Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

by Justin Taylor

  I told myself that Kenny languished on the one rung of the social ladder I knew I was above, though in order to believe this I had to first accept the increasingly dubious premise that either of us was on that ladder at all.

  In seventh grade an invitation came in the mail: his bar mitzvah. His parents must have forced him. I was lucky to have checked the mail myself that day, because if my parents had seen it they would surely have forced me.

  Kenny spent the summer after eighth grade with his aunt and uncle. Their kids were a little older and they had a summer place way up in Maine.

  I saw him on the first day of ninth grade—high school, the real big time—down the hall from me, in motion. He was taller, and not so zitty as he’d been. He was lean now, hair the color of wheat and shaggy about his ears. We saw each other, thirty feet of emptying hall between us. The bell was ringing—a digital bell that sounded like some bag of microwave popcorn was ready. The linoleum floors were freshly buffed for the new school year and the light flung down by the fluorescent tubes screamed back up at the ceiling. It was like being trapped between two horrible moons. He nodded at me—one acknowledging chin raise, that was all it was—and I gave him the same back. We were zeroed out, I understood this, strangers about to meet for the first time, though we didn’t. Not then. We had classes to get to and were both late.

  The same kids who had made middle school hell now greeted Kenny with elaborate high fives that climaxed with finger snaps. They sought him out. He was seldom by himself, in the hall or at lunch, but retained a sort of loose air of aloneness, which is not to say he ever looked lonely. He was standoffish and comfortable, genial but indifferent. He let the cool kids buy pot from him and court his interest in other ways. He had freedom of movement in and through every circle. He came and went. People called him Beck.

  Angela, by this point, had been a goth for a couple of years. She had dyed her hair black and gotten her license at the end of September. She started driving her mother’s old Volvo station wagon to school. Mrs. Beckstein drove a Saab now. I was old enough to go for my restricted license, but hadn’t. Usually, I walked home. It only took like a half hour, and everyone knew the bus was for losers, but when it rained I had to scrub a ride, and one gray October day it came to pass. The two of them were standing there, together in the thickening drizzle, while Angela finished a clove cigarette. It smelled like musky candy.

  “What up, Beck?” I said. I had never called him that before. The pert little word felt too smooth coming out of my mouth, like my tongue wanted to stumble, but on what? The word was a slick river stone. He’d been Kenny our whole lives. But this was his thing now, right? I could do it the new way. A fresh start. The nods. Just be cool.

  “You still live six blocks from us?” Angela asked, and I couldn’t tell if the question was a jab.

  She popped in a Marilyn Manson tape. Excluding that noise, we rode back to our neighborhood in silence, which Kenny finally broke by asking if I wanted to come over and smoke some pot.

  The Beckstein house hadn’t changed much. There was a new TV in the entertainment center, but the same old couch and lounger were side by side in front of it. I stood in the doorway and absentmindedly slipped my shoes off, assuming (rightly, as it turned out) that this was still house policy.

  Angela turned back to look at me. I was just standing there, still in the doorway. I hadn’t even shut the door.

  “Come on,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s all good.”

  We went to Kenny’s room. He led, then Angela, then me. I was hemming close to her, like a newborn doe to its mother, and accidentally mashed her heel. “Sorry,” I said, and took a big step to one side. I felt like I was in a spotlight, on a stage. Kenny sat down on the gray-carpeted floor, leaning against his bed, and reached underneath, behind the dust ruffle. He pulled out a small green bubbler. He had his Oakleys pushed up onto the crown of his head like a tiara. He pulled the metal stem out of the bong and put his nose to the base. “I think this water’s still good,” he said, then sat it down by his knee while he broke up buds.

  We sat with him on the floor.

  A few bong loads made it around the circle, then Kenny reached under his bed again. This time he pulled out a shoe box. “Our cousin Jeff hooked me up when I was up there,” he said, meaning Maine, presumably. This was the first conversation we’d had since 1995.

