Sons of the 613 (25 page)

We watch from the porch as the cops talk to Josh. Terri comforts Lisa, who finally came outside to see what was going on and is now crying and clinging to her adopted older sister. Tim Senior has left, screeching off down the road, the cops looking at each other and shaking their heads. Now they've taken Josh out of the squad car and uncuffed him, and Federson is writing out a ticket. The mood seems very different: I can't hear them, but from their movements, Thomke seems to be querying Josh about wrestling techniques. At one point Josh even demonstrates on an eager Thomke, grabbing one of his legs to illustrate the finer points of a takedown, both Federson and Thomke nodding—
Ah, now we get it.

“See that?” says Patrick. “That's the thing about your boy. He knows how to make friends with people.”

“When he's not punching them,” I mutter.

There are handshakes all around, and then Josh walks toward us across the lawn. Thomke calls after him: “You're gonna make that court date, right, Josh? And stay out of trouble?” Josh twists and gives him a little half salute/half wave in confirmation.

“Josh, I'm dead serious about this,” says Thomke. “You get into trouble again before the arraignment, even something small, and I guarantee you're gonna end up in jail.”

“Got it.”

“Gonna behave?”

“Scout's honor.”

“Okay, then.”

As we watch the cops drive off, Josh's phone pings. He digs it out in a hurry and reads it. Whatever it says, it transforms him, fills him with joy. It's a type of smile I don't remember seeing from him before, a moment of pure, unguarded happiness and excitement, like a kid who was expecting coal but instead got a pony.

“What?” says Patrick.

“Remember that party you were talking about?” Josh says to me.

“The one we're not supposed to have?” I say. “That party?”

“Yep. We're going to have it.”

“Josh, you heard those cops. You can't get in trouble again.”

“What trouble? What's going to happen?”

It's about an hour after the cops left our house. We're in the parking lot of a liquor store. He's placing the second large keg into the trunk, the car sinking visibly under the weight.

“Uh, you're buying forty-five gallons of beer?”

“So?”

“You're underage?”

“Not according to my ID I'm not.”

Patrick is grunting, trying to lift the third keg. Josh grabs one of the handles and they put it in the trunk. Josh starts to tie the trunk lid closed.

“Is this part of the Quest, Josh?” I ask.

“Sure, yeah. You're learning how much beer to get for a house party.”

“Josh, Mom and Dad—”

“Aren't home.”

“You signed the contract.”

“The situation has evolved.”

I know how it evolved. I did a little more electronic espionage, snooping on Josh's phone. There was a string of text messages between him and Trish.

TRISH:
You could have a party.

JOSH:
Not like youd come.

TRISH:
I might.

JOSH:
You wont get a drink w/me but youd come to a house party.

TRISH:
Maybe.

And so on, back and forth, until the sentence that I saw him composing earlier:
If I do it, will you show up?

And the magic, golden-smile-inducing reply:

TRISH:
Yes.

So we're at the liquor store. I don't know why, but I try again: “Josh, you can't have a party.”

“Why not?”

“Things could happen. Things could go wrong.”

“Like what? It will just be a few people. It will be fine.”

I still wasn't feeling great, so I spent the next day at home too, mostly napping. When I woke up this morning Josh was still asleep. I'm not sure why, but I went for a short run and did some pushups and sit-ups. Also, I actually studied my haphtarah by myself after last night's beer run, because Josh seemed pretty distracted. I'm not sure if the Quest is still on or not.

I decide on an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt from the summer soccer league. I'm not employing any product. Other than my haircut, there is no trace of the Lesley-influenced New Isaac. All right, I am wearing boxer briefs, but no one is going to know about that unless things get really weird.

The scratches on my face have scabbed over into three semiparallel lines running down my cheek. Like Ged from
A Wizard of Earthsea,
with the scars on his face from the nameless black beast that he summoned from the lonely outer darkness.

I ride my bike to school, timing it so that I arrive just before homeroom starts, meaning there will be fewer kids outside or walking through the halls, and those who aren't in classrooms will be concentrating on getting to them as quickly as possible. Before I step through the doors I take a moment for a deep breath.
You got nothin',
says Patrick.
Right. You got nothin'.

The school is a foreign country. It feels like a century since I've been here. I walk through the halls, past the lunchroom, the gym, the trophy case, and I wonder if it will ever seem normal again. It's like one of those optical illusions, where once you see it one way you can't go back to seeing it the other. But it's not the school that has changed, it's me.

The first test: homeroom. But Paul isn't there. Maybe he's out sick. I sigh in relief. I sit and bury my head in a book. If people are looking at me, I don't know it. When the bell rings and I'm walking out, Mr. Leopold pulls me aside.

“You all right? Not like you to be absent.”

I give him the note that Josh signed for me. Mr. Leopold reads it.

“You feeling better?”

“Yes.”

“What happened here?” he says, wiggling his finger at his own face, asking about the condition of mine. A nameless black beast from the outer darkness is what happened.

“Nothing. Just wrestling with my brother.”

 

I make it through the next two periods without incident. No one pays any attention to me. I don't spot the Assholes. I don't have any classes with Paul or Steve or Danny today, and I don't intend to seek them out at lunch.

It's right before third period that I spot Danny. I'm just turning away from my locker, and there he is, walking straight toward me. He looks determined.

“Hi, Danny,” I say when he gets close.

He punches me in the face.

In the forehead, really. It makes a bonking noise, sort of a miniversion of what it sounded like when Josh elbowed me. I reach my hand up and touch the impact point, surprised. Danny has taken a step back and is standing there, his fists clenched, his eyes wide, looking as surprised as me. And scared. And in pain. I think he hurt his hand on my forehead.

We're both nearly motionless, except for me rubbing the spot where he hit me. He is breathing hard, waiting for me to make the next move. So I do.

