Admission (18 page)

THE DOOR TO HIS APARTMENT
swung open without a knock.

“I wanna hear it,” Alec said as he approached the kitchen counter where the answering machine stood.

Then he took a look at Jake.

“You’re looking nice today.”

Jake hadn’t shaved in a week and hadn’t showered for a couple of days. Red eyes, a nice little beer gut, disheveled hair. He didn’t care. All he cared about was the message he’d gotten this afternoon.

He played it for Alec. The others were at school, doing what college students did: Sitting in class. Learning. Studying. Talking. Socializing. Eating. Laughing. Living. But not Jake. He was getting threats while he slept off a long night.

He pressed the machine. The voice started by greeting Jake with a juicy four-lettered curse.

“You think this is over, don’t you? You think it’s done, but it’s not. And you better watch out because we’re gonna finish what we started. I told you once, and I’ll tell you again. Nobody screws with me. Nobody.”

It clicked off.

Alec stood there, eyes wide open, unblinking.

“What should we do?” Jake asked, tired and without energy.

“Nothing.”

“What? We shouldn’t let the cops know about this?”

“Oh, no,” Alec said, going to the fridge to get a beer. “No, this is between you and him. Between Brian and all of us. Spring break is almost here.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, too drained to care.

“That guy has a lot of nerve. But we’ll see just how much nerve he’s really got. Just you wait.”

Jake nodded. Alec handed him a beer. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, and Jake could still feel the aftertaste of a case of beer the night before. He hadn’t eaten anything all day.

“I don’t know, man,” he said to Alec, looking at the beer in his hand.

Alec opened it for him.

“Drink up. Spring break starts now.”

Blink
.

The setting sun is gone and you’re listening to loud music and you’re laughing.

Blink
.

You’re on the road in the passenger seat watching the yellow lines roll by.

Blink
.

You’re on a sidewalk smoking a cigarette following the footsteps in front of you.

Blink
.

You’re entering a dark hallway with suffocating beats and soulless stares.

“Hey, wake up,” someone says on the couch next to you.

Everything races, glittering and pecking and blinding. You swear Kurt Cobain is screaming in your ear and he’s really angry.

“Huh?” you say.

“Don’t fade on me now,” the voice of Alec says from somewhere above or below.

“I won’t.”

“Need something to keep you up?”

“Sure.”

And it’s that easy.

Before Alec, you’d managed to stay drug-free, not counting pot, twenty years of your life, but that’s just a phrase, a notion by a government, a slogan for a television network.

This is not some crossroad you’re at. It’s simple and easy and your best friend laughs and makes it seem as easy as passing a bottle of salt and in a way it is.

Blink
.

The day and night mesh and overlap.

Blink
again.

You’re on the road, sitting in the backseat next to a stranger with long dark hair, laughing uncontrollably.

Control is for the weak.

Reality is for the foolish.

All you do tonight right now is feel and you’re invincible and the stars are out and you never want this feeling to end ever never and for a fleeting moment you believe it never will.

“Trent Reznor is a god,” Mike said, turning up the volume on the Nine Inch Nails album he had purchased a few weeks before.

“Or maybe he’s the devil,” Jake replied, throwing a dart into the board on the wall.

“Sounds more like it,” Carnie said.

“Come on, you love it.”

“Sounds like he’s on heroin and got locked in the room with a synthesizer and a monkey.”

They all laughed at Carnie’s joke, always a rarity but always worth it when the time came.

“Monkey?” Mike asked.

“Listen to that. It’s sounds like he’s torturing the poor thing.”

“We need to go out,” Alec said, coming back from the bathroom.

“I managed to go through a hundred bucks last night,” Jake said. “The bad thing is I don’t even remember most of it.”

“You brought home someone named Jen or Jade,” Carnie said.

Jake looked at him. “Shut up.”

“Seriously.”

“What?” Jake stared at Alec.

“He’s kidding. I mean, we were hanging out with a couple of girls. Sorta freaky too. Goth chicks into The Cure. We should’ve had this CD last night.”

“You should’ve invited me,” Mike said.

“No thanks,” Carnie said. “I spent $7.89 on beer and a burrito.”

“We were celebrating,” Alec said, hitting a bull’s-eye and making the board sound off.

“Celebrating what?”

“Freedom.”

“This guy really hates himself, doesn’t he?” Carnie said about the album.

“He’s taking grunge and industrial and combining them,” Mike said, hitting the wall next to the dartboard.