  In the shoe box were concert bootlegs—cassette tapes. The Grateful Dead, the Disco Biscuits, the Dave Matthews Band, and worse things. Cousin Jeff, I learned, had taken Kenny to this two-day campout concert thing called Lemon-wheel, thrown by a band called Phish at a decommissioned air force base near the Canadian border and named for a Ferris wheel they’d brought in for the occasion. The experience had apparently made a strong impression on Kenny. “Life-changing stuff, man,” he said, and rummaged, picked out a Phish tape, crossed the room, and popped it in. He hit PLAY, didn’t like what he heard, fast-forwarded to the end of the side, flipped it, and hit PLAY again. A guitar and piano were caterwauling. A cow bell went off like a dull shot. Something sounded like a vacuum cleaner.

  After a while, Angela got up and left. It was impossible to tell how long, since the songs on the tape seemed to have no beginnings or ends, but rather melted into and out of each other. She said something I didn’t quite catch that amounted, I think, to “Good to see you, Brad,” and then she was closing Kenny’s door behind her. A few seconds later I heard her bedroom door shut, followed by the twice-muffled rumble of Skinny Puppy or Jack Off Jill or NIN or more Manson—whatever it was she was into. And now we were alone with each other. Kenny had his eyes closed and was bopping his head, rhythmically, though not exactly in rhythm with the music. He was parallel to it, I thought, or maybe the rhythms related in some way I couldn’t follow. I stared at him. Christ this was strong stuff, not like the dirt weed I’d been buying from a junior named Omar, stuff that made you giggly for a half hour then left you with nothing but a headache. The busy, winding music fragmented my thoughts, alienated my mind from itself. Things felt murky and televised. I couldn’t help looking at Kenny—really drinking him in. He was stunning and I was seized with awe at the change he’d made, everything he’d sloughed off and become. I was still awkward, peripheral—the same as ever, save for the recent development of a downy mustache you could only see when the light was right. Jealousy washed over me, a sensation so powerful it was indistinct from either hatred or lust. The feeling lasted a deep stoned moment, which is to say I have no idea for how long. I felt choked, throat tight with need, mouth dry as if it had been swabbed out with a cloth. I wanted nothing but to cross that room and go to him.

  I forced my gaze to the window. A dumb little grapefruit tree, the neighbor’s hedge, a blue recycling bin. Cars in driveways. Yes, anything normal. His bedroom walls were the same, sponge-painted pale blue over an eggshell base, but the old outer space–themed border was gone. There were music posters now: Bob Marley with his head thrown back, laughing; a garish Steal Your Face on black light felt; a full-page photo of the guys from Phish had been torn from a recent issue of Rolling Stone and taped to the wall by his desk. But wherever I looked, my eyes invariably wound up on him again: quickly away, long circle back. His eyes were closed. He was in deep space. I was fidgeting, making adjustments to hide a formidable erection.

  “Totally bitchin’, isn’t it?” Kenny said, thankfully without opening his eyes. He meant about the stupid music, or maybe the quality of the drugs.

  “Yeah dude,” I said. “For real.”

  Angela would tear out of the school parking lot, wheels squealing because why? Because fuck you, is why, she’d have said if anyone had asked her. But who would ask? I loved the sound of the old family car yowling like an agitated cat. We’d pick up drive-thru burgers or Taco Bell, head back to their place, and get ripped. Her fat friend, Dawn, another goth, drove a black Suburban. She’d follow us back to the neighborhood, drop her car off at
her house, then walk over.

  Dawn was loud. She caked her face in some powder that couldn’t hide the craters in her cheeks; instead it cast them in white relief. Her eyeliner, black, ran in the heat. She believed she was making progress in the study of witchcraft and was objectionable on more or less every level. Angela said she believed in Dawn, that the fat girl did know magic. They would hang out with us as long as Kenny didn’t put his music on, which he inevitably did, because he hated Dawn fiercely. Indeed, she was one of the few subjects he allowed to trouble his easy-does-it-no-sweat veneer, I think because she reminded him of his old self. She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.

