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After I helped zip her into her uniform, she danced her routine in front of her full-length mirror, pantomiming the flag in two closed fists. She made unwavering eye contact with me. “Can I get an Apache cheer from the crowd?” she said, and I made a quiet whoop. She looked at me with mock disapproval, like
You can do better than that,
though I didn’t give it a second try. When she finished with the dance, she stood with her hands braced on her hips, still
facing the mirror, asking if I’d French-braid her hair. She’d taught me how to weeks earlier.

“I’d rather not,” I said, and she tucked her chin to her neck, sucked in her bottom lip in a sulk. I added, “I’m not that good at it.”

“You’re fine. Come on.” She plopped herself between my legs, her body still warm from the exertion. “Please,” she said, waggling her hair on my legs, making it nearly impossible to say no. Her silky hair slid through my fingers as I tried to wind it over and through itself.

“Jerold’s coming to the game with Gregory and Kent,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she went on. “This is what you do. You act like you really want to talk to Kent so you can sit by them, and then you just give a little bit of attention to Jerold, but not too much. Keep him guessing, you know?”

“What am I supposed to say to Kent?”

“Anything. Talk about the game or whatever.” I could not imagine a conversation with Kent about the game. I could less imagine a conversation about whatever. Kent spent most of the time shouting uncreative insults to the opposing team
(Your momma should’ve used birth control)
and making fart noises with his hand in his armpit.

When I was done with the braid, I thought it looked funny, cockeyed atop her head, the pulled-back hair only drawing more at-tention to the lopsidedness of her freckles. But she told me
perfect
and gave an air kiss next to one of my cheeks.

“Let’s do you up now,” she said, clapping her hands softly together. She clamped my eyelashes in curler brushes and drew eyeliner across my lids, her breath warm on my face. It was hard to stay prickly in Lola’s world, pliant and fluffy as it was. Pulling her head back from mine, she gently rubbed blush onto my cheeks. “Mmmm, mmmm,” she said, like she could eat me up. I smiled at her. “Shut up,” I said, but nicely. She was psyched about the shirt.
She kept rocking on her heels about it, clapping her hands together, telling me I was absolutely adorable.

At the game, I ended up a couple rows in front of Jerold and Kent and Gregory, Tip having cleared a spot for me between him and Michael Chemanski. Tip greeted me by chucking my shoulder lightly with his closed fist and passing me a nearly empty Pepsi bottle. The alcohol had sunk to the bottom and my sip was a blunt, bracing mouthful of rum, which jostled my stomach momentarily and then spread a quiet warmth through me, which I tried to hang on to far longer than it could rightly last.

Players dribbled the ball and shot baskets and stumbled over each other as referees called fouls. Michael Chemanski went off on a long, and I assumed drunken, tangent about how he bet I could spell any word he could think of. He started out with ones like
psychiatrist
and
bureaucracy
and I felt a little like a trained monkey. His big joke was saying, “I don’t fucking know” once I’d given my answer, or “Sounds good to me.” When he said, “Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious,” I said, “You know that’s not a real word. That’s a Disney word.” He wanted to argue then about whether Cinderella was a real word. “Or what about the Matterhorn?” he said. Michael Chemanski used to come over and wrestle with Danny in the basement. One time they kicked a dent into the wall next to the old bookshelves and had to take off all the books and drag the shelf over to cover it up. When I told him that the Matterhorn was actually a mountain in the Alps, he said, with an inexplicable hint of bitterness, “Figures,” and shook his head.

I was aware of Jerold the whole time, driven more by curiosity than all-out interest. I found myself laughing too loudly and
animating my face more than normal from the expectation of being watched. I found myself too turning to examine the banners that hung on the wall behind Jerold, the long feltlike panels that hailed our state championship in basketball in ’83 and track and field in ’79 and ’91. Jerold’s face blurred in the foreground—I was controlled enough not to stare right at him—but I could see his slightly open mouth as he watched the game, the swirl of hair that looked unbrushed at the top. Throughout the game, he and Kent Newman and Gregory Baron took part in playful roughhousing, shouldering each other in the sides and teetering in their seats.

