Prince Charming

by S. Celi

  “I bet Laine will be there,” Josh said.

  “She probably will.” No need to add the insider knowledge that I had confirming the fact.

  “I saw her the other day with Evan out in the parking lot. I don’t think they’re very happy.”

  “Why would I care about that?” I took special care with my voice to make sure I sounded disinterested. Then I bit the inside of my cheek and hoped he believed it.

  “Because you’ve had a crush on her since seventh grade.”

  Fuck. Time to think of a lie. Something. Anything.

  “I don’t have a crush on her. I don’t.”

  “Oh, so you’ve all the sudden stopped liking her?”

  “Yep.” I popped my jaw and kept my eyes on the ceiling. If he couldn’t meet my eyes, he wouldn’t see the truth. Right?

  “Dude, I’m your friend. Your best friend. I see the way you stare at her. You did it again today at lunch.”

  “I don’t stare at her. I don’t!” Those last words sounded like a lie, even to me.

  “Nice. So. You do care.” Josh poked me in the back. “Anyway. Seemed like the argument between Laine and Evan was pretty intense.”

  “Laine’s hot,” said Mark, sounding like a zombie. Josh flipped his head in Mark’s direction, but Mark didn’t turn around. Instead, the game got louder as Mark and Nathan started another shooting sequence.

  “She is hot,” Josh admitted as he turned back to me. “More than hot. Didn’t she book a new modeling job?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied again. “I guess.”

  “Yep, something with Macy’s,” Josh said. “Probably got it since she modeled in Paris last summer,” Josh said.

  “She did not.”

  “She did. I saw it on Twitter.”

  “Like Twitter is believable. People say fake shit on Twitter all the time. Like all the times people say some celebrity died, and they didn’t.”

  “Whatever. I have 1500 fuckin’ followers.” Josh liked to remind people of this statistic. He kept track of it the way some people kept track of stock prices, and he checked his phone every afternoon after class just so he could see his number rise and fall. “How many do you have?”

  I sighed. “Twenty. But I never tweet.”

  “Exactly.” He said this as if he’d just made a case-winning argument in court. “Trust me. I saw it there.”

  “You have 1500 followers because you followed all those people first, and then they were nice and followed you back. Do you even know who half those people are?”

  “What I’m sayin’ is that I have a lot of sources. Get information from everywhere.”

  “Look, not all those people are legit sources.”

  He dismissed me with a wave. “Doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth.”

  “Why the fuck are we arguing about your Twitter followers, Josh?”

  “You can think whatever you want,” Josh replied. “I’m just sayin’ I tapped a broad range of people for my information. That’s how I know that shit is real.”

  I shook my head, but didn’t try to further correct him. Laine did pick up the occasional modeling job, but only regionally, and the furthest away she’d ever modeled was for a job in Chicago. She booked mostly print, and some small runway for a few designers in town—one of whom had a studio in Milford, and liked to design dresses for beauty queens. Again, I knew all of this just from Facebook stalking, the best and worst thing to ever happen to the Internet. Maybe I would do some more of that over the weekend.

  Couldn’t hurt. And yes, I was a little bit obsessed. Okay, a lot.

  “That’s it.” Josh stood up from the bed. “We’re goin’ over there. Now. Right now. No more fuckin’ waitn’.”

  I glanced from him to foot of the bed, where Mark and Nathan continued to battle. Josh followed my eyes, and then poked me in the shoulder.

  “Do you really want to stay here and watch them play while all we do is drink?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “Good. At least our lives aren’t going to be totally stupid this weekend.” He grabbed my arm, pulled me up off the bed, and propelled me to the door without another glance at our video gaming friends.

  We heard the music before we got to the house. It rocked through the brick, shook the window glass, and sounded like a mix of rap and techno spun by a Hollywood DJ. My stepbrothers must have put the music on full blast with the sound system they got for Christmas. That thing had enormous speakers.

