by Flynn Meaney
“What is it?”
But then she tugged at her lip with her teeth, and I saw her parted teeth, soft tongue, all that pink wetness.
“It can wait till later,” I said, grinning, and leaned in.
The next time I saw Kate at school, after a hug at my locker that brought back memories of making out in the Bat Cave for an hour and a half, I asked Kate to tutor Luke. And I promised her that my mom would pay her—or, probably, canonize her, as long as she could keep Luke in the Fordham Prep varsity sports program. Of course, Kate offered to do it for free.
“I’m really interested to meet your brother!” Kate told me.
Super. Fantastic. I couldn’t wait for her to meet my hunky heartthrob brother either. Seriously.
I told my mother that I’d found Luke a tutor.
“Who?” my mother asked. “That boy Jason you’ve told me about?”
“No,” I said. “My friend Kate.”
“Kate whose house you went to for dinner Kate?” my mother asked, leaning in to me like she was a witch and I was Hansel covered in candy.
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s pretty good at math.”
In my mind, I was the essence of smooth during this conversation (although I shouldn’t waste my smoothness on my mother. But I guess vampires have so much of it that I can use a little bit of smoothness on my mother). But my mom had a goofy grin on her face, and I knew she thought Kate and I were in love. My mother has a sixth sense about these things.
And so Kate came to my house two nights later. And she met my whole family: my brother, who once used our Waterford crystal dessert plates as Frisbees; my mother, five foot nothing, armed with a Swiffer mop and waaaay too in the loop about my feelings for Kate; and my father, who was still eagerly asking me for details of what it was like to be in a fight.
My dad was the first one to meet her.
“Kate!” he boomed in that cheesy sitcom-dad voice. “Nice to meet you, Kate!”
Why is it that parents repeat someone’s name eight times when they meet them? It must be their fading memories. My parents are middle-aged, after all. They’re not as sharp as they once were.
“Well, is this Finbar’s Kate or Luke’s Kate?”
Asking that was my dad’s next stupid move. Way to objectify women, Dad!
But Kate shrugged, seemingly unoffended.
“I’m usually Finbar’s,” she said. “But today I’m Luke’s. For geometry proofs. Lucky him.”
“You know,” my dad said thoughtfully, “I never had to prove a damned thing when I was in school! They told me two plus two was four, I just believed what they told me.”
“Paul! Did I just hear bad language in here? From you?”
My mother came scurrying out of the kitchen with an enormous bottle of Lysol All Purpose Cleaner. She aimed the spray nozzle at my dad like it was a gun. I swear, she would have cleaned his mouth with it if I hadn’t interrupted.
“Mom!” I called, my tense tone hopefully indicating she should behave herself. “This is Kate. She’s gonna help Luke with his math homework.”
“Oh, Kate!” my mother squealed.
My mother got overly excited and prematurely ejaculated some Lysol into Kate’s face. Right there in the front hall, I put my face in my hands and groaned.
My mother rushed to Kate’s side.
“Thank God for your glasses!” she was squeaking. “I could have blinded you!”
“I told you, the house is clean enough!” my father said.
My mother was furiously wiping Kate’s glasses on her own shirt. Then my mother put her glasses on for her. Like Kate couldn’t do it herself!
“What beautiful hair you have,” my mother cooed, like the Big Bad Wolf talking to Red Riding Hood. I was surprised Kate hadn’t bolted from my house by now.
“Mom—” I tried to form a buffer between her and Kate.
“I always thought I’d have a daughter,” my mother began to reflect. “When I found out I was having twins, they told me it was a boy and a girl.”
Oh, God no. Please let a terrorist come along and gag my mother right now.
“From the sonogram, they could tell Luke was a boy,” my mother explained. “But from the way Finbar was positioned, you couldn’t even tell he had a—”
“Luke!” I exclaimed.
I’d never been so ecstatic to introduce my good-looking, athletic brother to a girl I liked.
Luke pounded down the stairs as usual and jumped the last three. He extended his hand.