During halftime, Rochelle, the flag girl with the thick thighs, loudly dropped her flag, and everyone cheered. She looked like she might cry. Tip said to me before the second half started, “Are you wearing makeup?” which embarrassed me deeply, and I stupidly told him no. Lola joined us near the end of the game, still flush-faced and dervishlike from the routine. She practically sat in Tip’s lap and made unsubtle conversation about what I was doing sitting here. I answered obtusely. She asked if we had noticed Rochelle, and Michael called Rochelle a dumb heifer and Tip called her thunder thighs and Lola told them to shut up, but without much conviction.

“Let’s drive after this,” she announced near the end of the game. “I’ve got my car.”

Driving was the default weekend activity when no parentless house was available. I’d never taken part before. It consisted of cramming as many people as possible into cars and circling the city in wide, repetitive loops, honking at other cars full of either Franklin students or unfamiliar faces from other schools in hopes that something, somewhere would materialize, like a keg of beer in an open field or a restaurant that would let students take up tables for hours even though they ordered only coffee or pie and tipped
very little, if at all. Likelier, though, it meant simply spending an hour or two packed into the backseat of a smoky car.

Franklin lost in the final minutes. A junior named Callas missed a free throw and someone chucked a pop bottle at him from the bleachers. It missed. The game was stopped for a few minutes while the rent-a-cops unsuccessfully searched the bleachers for the offender. The whole thing—the pop bottle, the loss—turned the crowd antsy and downbeat. Kent and Gregory got into a shoving match in the parking lot before a couple guys stepped in, yelling, “Chill! Chill!” People complained loudly about being fucking cold. Girls stood in groups squealing about indeterminate topics. Everyone kept saying, “Okay, what are we doing?”

Lola managed admittance to her car with the aggressive precision of a maître d’ at a swanky restaurant. She selected Penny and Diana from the flag team (Bayard she directed to a crammed station wagon across the lot, Rochelle to a Chevy Bronco that was already pulling away); she then selected Kent and, of course, Jerold. She shooed me away from the front seat when I tried to go shotgun. It ended up with four of us in the back—Penny, then Kent, then Jerold, then me. We sat crushed together—we had no choice—and there was discussion of staggering ourselves forward, back, forward, back to make more room.

Jerold put his hands around my waist and guided me forward, positioning me in this weird tilt until I was half on the seat, half on one of his legs. He gripped me tightly, and I felt thick-throated and warm. I wondered if he could feel my heartbeat in his hands. When he let go of my waist, he left one hand resting on my coat at the small of my back. Kent grabbed a beer can out of his bag and passed it around, froth foaming from the mouth of it. I took a long swig, and it was flat and rancid-tasting, but I didn’t care. I passed it to Jerold, who said, “Thank you, Lydia,” the first words spoken between us
that night. I watched him drink, feeling the familiar prickle of disappointment. A few wiry hairs grew from his chin. A rash of zits clustered between his eyes.

We passed all the familiar sights of Fairfield—the Radio Shack, the impotently flashing neon sign for the darkened Delta Car Wash, the nearly full parking lot outside of the Denny’s. I pressed my face against the glass, though my awareness was on the hand at my back. The two of us sat quietly while Kent talked about what a chump Greg ory was and the girls grew shrill and fluttery in their reassurances, trying to calm him down.

Soon Jerold slipped his hand beneath the bottom of my coat and placed it over the waist of my pants. He rubbed me there in small circles, which didn’t exactly feel good—the friction of my waistband against my tailbone was mostly irritating—but still seemed to send all of my blood to that one spot. A dull tingling began at my cheekbones and soon spread along my entire face. Lola yelled from the front seat, “How’s everyone doing back there?” and I made a noise that came out strange, a phlegmy laugh. I drank more beer each time a new can came around. Jerold’s hand inched up my spine. His hands were soft and slightly clammy. I tried to imagine how it would be if these were Denis’s hands, rough fingertips abrading my skin.

Lola kept turning around to grin at me. I could see from my peripheral vision the way Kent watched us. Each time Diana giggled, which was quite a few times, I was sure it had something to do with me and Jerold. It was damp and more than a little claustrophobic in here. For a while I just closed my eyes and arched my back some, trying with what little space I had to inch away. I didn’t want to think of what might come next, if he were to try to reach around to the front of my shirt, try to make a grab.

