“Oh. Seamus’s for sure. Curran still thinks the incident is funnier than hell. So Seamus goes up, thinking he’ll check out the campus, maybe go to a few parties and have a few laughs, that sort of thing. And at first, it’s all good.”
“Until it’s not?” she offers when I pause to work things through.
“Until it’s way not,” I say, starting to laugh all over again. “So Curran and Seamus start making their way to all these parties with Curran’s frat brothers. One beer leads to another, a few shots, well, you get what I mean. Curran somehow loses Seamus. Can’t find him. Doesn’t know where he is. He and a few of his frat brothers take off looking for him. His frat brothers locate him first, lying on the front lawn of some sorority house trying to find his girlfriend at the time. FYI, she didn’t even go to the school.”
“Oh, God,” she says.
“It gets better,” I tell her, because it does. “The sorority girls know Curran’s frat brothers and insist they take him home to his girlfriend because ‘the poor guy really misses her’ and ‘if my boyfriend wanted to see me, I’d want someone to bring him home’. So the frat boys do.”
“That was nice of them.”
I huff. “No, they just wanted to get some. Anyway, they shove Seamus’s drunk ass into the car and drive all the way back to Philly. They more or less toss him on her front yard so they can get back to the hot sorority sisters, never suspecting Seamus would try to make out with his girlfriend’s mother, thinking it was her.”
Sol’s mouth pops open. “Are you serious?”
I laugh again. “Totally. Seamus stumbles toward his girlfriend’s front door completely wrecked out of his mind, falling over when Mom opens it. She screams for her daughter. They hook his arms around their shoulders and are dragging him inside, all worried about him, when Seamus pulls the mom to him and he slips her the tongue.”
Sol cracks up. “Oh, my God. Did she break up with him?”
I nod. “Yeah. But he and the mom are still going strong.”
Her eyes whip open before she realizes I’m messing with her and starts laughing again. “That is unbelievable!”
“I know.”
“So what happened?”
“The mom drops him like a pile of wet laundry and the girlfriend kicks him in the face. If that’s not bad enough, they call our mother. Seamus was like twenty-one at the time. Ma shows up and drags him out of their house by the hair, screaming at him that he’s going to hell.”
Sol says something like, “Madre de Díos,” before dropping her hand from her face and shaking her head. “I can honestly say, that’s never happened to me.”
“What? Making out with someone’s mother?”
“That, too,” she says, nodding. “What I mean is, getting so wasted I’m sprawled out on some lawn or breaking into buildings to steal beer.”
I try to sound casual―like I’m not some asshole who’s done stupid shit when wasted―even though I have. “You’ve never been drunk?”
“I have, but I have a sort of a hero complex. When my girlfriends and I went to parties, I’d start to drink, start feeling good, but then I’d see them getting too drunk, guys eyeing them like this is going to help them get laid, or encouraging them to drink more so they can get in their pants.” She shudders. “I couldn’t allow them to get hurt, you know? Girls, young women, they’re such easy targets when they start partying, experimenting with sex, drugs, things they shouldn’t and aren’t ready for.” She smiles thoughtfully. “I couldn’t let anything happen to my besties. I had to keep them safe.”
“So you’d sober up before anything could happen to you or to them.”
She tilts her chin, her stare growing distant as if remembering. “I tried. Ever since I was little, I’ve tried to keep people from getting hurt.”
Her statement gives me one hell of a pause. And even though it sounds stupid, not to mention in-fucking-sane, for a brief second I wonder if I had a friend like Sol, back then when it mattered, back then when I needed someone to tell me I shouldn’t follow that man into that house, if I could have been saved.
My anger, along with that deep-rooted resentment stirs. It doesn’t feel right. Not around Sol―not when we were laughing as hard as we were seconds ago. Fuck. For someone who prides himself on being able to take on anyone―to protect himself and those he loves, why would I think what I’m thinking now?
Because you’re all sorts of screwed up, I remind myself. Even with this pretty girl sitting beside you. In truth, what if Sol was with me that day? What could she have done? She would have been a little kid―just like me. Someone he could have hurt, too. Someone he could have raped―
“Hey,” she says, leaning in. Her fingers skim along my temple, where my hair is cut so short it lays flat. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere,” I answer, lying through my teeth.
She tilts her head. “Okay . . . for a minute there, it looked like you checked out.”