“Buying doughnuts on the way to school can make you late, can’t it?”
“I needed the coffee—”
My mom raised her eyebrow, stopping me in my completely screwed tracks. I didn’t question how she knew about the doughnut. As frustrating as she could be, the lady was smart. Chief scientist/X-Files professor/Hermione Granger–level smart. Companies hired her to interview potential applicants and evaluate their employees. She’d conduct twenty-minute interviews and, based solely on that, determine whether people should be hired or promoted.
“And how was the coffee, Nick?” Having heard this lecture many times before, I said it in my head as she said it aloud: “Was it worth it?”
If Mr. Hoover had asked me that, I’d have mouthed off. I’d have said yes, of course it was worth getting disciplinary action on my permanent record and jeopardizing my chance of a soccer scholarship. Hot diggity dog. And I’d have frolicked off to whatever class I was probably blowing off. Probably biology.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it a little more than my last apology.
She lifted her World’s Best Wife mug to her pale lips and drained the last of her tea. She didn’t bother pushing back—we’d been down this road before. While my dad and I had both woken up at the crack of dawn, somehow I was late to school and he was able to get there early to tutor eighth graders about the Oxford comma. Besides, it was my soccer scholarship at risk. If I even got a scholarship. If I even made a college soccer team. If my mom didn’t kill me first.
“I’m going up.” Her chair legs scraped against the floor.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Lock the door if you go out.” She rinsed her mug and examined it with her hand towel at the ready, sure to dry every last drop. With a satisfactory nod, she plodded up the stairs. I glanced at my iPhone, a hand-me-down from Carter: 6:50 p.m. New record.
A text message blinked in my palm. You coming over?
I leaned back and ran my fingers through my dark hair. Carter O’Connor was my best friend for three reasons: First, he knew what my phone password was (and I didn’t even have to show him). Second, he liked The Hangover as much as I did (maybe even more). Third, he had a sixth sense for when I simply couldn’t stand being home, and always welcomed me to crash at his place.
Thanks, man. I texted back.
That’s what it was like when your parents simultaneously treated you like a kid and a grown-up, and their emotional unavailability was both suffocating and lonely. Carter always understood that. And from the way gym class went this morning, it looked like Eliza might too.
Boo hoo. Poor me.
Yeah, I know.
When I occasionally complained to Madison about my family, she’d mock me and say, “Wahhhh, your life is so hard. Check your white, male, upper-middle-class privilege. Sheesh.”
And then I’d have to say, “I’m not denying that I’m another cog in the system of white male supremacy, Madison.” Because I know that’s exactly what she would want to hear, whether or not it was true, or if I even understood that. “Hashtag blessed.”
Madison would roll her eyes and we’d fight about it some more, and eventually I’d ditch her to go hang out with Carter and Austin, my fave (white, middle-class) buddies.
Real talk: whenever Madison called me out on it, of course I became crazy-aware of the fact that my bros and I have it made. Though, it’s not about the privilege we’re born into, it’s what we do with it that counts, right? Whatever that means.
I admit it, sure: the world definitely wouldn’t feel great if the saying were hoes before bros.
But.
It’s not.
RULE NUMBER 3
A bro shalt always finish telling his joke. He shalt never, under any circumstances, let it go without a punchline.
Carter’s house could put Tony Stark’s personal playground to complete shame.
It had a swimming pool and a trampoline, a surround-sound IMAX theater in the basement, and more gaming systems than any kid could ever ask for. As if that weren’t enough, the swimming pool converted into an ice rink in the winter, something Carter’s dad had set up before he Irish-exited his own family.
To top it off, the walls were actual colors: none of that beige crap that my parents used. When I’d climbed to the top of the driveway, the valet even took my keys.
Got ya . . . the O’Connors don’t have a valet.
“Look who it is!” Ms. O’Connor exclaimed as I let myself in the back. The peaceful aroma of salted caramel welcomed me.
