The Tragedy of Dane Riley

by Kat Spears

  Together they are the Extreme Sports Asians. That’s what everybody in their school calls them—like a superhero group. They are guys who don’t believe in boredom. They take risks constantly, and boarding—skate, snow, and surf—defines their existence. I’m not really cool enough to be part of their group, but they accept me, and I’m grateful for their friendship. When I am with them, it is the only place I belong without question or judgment.

  It isn’t clear as time goes on what still holds us together as friends. We have less in common the closer we get to graduation and starting The Rest of Our Lives. Or, maybe more accurately, just Our Lives. But I suppose it is fair to say that with each passing day I have less in common with all of humanity than I did the day before.

  By the time I find my friends, my mood is sour and I don’t want to be there. We gather into the drug-user huddle to load the dry weed vape, with Harry taking charge of the process.

  “Oh my god, I love this bud,” Harry says as he hits the vape, then frowns at it because it isn’t pulling the way he wants.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “It’s a good high.”

  “Happy,” Harry says with a nod.

  “Funny. Not happy,” I correct him. “Things can be funny even if you aren’t happy.”

  “Happy is just a state of mind,” says Mark, the eternal optimist. He’s like a walking meme.

  “Yo, shut the fuck up,” Joe says, menacing despite his short stature. “Look at this ma’fuck,” he says with a chin thrust at Mark. “Born ugly and stupid and all about looking at the bright side of life. Who the fuck are you? Mr. Rogers?”

  “Ma-an,” Mark says, dragging out the “a” in “man” to a high whine, “I don’t even know what you’re saying. Look who’s talking. You’re so short you have to slam-dunk your bus fare.”

  “Dane needs to be sad,” Joe says, Mark’s insult rolling off him like rain. “Just let him be sad if that’s what he wants. God damn, you’re always pushing, pushing, pushing. Just chill, man.” Joe, the diminutive philosopher, finishes his monologue and then pats his pockets, locating his cigarettes and lighter. “I’m going out for a smoke.”

  “Hit the vape,” Mark says. “I got nicotine right here. Watermelon flavor.”

  “Nah, ma’fuck,” Joe says. “I’m a smoker. I want a cigarette. And I want it to taste like tobacco. If I want to taste watermelon, I’ll eat a watermelon.”

  “It’s better to smoke a cigarette,” I say. “It gives him an excuse to get away from you fuckers.” Joe smiles at that and nudges me in my side with his elbow. “I’ll come with you,” I say.

  “Shit, I’ll come,” Harry says, “if you got a smoke for me.”

  “I only have five packs left,” Joe says, sounding sad about it.

  “Yeah?” Harry asks. “So, then you have plenty.”

  “I told you,” Joe says with the tone of impatience he usually reserves only for Harry. “I’m quitting. I bought one carton. Once they’re gone, I’m done.”

  “Well, if you want to quit, why do you care if you give cigarettes away?” Harry asks. “You just get to quit that much sooner.”

  “Because I want to get to enjoy every last one of them,” Joe says, his voice rising with exasperation. “I made a deal with myself to quit after this last carton. I want to smoke the whole goddamn carton. I’m rationing them for as long as I can.”

  “Well, if you like smoking so much, then why are you quitting?”

  The thing about Harry is that he isn’t asking this question to be annoying. But he is. Annoying.

  “If you like smoking so much, why don’t you buy your own fucking cigarettes?” I ask, delivering it like it’s a joke, but it isn’t.

  * * *

  Since my arrival at the party it has started to drizzle outside, which has had the positive effect of chasing everyone else inside so we have the yard mostly to ourselves other than one drunk guy staggering around aimlessly. His head is down, as if he’s looking for something he dropped, or his head hurts too much to hold it up. I feel sorry for him. I know how he feels.