  I had to park at the end of the street because a purple truck and silver 1999 Ford Mustang occupied the two parking spots in the driveway, and a thick sea of luxury sixteenth birthday presents, including souped-up trucks, designer SUVs and custom imports lined the rest of Ammunition Ridge.

  “Well, we know your brothers are popular,” Josh said. “Really popular.”

  He slammed the passenger door shut and put his gloved hands up to his mouth to cover his face from the cold.

  “Stepbrothers,” I corrected him.

  “Okay. Stepbrothers,” he said from behind the glove. “Jesus Christ, it’s fuckin’ freezin’. It’s like, negative ten around here.”

  The snow crunched under our feet as we walked up the concrete path to the house. When we got within ten feet, Josh hesitated, as if he wanted to go around the back of the house and head in through the patio just off the kitchen. I shook my head.

  “We’ll go in the front door.” I already had my key out, and I popped open the door a second later.

  Just like the music, a roar of laughter and conversations I couldn’t place filtered through the house to the front door. Josh and I walked through the foyer, past the living room, by the winding open staircase, and into the large kitchen. From there, we only had to open a white door and head down about fifteen steps to find the party.

  “How many people do you think are down there?” Josh shoved his gloves in his pocket, took off his jacket, and hung it on a hook near the breakfast nook. He didn’t ask if he should, because he knew that he could. In fact, he was the only person at Heritage High who had ever seen my bedroom.

  I shrugged, then dropped my own scarf, jacket, and gloves over the back of one the chairs at the breakfast nook table. “Maybe seventy-five.”

  “Can the basement fit that many people?”

  “This is the basement we’re talking about. It covers this whole house.”

  We both stood there for a few more minutes, listening. The laughter stayed loud, and the music didn’t switch away from rap with a strong bass line. Whoever was downstairs was having a good time. No, a great time. They might even have been having one of the best parties of senior year, and the thought made me cringe.

  I always stood on the outskirts of everything while everyone else had a better time than me. The popular guys had it so easy. They got chicks just by blinking. They laughed their way through high school, smoking pot, drinking, and somehow getting away with everything. They acted like nothing bothered them while I struggled to find words to say to a girl.

  And now, here I stood, eighteen years’ old, and intimidated by a house party. In. My. Own. House. What kind of bullshit was that?

  I looked Josh in the eye. “You ready?”

  “To what? Just go down there?”

  “What? You’re scared now? You’re the one who insisted we crash this thing.”

  “Well, yeah, but that was before—” He broke off, and rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand.

  “Before what?” My head tilted. All I had to do was keep up a brave act, even though inside I wanted to turn around and drive back to the World of Warcraft party. Maybe if I acted like I didn’t care, I wouldn’t, in the end.

  “There are just going to be so many people down there.”

  “Yeah.” My voice dripped with sarcasm. “They invited, like, the whole senior class. Probably the whole school.”

  Blake and Bruce had a way of doing things in a grand way, a part of their constant quest to ascend
to the top of the Heritage High social heap. Judging by the sounds coming from downstairs, their efforts this time might have worked quite well.

  I lifted my hand to open the basement door.

  “Wait.” Now Josh’s voice turned high pitched, and some color faded from his face. “What are we going to do once we get down there?”

  I thought about it. “Act like they invited us?”

  “That won’t work.”

  “Pretend like one of them got an urgent phone call?”

  “Come on, Geoff. This has to be good. Really fuckin’ good.”

  “I don’t know.” I sighed. “You’re the one who had this bright idea. You figure it out.”

  Josh’s thin lips twisted back and forth. Then, after a moment, his eyes widened. “Okay. I’ve got it.” He turned and his eyes swept over the kitchen, looking for something. “Where does your dad—I mean, David—keep his liquor? Like, the good liquor.”

  “In a cabinet in the dining room.”

  “Why don’t we get some and bring it down to the party?”

