The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(58)

In his BMW it was him and his boy Ryan Harbinger in front. Nick Brickston got in back with these three drunkass girls that he was babysitting—Cally Broderick, Alessandra Ryding, and Emma Fleed. Nick sat on one side, Alessandra on the other. Cally rode bitch in the middle. Emma was pretty compact, so she climbed onto Nick’s lap for the ride. By this time the rain had taken a breather.

“Okay?” Emma asked Nick. She kind of slurred it through her hair, which was swinging over her face. “Too fat?”

“Shut the fuck up,” he told her, and she smiled and pressed her lips to his ear, murmuring something that Damon didn’t know but must have been pretty great, because in the rearview mirror Nick started grinning like a motherfucker.

They slid through the night. The car was sick. He drove like a beast. The road was hairpinned and slick but he was relaxed. Steady mobbing down the narrow streets, swerving in and out of his lane, taking curves without even worrying about touching the brake.

—

Damon had managed to go six weeks without getting into any shit. So earlier that night, his parents decided to give him back the BMW.

“Not give, lend,” his mom said, like there was a difference, when he was their only kid left and everything they had would come to him eventually. His mom was a first-grade teacher and liked to use her little-kid voice on him, like she was helping him sound out a word. It made him want to punch the wall. Except he didn’t do shit like that anymore.

“Just for the night,” his dad said, dangling the keys in his face. “See how you do.”

“We really want to trust you again, Damon,” his mom said, all earnest, and for five honest seconds he thought about staying home and hanging out with her, baking cookies and watching a Disney Channel movie like they did when he was a kid—those weeks when his dad went out of town for work and that house felt like a place where he could be. But Damon wanted to get to Elisabeth Avarine’s function, the last major party of the year. So he just said, “Cool,” snatched the key ring, and twirled it on his finger until the keys chimed and clanged.

He went upstairs to get ready. At the bathroom sink he faced his reflection, ran a palm over his buzz cut. He liked to keep it short—liked the shivery feel of the clippers over his scalp and the dents and gleams his skull made in the mirror. He cracked his neck and felt the donut of flesh at the base of his skull. He hated how he always knew it was there. Hated his fleshy belly, his chest like a woman’s tits. As a kid he’d worn a T-shirt in the pool. Now he wore bigass shirts and jeans and he just didn’t fuckin’ swim. He wasn’t into exercise, ever since that asshole JV football coach kicked him off the team for grades. He didn’t care, he said at the time, loud enough so everyone could hear. Football at Valley was bunk anyway.

His body was what it was, no changing it. But his clothes were bomb and he took care of that shit. The shirt matched the shoes matched the hat. That night, he chose a blazing-purple T-shirt with a neon-yellow swoosh and highlighter-yellow kicks designed to blind. He swabbed alcohol over the silver studs in his eyebrows and trimmed the stray hairs in his nose. Finally, he took out his Swiss army knife that he got for his last birthday, cut his fingernails and scraped the dirt from underneath, jabbed his cuticles with the little plastic stick, snipped his hangnails with the tiny silver scissors. Say what you want about him, he had beautiful fuckin’ hands.

He was pumped to get out. He hated being trapped inside his house. Before he got arrested, he’d gone out almost every night with his boys, Ryan Harbinger and Nick Brickston. Ryan was this pretty boy, baseball star asshole who all the girls wanted. And Nick was like an evil genius or some shit—dealt weed and Molly and SATs, always made bank, never got caught. For years they’d gone around town getting chased away by cops. When it was soccer moms sitting around with Starbucks cups, it was called having a nice time; when it was him and Nick with a cigarette, it was loitering. Or Officer Frankel would find him walking home from Ryan’s at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday and slow to tail him like a draft car. “Been drinking tonight, son?” he’d yell. “Don’t you know there’s a curfew in this town?”

Still, Damon preferred the nighttime. In the day he burned too hot. Sometimes it was just physical heat—sweat beading over his eyebrows, T-shirt damp and sticking to his pits—and sometimes it went deeper than that. He’d lope down Camino Alto gripping his waistband so his jeans wouldn’t fall around his ankles—the band was cinched around his ass, boxers puffing over like a cloud of smoke—and the old ladies from the retirement home would stop pushing their stolen shopping carts to stare or even glare at him, their faces asking what had happened to their town. Like he was doing some illegal shit just by existing. But he’d lived in Mill Valley all his life—it was his town as much as theirs. He was as much Mill Valley as they were, he thought, in fact more so, because he was the now and the future and they were just waiting to die.

Overall he was just tryna get action. Tryna fuckin’ move. Kicking the leg of the dining room table. Snapping his wrist like Ali G. Tipping back in his classroom chair until he hovered on two skinny metal legs. His teachers yelled at him to calm down, be still. Hush, Damon! they were always saying. Focus, Damon! Pay attention! Since fuckin’ kindergarten with this shit. Stop that tapping! Don’t look at that. Don’t touch her. Don’t unwind that paper clip and jab the metal end into your thumb. Don’t pick up that stapler and pry it apart, don’t stick your fingers in to wiggle the machinery inside—