The Beginning of Everything(2)

Sorry. That was horrible of me. But honestly, it’s been long enough since the seventh grade that the whole thing feels like a horrifying story I once heard. Because that tragedy belongs to Toby, and he has lived stoically in its aftermath while I escaped relatively unscathed.

My own tragedy held out. It waited to strike until I was so used to my good-enough life in an unexceptional suburb that I’d stopped waiting for anything interesting to happen. Which is why, when my personal tragedy finally found me, it was nearly too late. I had just turned seventeen, was embarrassingly popular, earned good grades, and was threatening to become eternally unextraordinary.

Jonas Beidecker was a guy I knew peripherally, the same way you know if there’s someone sitting in the desk next to you, or a huge van in the left lane. He was on my radar, but barely. It was his party, a house on North Lake with a backyard gazebo full of six packs and hard lemonade. There were tangles of Christmas lights strung across the yard, even though it was prom weekend, and they shimmered in reflection on the murky lake water. The street was haphazard with cars, and I’d parked all the way on Windhawk, two blocks over, because I was paranoid about getting a ding.

My girlfriend Charlotte and I had been fighting that afternoon, on the courts after off-season tennis. She’d accused me—let me see if I can get the phrasing exact—of “shirking class presidential responsibilities in regard to the Junior-Senior Luau.” She said it in this particularly snotty way, as though I should have been ashamed. As though her predicted failure of the annual Junior-Senior Luau would galvanize me into calling an emergency SGA meeting that very second.

I was dripping sweat and chugging Gatorade when she’d sauntered onto the court in a strapless dress she’d been hiding beneath a cardigan all day. Mostly, as she talked, I thought about how sexy her bare shoulders looked. I suppose I deserved it when she told me that I sucked sometimes and that she was going to Jonas’s party with her friend Jill, because she just couldn’t deal with me when I was being impossible.

“Isn’t that the definition of impossible?” I’d asked, wiping Gatorade off my chin.

Wrong answer. She’d given one of those little screams that was sort of a growl and flounced away. Which is why I showed up to the party late, and still wearing my mesh tennis shorts because I knew it would antagonize her.

I pocketed my key lanyard and nodded hey to a bunch of people. Because I was the junior class president, and also the captain of our tennis team, it felt like I was constantly nodding hello to people wherever I went, as though life was a stage and I was but a poor tennis player.

Sorry—puns. Sort of my thing, because it puts people at ease, being able to collectively roll their eyes at the guy in charge.

I grabbed a Solo cup I didn’t plan on drinking from and joined the guys from tennis in the backyard. It was the usual crew, and they were all well on their way to being wasted. They greeted me far too enthusiastically, and I endured the back slapping with a good-natured grimace before sitting down on a proffered pool chair.

“Faulkner, you’ve gotta see this!” Evan called, wobbling drunkenly as he stood on top of a planter. He was clutching an electric green pool noodle, trying to give it some heft, while Jimmy knelt on the ground, holding the other end to his face. They were attempting to make a beer funnel out of a foam pool noodle, which should give you an idea of how magnificently drunk they were.

“Pour it already,” Jimmy complained, and the rest of the guys pounded on the patio furniture, drumrolling. I got up and officiated the event, because that was what I did—officiate things. So I stood there with my Solo cup, making some sarcastic speech about how this was one for The Guinness Book of World Records, but only because we were drinking Guinness. It was like a hundred other parties, a hundred other stupid stunts that never worked but at least kept everyone entertained.

The pool noodle funnel predictably failed, with Jimmy and Evan blaming each other, making up ridiculous excuses that had nothing to do with the glaringly poor physics of their whole setup. The conversation turned to the prom after-party—a bunch of us were going in on a suite at the Four Seasons—but I was only half listening. This was one of the last weekends before we’d be the seniors, and I was thinking about what that meant. About how these rituals of prom, the luau, and graduation that we’d watched for years were suddenly personal.

It was slightly cold out, and the girls shivered in their dresses. A couple of tennis-team girlfriends came over and sat down on their boyfriends’ laps. They had their phones out, the way girls do at parties, creating little halos of light around their cupped hands.

“Where’s Charlotte?” one of the girls asked, and it took me a while to realize this question was directed toward me. “Hello? Ezra?”

“Sorry,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Isn’t she with Jill?”

“No she isn’t,” the girl said. “Jill is completely grounded. She had like this portfolio? On a modeling website? And her parents found it and went crazy because they mistakenly thought it was porn.”

A couple of the guys perked up at the mention of porn, and Jimmy made an obscene gesture with the pool noodle.

“How can you mistakenly think something is porn?” I asked, halfway interested at this turn in the conversation.

“It’s porn if you use a self-timer,” she explained, as though it was obvious.