Suddenly, though, Lola was rolling down her window, blasting us with air. Jerold’s hand dropped from my shirt. There was a similarly
packed car driving next to us, its passenger window down. A girl called out “Croft’s!” Croft’s was a sprawling park spanning several blocks. In the summertime its picnic tables were overrun with family reunions and kids’ birthday parties, not so much because of quality as because of lack of other nearby options. At one end, old wooden playground equipment sat bowed and cracked. At the other end, a maze of crisscrossing trails wound through an anemic “forest” of trees, leading essentially nowhere. In between, there were several dilapidated picnic gazebos, weeds growing through cracks in the cement floors. In the winter the park sat idly beneath snowdrifts and ice, deserted except for cross-country skiers or the occasional hardy vagrant.

People were meeting up there. The idea of spending a cold night at Croft’s amid a marauding pack of teenagers held little appeal, except when weighed against the option of staying in this car indefinitely, crowded onto Jerold’s warm lap.

When we arrived, it seemed as if half of Franklin had beaten us there. A few stragglers wandered by themselves or in pairs, but for the most part, large groups gathered at the gazebos and the jungle gym, beneath light posts or at picnic tables. A few self-appointed monitors, like Gregory, who seemed not yet to have cooled off from the parking lot shoving match, and the junior class vice president, Daisy Montaine, who sported a fuzzy blue beret and a general air of self-righteousness, went around trying to break up the groups, imploring them to scatter into the darker recesses of the park so as not to attract the attention of the cops. “Put that down!” they would whisper-shout at the kids holding open containers in the lamplight. “Do you want us all to get busted?” They pointed to the houses lining the streets across from the park: “You think they won’t call 911?” This temporarily scattered a few of the most easily spooked. But mostly people stood their ground, this little dance with danger
seeming to be part of the appeal of Croft’s, this doggie paddle toward the wrong side of the law.

I drifted between amoebas of people, accepting more beer as it was offered, which turned out to be a fair amount. The novelty of my appearing at such events had not worn off; people still tended toward the generous when they saw me coming. Jerold was following me, but tentatively, some of the momentum from the car already dissipating. He eyed me from across groups, occasionally sidling up and putting a hand on my waist as if he were going to start ballroom dancing. “Hi there,” he kept saying, as if we were just running into each other.

I waited for the alcohol to do its normal stupefying thing, though the bracing air seemed to keep me unpleasantly cogent and aware. I wandered to the duck pond, where a knot of boys were hurling icy snowballs at the frozen surface to see if they could crack it open.

“Lydia,” one said, “you want to try?” He was offering me his packed snowball. These boys were sophomores. One of them was in trig with me. Still, I was surprised for them to know my name and to use it so easily.

“Sure,” I told him and hurled it overhand. It made a dull thud, and the boys laughed.

I found Bayard and Rochelle at a picnic table, drinking beer, talking quietly about people I didn’t know. They looked at me amiably enough—at least Rochelle did; it was unclear if Bayard even remembered who I was—but made no effort to include me in the conversation. I thought about telling her it was okay about dropping her flag. When she burped a loud burp, Bayard crinkled his brow and she made a big display of blowing her burp into the air. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The night was off to a strange start.
I wanted for it to gain just the right kind of traction that made the silly and stupid morph into actual fun.

I stood gamely enough beside Jerold as he talked to some of his wrestling friends, even once nudging him with my hip, though he acted different now, a quick nod my way between stories of hemi engines and takedowns. When I whispered (why was I whispering?), “Hi there,” his smile was mostly polite. I wasn’t sure exactly how this was supposed to work, though I was pretty sure I was doing it almost entirely wrong.

I continued to wander. Enough people kept offering me slugs from their drinks that the night slowly grew more enjoyable, the standing around, the listening in on snippets of conversations. At one point Dale Myerson handed me his cold metal flask. My eyes teared as I drank, the first sip burning my sinuses. Someone let out a low whoop. When I asked Dale, trying not to cough, what this was, he told me whiskey. A great deal of fanfare accompanied my continued sips, all sorts of whooping and encouragement until Dale finally took it from me and Lyle Walker called me a bruiser and spun me around like a ballerina. The park still twirled a little after he stopped.