She stood at the blue marble kitchen island with a spatula in one hand and a velvety, brown cupcake in the other. I’d have offended her if I assumed it was a chocolate cupcake. Not just any chocolate, she often criticized me, it’s Oreo. Or cinnamon spice. Or s’mores. Or peanut butter chocolate fudge.
Eliza perched on a bar stool at the island—a striking blond in the middle of a sea of cupcakes and mixing bowls filled to the brim with pale pink or blue icing. She wore Carter’s sweatshirt with one arm out of a sleeve, resting a heavy-duty icepack on her exposed shoulder.
She dipped a finger in her mother’s giant steel mixing bowl. “Got to make sure it tastes good,” she said.
I nodded. “Can’t go all the way to the event without realizing you used salt instead of sugar.”
“Rookie mistake.” Eliza licked pink frosting off her hand. I smirked. She pretended to throw a cupcake at me.
“Need an extra hand?” I asked. I didn’t always suck up to Ms. O’Connor . . . wait, yes, I did. She let me come and go from her house as I pleased and fed me unlimited cupcakes. Those four words were a small price to pay.
Ms. O’Connor spread pale blue frosting onto her confections as if she were waving a magic wand. “I can always use another decorator. Liza has to rest and I’m down a player.”
“Went a bit too hard in dodgeball this morning,” Eliza said as she resituated her ice pack. Ms. O’Connor handed me a bowl of blue sugar crystals.
“Sprinkle these on the ones with the pink frosting.”
Ms. O’Connor always gave me the easiest tasks, but I still found myself second-guessing my every move with them. Like sprinkle how? How many sprinkles per cupcake? What if the sprinkles end up in the wrapper and when someone eats the cupcake their hands turn blue and they don’t realize it and give a big speech and embarrass themselves and become doomed for all eternity?
I turned back to Eliza. “Really, dodgeball? As I recall you spent most of gym on the bench . . .”
“Kidding, Maguire. Had a rough volleyball practice. Olivia is very concerned about me.”
“Don’t know why it had to be volleyball,” said Ms. O’Connor. “Couldn’t have been cross-country or swimming. Just one of the most concussion-heavy sports.”
“The danger makes it more fun,” said Eliza, “like riding a motorcycle.”
The color drained from Ms. O’Connor’s already pale face. “Where are you riding motorcycles?”
“Nowhere, Mother.” Eliza relaxed into the bar stool. “It’s too easy with you.”
I kept my head down and flaked some of the sugar crystals onto the frosting as instructed. There must have been a hundred cupcakes on the counter. Half of them were brown, the other half white. I was about to ask Ms. O’Connor what the occasion was when we were interrupted.
“Dude.”
Carter stood in the doorway wearing flannel pajama pants and a Clarkebridge College sweatshirt.
“Sometimes I feel like you only come over here to hang out with my mom,” he said.
“Someone has to.” Ms. O’Connor approached Carter and nudged him with her frosting-covered spatula. “Here, sweetie, try this.”
“Ew. Stop.”
“Can’t blame me for trying.” She shook the frosting in his face, but Carter wrinkled his nose.
Carter was
the one person in their family, and perhaps the world, who didn’t like Ms. O’Connor’s cupcakes. He claimed it’s because when she was starting out, Ms. O’Connor fed him four cupcakes a day trying to perfect her recipes.
“If you’d gone through that,” he often said, “you wouldn’t eat another one either.”
“Have fun with your video games.” His mom smiled at us, relieving me from my decorating duties. “If you need anything, let me know before nine. Have to be up early tomorrow to drop these off. They’re for Stephanie Kaplan’s gender-reveal party.”
She picked up one of the brown cupcakes and broke it in half, exposing a deep blue center.
“It’s weird that I know the gender of the baby before she does . . . She came over with a slip of paper from the doctor. Said she hadn’t even read it yet.”
“You should’ve made these bad boys green,” said Eliza. “Tell her she’s having alien babies.”
