Chapter TWO
Leaving in 15 mins. C u there.
Chase Singer fired off the text to Zach and slipped his new Nokia cell phone, an early Christmas gift from his mom (one they couldn’t really afford), carefully into a back pocket of his jeans.
Every year, right before winter break, an Ascension High School senior stepped up to host the party to end all parties.
Part holiday gala, part celebration of being halfway done with the school year, the party was the stuff that legends were made of—legends that often took another six months to live down.
This year, with Ian Minster’s parents away on their second honeymoon, his house was ground zero for reputations to be ruined and reinforced.
Chase’s phone buzzed and he fished it out of his pocket.
New text from Lindsay Peters: Can I crash the Ascension party tonight? Chase didn’t respond. He’d been hooking up with Lindsay, a junior from nearby Trinity High, for a few weeks.
They’d met at a football party and she’d been cool at first. She
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was willing to drive to see him and not too needy. But now he was bored. She had a nice body—although not as nice when she wasn’t wearing a push-up bra—a low voice, and a big smile. But she wore a little too much makeup and laughed too loudly, even when his jokes weren’t that funny. Even when he wasn’t trying to be funny. A couple of weeks ago he’d started telling her about this cool documentary he’d seen about insects and she’d thought he was telling her the plot of a sci-fi movie. Plus she chewed with her mouth open. No, he definitely did not want her to come tonight.
As Chase snapped the phone shut, he saw the time. He had to hurry.
The tiny bathroom at the end of the narrow hall was clouded with steam. Chase grabbed a now wrinkle-free bright red polo shirt from the shower rod. The pipes shuddered and groaned as he turned off the hot water. He wiped the conden-sation from the mirror and held the shirt up against his dark jeans, evaluating the outfit. Did it look like he was trying too hard? He applied a dab of gel to his short brown hair and pulled at the cowlick that stuck up like an alfalfa sprout on the left side of his head. Dressed in the polo shirt, jeans, and impeccable new sneakers, Chase looked like your average preppy boy—not like someone who lived in a tiny trailer on the outskirts of town with his mom.
Which was, of course, the whole point.
Chase checked his phone; there was another text from Lindsay— I haven’t seen u in a week! —which he deleted quickly.
He was on a schedule: by the time he arrived at Minster’s house, 13
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the sophomore and junior girls would have drunk just enough to lower their inhibitions, but not so much that they were too wasted to flirt. (At Tina Hathaway’s Halloween party that year, he’d no sooner convinced a hot sophomore to ditch the crowd for a private make-out session in the woods than she’d pulled down her pants and started peeing on a tree and giggling. He’d had to half-carry her back to the party, where he off-loaded her onto her friends.)
So tonight was going to be a success. He needed it to be.
The Ascension Football Feast was in a little more than a week, on January 2nd. The Feast was an annual postseason celebration of the Ascension Warriors, the town’s pride and joy (at least when they were winning), not to mention a major charity event. Most players brought a whole entourage, including parents, siblings, and girlfriends. Last year, he’d arrived alone and felt humiliated when the guys made fun of the fact that he hadn’t managed to bag a date.
This year, his best friend Zach was organizing the whole event, hoping to raise five thousand dollars for a local homeless shelter. There would be a ton of people there, not to mention news cameras. And Chase was the star.
Chase was a damn good quarterback, probably one of the best in the state. College recruiters had already contacted Coach Baldwin to inquire about Chase’s post-high-school plans. And while it would be cool to get a free ride to a quality school—
he’d be the first Singer to attend college, and there was no way his family could afford it, otherwise—he wasn’t playing for scholarships. On the field was where he felt free, open, smart.
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He knew what to do, and he had the space to do it. He made the right choices. Sometimes, in the middle of a game, he was surprised to find that he was grinning.
And yet, in the back of his mind, Chase knew that at any moment, everything could come undone. One bad play and it could all close in on you—no holes to run through, blockers and tacklers in every direction. No options.
Smoothing his collar a final time, Chase grabbed his football jacket and closed the trailer door with a satisfied thud, ignoring the fact that it made the whole structure shake ever so slightly.