“You’re Kate, right?” Luke flashed his non-creepy blue eyes at the girl I liked. “Thanks for coming over.”
My mom steered them to the dining room, and I went upstairs to my room because I didn’t want to hang around. But I was so anxious about how Kate and Luke were getting along that I even crouched down and pressed my ear to the floor. Too bad my mother’s vacuum was sucking out all possibility of eavesdropping. Acting like Luke, I jumped around the room and then lay in his bed and threw his Nerf balls at the ceiling. I hit a spiderweb and it fell on my face. Gross.
I tried to tell myself I had nothing to worry about. I mean, really. Sure, Luke’s good-looking. Sure, Luke’s in pretty good shape. He could probably bench-press an elephant if he had to. But to be honest, my brother doesn’t have a whole lot of game. He has the pickup skills of a hurricane. Sure, he’s big and exciting and energetic, and sure, everyone talks about him on the local news, and maybe some girls get all caught up in him and follow him wherever he’s going, but Luke is a wild and unpredictable force. Not even he has control over his own power. If he set out with the intention to seduce a particular girl, he wouldn’t have the skill for it. He wouldn’t have the attention for it. He wouldn’t succeed.
Would he?
Under the very sneaky pretense of having an apple, I went downstairs. An apple would give me an excuse to spy on Kate and Luke and would prove to Kate that I was healthy. In biology, we learned that a lot of “attractive” traits are actually biologically alluring because they mean we’re healthy as potential mates. I’d just stroll in, apple in hand, wordlessly bragging about my mating ability, my strong teeth and fast-moving bowels…
But they were laughing. From the staircase landing in the front hall, I could hear them laughing. Shit. Laughing? What was funny about Math B, I wondered as I walked back to the dining room. I’d never taken Math B, but it was math, and math was never fun. Even that show Numb3rs, which tries to make math cool, is on every Friday night, because people who like math are always home on Friday nights!
Oh, no. I bet it was Luke. Luke had made Kate laugh.
“Done!” Kate cried from the dining room.
“Done! No, you beat me!” Luke cried right after her. He laughed.
I entered with the caution of a crime scene investigator. Luke and Kate were sitting side by side, but their chairs were turned more toward each other than toward the table, where the books, notebooks, and things they should have been focusing on were.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “So… what’s going on here?”
Luke snatched Kate’s paper and looked rapidly from hers back to his.
“Dammit!” He slapped his head, then slumped in his seat, pretending to drop dead. “I forgot to say that this thing equals that thing. But I know it does. So why do I have to say it?”
“You just do,” Kate said. “All the obvious stuff. Otherwise you can’t get from step one to step two. Which means, I am the champion!”
She threw both hands in the air.
“Champion of what?” I asked.
“We’re racing through proofs,” Luke told me. “Kate beat me three times in a row.”
“And loser has to copy the proof over,” Kate said. “Three times.”
Luke groaned, and Kate passed him an empty notebook and a pen. “There ya go, sucker,” she said.
While Luke copied the proof in his manic handwriting, Kate looked up, winked at me, and smiled. I smiled back genuinely and leaned against the doorway. It see
med somehow natural, Kate here in my dining room, at the table where we ate corned beef every Tuesday, below the childhood pictures in which Luke and I were wearing matching reindeer sweaters. In the second picture, he stuck his finger in my ear and in the third picture I had my face so scrunched up you couldn’t see my eyes. But I wasn’t embarrassed for her to see me as a puny, tackily dressed child. I couldn’t lose my sense of mystery because, according to Kate, I never had one.
Wasn’t it ironic? I’d made myself a vampire so I could get girls to like me. Now the one girl I cared about didn’t even like vampires. And she didn’t like me because I was moody, mysterious, or scary. She liked me because I wasn’t like that at all.
“Ready?” Luke said to Kate, ready to rip right through the pages.