Carter chuckled. “I’d go to that party.”
“And,” Eliza continued, “why does gender have to be binary? What if it doesn’t know what it wants to be yet? Like, we are literally color-coding babies to let strangers know what type of private parts they have. Pretty freaking weird, if you ask me.”
“Too bad no one did.”
“Carter,” his mom warned, shutting down a showdown between the O’Connor siblings real quick.
“Whatever. I gotta change.” Eliza put her ice pack in the freezer, between the gallons of frozen dough, and gave her mom a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Where are you—” I started, but Carter shook his head. Don’t ask.
Carter led the way up to his room, though I could’ve gotten there from his kitchen blindfolded, spun around a hundred times, and in forty steps or fewer.
A spicy vanilla aroma followed us. When I was younger, I used to be jealous of Carter and what seemed like having the best, most fun family. As I got to know them better, I realized the baking and wafting smells were there to fill the extra emptiness in their house, left over from when Mr. O’Connor went out for cigarettes, found a new European family somewhere in the chip aisle, and never looked back. His dad was still around when they first moved to North Cassidy, though he’d left pretty soon after. I’d met him a few times, but I didn’t really remember him. No great loss if you ask me. But it wasn’t my dad. They kept his last name—apparently “Olivia O’Connor” was too quaint for her business to give up.
Despite the IMAX theater in his basement, Carter’s room was where we hung out the most. Until late afternoon, sunlight flooded through several tall, bay windows making it impossible to sleep past 7:00 a.m., but also so you could never be unhappy. The walls that weren’t taken up by the windows were covered with autographed posters of his favorite basketball players and shelves holding an endless supply of gummies and pineapple juice.
Carter’s pineapple juice addiction had started before he moved to North Cassidy, so I never got the full story—but if a normal human’s body is 60 percent water, Carter’s was at least 50 percent pineapple juice cocktail. Maybe that was why the girls loved him so much after soccer practice—even his sweat made them want to be around him.
Carter’s hamburger-shaped beanbag chair made a satisfying crunch as he melted into it, clicking feverishly on his video game controller. I took the Oreo beanbag chair beside him and waited for him to fire up the game.
Three rounds of Fortnite later, I assassinated his lameness and the screen went black.
“And that’s how it’s done,” I said. “C’mon, man, you were practicing all afternoon and that’s the best you can do?”
“I know how you get when you lose.”
“Fine. I’ll let you have another rematch.” I thought Carter would have learned by now to not mess with my competitive side, though he was almost as competitive as I was. (But not quite.)
“Don’t cry when I shoot you.” Completely focused, Carter held his finger over the start button. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
“Carter?”
He pressed pause. There were two things that we’d stop gaming for: an alien attack (awesome) and Eliza interrupting us (sometimes awesome), though it hadn’t happened in a year.
Stop it, Nick. I commanded myself to be cool as I took in her appearance. Anyone but her. Eliza hung in the doorway, glittering like a firefly in dusky July twilight. The pale glow of the TV still revealed her tight leather pants and a flouncy top that could definitely be featured in some fashion magazine, and makeup that made her brown eyes flare. Where is she going, and can I come?
She pressed a light switch on Carter’s wall, illuminating us since the sun had fully set while we played. “I’m leaving now. Don’t make Olivia freak out while I’m gone.” Her gaze shifted from him to me. “You staying over?”
“Thought you’d never ask, babe,” I said. “Where are you taking me?”
She tapped her silver flats on the hardwood floor and shifted her weight from one leg to the other.
“Eliza has a date,” Carter said.
“Who’s the lucky guy?” I crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t say the name of a certain, rotten douchebag with a slimy—
“Josh Daley.” Damn. She did anyway. “We’re hitting up a parrrr-tay.”
Somewhat in shock, I uttered the two saddest words in the English language: “What party?”
“Juniors only,” she replied.
Were we seriously not going to crash this?
Carter shook his head. “It’s at Sarah Rosen’s house.”