The night was cold, and the snow that had been forecast was starting to fall. He was trotting toward his car—an old station wagon he shared with his mom—when he remembered that she was working tonight at the convenience store around the corner. He jogged back to the house to flip on the outside light. He didn’t like to think of her fumbling for her keys in the dark.
Every time Chase left his trailer on the west side of Ascension, he felt like he was emerging from a claustrophobic cocoon. His part of town was right by the highway, and the buildings—trailers, convenience stores, gas stations, water tow-ers—sat almost on top of one another. First he’d pass the Kwik Mart where his mom worked. Out of habit, he always slowed a little, trying to catch a glimpse of her bottle-blond hair. He liked it when she worked the register. That meant she wasn’t doing heavy lifting in the stock room.
A mile past the Kwik Mart, the landscape opened up; the 15
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buildings petered out at Williamson Farm, still in operation, with dairy cows and a smell of manure in the air. Here, he’d open his window despite the smell, breathing in the fields, the space, the nothingness. Then several miles of forest, with just a few houses cut into the woods, and then the old part of town, which tried to hold on to historic appeal, with brick buildings, green awnings, and small shops. This was where Ascension’s middle school was, a hulking stone prison. Chase loved driving by it. He never got over the thrill of having escaped.
Then he hit the nicer residential neighborhoods. Everything here looked cleaner, and in the summer, greener. The houses were set about an acre apart, each one claiming a small bit of woods for itself. Out even farther past the center of town, toward Minster’s neighborhood—where the money really flowed—the lots got bigger, the driveways got longer, the streetlights were fewer. And past Minster’s was the high school, out near the lake, with an expansive campus and a newly renovated football field. It took Chase the whole drive sometimes to start loosening up, to shake off the feeling of the thin tin walls around him, the old food smells that lingered in the tiny trailer air, the sense of smallness and dirt.
But tonight, Chase never shook off the claustrophobic feeling: He kept seeing shapes darting at the edge of his vision, but when he looked, there was nothing but snow, whirling out of the darkness.
He hoped the party would snap him out of his bad mood.
He was going to choose his date for the Ascension Football Feast tonight. He was going to pick someone quality, too—
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someone who would make up for last year. A girl who wasn’t too loud, and smiled at the right times, and looked good in a dress. Maybe even someone he could talk to for more than fifteen minutes.
Tonight, Chase planned on finding the perfect girl. He needed it. He deserved it.
When he pulled up to Minster’s house, which sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in one of Ascension’s newer developments, the party was already raging. Almost every light in the house was on, and a group of smokers stood in the driveway, hopping from one foot to the other to keep warm. He jogged up the lawn and pushed through the front door, into a large, marble-tiled entryway. A gold-framed mirror hung on the wall, and below it, a varnished wooden bench.
As he did when he entered most of his friends’ homes, Chase felt a moment of unconscious panic. Everything here was so nice, he felt like he shouldn’t touch anything.
But no. He was Chase Singer, and Chase Singer belonged.
He shrugged off his jacket and threw it on the bench with just a little too much force, glanced one last time at his reflection in the mirror, and began his rounds.
A group of underclassmen were overcompensating for their insecurities by being too loud. Jenna and Ashley, two cheerleaders, were standing with Taylor, a field hockey player, and all three of them were flirting with what appeared to be some extremely stoned lacrosse players. Coming out of the kitchen was Minster himself, looking surprisingly relaxed for someone whose enormous house was full of Ascension high schoolers.
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It appeared that half the crowd was drinking beer from plastic cups, and the other half was drinking a red-orange punch. The lights had been dimmed, so all the rooms were hazy and full of shadows. Pop music—new, dance-y stuff—thumped from a hidden sound system, and even people who weren’t dancing seemed to be pulsing with the music. Everyone who came in from the cold took a moment to adjust and to blow on their hands, as though they’d emerged from a long expedition.
He located Zach and Gabby by the keg and the punch bowl, and scanned the room for potential hookups. There were some definite possibilities—Jenna or Ashley, of course, and also a throng of sophomores who got giggly as soon as he passed through the living room. This would be fun. He smiled.