  Kenny and I never talked about—even mentioned—the old days. I knew that to do so would be to betray him all over again. It was a shame, though, because Angela was attached to Dawn, and I was hard-fallen for Angela, and I think on some level Kenny knew this, and in our whole lives he was never anything but kind to me. He would hold out on the music for as long as he could stand to.

  It doesn’t get cold in South Florida until after New Year’s, and it doesn’t even get that cold. No scarves and gloves. A few weeks of sweater weather is about it. But November? Forget it. You could go swimming. We should go swimming, I thought. I was standing in the Beckstein kitchen, stoned to the gills, pouring myself a glass of orange juice.

  “That’s stupid,” Dawn said.

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. “Sounds kinda nice. Swimming high. Like the womb or something.”

  “I don’t have a suit,” Dawn said.

  “Go home and grab one,” Angela said. “We’ll wait for you, or if you want I can come with.”

  Dawn gave her friend what was clearly intended to be a withering look, but Angela didn’t. This was to all of our surprise, including, I think, Angela’s. She said, “Well, I’m going to go change.”

  Kenny loaned me a pair of shorts. I put them on in the guest bathroom, then helped him move the stereo out back. Dawn was sitting upright on one of the lounge chairs, smoking a clove. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. She was already sweating.

  “Not even gonna dip your toes?” I asked.

  “Better not put on any of that hippie shit,” she replied.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, “do you live here?”

  “Neither of us lives here,” Dawn said to me.

  “Hey Dawn,” Kenny said, “why don’t you shut the fat fuck up?”

  Angela came out of the house. She was wearing a black bikini with string ties that rode low on her notchy hips. Her legs were a bone-white mile. There were freckles on her chest and face, a mole on her left shoulder. She seemed to catch fire as she stepped out from under the overhang and into the undiminished autumn sun. Her toenails, I saw, matched her fingernails, and both matched the bikini. Okay, I remember thinking, I’ll just be in love with them both then.

  Kenny lazed in the shallow end, floating on his back. Dawn lit another clove off the butt of the old one and sulked, watching her friend do laps. She didn’t want to be there, but it was a long time before she left.

  Over winter break, Angela tore her Nine Inch Nails posters off her walls. Her fishnets, her black boots, her goth makeup—all down the memory hole. When we went back to school, she was in blue jeans with plain tee shirts and looked like she belonged in a public ser vice announcement.

  Kenny’s birthday was in February. He was fifteen too, finally. I didn’t know what to get him. He only liked two things, and there was no sense trying to find a better pot connection than the one he already had, so I went to the record store. He had nearly a hundred tapes by this point, but a lot of them were incomplete or fuzzy recordings, and he—a late-comer but a purist—owned almost nothing on CD. There wasn’t a lot of Phish to choose from, except for one double live album I knew he already had, but there was a ton of Grateful Dead stuff. Studio albums, “official bootlegs,” best-of comps. Then I saw it: 2/11/69 at the Fillmore East in New York City. They’d been opening for Janis at the time, and this package had two discs marked EARLY SHOW and LATE SHOW. The eleventh was his birthday. I wasn’t sure if he would already have the show on bootleg, but if nothing else it’d be a sound quality upgrade from the tape version. I bought it, took it home, thought about wrapping it, didn’t, switched it from the clear plastic bag it had come in to a brown paper one, pulled it back out of the brown bag, dug around in the kitchen junk drawer, found a Sharpie. I pulled the shrink wrap off so I could write directly on the case. Fifteen years later & there you were, I wrote, and put the thing back in the brown bag.

  On the day itself, Mrs. Beckstein picked him up from school an hour early to go take the test for his restricted license. I waited at the house with Angela. We were on the living room couch, side by side, staring at the TV, unaccustomed to afternoon sobriety. She was flipping channels, paused briefly on MTV, a video for some angry song the old her would have cherished. “Stupid,” she said, to herself I was pretty sure, then went back to flipping—CSPAN, Jesus station, Spanish Jesus station, Home Shopping.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “No, I mean what’s the question?”

