Thanks for the Trouble

  Thanks for the game, I wrote, and stood up.

  “Hey, hey! Hold up there, Peebles. I was just messing with you. Of course I’ll help with your lady. I’ve already humiliated you once today. I’m not a monster. Sit your crushed ass back down in that seat.”

  I did.

  “You need a party.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s easy. Jamie Schmid’s doing his yearly Halloween bash tonight. Starts at nine. BYO shit.”

  I didn’t know Jamie that well, but what I knew about him, I didn’t like.

  He wouldn’t want me there, I wrote.

  “Fuck that. I’ll make sure it’s cool. I got him wrapped around my little finger. Give me your number and I’ll text you the address.”

  Thanks.

  “My pleasure.”

  I stood up again, still a little amazed it had been that easy.

  “Hey, Parker,” Alana said. “It’s good to talk to you. You should make a habit out of it.”

  I’d put my journal away, so all I could do was shrug.

  KILLING TIME, PART 2 (HOME)

  I SKIPPED THE BUS SO I could run some important party-based errands on the way home. First I took the trolley downtown to this Halloween superstore thing that goes up every year for about two weeks. The place was packed with other last-minuters like myself, getting themselves outfitted for a night as Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen or a slutty pharmacist or whatever. I’d come up with my own concept on the way over; I wanted something that would allow me to wear some of the clothes that Zelda had bought me that morning, but would still count as a costume. It only cost me about twenty bucks to get what I needed.

  After texting Zelda the party info I’d gotten from Alana, I stopped at the Whole Foods near my house. They keep all their flowers right next to the front door, which is basically a giveaway. I had a hard time deciding; roses seemed like a fat red cliché, but most of the other flowers were ass ugly. Finally I just grabbed a handful of thick-stemmed sunflowers and walked out with them. The whole way home, I could see people staring at me, trying to figure out what the hell costume involved a normally dressed kid holding a bouquet of sunflowers in one hand and a bunch of shopping bags in the other.

  We live in the Outer Sunset, a neighborhood at the far western edge of San Francisco. Our house has been in my mom’s family for decades, but we didn’t move there until after my dad died, because the place sorta sucks. It’s basically the exact opposite of Doctor Who’s TARDIS: way smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside. Claustrophobia sets in the second you walk through the front door. The kitchen is just a narrow alley between two counters. The oven door can’t even open all the way; it sticks at an eighty-one-degree angle against the cabinets on the other side of the room (I measured it precisely with a protractor for a geometry assignment, for which I received a C–). There’s no dining room, so we eat all our meals at the glass coffee table in the living room. A narrow set of stairs, each one a little bit higher than stairs are supposed to be, leads to the second floor, where my mom’s bedroom and the house’s one bathroom are. From the second-floor hallway, you grab a ring in the ceiling to pull down the ladder to the attic, where my room is.

  “There’s a frozen pizza in the oven,” my mom said when I came in.

  I spun the dial to 425. My mom was sitting on the living room couch, watching some random cop show, so she hadn’t noticed all my bags. This might sound like a lucky break—it would be tough to explain how I’d ended up with thousands of dollars’ worth of new clothes without stealing them—but the truth is, whenever my mom wasn’t at work, the odds were pretty good she’d be sitting on that couch, watching TV. I quickly ran up to my room to drop off the bags, then came back downstairs. The eviscerated remains of a TV dinner were still in my mom’s lap, and she was holding a mostly empty glass of red wine.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. It wasn’t an accusation, just a way to make conversation during a commercial break. She never really paid much attention to where I went or what I did.

  Around, I signed.

  “I love it there. Great appetizers. Hey, would you get a girl a refill?” I brought the bottle of wine in from the kitchen. When she turned around to take it, she noticed the bouquet of sunflowers I’d left on the counter.

  “What are those?”

  I’m going to a party tonight.

  My mom did a double take. Then a triple take. Then a quadruple take.

  Stop that.

  “I’m sorry. But, I mean, this is voluntary? You haven’t joined a cult? You haven’t been brainwashed or hypnotized or anything?”