He started to tune in to the conversations around him, but then Gabby was calling him over to where she and Zach were standing with Andrea Rubin, Sean Wagner, and Nell White.
“Look who I found,” Gabby said. At one point she’d wanted Chase and Andrea to get together, but Andrea had made it clear that she would go out with Chase only if he paid for everything—an impossibility that Chase resented more than he let on. While Chase wasn’t the poorest kid in Ascension, he was certainly the poorest popular kid in town. And he hated that people knew it.
“Hey, man,” Zach said. “Grab a beer—catch up!” He pumped the keg and handed a red cup to Chase, who accepted it and took a big gulp. Something about tonight made him feel like he needed more liquid courage than usual.
“Thanks, dude,” Chase said. “What’s up? Who’s here?
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Where’s Winters?” He addressed the questions to no one in particular; Gabby took it upon herself to answer.
“We were talking about Miller’s English final and how impossible it was,” she said. “And everyone’s here. Well, almost everyone. Em should be here soon. I don’t know what’s taking her so long.”
Chase nodded and nudged Nell. “You know that tall sophomore?” Nell was a peer adviser and somehow managed to know every single Ascension student’s name. She followed his gaze.
“The blond one? Jess Carlsen.” Nell paused and Chase waited, expectant. Nell rolled her eyes and went on: “She’s into drama or singing or something. I forget which.”
Zach laughed. “Homed your radar already, huh, Singer?”
Chase held his hands up in mock innocence. “I’m just trying to get to know new faces,” he said.
“You’re tracking new blood,” Gabby chimed in, and Chase could see her ever so slightly tighten her grip on Zach’s arm.
Then, out of nowhere: “Did you guys hear about Sasha Bowlder?” she asked.
At that moment someone must have leaned against the light switch: The overhead lights blazed and suddenly the room and everyone in it was starkly illuminated. For a second Chase had the impression that everyone was frozen. Then the lights were dimmed again.
Chase and Zach exchanged a quick glance.
Zach cleared his throat and asked, “What about her?”
“She tried to commit suicide,” Gabby said, her voice low.
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Now Chase felt as though the room had gone dark, even though the lights didn’t waver.
“By throwing herself off the Piss Pass,” Gabby added, referring to the highway overpass around the corner from Fitzroy’s, a local dive bar. Fitzroy’s regulars often stumbled to the overpass to pee when they were having a smoke; hence the nickname.
“Didn’t you hear all those sirens earlier? They were, like, ear-splitting. I thought there was a terrorist attack or something.”
Zach smiled, gently. “Ascension, Maine is hardly a terrorist target, babe. Nothing bad happens here.”
“Well, what happened to Sasha is bad,” Gabby said, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
Chase felt something tighten in his chest. Sasha was Ascension’s social pariah, but she hadn’t always been. Memories came to Chase, fast and thick, like a blizzard: Sasha as a young girl, weaving with him around the mounds of trash and broken furniture stacked up around the trailer park. She lived there then, just a few trailers over in lot 37. They played hide-and-go-seek and flashlight tag. And they shared secrets. Some nights, when his dad was too drunk and really raging, his mom would shuttle Chase over to Sasha’s house, just to get him out of the line of fire. And then, when Chase’s dad died in the freak factory accident, Chase stayed at Sasha’s for a full five days while his mom took care of the funeral, the creditors, and her grief.
He and Sasha would share a bed, toe to head, and tell each other ghost stories into the night. They preferred the fake scary stuff to the real. At least in stories, when you turn on the lights, the monsters disappear. The first time Chase ever thought about 20
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girls as anything other than less athletic versions of boys, it was to wonder what it would be like to kiss Sasha.
