“She’s good.” He nods again. “The baby is due in September. A girl.”
“That’s awesome, man, congratulations.” I take a sip of beer, looking for an escape. Eddie was my best friend in high school, but now… I know there’s a place inside me that still cares about him—about all of them—but tonight I can’t really find it.
The band starts playing, and Eddie looks relieved. Maybe we were both looking for an escape. “Talk to you later, bro?”
I nod and he’s swallowed up by the dancing mass of people in the living room. The bass makes the walls rattle and I wonder if this will be one of those nights when the neighbors call the police. In the middle of the crowd I see one dark head, standing still in the middle of the thrashing bodies. Black hair spikes out from his head in random cowlicks like… Charlie.
He stares at me.
I blink, and he’s gone.
“Travis, are you okay?” I hear Ryan’s voice pulling me back to reality. “You spaced out for a second.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” But I’m not. Sweat trickles between my shoulder blades beneath my shirt. “I just need a beer.”
Cooper is at the keg, refilling his cup. “Trav, my man! Where you been?”
Kid seriously needs to cut back on the weed. “We’ve already had this conversation, Coop.”
“Oh, yeah.” A stoned giggle rolls out of him. “Afghanistan, right?”
“Right.”
“Dude, did you see any poppies?”
Leave it to Cooper to ask me about the drugs. “Like the Wizard of Oz, man,” I say, because that will make him happy, but we didn’t take naps in the poppy fields of Afghanistan. We took fire from the Taliban.
I fill a cup, then go out to the living room, my insides still coiled from—I’m not even sure what to call what happened. Hallucination? Haunting?
Standing with my back to the wall, I watch the party going on around me. A couple of girls in tiny skirts stare at me on their way upstairs to the bathroom. Derek Michalski, who graduated with the unofficial senior superlative of Most Likely to Do Time for Dating Underage Girls, is hitting on a girl who looks about twelve or thirteen. Cooper and his girl, April, are deep into one of those stoned conversations filled with profound insights they won’t remember tomorrow. Used to be I was part of this. Now I wonder where, if anywhere, I fit. And if I even care.
A few beers later, I return to the kitchen, where Eddie, Paige, Ryan, and a few others are sitting around the table, reminiscing about some road trip they took last summer. Paige is sitting on Ryan’s knee, his hand curled around her hip. She plays with his hair as she talks over Eddie to be heard. “… and then the fucking car died in the middle of nowhere, remember? And…”
I sit for a while, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m thinking about the last time I got drunk. Just before we deployed, Kevlar smuggled a bottle of cheap, nasty tequila into our room and we drank it while watching M*A*S*H episodes on Charlie’s old TV. When Kevlar passed out, snoring and drooling on my pillow, Charlie told me that back home in St. Augustine he lived with his mom and her lesbian partner, and that his dad was an anonymous donor.
“I don’t really talk about it because I don’t want to get shit for it, you know?” he said. “Charlie has two mommies. Shit like that.” I might have made fun of him if I hadn’t been so drunk, but the tequila made us maudlin. Morbid. “If anything happens to me over there, Solo, I want you to go see her, okay?”
“Dude, don’t be so fucking stupid,” I said. “I’m never going to meet your mom because the only thing that’s ever going to happen to you is me, kicking your ass.”
I was wrong. The worst thing did happen—and I couldn’t stop it.
I lift my beer cup for a drink. Dirt fills the lines of my hand, and my fingers are stained with blood. The cup slips from my grasp, splashing beer across the top of the table. Paige jumps off Ryan’s lap, shrieking something at me, but I don’t understand what she’s saying. My chest is tight and I’m having trouble breathing.
I have to get out of here.
My chair falls over as I stand up.
“Trav, where are you going?” Ryan calls after me, but I don’t answer. I push my way through the living room and out the front door. The air is cooler outside, clear, as I pull it into my lungs in giant gasps until my heart rate returns to its regular rhythm. I look at my hands. They’re clean.
I walk down the street toward the Shamrock, the biker bar on the corner of Delmar and Estero. Apart from bikers, the only people who go there are leather-skinned old beach rats and brittle-haired women who think they’re still young and hot. The music is dirtball rock, the floor is sticky, and the beer is served in plastic cups, but they’re good about looking the other way when you “forget” your ID.
Going through the open doorway, I pass Gage Darnell. He was a year ahead of me at school, but dropped out when he turned eighteen. He’s leaving with a familiar-looking girl with a fake tan, fake nails, fake blond hair, and probably fake boobs. She looks like an Internet porn star—and not necessarily in a good way. I went to school with her, too, but her name escapes me. Angel? Amber? Something strip clubby, I think.
“Hey, Travis, welcome home.” Gage offers his fist to bump, then continues on his way. The blonde wiggles her fingers at me, then latches on to his arm. I might have slept with her.
Perched on barstools are a couple more girls around my age. The one wearing cutoff shorts and cowboy boots is Lacey Ellison. She’s not especially hot and wears too much makeup, but we didn’t call her Easy-E in high school for nothing. She’s flirting with a biker sporting a Hells Angels emblem on his leather vest and a dirty blond goatee. Lacey giggles at something he says and touches the snake tattoo on his forearm.
Beside her is a girl with a mass of light brown hair pulled into one of those sexy-messy knots. Compared to Lacey she’s overdressed; the only skin showing is a narrow stripe between the top of her threadbare Levi’s and a washed-out blue T-shirt. She doesn’t acknowledge me—not even a little chin lift—as I claim the empty stool next to her and order a beer, and for some reason, this bothers me. Probably because I’m drunk. “Nice night, huh?”
Her green eyes meet mine in the Guinness mirror behind the bar and it feels like all the air has been sucked out of the room. I’ve never slept with this girl, but she was the first I remember wanting.
Harper Gray.
The first time I kissed her was at a middle school slumber party Paige threw when her parents went to Key West, leaving her alone for the weekend. It was at the end of summer and I was new, because my dad had just been traded to Tampa Bay, but I’d already made friends with most of the guys on the eighth-grade football team at early practice. The lure of alcohol and girls wearing pajamas was too strong to resist, so we crashed the party. After raiding the liquor cabinet, Paige decided it was time to play seven minutes in heaven. I went first, using the spinner from an old board game, and it landed on Harper.
“Your seven minutes start… now,” Paige said as Harper followed me into the laundry room. I shut the door and she leaned against the washing machine, looking scared. I remember the sharp scent of the bleach mixed with the fabric smell of clean laundry. “I’m Travis.”
“I know.” Her eyes flicked shyly down to our feet—we were both wearing beat-up old Chucks and it seemed like a sign—then up at me. “I’m Harper.”
I already knew, too.
“Like Harper Lee?” I was showing off. I hadn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it was on my mom’s bookshelf, so I knew the author’s name.
“No,” she said. “Charley Harper.”
“Oh, um…”