  I don’t think so.

  “And the flowers, then . . . must be for a girl.” Her face lit up. I shook my head, but it was too late. My mom was clearly a little bit tipsy, and this would’ve been exciting news anyway. “They are! They’re for a girly girlity girl! A bonita señorita!”

  Shut up.

  “Okay. I’ll zip it.” But she was still smiling in that infuriating parental way, like she was in on a secret shared between her and all other adults ever. “Just tell me her name.”

  No.

  “Is it Bonita the Señorita?”

  Shut up.

  “Fine, fine, fine.”

  Her show came back on, and we watched it together. Then we watched another one while I ate dinner. It was only a little after seven when I finished, but my mom had already passed out. She was slack-jawed and drooling on a couch cushion—the perfect candidate for a malicious Instagram post—but I wasn’t that mean.

  My mom had been a pretty woman when she was younger. I’d seen photos of her as a long-legged, almost ditzy-looking teenager, throwing her hair back in convertibles and posing lazily on beaches, wearing outfits that made my skin crawl (thinking of your parents being young is like thinking of Winnie-the-Pooh going to the bathroom: just fucking weird ). But the past few years had been rough on her. After my dad died, she’d had to get a full-time job. There’d been life insurance, but after replacing the car and paying off my hospital bills and flying family members out from Colombia for the funeral, the money that was left over turned out to be just enough for a couple of movie tickets and a medium popcorn. She’d always liked traveling, so she trained to be a flight attendant for Delta. Turned out it wasn’t as glamorous as she’d expected. The pay was shit, and her seniority was terrible, so she ended up getting saddled with tons of all-nighters. Then there were all the hours she had to spend on her feet, the obnoxious passengers, the restless nights in cheap airport hotels, the crap airplane food, the bone-dry air that she blamed for her expanding LTE network of crow’s-feet.

  She’d been away since the previous morning on a layover in Dallas. Of course she was fried. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. Her eyes were unfocused, blurry with fatigue and at least half a bottle of wine.

  “Marco?” she said.

  I shook my head, waited for her to recognize me as her son. But her eyes were filling up with tears now. “I was having a dream about you.”

  I’m not him, I signed.

  “You were right over there,” she said, pointing at the other end of the couch. “We were watching The Simpsons together.” She wiped at the sticky corners of her mouth with the back of her hand, then at her wet cheeks. “It was so real,” she said, and I could tell she’d finally phased back to reality.

  I know.

  She moaned a little bit when she stood up, took my arm like an invalid. I led her upstairs and put her in bed.

  “Good night, Parky.”

  Good night.

  I went up to my bedroom to get dressed. It took me a good half hour to choose my outfit; I hadn’t quite realized just how much stuff Zelda had bought me. Finally I settled on the shirt with the red collar, a gray jacket, and the one pair of jeans that I could get into without contortions. Then I added the two props that turned the whole thing into a costume: a silver wig and a little orange-brown tail tufted with white. (Get it? No? Well, you have a few minutes here to tr
y to work it out.) I didn’t have a mirror in my bedroom, so I could only hope I looked presentable.

  Back downstairs, I picked the sunflowers up off the kitchen counter, stole a bottle of wine from the rack, then headed out to the first party I’d ever given a shit about.

  Zelda still hadn’t responded to my text.

  AN EVENING IN EIGHT DRINKS: INTRODUCTION

  IT MIGHT SEEM WEIRD TO hate parties. Who hates parties? It’s just a bunch of people getting together to have a good time, right? Wrong. It’s a bunch of people getting together to be drunk, loud assholes, with a special emphasis on the loud. And another emphasis on the drunk. And a third emphasis on assholes, while we’re at it.