But then things had changed. Sasha’s mom met a wealthy dentist from York—he swept into Ascension and bought a big house over by the McCords’. Just like that, Sasha wore trendy clothes, could go out for pizza on Friday nights, and could invite people over to watch movies on her big-screen TV. That was sixth grade, and suddenly, Sasha seemed to forget that Chase existed. It was weird—he’d hated her for a while, but in some ways, Sasha ditching him was the best thing that ever could have happened. Because that’s when Chase got it—as long as you’re wearing the right outfits, saying the right things, impressing the right people, you can blend in. It doesn’t matter where you come from, as long as you play the role.
Once Chase saw the matrix, it was easy enough to get in.
He talked about girls but not too much. He did well in class but not too well. He excelled on the field, was up for any physical challenge. He became friends with Zach McCord (but never invited him over). Over the course of maybe six months, Chase got in. By seventh grade, Chase Singer was part of the crew.
And by the time they got to high school, he was Way In.
Of course, the thing about the matrix is it works the same way in reverse: Once you’re out, you’re really, really out. Sasha discovered that too late.
The tides turned against her, easily, almost as if swayed by an invisible force.
She tried desperately to keep a low profile, to avoid the smears. No one could quite pinpoint what her mistake had 21
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been. Maybe she had been too eager, too mean. Or maybe it had all started from some small thing, like freshman year when she wore a fluorescent pink sweater to school and was called
“Rainbow Retard” for a few days. Or more likely it was when she made the mistake of letting two boys kiss her at a party in the fall that year. In reality, the kissing thing had probably been a last-ditch effort to be liked. But it was too late. After that the rumors started. Countless rumors—Chase couldn’t even remember all of them. Sasha was bi, or she was into porn, or she was just a freak, no further explanation needed.
She began to wear clothes that didn’t stand out—and started to slip into invisibility. She skipped a couple of important dances, she began to slouch down in her seat during class, she wasn’t involved in any extracurricular activities. And though it had happened seamlessly while most people were looking the other way, Sasha had quickly lost everything she’d once gained.
It was the easiest thing in the world to make fun of her. Over time, it became a sport. Eventually, she had just one friend left: Drea Feiffer, whose hair color changed weekly from purple to maroon to jet-black, and whose habit of wearing barrettes, striped socks, and T-shirts featuring Japanese cartoon characters seemed only to highlight the darkness of her general attitude.
Suicide. Chase felt a tingling heaviness in his legs and arms—the same feeling he used to get in church. His mom used to drag him there before she started working Sunday doubles.
He’d never liked church—hated it, in fact, but not because he was bored by the priest’s lectures about sin. He’d never told anyone this, but he’d actually been scared of the church—the 22
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weird smell of burning things, the priest’s thunderous voice, and the enormous crucifix over the altar. It had always freaked him out.
Now Chase felt like the room was tunneling around him.
“People don’t just—,” he started to say, but Zach cut him off.
“Is this a joke, Gabby?” Zach asked.
“Not even,” Gabby said, nodding so her blond curls bounced. “It just happened, like two hours ago! She’s going to be paralyzed for life or something.” By now more people had quieted down and were gathering around Gabby, which only fueled her on. “What I heard is that she fell into the bed of a truck—the guy was totally freaked out—and she’s in the hospital. Like in a coma. Someone at my mom’s TV station is reporting on it. That’s how I found out. My mom asked if I knew her.”
Everyone looked shocked, but Chase barely noticed. He blinked once, twice, and stepped away from the group.
Zach reached out for Chase’s arm. “Where you going?”
“I gotta piss,” Chase responded, avoiding Zach’s eyes. “I’ll be right back.”
Chase had been to Minster’s house a few times before, but all of a sudden he couldn’t remember where the bathroom was.
He wandered into the TV room, past the huge wall-mounted plasma TV, and into the living room. At a bar in the corner, Chase spied a bottle of whiskey. Perfect—the Minsters’ private stash. He moved casually toward the bar, tipping back what was left of his beer, and picked up the whiskey. No one would notice if some was missing off the top, he told himself, 23
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pouring a hefty slug into his plastic cup. Then he stood there for a moment, surveying the crowd. The musty, earthy taste of whiskey burned his throat as he took a large swig.
Suddenly all anyone was talking about was Sasha Bowlder.