She said, “Ready, set, go.”
chapter 15
All my high school life, I’ve had this hypothesis that you can’t go to a party unless you have a reason to be there. I’ve never actually been to a real party. I’ve only been to those sweet sixteens where the guy’s mom makes him invite everyone in the class, even the kids who don’t speak English. But I think at real parties, house parties, you have to have a reason to be there. For example, Luke is on the football team. This means that he gets invited to a lot of victory celebrations, especially because he usually is the reason for the victory. Also, he’s very strong. So he’s useful in lifting kegs and breaking open back windows to flee the cops and such. Also, when Luke goes to a party, girls go to a party.
Other guys have different reasons. Often the biggest schmuck in your class will have the greatest house and the most wonderful absentee parents, so he’ll get to throw the parties. That’s a hell of a reason to be at a party—when it’s in your own house. Then there’s the kid who’s got the older brother or creepy uncle who buys the beer; he’s the supplier. Then there’s the kid with all the stolen hip-hop music on his iPod; he’s the DJ. If there’s a kid who’s kind of on the border, a kid who’s a backup on the basketball team, a kid who’s a little overweight, a kid who wears boat shoes without socks, there’s one quality that can endear him to other guys and hot girls alike: “But he’s, like, so funny.”
And girls? No. Girls don’t need a reason to be at a party. Girls are the reason to be at a party.
The week after Halloween, Luke invited Kate and me to a football party in New Rochelle, which was halfway between Pelham and Kate’s town of Larchmont. Every other time that Luke had invited me to a party, I had refused to go. But now everything was different. Now, beyond having my brother as the kickass running back, I had a reason to go. I was bringing a girl.
The party house was huge, right on the water, with a big front porch and big backyard. It was Luke’s teammate’s house. Luke had been there before and showed us around. The party was already in progress when we arrived, i.e., most people were already drunk. There were girls trying to dance in the living room even though they couldn’t hear the music over their own laugher. The tallest one tried to break-dance to a John Mayer song. When her handstand failed, she spilled Smirnoff Ice down her push-up bra. Then she began to cry, and the other girls surrounded her in a kind of emotional huddle.
The iPod DJ was pretty nerdy; he had these thick, black-rimmed glasses that weren’t even hip in the Rivers Cuomo way. Score, I thought, I’m cooler than someone at this party. But, although he looked wimpy, he put up a pretty good fight when a girl lectured him with a pointing finger and a sloshing cup. “You should not play any Chris Brown songs,” the girl told the DJ. “I’m serious. Like, as a woman.”
“I’m sorry.” The DJ shook his head. “ ‘Forever’ is just too good to pass up.”
“ ‘Forever’ was the single that was out when the whole thing happened!” The girl was outraged. “That’s, like, the worst one to pick.”
“Yeah, but I made up a dance to it,” the DJ said. He stood up and popped and locked and dropped a little bit. He was actually a pretty good dancer. I was still cooler than him, though.
On the back porch, guys in black puffy North Face jackets were smoking cigarettes and acting shady. In the garage, the juniors and seniors were playing beer pong. I’d heard some senior guys at St. Luke’s talk about beer pong, and I’m pretty sure Luke had played once or twice, but I didn’t understand the game. How could you drink beer while playing ping-pong? That’s how I thought you played, holding a bottle of beer in your left hand and your ping-pong paddle in your right hand.
But the beer was in red plastic cups, not bottles, and the cups were grouped together in triangle shapes on the surface of the ping-pong table. There were no paddles, but there were ping-pong balls—the guys just used their hands to throw the balls into the cups of beer. There were only guys playing. It looked like this was a “no girls allowed” zone. Backed two cautious feet from the testosterone-laden and splintered wood table, the girls stood in twos or threes, in jean skirts, gnawing at the rims of their own red plastic cups. Somehow, even though they didn’t play, the girls knew a lot about the rules of the game. But how many rules could there be for throwing a ball in a cup?
“His elbow was a millimeter over the edge of the table! That shot doesn’t count.”
“His partner didn’t say he was ‘heating up’ after the second shot sunk but before the opponent’s turn began. He won’t get the ball back upon sinking a third consecutive shot.”
Apparently, there were more rules than I thought!