  Jamie lived just off Irving Street in the Inner Sunset, a twenty-minute walk from my place. The streets were overrun with a midget army of ghosts, witches, zombies, and Pokémon. It was a perfect Halloween night—thick with a fog that captured light and held it close, turning each streetlamp into a firefly cupped in the palms. The houses in the Sunset were closely spaced, laid out in colorful candy-button rows all the way down to the ocean. They were decorated with cobwebs and cardboard witches, tissue-paper ghosts and antique brooms. Every now and again you heard a little kid scream with pleasure-fear. I felt a brief burst of nostalgia for a time when a whole night spent collecting three bucks’ worth of shitty candy was something worth looking forward to.

  The party was audible from a couple of blocks away. Raucous hip-hop beats clashed with the “spooky” ghost noises coming out of cheap boom-box speakers at nearby houses. As I was walking up the steps to Jamie’s front door, a couple of young trick-or-treaters rushed past me, only to be called harshly back to the street by their parents, who recognized that this was not the place to go for a Kit Kat bar; true to form, Erik Jones was already vomiting into a pile of tiny white pumpkins artfully arranged on Jamie’s stoop.

  I dropped the bottle of wine off in the kitchen, then did a lap around the house looking for Zelda, but she was nowhere to be found. Out in the backyard, Alana was standing next to the keg, filling up cups for a couple of standard-issue vampires. She was dressed like a pirate, but she’d stuffed the back of her loose white pants with pillows. I got the joke right away, because it was even dumber than mine: Pirate’s Booty.

  “Look who made it out of the house,” she said.

  “Is that who I think it is?” Jamie Schmid, the host of the party, came running from the other end of the yard, a bottle of Budweiser gripped tightly in each fist. He was dressed like the bad guy from The Karate Kid, with COBRA KAI stitched onto his gi. He bore more than a passing resemblance to that guy, actually—reddish-blond hair, a pale face peppered with a few misleadingly wholesome freckles, and a palpable cruelty around the mouth, which rarely tautened into a smile as a result of anything other than its own jokes. “Fucking Charlie Chaplin has come to my party. I’m honored. And let me get a look at this costume.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around like a doll. (I haven’t mentioned this yet, but sometimes people treat me like a piece of furniture because I don’t speak.) “You’re a bunny rabbit, but with a bunch of dumb flowers. Peter Rabbit, right? Or Roger Rabbit?”

  “He’s a silver fox,” Alana said, as if it were obvious.

  “Ho!” Jamie put a hand over his mouth like some kind of MC. “That is the shit, Charlie. I love that. You just earned yourself a beer.” He handed one of the bottles over.

  “So where’s this girl of yours?” Alana asked.

  “She must not have gotten here yet,” Jamie said. “I don’t hear any oinking.” He laughed.

  “Shut up, Jamie.” Alana lifted her beer in my direction. “Here’s to you, Parker.”

  Unlike most kids I know, I’ve never seen the appeal in getting hammered every time there’s alcohol on offer. But here I was at a party made up entirely of people I either didn’t know or didn’t like, so what else was I supposed to do? Down the hatch.

  DRINK #1: A BOTTLE OF BUD

  I HADN’T BROUGHT MY JOURNAL to the party, because I didn’t want to carry it around with me all night. I could see the pity in people’s eyes when they watched me write. It’s the one thing I can say for the Jamie Schmids of the world: their honest contempt is a million times easier to deal with than the stilted, stuttery sympathy that a lot of so-called “nice” people end up spewing. I’d much rather be treated like a freak than a charity case. Anyway, carrying my journal with me implied that I wanted to communicate but couldn’t, when really I didn’t mind keeping quiet. I wasn’t here to make friends, as reality TV stars liked to put it. I was here for Zelda.

  I stood in a classic awkward party circle with Alana, her boyfriend Tyler, Jamie, and three or four of Jamie’s friends that I knew tangentially from school. They were talking about teachers, impersonating some and hating on some and admitting to crushes on others. Then they moved on to the stupidest answer any of them had ever given in class.

  “Hey, Jamie,” Tyler said, “you remember that time you said the third president was almost George Washington?”

  “I stand by it. I was only off by, like, two presidents. That oughta be worth partial credit.”

  “There’s no partial credit with hard facts,” Alana said.