People were as drunk on gruesome details as on the watered-down beer. Did she leave a note? Was she real y paralyzed? Was she at the local hospital, or had she been sped to Portland, or airlifted to Boston?
Chase felt like the room was clenching and unclenching around him, a giant fist. Suicide. The word kept replaying in his mind. Suicide. And the Sasha he hadn’t thought about in years—
the normal Sasha, the best-friend Sasha of his childhood, smiling, gap-toothed—kept coasting into his mind.
With one last swig of the whiskey, Chase shifted, moving away from the bar and the living room, from one conversation to the next. He hated the way the pictures on Minster’s walls—Smiling happy grandfather! Smiling happy mom! Smiling happy brothers!—seemed to be following him with their eyes, sneering. He picked up a random beer from a bookshelf in the TV room and chugged it. Man, it was hot in here. He passed the bathroom, finally, and the long line of girls waiting to use it. All of their faces seemed to blend together. He was having trouble recognizing them, like everything was happening behind a cloud of smoke. He had to steady himself against a doorframe before shuffling back into the kitchen, where a large group had assembled. Gabby was still holding court, divulg-ing details she’d heard from her mom—and, probably, adding plenty of her own. Even though everyone else was standing, Chase sat down in a kitchen chair with a thud.
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“You okay?” Chase looked up to see Zach standing over him, offering a fresh beer and an inquisitive look.
“Yeah, thanks. I just . . .” Chase switched gears. “What do you want to do over the next couple of weeks? You’re a free agent!” He quickly looked at Gabby to see if she’d overheard, but she was too deep in conversation with Fiona.
“Free agent—yeah right. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gabs plants a video camera in my alarm clock.” Zach’s breezy tone sounded forced.
“Tough break.” Chase leaned forward to punch Zach’s arm. The room swayed as he settled back into his chair. “Is that Guitar Hero tournament at your place really the extent of our vacation ambitions?”
“Well, that and study for the SATs.”
“Seriously. If you don’t get a perfect score, we’re going to have to go on stepfather suicide watch.”
A look of embarrassed shock passed between them. The topic of suicide was too relevant to be funny.
And over all of this, they could hear Gabby’s voice, ringing clear above the dull roar of the party. “We should start a suicide support group, something for all the grieving students,” Chase heard her say. Lauren was nodding enthusiastically. It looked like Fiona was tearing up.
He grimaced, pulling his forehead into a mess of little lines.
All this mopey bullshit was just too much. He stood up and strode over to Gabby, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward him.
“Since when do you all care about Sasha so much, any-25
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way?” Chase could hear himself slurring his words. “She was a loser. It’s not like anyone will miss her.”
The group surrounding Gabby got quiet, and she elbowed him sharply, spilling some of her punch on his wrist in the process.
“Why would you say something like that?” she demanded.
Chase’s mind felt like it was coated now, thick and white and blank. “You got punch on me,” he said. The words sounded distant, as though they came from someone else.
“You’re a real a*shole,” a voice said behind him. He turned, and there was the artsy girl, Jess something-or-other. She was looking at him with disgust. There went that prospect.
He tried to change the subject.
“Five minutes—beer-pong tournament,” he shouted, notic-ing that people were uncomfortably, and subtly, moving away from him. “I challenge any of you to defeat me and Zach.”
As he headed for the bathroom line, he heard Zach trying to smooth over the moment, urging people to quit gossiping and enjoy the night.
A couple of minutes later, in front of the vanity mirror, washing the sticky punch from his fingers, Chase examined himself. He adjusted the collar on his shirt and turned his face to the left and right, checking for missed shaving spots. Finding no imperfections, he looked himself square in the eyes. Chase, dude, he said to himself, get it together.
Someone was banging on the bathroom door.
Just then Chase noticed a tiny stain next to the second button on his shirt. Shit. The punch. He clenched his fist. Get it 26
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together, he repeated. It was only a small spot. Still, Chase knew how easily things could fall apart. And sometimes all it took was one little thing gone wrong: a fumble, a lie, the click of a send button. A moment of weakness. Even something as minor as a stain could ruin everything.
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