The maintenance road was more pothole than actual road, the asphalt cracked and crumbling as if there’d been an earthquake. The moon bobbed along overhead, a waxing gibbous following us through the trees. Eventually, the path turned to gravel, and we emerged from the trees into the scattered weeds beside a country highway. Across the road, a field was chock-full of moonlight. White wildflowers drooped in clusters throughout the grass, glittering diamonds laced into green embroidery.
Isaac, Jon Cox, and Mama sat in the middle of the field, waving. We jogged across the street, picked through the field, and settled in a circle. Surrounded by long grass stalks and knotted flower stems, Jon Cox had abandoned his usual uniform of pastels and crisp khaki, slouching in an oversize hoodie. Isaac’s hair was down, thick and wild and dark, and he lay on his side, stripping the leaves off weeds. Mama was setting out a line of glasses in the grass, his big arms pale and bare in the moonlight. The dewy ground dampened my jeans. The breeze cut through my jacket. I shivered.
“Gentlemen!” Isaac said, sitting up. He looked, as always, as if he hadn’t expected to see us but we were the best surprise all day. “It’s time to celebrate a victory over our mortal enemies.”
Trav’s expression darkened. “What did you do?”
Isaac held up his hands in a wait-there’s-more gesture. “As we all know, I’m sure, ammonia plus matches equals ammonium sulfide, which smells so bad, it makes Jon Cox smell amazing in comparison.”
“Wait, what?” Jon Cox said, sniffing his own armpit.
“Tonight,” Isaac continued, “sixteen terrible people are going to find their mattresses saturated with this smell. Will their noses ever recover? Who knows?” He lifted a bottle of whiskey with an aged honey-brown label. The liquor glowed tawny in the starlight. “Courtesy of Jon Cox, a toast to vengeance.”
He started pouring, and I eyed the bottle, uneasy. I’d been drunk all of once—Shanice’s fifteenth birthday party, the summer between freshman and sophomore year—and it hadn’t gone well. Jenna had kept flirting with me, and alcohol, I learned, made me uncontrollably happy about everyone and everything. So when she kissed me, it lasted a minute or two before the alarm bells in my head blared, reminding me that, oh, right, I had a boyfriend. And I was straight. At least, I’d thought so.
Michael and I fought about it for hours the next day. It had been one of our dumbest fights. He freaked out at me, stunned that I’d never told him I might be into girls. That’s because I don’t know if I am into girls! I’d yelled back.
How can you not know? he’d demanded.
I hadn’t had an answer then. I didn’t have one now. I just didn’t know. I’d never been sure if I was attracted to girls, or whether it was a too-strong awareness of how attractive I thought girls might be to other people. Three or four times, I’d had what I chalked up as weirdly intense friend-crushes: I’d meet a girl, get flustered, get fascinated, and for months, I’d want only to be around her.
Where was the line, though? Did I want to be around her, did I want to be her, or did I want to be with her?
“If you’re bi, that’s so much more competition, babe,” Michael had said at the end of the fight, sounding exhausted. I’d spent the following weeks convincing him that he didn’t have competition. That nobody would ever compete.
I took a glass and stuck it out. Isaac let the neck of the whiskey bottle clink to the glass and tilted. Amber liquid rushed out. “That’s good,” I said quickly.
“Lightweight?” Isaac said, a hint of a challenge in his voice. I didn’t rise to the bait. He grinned and moved on.
“Cheers, gentlemen,” Isaac said, after pouring Marcus’s drink. He lifted his glass, and seven hands followed suit. Nihal and Trav, who hadn’t taken glasses, mimed the toast.
“To us,” Isaac said, “for being handsome and brilliant.”
Nihal’s merry chuckle punctured the declaration. “I think maybe 50 percent of us meet maybe 50 percent of those requirements.”
Laughs rippled around the circle. We drank. The whiskey was as bitter as rust and burned all the way down my throat. My face screwed up. By the time I untwisted it, the conversations had broken open again, low voices filling up the night, and gratitude flooded me for this field on this night with these boys, who knew so little about me and somehow seemed to know everything that mattered.
To my left, Trav spoke quietly to Isaac. “There’s going to be hell if anyone finds—”
“Nobody’s ever watching the side gate,” Isaac said, low and careless. “And if someone does show up, whatever. We’ll run.”
“I was going to say, if anyone finds out it was you who poured that on their beds.”
“Oh, well, they’ll obviously know it was me.” Isaac smiled. “But that’ll be it. The Minuets aren’t going to say anything, or I’ll tell the school they broke into Jon Cox’s car, and that’s no good for anyone, right?”
Trav wasn’t satisfied. “Right, well, no more of this. We should focus.”
“We are focused. We’re ahead of where we thought we would be.” Isaac’s voice softened, and in the space of a second he became someone I hadn’t seen before, who used words like they mattered, who knew how to wield them to push away or edge a little closer. “Hey, look at me, Trav.” He raised his eyebrows. “You’re on top of all this. I promise.”
Trav took off his beanie and scrubbed his hand over his shaved head. “Yeah,” he muttered, almost too quiet to hear. “I know. You’re right.”
Isaac clapped him on the back and met my eyes. I glanced away, embarrassed. I shouldn’t have listened in.
The night wore on. I sipped my tiny amount of whiskey down to nothing, but the others poured more and more for themselves. I had drunk just enough to turn the world to gold. I looked over at Trav around one thirty, while the others looped a song into existence, making up parts as they went. They folded in snatches of popular songs every so often. Da-dah, hmm, yeah. What do you love? What do you love? What do you love? Trav’s eyes were shut. He looked peaceful.
I closed my eyes and felt it, too. That potent thing distilled out of familiar voices, hidden in the lovingly painted strokes of rural New York, nestled in the lazy weeks before the cold cut down. Peace. We’d locked the world out, frozen time, trapped a little idyll in the isthmus of the hourglass. As for Michael, and my life in theater, and the big bold question mark of my family’s future—the competition, even, sitting ahead like a bull’s-eye at the center of a target—gone, gone, gone.
Isaac was wrong, it turned out.
Not about everything. We didn’t get caught in the field, thank God. And the Minuets didn’t go to the administration about the mattress stink bombs.
But it wasn’t over.