Beyond the Point(7)

Avery rolled her eyes. She was so ready for high school to be over. Senioritis felt like sitting in a brand-new car with no gas: all of the promise, none of the horsepower. Kids from her high school talked a big game about going to college out of state, but in the end, they’d all end up at the University of Pittsburgh. The boys would play the same drinking games in college until they were fat and bald. The girls would join sororities and attend themed parties until they gained communications degrees or engagement rings or fetuses—whichever came first. It was sad, Avery thought. So predictable. So convenient. So not her future, if she had anything to say about it.

She’d seen what the American dream achieved—and it wasn’t happiness. Her mother and father coexisted in their house. Other than attending Avery’s basketball games as a pair, they might as well have been strangers.

Avery’s relationship to her parents was like that of a business owner to a bank. At the beginning, they were happy to finance her way to big dreams. Hank and Lonnie Adams justified the money they spent on private coaches and summer basketball camps with the assumption that Avery’s future would be financed by her skill in basketball. But the more time passed, the more the pressure built for Avery to perform, and the more uncomfortable they looked writing the checks. Every day, her mother asked whether or not any college coaches had called, and while she waited for an answer, Avery could see her mother doing math behind her eyes. Have you been worth it?

Walking toward the kitchen, Avery held up the towel around her body and filled her empty cup with water, guzzling it quickly to counteract the anonymous pink punch she’d imbibed earlier. A cooler of beer sat on the counter and the smell of weed wafted in from outside, pungent and earthy. She wasn’t much of a smoker, especially not during the basketball season—it took away her edge—but the smell sent her shoulders rolling down her spine. Maybe she would stay a little while longer. After all, what good was having an edge if she was just going to end up in the same place as everyone else?

“Yo, Avery!”

Turning, Avery spotted Kevin Walters across the kitchen, holding a corded telephone in his hand. The plastic spiral dangled from the phone to the floor and back to the wall, where it was plugged into the base. Rotund and jovial, with bright red cheeks and dark brown hair, Kevin had avoided years of bullying by making fun of himself before anyone else could, gathering friends by the dozen. It also helped that his parents were frequently out of town and chose to ignore the signs that he held ragers in their absence.

“Phone’s for you,” he said. He held a puffy hand over the receiver and extended it toward her.

Avery’s thin, tweezed eyebrows immediately crunched together in confusion. Who in the world would be calling her here? Swallowing hard, she walked across the kitchen, still barefoot, aware of the sticky layer of smut she was accumulating on the pads of her feet.

It couldn’t be her parents.

Definitely not. In four years of high school, they hadn’t once asked where she was going. They never waited up on the couch when she didn’t come home by curfew. She wasn’t even sure she had a curfew. If she did, her parents had never enforced it. Maybe that was because they’d assumed Avery would be like her older brother, Blake—bookish and square. At sixteen, her younger brother, Caleb, had only had his driver’s license for a month. Plus, it wasn’t like he had anywhere to go. Caleb was a sophomore with nerdy friends that were always watching sci-fi movies or playing board games, the names of which Avery couldn’t pronounce. Settlers of Catan. Dungeons and Dragons.

But as lame as Caleb Adams might have been, at least he could keep a secret. Any time Avery arrived home from a party in the single-digit hours of the morning, smelling of guilt, her little brother would pretend not to notice. Bleary-eyed and drunk, Avery would place a single finger over her mouth in the universal symbol for “shhh,” and then tiptoe up the stairs to her room. It was their secret. Don’t ask; definitely don’t tell. And Caleb never told.

She took the phone from Kevin.

“Hello?” Avery plugged her other ear with a finger, trying to block out the sound of Dave Matthews in the background.

“Avery?”

The voice on the other end of the line was quiet, shaking—and unmistakable.

“Caleb? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I need you—” her little brother said, hiccupping like he’d been crying for hours. “I need you to come get me.”

“Okay,” she said, quickly trying to assess whether or not she was sober enough to drive. “I’m on my way. Where are you?”

“The Riverview police station—”

“The what?”

“—on the parkway. Hurry, Avery. They say they’re going to call Dad.”

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Avery’s little brother sat in the passenger seat of her beat-up Honda Civic, his Kurt Cobain hair hanging like a sheet in front of his eyes.

A six-inch piece of duct tape held a rip in the back seat together and the left rear window hadn’t rolled down in more than a year, but there was no money to get this piece-of-shit car fixed.

“It has four wheels and an engine,” her father had said. “Be grateful.”

For her eighteenth birthday, Avery’s mother had given her one of those cassette tapes with a cord that attached to her portable Discman, so at least she could play her CDs. That fact alone had bought the car another few years of life. Plus, she wasn’t about to ask her parents for anything else. Not before, and definitely not now. Sitting in the driveway looking at the split-level house in front of them, she realized that this night would destroy any chance she’d ever had at getting a new car.