by Chris Lynch
I picked up an unguarded lemon vodka drink in a bottle and left the room.
Out in the hallway I ran into Delia, who I dated once with no lasting effects. She was drinking, and weirdly dancing, caught as she was in the crosscurrent of reggae coming up from the basement and the electro nonsense of the room I had just left. She had a crowd moving along with her, guys and girls alike, nobody doing a particularly smooth job of things, nobody standing out as notably awful either. It was like a class of beginners at an aerobics class.
“Killer!” the crowd hollered.
What a rush. Never expected that. Must have been twenty of them, all putting a whole lung into it. I never heard anything quite like it, and I have to admit—have to admit that the sound of that name wasn’t sometimes a bad sound at all.
“Yoyoyo,” I yelled in return, waving my vodka drink.
“Where is Gigi Boudakian?” I yelled, right up close into Delia’s ear.
She pulled away, partly out of my screaming so up close, partly to be coy.
“Killer got a crush,” she said, laughing and pushing me playfully.
“Shut up, I don’t,” I said.
“Shut up, you do,” she said, pushing me again.
I felt myself smiling against my will. My will wanted me to be cool and calm, my will wanted me to be stern and secretive. My will wasn’t good for anything.
“Ya, I do,” I said. “Got a big ol’ crush.”
Delia squealed, like we were still in sixth grade, talking about this crush business. “I don’t know where she is,” she said. “I think she went, like, over there,” she pointed, “up there,” she pointed, both hands pointing now, in slightly different directions. “Her cell went out and she was looking for the phone, I think.”
I thanked her and started upstairs.
“You better be careful,” she called, “or her boyfriend’s gonna shoot you when he gets here.”
I turned, walking up backward while talking over the music. “Who’s the killer? Who’s the killer here?”
I hit the top of the stairs and found her, Gigi Boudakian, trying to make conversation on a telephone, a very old-fashioned telephone, black and shiny and shaped something like a dumbbell. She wasn’t having a great deal of success with the phone, but the look on her face said that there was some information coming through.
I waved at her. She looked right through me. I stood right there and refused to be transparent. She stopped ignoring me and stared hard at me. She was scowling at the telephone as if she was trying to intimidate it, and when that did not work she turned on me.
She waved at me, impatiently, aggressively, like a traffic cop. Move along. Nothing to see here.
I moved along, down the upstairs corridor, checking doorways, looking back over my shoulder to see her now gesticulating wildly at whoever was on the phone.
As if I had been expected, as if this was all for me, a door burst open at the far end of the hall, and as I continued staring back longingly, sympathetically, and perhaps obsessively at Gigi Boudakian, I was seized by a cluster of hands and arms and hauled into the room. The door slammed and locked behind me.
“Killer!” Quarterback Ken shouted down into my face as he squeezed me in a headlock.
“Ken!” I shouted back.
“Killer!” he shouted, squeezing a little harder, giving my head a little yank and a twist for emphasis.
“Ken,” I said once more, though it came out now as a kind of strangled rasp.
He let me go, straightened me up, and gave me a proper hug. I hugged him back, looking around at the same time.
We were in a big, lush bedroom that had to be his parents’. Surrounding us in a tight, quiet semicircle was the core of the football team.
A weirdly quiet semicircle. These were not shy guys. There were a pair of twins, Cory and Bam (whose real name was Brian), the two starting offensive tackles who spent the last four years protecting Quarterback Ken. They weighed something near six hundred pounds between them, had received offers from, like, six hundred schools between them, and had the kind of personalities that probably come along inevitably with that kind of bulk and good fortune and the knowledge that somebody huge is always there watching your back. That is, they were loud, aggressive, scary, fun, cool, tense, mean, privileged, confident, unpredictable, unsurprising, lazy with bursts of superhuman antisocial energy. And blond. White blond. They looked like a couple of big Swedish farm boys. They filled a room.
Usually.