“Stick to music, my young friend,” Carnie said, hitting a triple twenty and hearing the board celebrate his shot.

Alec began discussing where they needed to go. It was seven in the evening but it felt much earlier—like they had just gone out and just woken up.

“What day is it?” Jake asked, suddenly and completely forgetting.

“Saturday,” Carnie said.

“Does it matter?” Alec said.

And as Jake delicately sipped his first beer of the day, his mouth still raw from the previous night, he listened to angry, fierce vocals of the music as they wailed,
I do not want this
.

“Tell me about your parents,” Bruce said to Jake as they sat in the forest preserve on the sunny day, the mercury pushing seventy.

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. You just never talk about them.”

“What’s there to talk about?”

Bruce shrugged.

“My older brother is the hero and my older sister is the brains and I’m the youngest they don’t know what to do with.”

“They made you go to Providence?”

“Sure. They wanted someone else to try and save my soul. They’ve sorta given up.”

“Do you like them?”

Jake took a sip from his beer. “It’s not like I don’t. It’s just—I don’t know. They don’t get it, and I feel like they’re so old, you know.”

“My dad is nonexistent and my mom overprotective,” Bruce said.

“They’re divorced, right?”

“Yep. That does wonders for a family.”

“You know—we go to college when the divorce rate is higher than ever and AIDS is rampant and the world might be coming to an end, and they wonder why we listen to this music and do the things we do.”

“Gen X, man.”

“I wonder if it’s going to keep getting worse,” Jake said. “Like if the next generation of kids are going to be even more jaded. And imagine the music—how angry that’s going to be.”

“It’s all circular. They were enraged in the sixties, right? And the seventies too. But look at the eighties.”

“Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to do once I graduate. I don’t even want to graduate … but I don’t want to stay around here.”

“If you could do one thing in your life, only one thing for sure, what would that be?”

For a second, Jake thought of Alyssa. It was a fleeting, foolish thought, but she came to his mind.

“Climb Mount Everest,” he said.

That’s actually attainable
.

“Really?”

“Sometimes I’ve stood on the edge of a mountain and
thought, it can’t get any better than this. The view, the height, the intensity of the moment. You know?”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, taking a drag from his cigarette.

“What about you?”

His longhaired friend thought for a moment and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “I’d get my father to admit he loves me. Or that he even knows I’m alive.”

“That’s cool,” Jake said.

“It’s pathetic, but it’s a goal.”

“I wonder,” Jake said. “If and when I get older … if I’ll do any better. If I’ll be a better man. A better person.”

“I will,” Bruce promised. “I swear to God I’ll do better.”

It was Tuesday, April 5, a little after lunch. Jake lay out on a blanket watching the clouds and waiting for Alec. This would be the third day in a row they had come to the forest preserve. The weather was unusually warm for this time of year, and they were making good use of it. In a way Jake felt like he could put the winter’s woes behind him, even for the moment.

The door to his CRX was open, playing Pearl Jam. This early in the day, and in the year, they wouldn’t be bothered by cops or strangers.

Alec arrived and came out of his car holding a case of Bush Light Draft.

“I don’t think you have enough beer,” Jake said.

“I’ve got another case in the car.”

“Nice.”

“We’re going through both of them today.”

“A case apiece?” Jake asked, laughing, his stomach turning.

“You bet.”

“I think at this rate I’m going to be dead by Friday.”

“We can arrange that.” Alec laughed.

“Don’t you get tired of drinking?”

Alec cracked open a beer and handed it to Jake. “My man, when will you ever learn? Life is only manageable when you’re out of hand.” He opened his own beer and raised it.

“What are we toasting?”

“The grand scheme. The master plan.”

“We’re not still going through with it,” Jake said.

“You bet we are. I’ve got it all planned out.”

“Alec. The stuff with Brian is over.”

“Oh, it’s not over. It’s
far
from over.”

“Alec.”

“What,
Dad
?”

Jake swore.

“That’s the spirit,” Alec answered. “You don’t worry about anything. Just drink up.”

“I thought we were going camping this weekend.”

“Oh, really?” Alec laughed. “That’s all part of the plan. Part of the alibi.”

“And Brian?”

“He doesn’t have a clue.”

“About what?”

“About what’s going to hit him.”

Alec grinned one of his uncontrollable, unbridled grins. Suddenly, drinking sounded like a really good idea to Jake.