Ah. Sarah Rosen. The one girl Carter had “been intimate” with, without calling her his girlfriend.
Sarah Rosen, one of the most straight-as-an-arrow girls at our school, was a sore subject. Carter had hooked up with her at a party two years ago, and things were different for him after that.
Which meant, on principle, that he’d never enter her house without an invitation. I was totally free to attend, except that the Bro Code clearly states to never leave a bro behind. Goddamn Bro Co—I caught myself. Close one. I’d almost blasphemed bro-kind.
“I’m kind of nervous, though,” said Eliza.
“I cannot be here for this, not again.” The beanbag chair swished in protest as Carter jumped up, escaping to the bathroom. He slammed the door behind him.
“Let me guess,” I said, “You guys’ve already had the pre-date boy talk?” (But for real, who wanted to sit around and talk about freaking Josh Daley?)
Eliza slid into Carter’s seat, playing with the ends of her shirt.
“What if he thinks I’m boring?”
Not possible. “In those pants it won’t matter,” I said instead, though that probably wasn’t better.
“Ha.”
“Here, I’ll help you.” I stood up.
“Um . . .”
I took her long hands and she rose to meet me. “What’re you doing, Nick?”
“If you’re ever in a jam,” I said, “tell this joke: what’s the difference between a pregnant woman and a lightbulb?”
Eliza gave a little shake of her head.
“You can unscrew a—” I stopped. There was no way I’d make that kind of fool of myself in front of her . . . for the time being.
“Never mind.”
Eliza blinked back at me. “Wow. I can’t believe you tried to tell me that.”
“Same.” Unable to stop myself, I reached for her wrist and gave her a quick twirl.
“Oh my gosh,” her voice cracked as she caught her balance, her hands on my shoulders. Just four inches away from me.
“Not bad,” I whispered.
“Likewise.”
We stayed like that for what felt like minutes but was probably a few seconds. Long enough for me to wonder what it would feel like to stand even closer. Stop, Nick. Cool it.
“Say hi to Josh for me,” I said.
Eliza blushed, her wild eyes filled with bashfulness and a hint of something else. My shoulders felt empty as she removed her hands from them, our moment over.
“You’d be a good dance partner, Maguire. Any girl going out with you would have a lot of fun.”
“Duh,” I teased. “Remember, if your date with Josh is sub-par and you ever want a redo.”
“You wish.”
Great, now it’s weird.
“I should go now, before this gets any more . . .” Eliza’s shoes clicked as she walked like she couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“Bye, Carter!” She called. She nodded in my direction. The light seemed to follow her as she left the doorway.
“Is she gone yet?” Carter’s voice was faint.
“Yeah, dude.” I sank back into the Oreo beanbag. The refreshing hiss of a pineapple juice can opening came behind me. “Josh Daley. Gross.”
“You had one job, Nick,” Carter sighed. “One freaking . . . ugh. In any case.” He paused for a sip. “What’re we waiting for? This is the first time you’ve been here since Eliza came back from Australia. Remember all those ideas we had? My mom’s probably in bed now so . . .”
“Oh, hell yeah.” We’d had many pranks in store. “Did you get a new gun yet?” By gun I meant a Nerf 2000. He broke his old one a few months ago when we’d decided to test Austin’s reflexes. We’d completely forgotten Austin spent two summers at karate camp (a fact he likes us to forget), but when we hid in the coat closet and fired at him, he’d jumped into a karate stance and chopped Carter’s plastic toy in half.
The definition of tragedy.
Carter shot me the evil smirk he reserved for these moments. “Better than that. C’mon.”
We tiptoed through the hallways until we reached an old, squeaky set of stairs that led to his attic. As fancy as Carter’s house may have been, his attic always reminded me that it was not made in this century. Arguably, that tidbit made it even cooler.
“Did those bats leave yet?”
“Looks like.” Carter lifted a piece of yellow newspaper in a cobwebby corner.
The Bro Code Page 3