  I hate being drunk. Usually if I’m at a party I’ll have one beer, nurse it for the whole night. And I only do that to avoid people asking me why I’m not drinking. Puking because I drank too much once was enough times to convince me I never wanted to do it again. Mostly my friends and I smoke weed. The thing with weed is that you get high, and you feel it right away, and then a few hours later, when the party’s over, you come down, eat an entire box of cookies, and pass out. With alcohol, you drink and drink and drink and you feel great, until all of a sudden … you don’t. You can’t walk straight, you can’t talk right, and it’s as if everyone else in the room is in on a joke that you just can’t understand. And the joke is you.

  It isn’t until you’re drunk that you wish you weren’t. Then it’s hours, literally hours, before you feel anything approaching normal again. It sucks.

  Drinking also makes me feel sorry for myself. I can cry when I’ve been drinking, something I can’t do sober. And usually I do end up crying when I drink. I hope the drunk guy doesn’t come over to talk to us, or start crying. Or both.

  Emily’s backyard is surrounded by a chain-link fence and there’s evidence that there has been some effort to convert the space into an urban oasis. There’s a collection of pots on the patio, but the plants have turned brown and wilted. And there’s a bunch of wood planks on concrete blocks that probably looked like a viable hillbilly-chic idea for a bench in a Pinterest post. In practice, the effect is a little sad.

  “What you want to get into tonight?” Joe asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “There’s a party over in McLean. I thought about going but I hate most of the people I go to school with.”

  “So what?” Harry asks. “Will they have beer?”

  “If I tell you something, you have to promise you won’t react.”

  Joe holds up his hand like he’s giving me a blessing. “You know me, man, I don’t judge. Except for maybe that guy,” he says, gesturing at the drunk stumbling guy in the yard. “And Harry and Mark because they’re idiots. And people who don’t eat gluten.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all valid,” I say. “Ophelia texted me earlier. She asked me what time I’d be home.”

  “And you came here?” Joe asks. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I had the weed.”

  “So? You think if Harry had a girl like Ophelia inviting him to a party, or Mark, you think they’d show up to bring you a bag of weed?”

  “Absolutely not,” Harry, Mark, and I all say in unison.

  “Ri-ight,” Joe says. “So, what the hell are you doing here? I think she likes you, dude. She’s always giving you a hard time. Makes fun of you. She wouldn’t do that if she wasn’t into you.”

  “You think? That’s how you tell if a girl likes you?”

  “Absolutely. If she makes fun of you, or, you know, she asks you what you’re going to eat, or whether you’re going to be someplace where she’s planning to be, like a dance or something. That’s how you know she likes you.”

  “You think she knows how much you like her?” Harry asks.

  “I don’t like her,” I correct him. “I love her.”

  “You should tell her how you feel,” says Mark, because it would never occur to Mark to be afraid to say what he feels. “In another couple of months she’ll be gone. And you’ll have to live the rest of your life regretting it if you don’t tell her.”

  “Forget it,” Harry says. “That’s a terrible idea. Dane, you don’t tell a girl you’re interested in her unless you’re sure she’s going to say she likes you back.”

  “I know that.”

  “Man, that’s dumb,” Mark says. “You think the reason why some guys end up with a new girl every weekend is because they sit around waiting for girls to come to them?”

  “Guys like that, they know the secret—go average early,” Harry says. “That’s what I say. You don’t wait for the most beautiful girl
to fall in love with you. If you do that, you’ll be waiting forever.”

  “How is that supposed to help?” Joe asks, impatient with Harry now. “Dane likes Ophelia. He’s not looking for a girl. He’s already found one.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Harry says. “You think a girl like Ophelia, who’s good-looking and smart and popular, is sitting around at home wondering when Dane is going to call her? No offense, Dane.”

  “None taken,” I say. “I already figured that part for myself.”

  Joe sighs. “If you say so, dude. I think she likes you.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But, what if the reason she makes fun of me is just because she thinks I’m an idiot?” I ask.

