The Beginning of Everything(36)

“Oh, right,” I said sheepishly. I had approved the next year’s Team Activities budgets. “Appetizers for everyone, then. You can thank me later.”

“Actually, the new guy buys the booze,” Luke told me.

Phoebe shook her head. “He’s kidding.”

We ordered a couple of appetizer platters, and everyone filled me in on the rivalry with Rancho.

“Basically, they hate us,” Austin said. “They think we don’t take debate seriously.”

“We don’t take debate seriously,” Sam drawled.

“Yeah, but we used to,” Austin said. “We were like, sister teams, or whatever it’s called, during freshman year. Before your time.”

Sam and Phoebe were both juniors, but I kept forgetting.

“Debate sucked back then,” Luke said. “Coach Kaplan would surprise us and search the hotel rooms.”

“It sucked,” Toby agreed. “Poor Kenneth Yang.”

“What happened to Kenneth Yang?” Cassidy asked, taking a sip of her drink.

Everyone sighed, and I got the impression that this was a story they’d all heard a million times. But Toby was determined to tell it again. He grinned.

“So Coach Kaplan comes by at two in the morning to make sure we’re all in bed and not still awake, because Kenneth Yang made this huge show of bringing a Monopoly board with him. So Coach is all, ‘Open up! I can hear you little shits playing Monopoly in there,’ and no one opens the door, because there’s liquor everywhere. So he wakes up everyone sleeping in the adjoining room and bursts through, and there’s Kenneth Yang with three neckties around his head, doing sake bombs while ironing his pants.”

We all crack up.

“And Coach Kaplan is all, ‘What the fuck, Yang?’ Because Kenneth Yang was team captain back then, and one of the best policy debaters around. And Kenneth Yang looks at Coach with the three neckties still around his head, in his goddamn underpants, and says, ‘It’s not what you think. I got a chance card in Monopoly, Coach.’”

Even Phoebe was choking on her soda at this point.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A week’s suspension,” Toby said. “And he got banned from overnight competition for the rest of the year. Carly Tate took over as captain. And she’d hooked up with the Rancho captain the year before, so that was awkward.”

“And that, Dragon Army,” Austin said, “is why Rancho is the enemy.”

“And also why the enemy’s gate is down,” Luke added, earning a few eye rolls for reasons I didn’t understand.

We ordered an entire chocolate cheesecake for dessert. It arrived at the table along with half of the Cheesecake Factory staff, who were clapping and singing some permutation of “Happy Birthday.”

The cheesecake went down in front of Cassidy, a single candle poked into the blob of whipped cream in the center. She turned red when she realized what was happening, but took the joke well, blowing out the candle and claiming that she was going to keep it as a souvenir of our immaturity.



IT TURNED OUT everyone’s suspiciously oversized duffel bags were full of party supplies. Specifically, gin and whiskey and wine—the fancy stuff my parents drank, not the cheap beer that went into Solo cups at high-school parties. There were speakers too, sleek expensive ones that plugged into Austin’s iPod, and tonic water with lime, and little wedges of gourmet cheese, and a baguette, which I found particularly hilarious as Phoebe pulled it out of her mini-suitcase. I didn’t know any sixteen-year-olds who bought baguettes as party supplies.

Before I knew it, I was standing in the midst of a party. A bunch of people from some school called Wentworth showed up with a bottle of prosecco, which Cassidy whispered to me was poor man’s champagne. They went to a tiny K–12 school in Los Angeles and gave the impression of being older and jaded, even though some of them were just sophomores.

Sam played bartender, rolling up his sleeves and filling plastic champagne flutes and glass cups from the bathroom. He seemed to know what he was doing, rattling off the names of cocktails and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have a bottle of St. Germain, and that Luke had bought the wrong kind of vermouth. The Wentworth team—there were six of them—drifted onto the balcony, smoking and drinking near-champagne.

Austin set up the speakers and docked his iPod. “Requests?” he called.

“Make us feel young and tragic,” Cassidy said, sitting cross-legged on one of the beds. She was sipping something that looked like Sprite but probably wasn’t.

The opening bars of some Beyonce disaster drifted through Austin’s speakers, and everyone groaned.

“I’m joking!” he assured us, switching it to Bon Iver.

Toby passed me a whiskey on the rocks, and I tasted it cautiously. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but there was good music playing, and a baguette on the ironing board, and Cassidy sitting cross-legged on the duvet in a schoolgirl outfit, so I tossed it back, because I was sick of being cautious.

Sam refilled it instantly and I downed the second glass as an afterthought, not realizing what I had done until my head began to spin from the combination of pain medicine and liquor, a combination the little prescription labels had warned against. I sat down next to Cassidy, who was talking with a cute blonde girl from Wentworth.