“Hey guys,” I said, letting go of Ken to go shake hands.
“Yo, Keir,” Bam said warmly, “good to see you. I was hoping you’d make it.”
“Good to see you, Keir,” Cory said, offering me a handshake like a fistful of warm rigatoni.
The whole room was like this. Cool. I went around the semicircle of football players as if it were a reception line for the president’s birthday party.
“James,” I said, nodding at James, our lanky and beautiful wide receiver with the great legs but the hands of stone. James spent the year blazing around the field, looking like a threat, catching very few passes but looking fab doing it.
“Arthur, Phil, Jon-Jon,” I said to our pudgy pack of defensive linemen. I realized our players were even good enough to have arranged themselves by position, as if there were some chart someplace that instructed offensive players to hang with offensive players, defensive with defensive, with our fearless leader Quarterback Ken there to stir the ingredients as necessary.
I was special teams. It is just a saying. It is just a term, and a kind of stupid term to boot, in that glorious way only sports can be that stupid. But momentarily, it had meaning for me. I was a kicker, the kicker, neither offense nor defense, untethered, unaligned, unmarked. I could go where I wished, mingle as I wished, do exactly whatever I wished.
Kicker not cornerback. I was never a cornerback, really.
As I stood mutely with my associates and homes of the last few years, the music thudded along the floorboards, up through my shoes and into my bones from all the other places in the house where people were acting like there was a party going on.
“Hey,” Ken said as he came up behind me and slipped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed me once more. But it was a warm squeeze this time, a soft and gentle squeeze.
“Hey,” I said back, turning to catch his face right in mine. “No parents, huh?”
He giggled, sort of distractedly, as if somebody in a far corner of the room had said something.
“No,” he said, “no parents.”
“No parents,” James said with a similar giggle, and they all appeared to take this as a cue to disperse. A few guys spread out over the generous expanse of the Quarterback Ken family bed. A couple more went to hang precariously by a wide-open window, while one or two more seemed to merely hug the walls looking for plaster cracks.
Ken started guiding me toward the dresser.
“Ya,” he said, his head brushing alongside mine as he nodded, “that’s their graduation present to me. They cleared out. I have until Monday, free-range, full amnesty, no questions asked as long as nobody gets injured, nothing gets broken, and no authorities arrive on the premises. Or if any of that does happen, it’s covered up by the time they’re back.”
He was giggling again by the time he had finished speaking and we had reached the highly polished cherry-wood top of the dresser and its great big mirror staring us in the faces.
Quarterback Ken’s face had a strange, lopsided, unrecognizable smile, like he had had a stroke but that it wasn’t an unpleasant thing. My face, I was shocked to find, looked shocked.
“What is this?” I asked, looking down at the silver tray.
“What do you think it is?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Oh, I think maybe you would know.”
“I think I don’t.”
“Would you like to know?”
“Well, Ken, that’s why I asked in the first place. To know.”<
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“No, no,” he said, dramatically undraping his arm from me so he could bend low and address the tray.
He picked up the short green plastic straw and inhaled a straight white stripe.
When he stood back up again and tried a smile on me, the live half of his face had sunk to meet the floppy half.
“But that doesn’t tell me what it is,” I said.
“It’s whatever you want,” he said, pointing like a general over a battlefield map. “You want to go up, you stick to this area over here. You want to go down, then these here are what you’re looking for. Then, of course, we have whatever combination of the two you might be interested in.”
I took a half step back. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“If that’s what you want,” he said, reaching down toward my leg. My kicking leg.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and brought him back up. “Really, Ken,” I said. “All this stuff . . . serious stuff?”
“Serious as it gets,” he said proudly.
I shook my head. “That’s, um, that’s beyond me, I think, Ken. That’s . . . you have to be, like, a freak to be doing that stuff.”
“Nah, nah, nah, nah,” he said. “You’re talking about injecting. This isn’t like that. This is just for laughs. Strictly recreational . . . although seriously recreational.”
