All the Lies We Tell (Quarry Road #1)(9)
“Not unless someone narcs on us. Mom and Dad won’t be back until late Sunday. Galina’s working a double, or something. Ilya said she won’t be home until morning. Barry went fishing for the weekend. And Babulya’s staying with some friends in Camp Hill, some kind of quilting thing.”
Galina worked a lot of nights and weekends. Her still-newish husband was also often away during the same times. Alicia’s parents, however, went away for the weekend occasionally, and never before without having someone come to stay with them. Babulya was almost never gone. If there was ever a time to have a party, this weekend was it.
Alicia wasn’t satisfied. This had all the makings of disaster. “What if someone calls the cops?”
“Who’s going to call the cops?” Jennilynn rolled her eyes. “We’re the only houses on this dead-end street.”
Four hours later, their parents barely two hours on the road, Jennilynn was wasted and dancing so hard in the center of the Sterns’ living room that her halter dress could barely stay up. The guy who’d bought her the case of beer showed up to the party with a couple of bottles of rum. He was at least in his thirties, way too old to be at a high school party, but nobody seemed to care. Especially not Jennilynn. The Stern brothers pulled out a stash of vodka. Ilya was mixing some with red punch. Someone else spilled the chips all over the living-room floor, and kids danced on them, crushing them into the carpet.
“Of course it’s vodka. Like water for Russians.” Imitating his grandmother’s thick accent, Nikolai lifted the bottle toward Alicia’s nose until she recoiled from the stinging scent. “Water of life, come on, have a drink. It’s Galina’s.”
“Won’t she notice it’s gone?” Alicia had to shout over the sound of the music getting louder, louder, louder, the bass thump pressing her in every place her heart beat.
Nikolai didn’t hear her. He swigged right from the bottle, but she turned her head at his offer to drink. She already had a beer and didn’t like the taste or how it made her feel. She needed to get outside, get some air, away from the now-hovering haze of marijuana. This party was getting out of control, just as she’d predicted.
The Sterns’ backyard was rarely mowed. The flower beds went unweeded, unmulched, untended, and the flowers there grew wild and lush. Like a meadow. Alicia’s mother tut-tutted about it under her breath, about how a woman alone raising two boys shouldn’t need to hire a gardener to keep her yard in shape. That was what boys were for, Alicia’s mother had said to her father in the kitchen after dinner one night. Or that new husband. To mow the lawn and take out the garbage. To fix the sagging shutters and the screen door that blew open every time there was a storm.
But what difference did it make? Out here at the very end of Quarry Street, with only two houses and nobody to even see the Sterns’ backyard except them? It wasn’t like they lived in one of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods, where all the houses looked the same, one on top of the other, every yard nudging up against the next so you couldn’t be sure where one stopped or started except by the placement of the swing sets.
Sometimes she wished they lived closer to town, so she could walk to places the way her friends did, or so she didn’t have to get up so early to catch the school bus, but most of the time, Alicia loved living out here on the end of Quarry Street with nobody but the Sterns. It was quiet, at least on nights when her sister and Ilya weren’t throwing a party, and because there were no streetlights, there was never any problem seeing the stars.
Her feet whispered through the too-long grass, damp with night dew. There was a bench out near the dilapidated garden shed, and she sat on it to stare at the dark sky. The Quarrytown iron quarry was operated at one point in its history by a pair of brothers who preferred to live close to the site, so they’d built their houses directly across from each other outside the quarry’s original entrance. The Sterns lived in what used to be the older brother’s house, which was bigger and fancier because the older brother had never married and spent all his money on his property. The Harrison house across the street was smaller but kept in far better shape. Both houses were built from the same local limestone, but the Harrisons didn’t have a shed. Their backyard edged up to a farmer’s field that was usually planted with corn. The Sterns’ backyard eased into the woods surrounding the quarry, which was abandoned in the early seventies after a hurricane flooded it. It had become a vast, clear lake fed by spring water that never got warm, not even in August.
When they were much smaller, the four of them used to build forts out of tree branches and the cast-off bits and pieces of machinery or other things the quarry workers had left behind. They used to hide junk food in the old equipment shed. Now, she’d be more likely to find a stash of weed and some empty beer cans and maybe even a used rubber or two rather than a box of Little Debbie Snack Cakes. They all still swam in the quarry, but Alicia couldn’t remember the last time they’d hung out together in the woods. They were all growing up. Jennilynn and Ilya were high school seniors. Nikolai was a junior. Alicia and the Stern brothers’ new stepsister, Theresa, were both sophomores. They all waited for the bus together at the end of their street, but that was about it.
Except for now, at this party. Cars lined the street. The music was way too loud. There wasn’t anyone around to call the cops—Jennilynn was right about that—but in some way or another, by the end of the night, the cops were going to show up. The only time kids got away with mega parties like this without getting busted was in the movies.