-ingenue sort of voice and said, “I know it seems grim now, Sammy, but I reallydothink your parents are going to love the new color of the dining room wall?—”
“Oh my God, stop, stop,” Sam said, laughing for real, even if it was half in horror. “God. You’re right. That’s worse.”
“If I were you,” Jake said, his voice abruptly serious, “I think I might be relieved. Not because David and Mara aren’t going to kill you, they definitely are, but. I don’t know.” Sounding unsure, like he wasn’t entirely certain it was the sort of thing they had permission to say to one another, he added, “I guess I just feel like…why would you do all of it, you know? Not this, I know this party was an accident and/or the horrible act of a vengeful God, but…the rumors, the vandalism. Why would you do that if you didn’t want, on some level, to get caught?”
“Seriously?” Sam said, trying to laugh on it. “You think Iwantto get in trouble? That this is all, what, some sort of half-cocked scheme, and deep down I just want my parents tocareenough about me to—” He stopped, cutting himself off, because he could hear the razor-edged truth in it even though he desperately didn’t want to. It settled, heavy and unignorable, into Sam’s bones like lead.
Jake shrugged, looking pained. “Isn’t it?”
“Sometimes I wish your mom wasn’t a therapist,” Sam muttered, staring down at his hands, and was surprised when Jake laughed.
“Sam,” he said, with real feeling, “sometimes we all wish that.”
Sam still couldn’t quite muster up a laugh, but he turned his head and smiled at Jake, amused and rueful at first. But Jake was staring back at him with an expression of such fierceconcentration that Sam’s smile slid into something smaller, more confused. He said, “Jake…?”
“Realistically,” Jake said, his brow still creased in thought, “what’s the shortest amount of time you expect your parents to ground you? Like when do you imagine there’s a glimmer of a chance you’ll see the daylight again?”
Sam sighed, grimacing. “Oh, I’d say seven? Eight, maybe? We’re talking thousands of years, right?”
“Of course,” Jake agreed. He still seemed to be somewhere else, his gaze fixed but nearly vacant. “That’s about what I thought. It’s just… I mean, the timing’s reallybad, obviously, but I guess itismy last chance to do it before… Hmm.”
“Your last chance to do what?” Sam swallowed, wondering if he should be alarmed. If Jake had secret aspirations towards setting the hedges on fire, for example, it would be a terrible time to find out. That didn’t really sound like Jake, but a few hours earlier Sam wouldn’t have suspected his classmates of wanting to throw a frozen turkey across his living room like it was a bowling ball, so he wasn’t looking to take anything for granted.
Then Jake said, “This,” and grabbed him by the T-shirt, and kissed him.
It was abadkiss, which shouldn’t have been a surprise; it was, after all, Sam’s first one. But Sam was so profoundly not expecting it, was so sure his feelings for Jake were one-sided, that Jake was so far out of his league that he couldn’t possibly see Sam that way. He gasped in shock against Jake’s mouth, which, combined with the driving force of Jake’s enthusiasm, caused an unfortunate meeting of teeth. They both pulled back, Sam not sure if he wanted to wince at the awkwardness or grin for the next several eternities at the amazing, impossible news that Jake wanted tokiss him.
And then Jake smiled, and shook his head, and said, “Let’s try that again, shall we? Once more, from the top.”
Sam changed his mind. He didn’t want to wince or grin; he wanted to do this, and nothing but this, forever. When he looked back on the moment later, he’d be appalled by his inexpert technique and fumbling hands, but at the time he’d felt as though he and Jake wereinventingkissing there on the rotting old bench, the first two human beings in history to ever discover it.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a siren began to caterwaul, as though alerting him to the opening of a secure door, one meant to protect something valuable. He ignored it at first, only managing to break away, breathing hard, when he realized the howling of sirens was not within, but without—approaching from a distance, but louder all the time. Resting his forehead against Jake’s, he murmured, “Shit. Those are for me, aren’t they?”
“Ohhhh yeah,” Jake said, sounding apologetic about it. “No doubt about it. And, so you know, no offense or anything, but Iwillbe jumping the fence before they get here. It’s not you, it’s just that I’m not interested in being arrested and then executed by my father, especially not so close to your own untimely death. You understand.”