As if we had settled something there, he nodded at me, patted my cheek a couple of times, then went at the silver tray again, this time taking one from column A, one from B. The Swedish farmers, cashing in, I supposed, on years of faithful service protecting the quarterback’s body, were now edging up to collect on the debt.
Ken stepped aside to let them in.
“Your choice,” he said, glassy-eyed, his speech slowing as he tried to blink away the wet eyes and twitchy nose.
It might be understating things to say that I was no choirboy. Truth is, I had no aversion to the occasional stimulant. Probably that was the issue, that maybe I’d have been better off with some kind of aversion. Not that I was inclined to go mental on cocaine or whatever. Just that . . . it tended to keep me going, beyond the point when I should have been finished. It was like being kept in the game long after you should be taken out and so you spoil it for everyone.
I thought about mistakes I had made in the past. I thought about when things went wrong. And I realized it was never an issue of intent, but of intensity. I was a good guy, recall. I could do things and be okay. I could join in and have fun and not cause problems. I didn’t have to be afraid of any of this stuff. I didn’t have to lock myself away from the action, as long as the action didn’t get too hot.
“Right, just a line, then,” I said, stepping up. “But mix it, one from column A and one from column B together. To balance me out.”
“Ah, a very sensible guy,” Ken said, and right away did the required scooping and mixing.
Without fuss I bent into it, and it bent into me. I straightened up, shook my head like a horse. My head filled and sped up. Eyes went wide, all went bright. My heart raced and mellowed parallel, like I had two partner hearts working together, and only just now they were broken open and shown to me.
I had two whole hearts. How could I have missed that? Lucky me.
I saw my reflection in the mirror, overexcited and overcharged, and I backed away.
“Now you’ll have another,” Ken said with a big grin.
“Now I won’t,” I said, hands out in front of me. “I think . . . maybe I’ll just go and find a drink. If that’s okay. You know, I wasn’t really planning on staying, so I’m sorry I didn’t bring anything . . .”
“Hey, shut up,” he snapped, as if the strain of keeping his eyes clear was infuriating him and I was somehow responsible for it.
I was about to apologize again, when I realized I had it wrong.
“Bozo,” he said. “Killer, Bozo. Don’t you dare apologize. You don’t bring drink here.” He started slapping himself on the chest. “I provide, for my friends. You’re my friend. Everything is on the house here. Here . . .” He reached into his pants pockets and came up with something cupped in his hand. He took me by the wrist and with a little flicking gesture ejected all the contents of his hand into my open palm, like an old-timer giving pocket change to a little kid.
They were pills, a few like the blue triangle one I scarfed earlier, a few gel capsules, a few that looked like aspirin.
“I don’t want these,” I said. “Ken, this is too much. This is your stuff. You keep it, don’t go wasting it—”
“I’m not wasting anything,” he said. “I got millions. Anything you want. What do you want?”
“Really, nothing,” I said, and then took a harder look at the contents of my palm. Hmm. The pill from earlier . . . I was, in fact, feeling awfully better. Awfully warm. Awfully . . . nice. Awfully fearless and in control.
“Maybe just this one,” I said. “Maybe—”
“Maybe nothing,” he said, grabbing my fist and curling it up into a ball so I couldn’t refuse any of it. “If you don’t just shut up, and take my gift, and be a good party guest . . .” Here he either lost his train of thought or was actually thinking about what he would have to do if I didn’t be a good party guest.” . . . then we’re all going to kick your ass. And then drop you out that window.” He looked quite pleased with his solution. “Aren’t we, guys?” he called out, to general murmuring and gurgled support from the team.
I looked at the pills. I looked at Quarterback Ken. I looked at the open window. I shoved the pills into my pocket.
“Happy graduation,” Ken said.
“Thanks,” I said.
He hugged me. “I love you, man.”
“Well no, really you don’t,” I said, hugging along.