“My brother is having a party tonight,” I say. “Wanna come?”

M
ERIT
B
ADGES
: T
OO NUMEROUS TO COUNT.

The floor is a living thing under my feet, vibrating, pulsing like a heartbeat under the collective weight of the ten thousand people packed into our home, all those individuals blending into some sort of supercreature bouncing ecstatically to the music.

“This is a fucking awesome party!” bellows Patrick, his words less comprehensible through hearing than through lip reading, the music overwhelming his voice.

I'm used to his enthusiastic speaking style, and I've got my mouth shut and eyes reflexively squinted. Danny and Steve and Paul are just meeting him now, though, so I'm pretty sure they caught some spray, especially with the way that they're goggling at his appearance, mouths agape.

“Patrick!” I bellow up at him. “These are my friends, Danny, Paul, and Steve!”

“What's up, Motherfuc
kahs!!
”
—
the last syllable in a ghetto falsetto. High-fives that nearly take each of our arms off, a “Yeah, dude!” accompanying each slap, and then he bends and grabs Steve's head like a melon and mashes his forehead against Steve's in a primitive greeting, giving him three gentle-ish head butts. “Yeah!” says Patrick as he's doing it. “Gimme some
pain!
”

Then he straightens and dance-squeezes his way through the throng and is lost to sight, his Mohawk scraping the ceiling.

“What the hell was that?” shouts Danny, wiping punk-rock spittle off his face.

“That's just Patrick,” I shout back.

The Four Geekateers, together again.

After Danny punched me and I invited him to the party, we went for a long walk around the school. And we talked. I apologized for hitting him. He apologized for hitting me. We agreed we were even. I told him a little bit about my adventures the past few days, with plenty of lingering on the strip club part of the story.

Mostly we had one of those awkward but hopeful talks you have after a bad argument, where you're both hideously aware of the issue but you're intentionally avoiding it and doggedly talking about other things, giving each other verbal pat-pats, both of you smiling and laughing just a bit too hard because you're so desperate to get things back to Normal.

The three of them showed up around nine o'clock, as the party was starting to pick up speed, dumping their bikes on the front lawn. I hadn't yet talked to Paul or Steve, and there was a good ten seconds where no one said anything when I opened the front door. Then Paul pointed at my Ramones shirt and said, “You are so gay.”

“
Sooo
gay,” seconded Steve, and I knew everything was going to be all right. Things are right back to Normal.

But in the back of my head there's a little voice telling me that everything has changed, that it will never be quite the same.

A new song starts, louder than the last, everyone cheering. So much for “a few people”: there are cars parked in our driveway, cars halfway on our lawn, cars up and down and probably around the block. There are people crammed into every square foot of the upstairs, the downstairs, the backyard. The musics are loud—
musics
plural, because there are at least three competing sources
thumpa thumpa thump
ing against each other in an epic battle for dominance: the stereo in the living room, a portable boom box in the basement, and another one out back where the kegs are. I saw Josh out there earlier in the center of a cheering mob, hoisting one of the 170-pound kegs above his head and drinking directly from the nozzle that someone held in his mouth. Somebody may call the cops because of the noise, but it's not going to be Mr. Olsen. He's in the sardine-packed kitchen, beer in hand, big grin on his face, chatting up one of Terri's stripper friends.

Lisa is already asleep in her room. She can sleep through anything. She slept through a thunderstorm in which lightning hit the tree outside and hailstones shattered her window.

It's so packed, all of our other neighbors might be here, too, as far as I know. It's hard to describe the crowd: imagine some sort of high-energy collision between twelve very different types of nightclubs, resulting in an entirely novel and unstable element. There are hipsters, and young businessfolk, and punk-rock friends of Patrick's who look like they're going to rob the businessfolk, and stripper-girlfriends of Terri who look like they're going to seduce and rob everyone, and small solid men who look like the Mexicans who work behind the scenes in restaurants, and college students, and high school students, and muscly dudes who must have been on my brother's various sports teams, and then just random people that I can't categorize.

And then a handful of scrawny, pimply junior high kids, scurrying around like rodents under the dinosaurs' feet.

“It's not the static weight, it's the shock load,” Steve is saying to Paul, the two of them still arguing over the structural integrity of the living room and whether there will be PARTY TRAGEDY headlines in the paper tomorrow. “Look at the amount of displacement of the floor,” he adds, indicating the worrying manner in which the floor is flexing under everyone's weight.

My peeps.

“Isaac! Hey! You hear me?” Danny grabbing my arm, pulling my attention back from scanning the crowd. “I said, check out the tits on that girl!” He's indicating one of Terri's friends. Appreciative noises from Steve and Paul.

“What? Yeah, nice,” I say. It seems cheap to tell them that I've already checked them out at the club, and without any fabric intervening between my eyeballs and her nipples. I go back to my distracted crowd scanning.

“You waiting for someone?” asks Paul.

“No.”

I am. Partially, I'm waiting for the police to show up and drag Josh away.

But I'm also waiting for Lesley. Not because I want to see her. I don't.

Danny grabs my elbow again. “Isaac, check it out!”

Eric Weinberg. He's wandering amid the forest of larger folks, searching for a familiar face.

“What is
he
doing here?” says Steve.

“I invited him,” I say.

I did. I sent him an e-mail and then called him and then texted him from Josh's phone. I didn't think he'd actually come, but I'm not unhappy he's here. It seems somehow right that he would be.

He spots us and holds up a hand in greeting, makes his way over to us. When he reaches us I notice that he's got a plastic cup of beer in the other hand.

“Hey,” he says, or shouts, when he's close. Heys all around. It's loud enough that we all have an excuse to just sort of stand there without talking, pretending we're observing the party all around us, which is what we do for a stretch. Then there's a pause in the music.