All We Can Do Is Wait(4)

Maybe it would be better, Jason often wondered, to be alone. But then he’d get frightened at the thought of having no one, even people he didn’t like all that much, and decide to bottle himself up, to not tell Carter or anyone, until he graduated and could leave.

Graduation would be hard-won. Jason was kicked out of his first school, a boarding school in New Hampshire he’d begged his parents to send him to when he was in eighth grade, for stealing a case of champagne from the headmaster’s office—it was left over from some fund-raiser, the headmaster explained—and distributing bottles to the kids in his dorm. The truth was, he’d been looking for a way to get booted, not wanting to tell his parents that he’d made a mistake, that he hated this remote school and its stuffy traditions and wanted to come home. He’d also developed a furtive, dangerous crush on his roommate, Jamie, a kid from some insanely rich family in Colombia, who had shaggy brown hair, a beautiful accent, and a habit of telling Jason long, rambling stories about his sexual exploits back home. Jason had spent the better part of that year tormented in this frigid prison, and thus the case of Mo?t, just waiting to be nicked, had been a perfect out.

Then there was a school in town, or in a close suburb of the city, a progressive kind of place where students called teachers by their first names and the choir sang nondenominational, or omnidenominational, songs during “the holiday season.” It wasn’t such a bad place, generous and laid-back as it was. But that was the year when, at fifteen, almost sixteen, Jason got into partying, first trying weed with a junior named Chance Righton in the wood-smelling basement in Chance’s dad’s condo in Stowe. He’d moved on quickly to drinking. It was many nights of booze from parents’ liquor cabinets, maybe some pills brought back from New York City, where Chance’s brother, Reardon, was a freshman at NYU. (Yes, Reardon Righton. They called him Rearin’ Right In, which Jason thought sounded kinda gay but was apparently a nickname given to Reardon after an encounter with an especially adventurous girl from Choate on Nantucket two summers previous.)

Jason spent the winter of his sophomore year bumming around Chance’s dad’s ski condo, or up till dawn at the loft apartment on Commercial Street where a girl named Ainsley Briggs lived, essentially alone, as her parents spent most of their time at their country house. If Jason’s parents noticed any change in their son, his odd hours and frequent overnights at friends’ houses, they didn’t say anything. Linda was often busy helping to plan First Night in the lead-up to New Year’s, and then Theo went on scuba diving trips to Martinique with clients all throughout January and February. So winter was not a very scrutinized time for the Elsing children. By the time anyone but Jason and his teachers noticed his grades slipping, it was too late. He was not “asked back” for his junior year at the progressive school, leaving his parents frustrated, but not so much that they sat him down and talked to him, really asked him what was wrong.

“You’ve got to fix this, Jason,” his mother said, frowning at him in the kitchen a week after his glorified expulsion.

“Fix what?” Jason asked, head pounding, not fully aware if it was day or night. The Elsings’ kitchen was in the basement of their town house, and there was no natural light.

“This . . . whatever it is you’re doing,” Linda said, already sounding bored with the conversation. “We can’t just keep shifting you from place to place, Jason. You need some grounding; you need roots. You need a track record, a history in one place, so you can go somewhere decent.” She was referring to college, of course, though college was so far off Jason’s radar that she may as well have been talking about Mars.

Jason nodded, said, “I know, I know,” and that was it. Linda returned to whatever work she was doing, and Jason dragged himself up to his third-floor bedroom to go to sleep.

Mostly Jason’s parents seemed annoyed that they had to find him another school on such short notice. Alexa’s school was out of the question, because it was all girls. And even if Jason had been a girl, his grades were shit, so he never would have gotten in. So, the family settled on Neiman Prep, a small school in a quiet part of downtown that was known to be a dumping ground for rich burnouts, problem kids who had to bang around somewhere until they graduated and exploited legacies to go to universities they had no reason being at. If Theo and Linda were concerned or embarrassed about this downshift in Jason’s education, they didn’t let on, and Jason didn’t much care. By that fall, he’d grown sick of Chance and Ainsley and preferred to hole up in his room, taking pills, an Adderall or a Xanax, sometimes, ones he bought from a public school kid, meeting him in the Fens about once a week.

There was something sexy about meeting a guy in the Fens, a known gay cruising and hookup spot between Fenway Park and the MFA, but Jason never dared try anything with the amateur dealer, whose name was Sean and who had the ratty, malnourished look of many a Dorchester or Charlestown boy. (He wore it well, though.) In fact, Jason didn’t try anything with anyone. Potent and horny-making as getting wasted could be, it also effectively removed him from normal socializing. If he wasn’t doing it alone, whoever Jason got fuzzy and fucked-up with—a few kids from Neiman, occasionally one or two of his less square, less preppy childhood friends—they all blended into the same amorphous blob, names and faces smeared together in the haze of the night.

Things continued on like that for all of Jason’s junior year, his grades improving a little, but only because Neiman basically gave you a B just for showing up. Then, in May, the announcement of the Wellfleet plan. This dreadful moment at the dining room table.