“I’m not making you do anything, dude. I’m just doing my own thing. Nothing wrong with that.” It came out so naturally, so exactly the way the old me would have said it, and the fast upward jerk of Leon’s chin made it so clear that I was getting to him, I couldn’t stop laughing.
“That’s bullshit,” he snapped. “Dude. Have you seen your eyes? Just because you can slip it past them”—toss of his head towards the house—“that doesn’t mean you’re actually doing an amazing job of hiding it. You’re off your tits on something.”
This made me laugh so hard that smoke went down my nose. I doubled over, hacking. “And you’re hysterical,” Leon said sourly, moving away from me. “Whatever you’re on—”
“Heroin, man. All the cool kids are taking it. You should really—”
“You know what would be great? If you would just shut up. Just finish your cigarette—my cigarette—and go inside and leave me alone.”
“Oh, here you are,” Susanna said, ducking surreptitiously out of the back door with a fast wary glance behind her. “Your dad’s singing ‘Raglan Road,’ Leon. I said I’d go find you guys, since obviously you wouldn’t want to miss that. I think it might take me a while, though. What’s so funny?”
“Toby’s lost his mind,” Leon said, grinding out his cigarette viciously under his heel. “What there was of it.”
“Jesus,” I said, catching my breath. My heart was skittering. “That was worth this entire shitty afternoon.”
“Thanks a lot,” Susanna told me. “You’ve been great company too.”
“The company’s been”—I was looking for scintillating, couldn’t find it—“gorgeous. Dazzling. But you’ve got to admit, given a choice of ways to spend the day, this comes right below a, a root canal.”
“Tell me you brought booze,” Leon said to Susanna. “I can’t face going back in there till I’ve had more drink.”
“I thought you had some. Hang on”—turning, eye to the crack of the door—“OK, it looks clear. I’m going in. If I get nabbed, you come get me, right? I’m serious.” She vanished back into the kitchen.
“Sorry about that,” I said. I was feeling a lot warmer towards Leon, and not just because he thought the only thing wrong with me was a few too many party favors. We hadn’t been close in a long time, not since we left school—new friends, widening social lives, plus he had come out and had made sure everyone noticed by going through an over-the-top phase of the kind of stereotypical drugs and clubs that definitely weren’t my scene, and we had never really made our way back from that—but there was something very heartening about the discovery that I could still push his buttons with practically no effort. “Just, for a second there it sounded like you thought I was banging up or something. It was beautiful.”
Leon lit another cigarette, without offering me one.
“It’s just painkillers. I still get the odd headache from the concussion. No big deal. I just didn’t feel like coping with today and a headache at the same time.”
“Whatever.”
“Did anyone else notice?”
He made a dismissive pfft noise. “Nah. Even if they did, they’ll just think you’re still shaken up. My mother says you need yoga classes to re-center your energy.”
That pulled a snort of laughter out of me, and after a moment he gave a reluctant half grin. “Wonderful,” I said. “I’ll be sure and ask her for recommendations.”
“Just be careful,” Leon said, glancing after Susanna and lowering his voice. The edge had gone out of his tone. “I had a friend who . . . well, anyway. All I’m saying is, whatever you’re taking, just because you get them from a doctor, that doesn’t mean they’re harmless little Smarties. Don’t get cocky.”
“Who, me? Never.”
Leon’s mouth twisted, but before he could say anything Susanna nipped back out the door, holding a bottle of wine. “Score,” she said. “We’re definitely going to need supplies. Your dad’s doing ‘Spancil Hill’ now, Leon.”
“Oh Christ.”
“I couldn’t get Melissa out,” Susanna told me. “Your mother’s got her arm around her.”
“I should go in there,” I said, without moving.
“She looks OK.”
“She is OK. Melissa would be OK anywhere. That’s not the point.”
“You won’t believe this,” Leon told Susanna. Flicking his chin at me: “He’s staying here.”
Susanna sat down next to me on the steps, produced a corkscrew from her back pocket and held the bottle between her knees. “I know. I asked him to.”
Leon’s eyebrows shot up. “You never said.”
“Well, I didn’t think he’d actually do it. But”—a flash of a smile to me, as she wrestled with the cork—“looks like I underestimated him.”
“It’s so easy to do,” Leon said, out to the garden.
The cork came out with a pop. Susanna took a swig, with a relish that startled me—part of me still thought of her as an eight-year-old—and passed the bottle to me. “Ignore him,” she said to me. “He’s had a shit day.”
“Haven’t we all,” I said. The wine was red, heavy and late-summery, and I could tell even before it hit my tongue that it was strong. “How are you doing?”
“About how you’d expect,” Susanna said, tilting her head up and massaging the back of her neck. She had changed a lot less than Leon. Her hair was in a wavy chin-length tumble instead of the two thick childhood plaits or the graceless teenage flop, and her old bony plainness had settled into something arresting in its serene aura of permanence, its implication that she would look much the same in twenty years, or fifty; but having babies had softened her long-legged angularity only a little, she was wearing faded jeans and almost no makeup, and she still sat the way she had as a kid, cross-legged and unselfconscious. “Tom’s turning into the back-rub king. How about you?”
“Fine.”
“Honestly?”
“Well, I don’t have Tom’s back-rubs. But apart from that, I’m fine.” I caught Leon’s sardonic glance and ignored it.
“Whatever that means right now,” Susanna said, reaching for Leon’s cigarette. Someone, presumably one of the kids, had drawn some kind of bug on her hand in purple marker. “Give me a drag of that.”
“You can have your own. Here—”
“I don’t want my own. I don’t want the kids seeing me smoking.”
She was a bit drunk, too; now that I came to think of it, so was I. “Give me one,” I said to Leon. “I’ll share with Su.” The kids were down at the bottom of the garden poking something in the grass with sticks, and they didn’t appear to be taking any interest in us, but I’ve always been a little protective of Susanna, even though she’s only three months younger than me. I can remember being about five, picking her up around the chest with a mighty effort and waddling frantically away from the wasp that had been circling her. I lit the cigarette, took a deep drag and passed it to her.
“My dad’s not fine,” she said, on a stream of smoke. “We were over there the other day and I walked in on him crying. Sobbing his heart out.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah.” She glanced sideways at me. “He’s got some present for you. To make up for missing your birthday party. I think it might be some awful family heirloom. If it’s shit, be nice about it.”
“Sure.”
“Because I don’t think he could handle even one more tiny— Zach!” Susanna called across the lawn, to where Zach was clambering up into a big wych elm. “Get out of that tree! How many times have I told you?”
“We used to climb those trees all the time,” I pointed out. Zach was pulling himself farther up the tree, totally ignoring her.
“Right, and then you fell out of that exact one and broke your ankle, you were in a cast for— Zach! Get down right now. Do I have to come over there?”
Zach dropped from a branch, did an exaggerated slump with his head thrown back to inform his mother what a moron she was, and then charged off across the grass to hassle Sallie.