“I have some of that, too. Debts.”
“Sucks, man. Fuck a debt.” Cody packed another bowl. The car was choked with smoke. “Hot-boxing in the front of my Jeep,” he sang to the tune of “Party in the U.S.A.” His voice wasn’t half bad.
“Nice. You should record an album. Roland and I recorded one a few weeks ago, with this record collective in the city. Meloncholia? You know it? The band, Psychic Hearts, we’re playing a show on August 18 at Jupiter. This club down in the city. ”
“In Colorado,” Cody was saying, “there’s mountains everywhere. You can live on a mountain and ski to work. That’s what I’m going to do. I don’t know how you could live in New York Shitty. It’s fun to party in, but it smells like a bag of assholes. Anyway, I couldn’t live in one of those little apartments that cost nine thousand bucks a month. I want a house in a mountain. A whole house in a whole motherfucking mountain.”
“It doesn’t cost nine thousand bucks. That’s only for celebrities. So where are you going to live?”
“What? I said, Colorado.”
“I mean, in Colorado. Where are you going to live in Colorado.”
“In a mountain! I said that. You’re not listening. Where Mike’s brother lives. The—I forget the name of the town. His name’s Chris.”
“When did you visit him?” This was ridiculous. Daniel wanted to tell Roland about getting faded with Cody Campbell at the pond at the bottom of Cedar, about going to Econ every morning with Amber Bitburger, but he hadn’t spoken to Roland since getting kicked out of the rehearsal space. It wasn’t like Roland had contacted him either, but he missed Roland, damn it, missed him like subways and rooftops and singing, even if being back in Ridgeborough was an unanticipated reprieve. He had eliminated the possibility of feeling out of place by banishing himself to no place, stoic nights alone in his bedroom or flipping through news magazines with Peter and Kay.
“I haven’t gone there yet, Wilkinson, I saw pictures. I told you, I’ve got to get my money in order, pay off that debt, but I’m working on it, I’m figuring it out. Like you. Gonna make our dreams happen, right?” Cody held out the pipe. “More?”
“Yes, please.”
Cody’s phone chirped, signaling a new text. “It’s Amber. She wants to know if we want to go to the stupid Open Mic at the stupid Black Cat.”
“Let’s go.” Daniel wanted to be around other people, even if they were Amber and Kelsey. He rolled down the window and heard crickets and frogs over the radio, but the woods seemed sinister, foreboding. One time in high school, Mike Evans had driven his brother’s moped into the pond.
“You serious?”
“Come on, we can grab a beer, chill.”
Cody considered this. “I am kind of parched.”
IN THE BACK ROOM of the Black Cat, the only business open on a block of boarded-up storefronts, four middle-aged men were playing a cover of Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” Amber and Kelsey waved Daniel and Cody over from a table near the stage.
“You guys found each other,” Amber said. “You smell like a bong.”
“Like Colorado,” Daniel said.
“How’s all that studying going for your test tomorrow, Wilkinson?”
“What test?” Daniel poured himself a glass of beer from the pitcher on the table. The band broke into a guitar solo and the lead singer, bald and stocky, started headbanging. Daniel laughed. “These guys suck.”
“They’re not that bad,” Kelsey said.
“They’d last half a song in the city until they got booed offstage.”
“Guns N’ Roses is all right.” Cody screwed up his face and played air guitar. His fingers weren’t even in the right places for the imaginary frets and strings. “You’re in the jungle now! I don’t care if they suck. I don’t care.”
Kelsey shrieked. “Oh my God, you guys are twins!”
Daniel looked down. He was wearing his hiking boots, even in the middle of the summer, because he didn’t have any other shoes. Cody was wearing a pair, too. Both of them wore blue jeans and black Tshirts.
“You’re like the Asian version of Cody,” Amber said, and everyone laughed.
Kelsey took a picture with her phone. Cody said, with a fake lisp, “We planned our outfits together.”
The singer screeched. The band, at least, looked like they were having fun.
He came home at midnight, his buzz long gone, and lay on top of the same quilt that had been there when he’d first become Daniel. Those early months in Ridgeborough had been suspicious, begrudging. But at some point it had become easier to play along; it had become second nature. The doubts had burrowed deeper until he barely felt them at all. By his last year in high school, thinking of Deming or Mama was like remembering a terrible band he had once loved but now filled him with mortification. Only once, in high school, after he saw the Chinese woman in the mall, had he let things slip. When Kay and Peter had told him that he had to stay home and study for the SATs instead of going to see a band with Roland, Deming had said his real mother would’ve let him go. It had popped out, unbidden, real mother an abstraction; Mama would probably have made him stay home. He hadn’t meant to hurt Kay and Peter that much, but he was angry at the injustice—if he missed this show he might never see this band again!—and Kay had winced and told him it wasn’t the end of the world. “We are your real family,” Peter had said.
Back then, the mystery of what happened to his real family had been too enormous to solve. But now he had found them, and nothing had changed.
He’d have to pull an all-nighter to finish the essays. Schenkmann had returned his last paper marked up in red pen. He typed his name out on a blank Word document, followed by the date. The cursor blinked back at him as he read the first question again.
Discuss two major theories that characterize the role played by interest groups in U.S. politics. Describe the insights these theories can offer regarding the operations of the legislative process.
He sighed. He had never seen the guy who was playing poker in Econ class again; Amber said he might have dropped out. Daniel closed his laptop and decided to take his guitar out instead. A new thing was forming, not the essay he was supposed to write, but the song he’d been working on before he left the city.
Two hours later, when he returned to the essay, he saw an e-mail from Angel. He’d been sending her the occasional message, but this was the first time she had responded.
Daniel, PLEASE don’t text me anymore. I wish you the best.