  “He’ll notice.” I leaned my back up against the island as I considered his idea. “Yeah. David would definitely notice.”

  “Hmm. We could bring them all pizza.”

  I shook my head. “No way. We’ll just go down there, and act like we’re supposed to be there.”

  “That’s going to piss them all off.”

  I smiled. “Exactly.”

  “Are you sure we should?”

  “What are you talking about? You’re the one who had this idea. Now you’re going to back out?”

  “Well, I mean—”

  “Dude, whatever.”

  With a flourish, I pulled open the door and led Josh down the steps. I got a good look at the basement about halfway down the staircase, and I stopped on the third step from the end. Josh bumped into me as I did. By then, the conversation and laughter from the party had died, and only the deafening beat from a Kanye West song remained. More than fifty people stared at me, smelling like a stew of marijuana, incense, and stale pizza. I saw faces from the senior and junior class, most of them the popular and the beautiful people of Heritage. Open bottles of liquor littered the coffee table in the small living room area to my right, and still more of those bottles lay in a haphazard mess on the bar. Blunts painted a small table that sat just below the dartboard on the far wall. One girl had her shirt off and stood next a group of boys in her bra.

  Wild party.

  There was no doubting that one. Damn, I wished I’d been invited to this, but once again I’d been left out. The popular kids got everything they wanted, and I hated them even more for it in that moment. Assholes. Squinting at the silent group, I wondered for a second if I might get a contact high from all the pot. Might be kind of nice if I did.

  “Don’t mind me.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?’ Bruce’s voce resonated over Kanye West. He sat in between a couple of junior girls on the leather couch in the far end of the room. One girl had curly black hair, a nose ring, and breasts that threatened to tumble out of her V-neck sweater as she leered at me from the crook of his right arm.

  “Geoff Megadeth,” Monica said, from inside the crowd of guys gathered near a couple of empty cans of cheap beer on the bar. Laine stood next to her in a pair of dark jeans, but I didn’t let myself acknowledge anything about. If I did, I might lose focus on what I wanted to do next.

  “That’s me,” I said in their direction. God, that nickname was so uncreative. You’d think they might come up with something better. Couldn’t they get over that, and move on to something else?

  “What do you want?” Bruce asked again.

  “Well, this is a party, right?” I reached out to a table next to the steps, grabbed a beer, and popped open the can. “I love parties.”

  “You’re not invited.”

  A few murmurs spun through the crowd. Some people giggled. Others gawked at Josh and me. A few looked uncomfortable and some stepped backward, as if to give the showdown between Bruce and me more space. Everyone knew life inside Heritage High meant being a part of a hierarchy, just like I did. Blake and Bruce enjoyed the comforts of pseudo friendships with people they thought mattered while Josh, Nathan, Mark and I swam along the bottom next to the band geeks, computer freaks and poor kids. A fight between the two circles always made for good entertainment.

  “Sure I’m invited,” I told Bruce after a few seconds of stalemate. “This is my house.”

  He stood up from the couch and took a purposeful step toward me. “Get the fuck out of here, Geoff.”

  “I’m not going to—”

  “Get the fuck out of here, now.”

  “Come on,” I said locking my eyes with his as I took I sip of the beer. It tasted like sour water, and I wanted to spit it out, but I didn’t. “You don’t mean that.”

  “This isn’t a party for you, or assholes like you.”

  “Come on, Blake,” Bruce said, but he shut up when Blake shot him a glare.

  “You weren’t invited, asswipe.” His voice grew louder, until it made Kanye West sound like a whining child. “And if you’ll go on ahead and leave—”

  My laughter cut him off. He took another step toward me.

  “Seriously, you aren’t invited. And you know not to come in the basement. What the fuck do you want, Geoff?”

  “Oh nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know—the neighbor was complaining.” I switched my attention to the rest of the crowd. “About the loud music.”

  Bruce crossed his arms and gave me one of those looks that told me he didn’t buy what I was selling. I had to try harder. A lot harder.

