Chapter 6
SIX
THEN: MAY, TWELVE YEARS AGO
Sam absolutely did not intend to throw a house party.
Well, no, that’s not strictly true. It’s teenage logic, calcified and fossilized in his brain all these years: He did intend to throw a party, and he did intend that party to take place at his house.
He just hadn’t intended it to be a big house party.
Every previous time in his life he’d invited friends over without permission while his parents were out of town—and that, admittedly, had been a number of times—only the people he’d invited had showed up, and things never got particularly exciting.
Usually they watched a movie or, if the night got wild, played a few rounds of Settlers of Catan.
At seventeen, Sam had not understood party mechanics.
It was for adults and more popular teenagers to know that after a certain point, a party is more than just the sum of its guests.
These days, he’s aware that if you gather enough people together in the spirit of having a raucous, no-holds-barred good time, that gathering will take on a certain life of its own.
You can’t work in his industry and not know that.
In the right conditions—even, remarkably, in an entirely sober crowd—people will do things they’d never consider in any other circumstance, driven by the spirit of the party.
But Sam hadn’t known that then. What Sam had known was that if he asked twelve people to come by on Saturday night and hang out, maybe six or seven of them would show up.
Still, he dutifully made enough frozen pizza rolls for thirteen and then waited for the first person to arrive, nervous as always that no one would.
An hour later, that worry had transformed into a blissful daydream, one Sam tried to wrap around himself as he walked around his parents’ home in horror. In another, better world, no one had shown up at all, and Sam had been a little sad, maybe, and then he’d read a book, and gone to bed.
In this world—one Sam was beginning to suspect was, in fact, hell—every student he’d ever passed in the halls of Horseshoe Heights High was crammed beneath the rafters of the so-called Red Roof Inn.
They’d poured in through the front door like a swarm, one right after the other.
They’d brought speakers, and plastic cups, and a variety of high-end liquors stolen from their parents’ carts and cabinets.
In retrospect these were the weird alcohols, least used and thus unlikely to be missed.
At the time, Sam had assumed that among the most common drinks in the world was the combination that was on trend amongst his peers: peppermint schnapps and Sprite.
There were people in every room of the house.
He’d walked into them all, perversely curious, needing to know how bad it was and then regretting finding out.
Someone was smoking a joint on his parents’ bed, and there was a sort of Olympics of Bed Jumping being held in the triplets’ room.
God, who even were all these people? He didn’t recognize most of their faces.
Should he call the police? But wouldn’t he be the one to get in trouble, if he called the police?
But they were destroying the house—oh, his parents were going to kill him.
But then someone came up and clapped Sam on the back.
He was a football type, big, wearing a senior letterman jacket.
Sam never actually learned his name, because they never interacted again.
But he shone with the unquantifiable light of popularity visible only to teenagers, and he grinned at Sam, and said, “You’re like the biggest badass in HHHS history, bro.
I mean, these fools are wrecking this place and you’re just vibing.
Cool as a cucumber. Guess it’s true what they say about you, huh? Anyway, congrats on a dope party.”
He handed Sam a drink and ambled away, and Sam stared after him, thunderstruck.
It shouldn’t have mattered to him, but that approval, in that moment, had felt like the sun rising.
Sam hadn’t been cool as a cucumber: He’d been frozen, horrified, ripping himself into little stressed-out shreds.
But to that tall, popular, linebacker-shaped senior, he’d come across as a chill and unfazed badass, calm and in control.
Sam had wanted to feel calm and in control for so long, by that point. He’s not sure that, before that moment, he ever really had before.
He took a breath. He took another. You’re a badass, he told himself, and tried to believe it. You’re a badass, and it’s too late to do anything about it, so you might as well enjoy your stupid party. You are, after all, going to die for it.
When he took a step down the stairs, someone caught his eye, and enthusiastically gave him a pair of cheerful finger guns.
Someone else called, “Cool party, man!” A girl he’d been in math classes with for two years—a girl who had once, when Sam asked her if she’d dropped a pencil, stared at him for a full minute but refused to respond—waved coyly at him, and blew him a kiss.
