Being primarily friendless, and also somewhat intelligent, I’m staying in. Halloween stuff doesn’t scare me easily, but when this many teenagers in town are congregated in permissive parents’ basements doing shots of 151 and preparing to smash in some car windows, you can sort of feel the weird destructive electricity in the air.
I feast on a balanced meal of pizza and a coffee mug filled with some white wine Dawn left uncorked on the side of the fridge, squeezed in between the eggs and milk. Then I read a little bit of Kira’s novel, Genius Family, right up to the part where her brilliant and beautiful but aloof physics-prodigy mother makes subtle fun of the soccer moms at the PTA but they’re too stupid to notice. I Google Kira again and read some new reviews, one of which is in the Washington Post: “A solid debut,” albeit “just a touch self-consciously quirky and smug.” Ouch. I wonder how she’d respond to that. She’s probably above it all. I think it’s easy for beautiful people to be above things.
By around ten I’m lying in bed and lulling myself to sleep chatting with Were-Heads about random stuff, because that’s the thrilling life I lead.
I’m half-asleep when I turn my head toward the window and see some movement across the highway, in front of Ruth’s place. I sit up and pull my curtain aside to see four small, dark figures standing—posturing, really—one of them holding a nearly empty squarish bottle by its long neck, glinting in the porch light. Their steps, somehow, are barely making any noise.
Simultaneously two rolls of toilet paper soar in an arc against the dark sky toward Ruth’s roof, and then comes the splat of an egg. I realize they’re in the garden, their Sperrys mashing and ruining Ruth’s flowers. That’s why their sneakers are padding silently on the ground. Ruth is almost certainly sound asleep by now; she has been going to bed earlier and earlier. If this wakes her up, she’s sure to be wrecked tomorrow.
Suddenly I’m so angry I can hardly feel my body, other than my face getting so hot it feels like my head might explode. My body, meanwhile, is jumping out of bed, yanking on Dawn’s Uggs by the front door and leaving it wide open behind me as I fly down the stairs and march toward them with a flashlight. I barely check for cars before I’m tearing across the highway.
“Hey!”
Jason Tous stands there casually, like he’s waiting for a bus, but the other three—who I can’t make out—take off, winding around Ruth’s house and running into the pitch-black woods that crawl almost all the way up to her side door. I take off after them. We are all quickly swallowed up by the darkness and the quiet, every branch snapping under our shoes sounding like gunshots.
“Yo!” I shout.
One of the guys drops an empty bottle in his haste, and I snag it, barely slowing down. Jack Daniels—of course, patron saint of boys who try too hard to be Men. I hurl the bottle at the slowest boy as hard as I can, and it glances off his shoulder blade with the whack of glass on bone.
“Fuck!” he yelps, stopping to crouch and massage his shoulder. One of the other two keeps running, but one slows to a stop, looking back to see if the injured one is okay. I shine my flashlight in that guy’s face and actually gasp—as if I am on a soap opera and just caught my estranged evil twin making out with my husband—because it’s Gideon. I mean, of course it is. I’m surprised, and not surprised, and that combination takes my voice away for a few seconds, but fortunately I get my words back.
“Seriously?” My voice verges on shrieking. The injured boy—it’s Dylan Dinerstein—is still rubbing his shoulder and looking sullen, but I’m addressing Gideon. “What’s wrong with you?”
He shakes his head minutely, and I think I see a flicker of something in his face—guilt maybe—but he says nothing.
“That’s the problem with you assholes,” I snap. “You have nothing to say. So you pick on people who do.”
I can’t look at Gideon anymore—with him it’s way too complicated. But the other guys? They’re anything but. The words fly off my tongue before they’re filtered by my brain.
“Know what? I hope you get monster boners when you wreck an old lady’s house, or when you make Leslie Barnes feel like shit for raising her hand. In ten years, Leslie Barnes will be running a million-dollar company—but you’ll still be here, still doing this, for the rest of your life. She won’t even come back for reunions. And neither will I, bitches.”