Prince Charming (5 page)

“So, the party’s happening now?” Josh asked. He stretched out face up on the bed, sounding bored.

“Yep.”

“How many people did they invite again?”

“Not enough. They didn’t invite us.” I laughed.

“I kinda wish they had,” Josh said.

“They’re trolls,” I replied.

He chuckled. “Tell me something I don’t know. But I do wish they’d stop leaving us out.”

A lot of the time, I looked at the calendar on my phone and counted the days until I could leave the twins and our boring town in suburbia behind. Two million people lived in Greater Cincinnati—probably more than that, if you counted the fringes of Dayton, OH. There had to be more to life than a small town where everyone was rich, warm, comfortable, and focused on beating each other for scholarships, grades, state championship football titles, and awards given out by the local newspapers. It all just resembled a boring game—one I didn’t want to play anymore.

“You know—” Josh ran his tongue along his front teeth, “—we could show up.”

“Show up?”

“And crash the party.” He looked over at me. “It’s your house. There’s nothin’ stoppin’ us.”

Josh liked to drop the “g” from his words when he drank.

I rolled my eyes. “They’ll stop us.”

“’Nd do what? Kick us out? Call the fuckin’ cops? Start some kind of fight?” He also liked to switch up his voice and cuss a lot, so that he sounded tough. Trouble was that Josh wasn’t tough. Not really. A long scar decorated his shin from the one time he’d gotten into a fight after school in the second grade, but for most his life, Josh shrank from conflict. He talked big, but he never followed through.

“Yeah. Call the cops. Exactly,” I replied.

“I’m not scared.” He paused. “Not scared at all. We should go the fuck over there.”

“Come on,” I said. “You don’t mean that.”

“What if I do?”

“It’s not worth it. No reason to make things worse. They’re already horrible enough—”

“Whatever. We should still go over there.” Josh rose up and blocked my view of Mark and Nathan, both still shaking and shouting as they started the final push to win the level. With their energy level, this could go on for hours.

“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.

W
e 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.