  “Whatever. And you should talk, Tyler. You once said that the White House was the capital of America.”

  “I was eleven years old.”

  “You were stupid years old is what you were.”

  I was careful not to laugh. My laughter, I’ve been told, is a strange sight to behold—like a silent seizure. I just smiled, then plugged my mouth with the already empty bottle of Bud.

  DRINK #2: ANOTHER BOTTLE OF BUD

  THE CIRCLE DISBANDED AS EVERYONE went to get another drink, and I was forced to engage in my least favorite party activity—wandering around pretending that I knew where I was going. I found the kitchen, where I grabbed another beer from the fridge and ate some Doritos. In the living room, I watched the DJ do that weird thing DJs do, where they hold one headphone to their ear and pretend that they’re engaged in a really difficult and serious artistic task. I bounced my head to the beat for a minute, then headed deeper into the house to get away from the crowd. A closed door beckoned—Jamie’s parents’ room. It was funny: you could tell who slept where by the contents of the bedside tables. The one on the left featured a stack of books about World War II and a pair of nail clippers big enough to trim hedges with. The one on the right had a crystal ashtray with a lipstick-stained cigarette butt and a slim self-help book: Finding Your Inner Goddess.

  Jamie’s room was right next door. An unmade bed. A stack of Maxim magazines. A smell like the inside of a dirty mind, made up of equal parts Axe body spray and tube sock. The idiot had left his PS Vita plugged into the wall in plain sight. I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket.

  Back in the hallway, Rosie Cuevas (dressed as a pink bunny) stood against the wall, waiting for the bathroom. She was checking her cell phone in that way you check your cell phone at a party, reading over your old text messages just to have something to do. Rosie was my first and only kiss, way back in the seventh grade, during a game of spin the bottle I’d somehow gotten involved in behind the library after a dance. The bottle had landed on her first, then on me, then blam! I was kissed. Kisses are weird that way. They’re supposed to be performed by two people simultaneously, but they don’t have to be. We even have a term for it—a stolen kiss—which is really just a euphemism for full-on oral assault. I can remember looking up from the open mouth of the bottle only to find another open mouth rushing at me. A crush of lip and tongue and saliva and the chorus of yowls from the onlookers. The next day I left a note in her school mailbox asking if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She politely declined.

  “Parker!” she said, eyes lighting up in a way that was too sudden to be insincere. I raised a hand to say hey, but she bypassed it for a hug. “What the hell, man? You never come to parties!”

  I shrugged.

  “Hey, check this ou
t. I still remember how to say ‘I love you.’ ” She signed the phrase. “Was that right?”

  I nodded. I’d forgotten that I’d taught her that.

  “So have you started looking at applications yet? State wants all these essays and recommendations and stuff. It’s nuts. I sorta thought you could just ask to be admitted and they’d say yes or no. Stupid, right?” The bathroom door opened and disgorged some kind of goth death fairy. “Anyway, wait for me out here, yeah? We should totally catch up.”

  But while Rosie was in the bathroom, a cheer came from the direction of the living room. It could’ve been anything—somebody taking off an article of clothing, somebody punching somebody else in the face, somebody beer bonging a forty of Olde English—but somehow I knew it was Zelda. I realized I was suddenly grinning like an asshole, so I took a moment to calm myself down.

  Be cool, I signed to myself.

  When I was sure I looked appropriately unenthusiastic, I headed for the living room.

  DRINK #3: A GLASS OF BUBBLY

  THEY WERE CARRYING THEM FROM the trunk of a limousine double-parked outside, straight through the house, and out onto the back deck: bottle after bottle of champagne. Zelda followed behind them, directing their labor. She was dressed like some kind of old-timey movie star, in a black dress with a neckline that plunged like a bungee jumper down her front, revealing two half scoops of vanilla skin on either side. Her hair had been smoothed into a tight wave and covered over with something halfway between a tiara and a hairnet, dripping black jewels down her forehead. Her eyes were ringed with mascara. I hardly recognized her, but in a good way.