Well, that was that. Sam could tell himself all day he was a badass, and he might even be able to believe it, but there was nothing he could tell himself that would make him want to kiss a girl. God knows he would have found it already, if such a thing did exist.
When he got down to the first floor, he realized someone had set up a keg in the foyer, using his great-grandmother’s hand-embroidered footstool as a balancing device.
One of the legs had broken off of it and was sitting forlornly to one side.
It looked up at him accusingly, as if to say, “You’ve killed me, Sam! You and you alone!”
Sam decided to get some air.
He walked back down through the party, briefly and half-heartedly thrashing along with the group blasting music in the living room and spilling a bit of his untouched drink, then choosing to ignore two boys ripping the hose attachment out of the kitchen sink faucet.
He gently pushed aside a couple making out aggressively against the back door, and then stepped outside, relieved to take a breath of air that didn’t smell like sweat, beer, or pot smoke.
Then he looked out into the yard and was relieved all over again: There on the other side, leaning up against the fence next to their shared hedge, was Jake.
He met Sam’s eyes, and smiled.
The walk across the yard that night is etched in Sam’s memory like stained glass, leaded in place and catching the light even now.
He’s never been entirely sure why. Maybe it was that sense of blooming possibility, the still-solidifying idea that his life was his own, and he could do anything with it he wanted.
Maybe it was the way Jake was smiling at him, a small, private smile, one Sam would normally only get to see through the gaps in the fence.
“Hi.” Sam was breathless by the time he reached Jake, for exactly no reason at all—it’s not as though it was a taxing walk. “You came. I thought you had… You’re not usually around on Friday nights.”
Jake’s smile shrank down, his lips pursing slightly as he glanced down at his nails. “You sound oddly glad I’m here,” he remarked, “for someone who didn’t actually invite me.”
“I didn’t actually invite anyone,” Sam admitted, leaning up against the fence next to Jake. “Or, I mean, I invited a few people from my English class to come over and watch the movie version of Rebecca so we wouldn’t have to actually read it—”
“What’s so wrong with Rebecca?” Jake said, crossing his arms over his chest and sounding genuinely affronted. “Gothic mansions, undertones of lesbian obsession, hot murdery husbands—it’s basically a perfect book!”
“You think Maxim in Rebecca is hot?” Sam asked, wrinkling his nose.
“Do you not?” Jake seemed astounded by this. Then, before Sam could answer, he added, “Hey! And you’ve clearly read it.”
Sam shrugged and felt himself flush slightly, caught. “Ah. Yeah. A few times.”
“So you invited your English class”—Jake looked doubtfully out over the yard and house, both packed with teenagers—“and maybe every English class there’s ever been, over to watch a movie… to avoid reading a book… that you’ve already read several times?”
Wincing, Sam said, “Honestly? My parents are in Michigan with the triplets, taking them to tour sleepaway summer camps—”
“Ew,” Jake commented.
“I know,” Sam agreed, still bitter about it.
He’d never gone to sleepaway camp. He’d never so much as gone to day camp, not even the free ones you could sign up for in most cities if you got on the list early enough.
“But I just. I don’t know. It felt too lame to do nothing, and you’re usually…
” Sam paused, and only didn’t say, Out with your actual friends, by the skin of his teeth.
“…busy, on the weekends, so. I figured I’d have a few people over.
Only those people told people, and those people told people, and now…
well.” He gestured out at the yard, and sighed. “Here we are.”
Meditatively, Jake said, “Your parents are going to kill you, you know.”
Sam sighed again. “I know.” He looked wistfully into the windows of the house; he’d never seen them like that before, every one alight, shadows alive and moving in every room, and he never would again.
It was nice, in a strange, complicated way.
Looking at it made him feel a bit sick and weirdly proud of himself at the same time.
“But it really was an accident, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. ”
“You could ask them to leave,” Jake suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “Do you think they would?”
“No,” Jake admitted, on a sigh. “They might have a few hours ago, or if they didn’t all think you were some sort of semiprofessional daredevil, but as it is: no. Probably not.”
“Right. So.” Sam shrugged, and cast Jake a slightly hesitant sidelong grin. Lifting his drink, he said, “Might as well enjoy it? Since it’s literally my funeral?”