Here So Far Away(74)

“Oh my god. I forgot why it’s such a bad idea to get you high.”

Where to start? With the night at Lisa’s cottage when we did hash off hot knives and I spent the whole night shushing everyone because I was paranoid that we were bothering the neighbors, the closest of whom were a mile away? The time we smoked pot by a bonfire at the shore and I was so terrified we’d set the whole beach alight that I kept running back and forth between the fire and the ocean, trying to put out the flames with handfuls of seawater? Some people turn into rock stars when they get high. I turn into your mother.

“We need to go out so that I don’t have to deal with you alone.” His eyes grew wide. “The play!”

“The plane?”

“Lisa’s play! Tonight! Like, in less than an hour. Shit. Shit, shit. I’m calling a taxi.”

“The taxi.”

“George, this play is gonna be a disaster—really, really a disaster. After Lisa fired everyone, a lot of people said they were boycotting. We gotta fill the seats.”

“Fired who when?”

“Everyone except, like, six people. Couple weeks ago. She’s hardly left the auditorium since. Shit. Where are my clean pants?”

So she’d grown a backbone and done what she needed to do, just in time to ruin it. Too bad none of her friends—not Christina or Keith or even Bill—had the nads to tell her the hard truth when there was still time to save her.

“Buddy, we don’t need to go to this play,” I said. “We need to stop it.”

I had my hand up, waiting for the high five.

He was back to swatting the air.

We arrived soaking wet after a long sprint in the rain. The taxi driver had ditched us a half mile away, disinclined to have anyone at the school see two frantic, stoned kids doing parachute rolls out of his vehicle.

“This is what’s happening,” I said to Bill after we bought our tickets. “First, we go in through the front doors here and you cover me while I head down to the stage.”

“And then what, you pull the fire alarm?”

I had no idea what came second, but the fire alarm sounded good, which I said loudly enough to bring Nat and Doug running from the makeshift concession stand by the principal’s office.

“What the hell, George?” Nat said.

“We need to stop the play. It’s going to suck.”

“We need to what?”

Doug said, “Babe, check out their pupils.”

Nat glared at Bill.

“What? I thought she needed to relax.”

“Most people get high to lose control,” she said. “But the possibility of losing control is exactly what turns George into . . . this.”

I was looking at Nat, looking at Doug, looking at Nat, looking at Doug, trying to figure out how a person was supposed to figure out if they were together without being too obvious about it.

“Oh, come on,” Bill said. “Let’s see what happens. She’s in a totally different movie from the rest of us.”

Nat had never been a touchy-feely person, and she didn’t seem to know quite what to do with her hand when she reached over to me. She settled for brushing my wet hair away from my face. Then she brushed it the other way. Then she gave up. “George? Georgie Girl? I know you think you’re having some kind of a big moment here, but you don’t want to ruin this for Lisa.”

“I’m going to save her,” I said. “Because it is going to suck.”

“No, you’re going to embarrass her and get kicked out and the play will go on. You know why?”

“Yes,” I said, hoping that would keep Nat from laying one of her truth nuggets.

“Lisa doesn’t need you anymore.”

I don’t know how long I’d been staring at her, my ears ringing, chest flaring spectacularly, when Doug said, “Let’s just go in. Maybe you guys will sober up by the time it starts. What did you take?”

“The stuff in the blue baggie,” Bill said.

“Oh no, you’re not sobering up.”

Getting to our seats was challenging, seeing as the aisle kept stretching out to infinity no matter how far we walked. It felt like everyone was watching us, though I couldn’t tell for sure because my eyes were blurry with the sting of what Nat had said.

She plunked me into a seat and turned to shush Bill, who was having a giggle fit on her other side.

A long leg nudged mine. “You okay?”

I started so badly at the sight of Joshua Spring that he jumped and hit his knee painfully on the seat in front of him.

“Aw, why?” he groaned.

“I’m sorry! Sorry. I’m a little, you know. Out of it.”

He gave his knee a last rub, then reached under his seat for a thermos he’d stowed there, holding it out to me. I sniffed it: the infamous Spring family home brew. “I mean, this is going to suck,” he said. “I don’t think anyone here is sober.”

The house lights dimmed and the curtains parted to reveal a single light on a bare stage. Keith stood in the center, wearing a pair of old-fashioned pants with suspenders and a white shirt. His feet were bare. “This is the forest primeval,” he announced to the half-empty auditorium.

“No,” I said, apparently not just in my head.

Beside me, Joshua chugged his home brew.