  “Well, you’ve like, changed.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “Yeah, I guess not.”

  “I don’t really know how to explain it,” she said. “It feels a lot like traveling. Movement. Some urge like birds get.”

  “Whales. They go far, right?”

  “I don’t know, maybe, yeah. I like birds better. I want a tattoo of a bird. Something that flies over the ocean.”

  “Don’t get a seagull,” I said. “They’re scavengers. They smell.”

  “Something else then.”

  Her lips were dry and not as soft as I’d imagined. She exhaled through her nose, a tickle skittering across my face. “Don’t do that again,” she said. “They’ll be back any minute.” And they were.

  Kenny had passed the test. He had his learner’s permit. I congratulated him, then gave him his CD. “Hey cool,” he said. “Let’s go throw it on.” I knew the songs now, some by their opening riffs and others not until I heard the lyrics, but I got there, usually. Kenny told me the names of the ones I’d never heard.

  I was in the cafeteria, sitting by myself because lunchtime was when Kenny did most of his dealing. It was the end of March. I had forgotten my lunch that morning, and was eyeing the line, trying to decide if it was worth getting involved in. Dawn plopped herself down next to me. She smelled like sour sweat and old smoke. She tented her meaty fingers. “We’re losing her,” she said.

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “The fact that you didn’t ask ‘who’s her’ just proves how right I am.”

  “So Angela Beckstein’s too cool for us lately. What do you want from me?”

  “I have a ritual—”

  “Oh Christ, here we go—”

  “But I can’t do it by myself.”

  “Aren’t you a little old for playing pretend?”

  “It’ll bring her back to us.”

  But what was there, really, to bring Angela back from? She was a person who had made a decision, a change, probably for the positive—at least if measured by any standard other than our warped own. I’m sure her parents, for example, were sleeping better than they had in years.

  Here’s what Dawn couldn’t stand: Angela was dating Zak Sargent, who had grown into exactly the kind of cartoon character his name suggested. He’d become what we’d all always known he would. And Zak was a whole package. New friends, a suite of attitudes and hangout spots—the new life Angela had told me she was looking for. She was out over the ocean now.

  I hated Zak Sargent, too. I hated what he represented, and I hated him for everything he’d ever done to Kenny, so much of which I’d witnessed or turned my face away from, and of course because now he had Angela. Zak
Sargent would spend most of his life having and doing and getting whatever he wanted. I knew that. It was a great sick truth. Zak Sargent had led the pogroms of childhood, and since me and Kenny were best friends again, I lived every day with the knowledge that I would have joined those raiding parties if they’d only been willing to include me. But they hadn’t, and with nothing on which to base a claim for some portion of guilt, how could I ever hope to be forgiven?

  She got to my house at ten till midnight. I met her in the side yard and led her around back. She was wearing black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt with silver buttons. It was tight on her. She had a small blue backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “So where did you learn about this spell?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m past learning other people’s spells,” she said. “This is my own thing.”

  The moon was three-quarters full. We walked past the picnic table and out of the bright perimeter established by the outside security lights. We stood near the back fence, in a pool of shadow cast by our lone oak. Bugs buzzed and whizzed. She started taking things out of the bag: a coffee mug with the cast of The Muppet Show on it, a pair of black fishnet stockings, a votive candle in a little glass, a fillet knife, a can of shaving cream. The fillet knife had a wooden handle on which she’d drawn upside-down crosses and devil stars.

  She pointed to the knife and mug. “These are our chalice and blade.”

  “What about the stockings?”

  “Our personal item. They’re a locus of essence. It’s how we target the spell.”

  “You mean they’re Angela’s?”

  “Yeah, obviously. What would a pair of my stockings do?”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “She left them over at my house one time.”

  “And you never gave them back?”

  “Does any of this matter?”

  “You’re just sick is all.”