  “That’s also possible,” Joe says. “But you should be there, finding out. Not here.”

  * * *

  I think about all of the useless advice my friends have given me as I drive home and decide.… Forget it. I’m not texting Ophelia. If she really wants to talk to me, she’ll text me again. Which she hasn’t. So, I’m not texting her.

  I never message Ophelia because I am sure it will make it too obvious how I feel about her. If she texts me, then I respond, but I never send her a random observational text the way I do with Mark or Harry or Joe. It would seem too desperate for me to text her when there is no real reason for me to do so. If I sent her a text about a school assignment or something lame like that, she would be immediately suspicious. She knows I don’t care about school.

  I’ve tried to come up with the most disappointing possible reason Ophelia might want to talk to me, just to prepare myself. This is a strategy I use a lot. I think about the most disappointing possible outcome of a situation or any given day so I can anticipate the grief and be prepared for it. I do this especially if it’s something that is supposed to be good—like Christmas. Only this year I didn’t have to imagine anything terrible about Christmas before it happened. My dad being dead and Chuck and Eric coming over for Christmas dinner was definitely the most disappointing thing that could have happened. And it did.

  Another fifteen minutes go by without a message from Ophelia. Maybe she’s gone to bed. Or maybe she’s changed her mind.

  I can wait.

  Often I am awake for hours after everyone else in the house is asleep. I have worries. The worries keep me awake because they aren’t worries that can be solved. I think my brain does this on purpose. It actively seeks things that can’t be solved. Perhaps, as my guidance counselor at Brandywine often suggested, it’s because I am afraid of failure. And I would ask him if the reason he ended up as a guidance counselor at a school where the students could afford great therapy was because he was afraid of failure himself. Our meetings always ended in a stalemate.

  I don’t want to give up on Ophelia, so I go downstairs to keep myself from falling asleep watching a show. The house is quiet except for the faint sound of the television from Mom’s room. After Dad died, and before Chuck started staying over, Mom kept the television on almost twenty-four seven. She watched a lot of cooking shows, which is weird because she doesn’t ever cook.

  The kitchen is dark but for the glow of the work light over the stove. There is a separate wine refrigerator under the counter. The wine refrigerator can be set to three separate temperatures, depending on the kind of wine you are chilling. Though we look like doomsday preppers in the wine department, it’s a clear guarantee we would be the most useless members of the doomsday team. We can’t even survive with single-temperature wine.

  I help myself to one of the bottles of white wine. My dad was the only one brave enough to drink red wine around Mom’s furniture.

  The rear deck is visible from Mom’s first floor bedroom, so I can’t sit there. I go to sit on the front porch instead. The porch light is on but I switch off the security light that casts a pool as bright as sunshine on the front lawn. I take up a seat on the couch on the front porch, with the bottle of wine and two glasses, just in case.

  As I sit on the porch the night sounds rise around me. After a few minutes, one thin, high note rises above the chirp of crickets and the distant hum of traffic. It is a cry of loneliness, pleading with an uncaring and unforgiving world.

  It is the first time I have heard the coyote howl, and goosebumps rise on my arms and the back of my neck. Perhaps against reason, I feel as if the coyote is speaking directly to me, as if I’m the only person who can really understand what it’s like to be something wild in a place where people only want things tame.

  Even though I am watching the darkness intently, watching for any sign of the coyote, I jump with surprise and, horribly, let out a yelp when a human figure steps into the glow cast by the porch light. My heart jackrabbits in my chest and my body tenses before I realize it is just Ophelia, out wandering the neighborhood like an unsettled spirit.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. “I was hoping I would.”

  “You should have called out to warn me.”

  “But then I wouldn’t get to hear you yell like a scared little boy,” she says, the only one amused by her wit.

  “Ha, ha. You’re very funny. Did you hear the coyote?”

  “The what?”

  “That howl. It was a coyote crying.”