  “I think they called the cops.” I glanced back at Josh, looking for someone to back me up on my lie. He nodded in agreement. “Yeah. They did. Said they could hear the music in their kitchen.”

  “Which neighbor?”

  “The Andersons. Mrs. Anderson.” I looked down at my watch. “That was about fifteen minutes ago. I think—well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops showed up soon. She was really pissed. Like, really pissed.”

  “I didn’t think she was home.” Bruce sounded skeptical.

  “I took the call,” I told him, making sure I didn’t waver on my lie. “Didn’t I, Josh?”

  Josh answered my question with an emphatic nod.

  Bruce still didn’t seem convinced. “You don’t—”

  “I tried to stop her from calling,” I said. “But I don’t think she wanted to listen to me.”

  “Shit,” Evan said from the back of the room. “I gotta—I can’t get arrested again. I don’t want to risk my scholarship.”

  “I should leave, too,” a brunette junior girl who was sitting on the large leather chair near the sofa, said. “I can’t get arrested again—” She stood up and brushed pizza crumbs and marijuana off her skirt. “Oh my God. I really should go.”

  “Wait.” Blake held up his hand from his place by the stereo. He turned the volume down. “We don’t know she called. Geoff could just be lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Bruce’s lips twisted. “I bet you are, you little piss ant.”

  “Do you really want to find out?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” said the junior girl as she pulled on her puffy red Columbia jacket. “I really don’t.”

  “Yeah, I’m leaving, too,” said a girl right beside her. “Where did I put my coat?”

  “Where did I put my shirt?” asked the girl in the bra. She began searching the room for it, and I had to bite back a grin. Her boobs looked kind of funny as they bounced around in black lace.

  “Goddamn it,” Bruce muttered.

  Once I heard that, I full on smiled. Nothing could break up a party like the threat of the cops. It was funny, really, how easy it was to do it. They were all lemmings—all followers.

  “Nice work,” Josh said under his breath.

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6

  THAT WINTER, I would stumble through
the aisles of Target three times a week. I couldn’t really place why I wound up there so much. Sometimes I just went there and walked around to pass the time. Something about the wide shelves and red paint attracted me. It was a good place to get lost and blow the $50 a week David and my mom gave me for chores around the house. Plus, Target had cheap graphic tees and a decent video game selection. Just so long as I stayed away from the Megadeth t-shirts.

  I picked out a shirt that said, “Trust me, I’m a doctor” and walked, as usual, to the video game section. Racks of games stretched out on one side, while rows of computer parts and accessories lined the other. My hand skimmed through the games, but I didn’t really see them. Shoppers strolled past me on their way to the toy section and the food, and boredom arrived. Maybe I’d buy this game, or that game. Or none of them at all. I’d been there a few minutes when a twist of my stomach told me to look up.

  Laine stood at the end of the row.

  “Hey. What are you doing here?” I asked, as I walked over to her. She had one hand on her hip, a red basket in her other hand, and a large grin on her face. And, God, she wore that leather jacket like she’d just come from a Victoria’s Secret catalog photo shoot.

  She held up the basket, half full of makeup, shoes, and books. “Buying stuff. Since that’s what people do here.”

  “Just like how they study in a library.”

  “Exactly.” She grinned. “Sometimes they study there.”

  “Other times, they just go there to get away from people.”

  She stepped closer and everything about her body language enticed me, from the smile that danced on her lips to the way her body showed off her breasts. And again, she smelled like bubblegum lip-gloss. Damn, I was going to have to bottle that scent. “Is that what you do in the library?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “I thought maybe you liked to be alone.”

  “Well,” I faltered, my voice growing weak as my neck flushed, “I don’t know—”

  “Like here in Target,” she said, her voice low. “Do you like to be alone in Target?”

  “Well, I mean…” I struggled to find something to say as I realized her voice had just given me a hard-on.