“Ah, you’re probably right,” he said, spun, and went back to the silver tray, where scholar athletes were now gathering like big cats around a carcass.
“I’ll just go get a drink then,” I said.
Nobody objected. I left.
When I stepped back out into the hallway on the second floor of the Quarterback Ken residence, my senses were swarmed, inside, outside. Everything seemed brighter, like a floodlit movie set. The music was enormous, filling my body and rattling it, from the bottom up. My stomach was filled with I didn’t know what, but whatever it was I had swallowed it whole and it was dancing. And here is a thing: I flashed on my sisters. Not like that, not like a freak. But I couldn’t believe they were not here. I couldn’t believe this day was here and they were not.
I had never had a day, I mean, you know, a day in my life without them. I missed the hell out of them. I was so goddamn mad at them. They knew how important they were. They knew, Mary and Fran.
Your family should be there. Your family should always be there. What does it say about you if they aren’t? It’s inexcusable.
Then my eyes came to rest on Gigi Boudakian, still at the telephone table.
Only, “rest” would not be the correct word. They were not resting, my eyes, when they were on Gigi Boudakian. She glowed, in my eyes, above and apart from everything around her. She was powered from within, wattage firing up from her while the rest of the hallway, the rest of the world, went completely flat.
I was so stunned, I was so jumpy inside, I was so much running on pure feelings now rather than my own thinking power, that I nearly failed to notice that Gigi Boudakian was not in a party spirit as I stood there shamelessly staring at her. I nearly failed to notice that Gigi Boudakian was in tears.
Her full bottom lip puffed out and pulled back, puffed out, pulled back as she talked to whomever she was talking to on the phone. Then it puffed out, remarkably, pneumatically, dramatically, as she sat in unhappy silence listening to the words of whatever monster could possibly speak words to make Gigi Boudakian cry. I watched, I suppose, the way people watch sports on TV, moving, twitching, shifting along with the action as my body language attempted to influence the outcome of whatever was going on there in that phone conversation.
I was doing the lip thing as I watched her doing the lip thing, puffing it out, pulling it back, puffing it out, and then biting it to stay in place and show Gigi Boudakian to be happy now and not, and not, and not anywhere near tears.
“What are you doing?” Gigi Boudakian yelled at me as she placed the phone receiver in her lap and glowered.
What was wrong? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me making Gigi Boudakian cry. It would never be me making Gigi Boudakian cry, it was me standing here rooting for her, rooting for her lip and for happiness and rooting for whoever it was to say the right thing and do the right thing, whatever the right thing was that would put Gigi Boudakian’s face back the way it should always be. Even if that right thing for her and for him was not the right thing for me. Even if that.
“Do you mind, Keir?” she said to me. “Go downstairs. Or go back in there with the secret society.”
For lack of any other ideas, I treated this as an actual conversation. “No,” I said, nodding back toward the bedroom door. “That’s not my kind of—”
“Go!” she snapped, with a small shriek that could not ever have come out of Gigi Boudakian.
I walked down the hall, passing by her with a dumb little mumbled “Sorry,” and took the stairs.
“And could you bring me a drink, please, Keir?” she said in a whole different voice, sad and tired and something apologetic all at once.
I went directly to the food and drinks center and realized quite clearly the minute I got there that I really wanted neither food nor drink. But I found the lemon vodka drinks that Gigi Boudakian wanted, and I got two of them.
Like a good boy, like a very good boy, I returned directly with both drinks. Like we were somehow having a drink together, Gigi Boudakian and the phone and myself. I stood there. I could have been waiting for a tip.
“Ke-ir,” she said, exasperated, saying my name with two syllables.
She did not need to say more. I saw her lip quavering again, I saw the effort, I saw the time that was passing over this phone conversation, and I saw I had better go before I saw more than I wanted to see. Good or bad, I had the feeling the outcome would not be something I would like to watch.