  “Oh,” Ophelia says as she looks back over her shoulder, as if nervous there might be a coyote standing behind her. “No. I didn’t notice it.”

  “Sit down,” I say, patting the seat beside me on the wicker couch. “Maybe he’ll do it again.”

  “How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” she asks, and I shush her.

  Ophelia sits and we are silent, waiting to hear the coyote. After a few minutes I can feel Ophelia’s impatience as there is only the sound of crickets and the distant hum of traffic from the Beltway.

  Ophelia gestures toward the two glasses on the wicker table and says, “You expecting someone?”

  “You,” I say. “I thought you might turn up.”

  “Thanks,” she says, sounding surprised as I pour her a small glass of wine. She takes a drink, then wipes her lips with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  I am envious of the glass, of the sleeve of her sweatshirt, things that can touch her lips so casually. I can’t look at her mouth without thinking about kissing it, so I try not to look.

  “What are you doing out?” I ask, giving up on the coyote. My desire for Ophelia is so present, it seems incredible to me that she can’t sense it.

  “Oh,” she says with a shrug, “I just felt like going for a walk.”

  “Why?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why does something have to be wrong for a person to want to go for a walk?” she asks with a frown. Incredible how she does that. She’s the one who texted me, the one who snuck up on me while I sat in the relative privacy of my own porch, and the one who is out for a walk in the dark in a neighborhood that actively discourages walking by not providing sidewalks. Yet, somehow, I am the one under indictment for asking the simple question of why she is out walking.

  “It’s dark,” I say, selecting the most obvious of the possible answers.

  “So? My grandfather used to say that there is nothing more to fear in the dark than there is in the light.”

  “Did your grandfather get hit by a bus, too?” I ask. “Possibly at night?”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Well, no offense, but your grandfather sounds like a moron. Of course there’s more to fear in the dark. Serial killers mostly work at night.… And vampires.”

  “That’s not what he meant. He was talking about monsters under the bed. He was saying not to be afraid of the dark.”

  “Still,” I say, my mood shifting now that we are on this subject, “I’ve never seen a ghost during the daytime, but if I did, somehow I don’t think it would be as frightening.”

  “What do you mean you’ve never seen a ghost in the daytime? Does that mean you’ve seen them at night?”

  “Not like you’re think
ing.” I turn to look at her and am surprised by the warmth of her gaze. I am always struck by how soft her eyes are. The brain behind her eyes is so sharp and cutting, it is hard to understand how her eyes can be like velvet in their appraisal of me.

  She pauses then, as if working up the nerve to say something socially unacceptable. “You talking about your dad?”

  “I guess. I mean, it’s not as if I see my dad walking around the house.” I am saying more than I probably should. The glass of wine takes away my better judgment, leaving only my judgment. “I just feel him. Like he hasn’t accepted the fact that he’s dead yet and is still hanging around. Do you think that’s crazy?”

  She purses her lips in thought, then says, “The short answer is no.”

  I laugh. “And the long answer is yes … with a ‘but.’”

  “The Simpsons,” she says, and slaps my leg so hard it hurts, but I know she is slapping me as a show of affection so I try not to react. I don’t want to discourage her from other shows of affection. “That’s a funny episode.”

  “So, if I say I’ve seen a ghost, that’s a crazy thing to say?” I ask.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says with the simple confidence of a person who has accepted the absence of a god. “I think once you’re dead, that’s it. There is nothing else. No eternal life. No heaven or hell.”

  “Believe me,” I say, “I hope there isn’t life after death. That would suck.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asks with genuine curiosity.

  “This life isn’t so great. I definitely don’t want to live another one for all eternity.”

  “That’s why people make up places like heaven, you know?” Ophelia says as she holds her glass in her lap and curls her feet up under her on the couch. “We all want to believe that we’re going someplace great after this life is over. I mean, what do you think is worse? Believing in a place like hell and you might go there? Or thinking that when you die there’s just … nothing.”