“Do you know how to play beer pong?” I asked Kate as we stood on the sidelines watching, holding red plastic cups. Ours contained Mountain Dew, though; Luke had poured our nonalcoholic drinks in the kitchen while he got himself a beer.
Kate shook her head.
I quickly resolved to go home that very night and learn beer pong. Once I was a master, I could beat seniors, and Kate would be impressed. So how would I get good? Luke would practice shots with me. I’d find a piece of wood for a table and we could sacrifice Luke’s desk, which he never used anyway, to practice. We’d fill cups with water. I figured we’d get about two weeks of practice in before my mother discovered the cups in triangular formation and assumed we had joined a satanic cult. Yes, we were rehearsing for a game that involved drinking beer, and we were underage, but I knew my mom’s mind would leap first to satanic cult.
Of course, I had never even had a beer. Maybe you had to learn how to drink beer before you learned how to play.
Or maybe if you drank too much beer, you couldn’t play at all: none of these guys were actually getting their ping-pong balls in the cups of beer. So it was a pretty boring game to watch. The only entertaining thing was watching girls try to chase and retrieve the stray balls from the cobwebbed corners of the garage without bending over too far in their short skirts.
“Is this cup of water really used to clean the ball?” Kate asked, peering over the edge of the table at a red cup of water with a dirty clump of hair floating on its surface. “I don’t think it’s working.”
“We probably got swine flu just by watching this game,” I said. “Should we go see if the iPod DJ is still playing Chris Brown?”
“I think we should go to the kitchen and see your brother do a kegstand,” she said. “He’ll make it into an Olympic sport.”
Kate led the way up the basement steps, and I had my hand on her back, possessive yet cool about it, when—Bang! The door swung open in front of us and hit a beam of the garage wall. This wasted kid who couldn’t even see in front of him stumbled into the garage. Kate and I both backed up, because he stumbled down all three basement steps. Then he stopped, turned to us, and rocked back and forth, back on his heels, forward on his toes. Back on his heels, forward…
Rocking Chair pointed to Kate, his finger reaching forward out of his drunken stupor.
“Hey,” he said. His eyelids drooped down over his eyes. “I know you,” he told Kate.
Kate stood still, like she was hoping not to be noticed. Thinking this kid didn’t even know who he was pointing to (or where he was)
, I led the way up the stairs again, took the first step, but—
“Katie,” Rocking Chair said loudly, over the sound of a runaway beer pong ball and the girls shrieking over it. “Katie Gallatin.”
“Kate?” I began. How did this creepy guy know Kate? This chest-filling, defensive, masculine thing took hold of me. Possession. As Bill Compton from True Blood always snarled in his fiercest Southern drawl, Kate was mine. Why was this loser even speaking to my Kate?
Tilting back, Rocking Chair snickered and said, “I don’t recognize you with your clothes on.”
I’d never seen Kate unsure before. Now she seemed flustered, even nervous. Her hand rose to adjust her hair, her glasses, and she looked down at the basement floor.
Rocking Chair only got louder. He called out, “Hey, I went to school with this girl in Larchmont.” He pointed to Kate. “This girl was the biggest slut. Katie Gallatin was the biggest—”
“Hey!” I stepped in front of the shrunken, uncertain Kate. I almost tripped on the first basement step, but didn’t. I was a big strong man. I was protecting the girl I loved—or, the girl I liked a hell of a lot. I was freakin’ Edward Cullen staring down a werewolf.
Rocking Chair simply stepped to the side and kept speaking to Kate.
“Go get another drink, Katie,” he told her. “Pass out and get the cops called to this party.”
“Hey!” I said louder. Maybe my first “hey” hadn’t been loud enough.
The nervous, buzzy feeling through my body wasn’t quite the same powerful rush I had felt with Chris Perez. There, I’d been alone, no one except Chris Cho to see me make a fool of myself. Here I was surrounded by cool juniors and seniors from another school.
But I had to defend Kate. I didn’t have to kick this guy’s ass, just keep him separated from my girlfriend. I mean, the girl who is my friend. And who kissed me in the hallway, but may or may not have been romantically interested in me. But probably was.
