Chapter 8
EIGHT
THEN: NOVEMBER, TWELVE YEARS AGO
It was a long, terrible summer, the summer before senior year. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, Sam crawled into bed most nights at the very end of his rope, only hanging on by the barest grip.
His parents had been furious about the party and the wreck it left of the house, of course. Sam had expected them to be furious. Actually, Sam had expected them to be apoplectic, which they were, and he’d also expected them to punish him extensively, which they did.
But he hadn’t expected their rage to be quite so…
apocalyptic, and he really hadn’t braced for the nuclear winter that settled over their relationship in the weeks and months that followed.
Sam had thought, after a lifetime of making his own sack lunches and sometimes his mother’s, father’s, or sisters’—after being left more than once to wait anxiously because someone forgot to pick him up—that he understood how it felt for his parents not to bother with him.
He thought he’d had that all packed away, nice and neat, in a box on a shelf where it couldn’t upset him at all.
He’d been wrong, though. As each new bill came through for the repairs to the house—as David and Mara cancelled the triplets’ summer camp plans because they had to redirect the funds into undoing the damage—his parents seemed to turn to glass, cold and empty and brittle.
They didn’t make eye contact; they barely looked at him at all.
He tried, dozens of times, to explain: that it had all spiraled out of control, that he hadn’t meant it to happen, that he’d been lost in trying to be someone else, that he was so sorry.
That the very next Monday he’d gone to school and, when someone had asked him whether it was true that he threw parties like that every weekend, snarled, “I made it up! I made all of it up! I’ve never lived anywhere but the suburbs of Cleveland, I’m not wanted by the FBI, I’ve never been in the mafia!
I don’t throw parties like that every weekend; I read books and try to cook soufflés and look after my stupid sisters!
I made it up!” That the other kids in the hallway had all stared at him, and then silently dispersed.
That whispers had followed him through all his classes, circling like vultures but never approaching, still waiting for him to die.
That his social standing had dropped like a stone all afternoon, and by the time the day’s last bell rang, he was an even bigger loser than he was at any of his previous schools, epic party or no.
That he didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, because all that mattered to him was how sorry he was, and how much he never wanted anything like this to happen again.
Nothing broke the glass. It all bounced off his parents with a high-pitched, slightly sickening peal, as if each strike brought them that much closer to shattering entirely.
So it was a hard, horrible summer. But there was, as there always seemed to be when Sam lived in that house, one bright spot, beaming up like the sun itself from behind the hedge in his backyard.
It wasn’t like they meant to start hooking up or, God forbid, talked about what it meant.
It was just that something had shifted, somehow, after that party.
After that kiss. Suddenly, the adult world with its adult consequences seemed to be looming just above them, no longer a safe distance away.
Jake was fixated on the idea of going to Juilliard to study ballet, and had been dreaming of it since he was practically a baby.
There was no question, at least as far as Sam was concerned, of Jake’s talent; he couldn’t imagine a world in which Jake didn’t get in.
But Juilliard was all the way in New York, and while that was great for Jake, Sam knew to his bones that he wasn’t going to end up in a big city like that, if he ended up at college at all.
A certain urgency began to enter their conversations, replacing the caution with which they’d both approached the heavier topics before. Questions started to become more loaded; areas which had once been safe to tread were suddenly seeded with land mines.
But hooking up? Hooking up was safe. Jake couldn’t bring up the five hundred miles he was hoping to move away if Sam’s tongue was in his mouth; Sam couldn’t blurt out some stupid, embarrassing question about what exactly they were to one another if Jake was making him forget his own name.
Neither one of them could accidentally take things too far if they were busy taking things too far.
Or, as Sam remembers it, just far enough.
He was reasonably certain they’d both been virgins when they’d kissed at the party, but was entirely sure neither one of them was by the time August rolled around.
So they didn’t talk about it. They kept meeting up behind the hedge like they always had, talking like they always had, and, when they were sure no parents or siblings could possibly turn up and catch them at it, fooling around.
It worked for them through the hot, sticky swelter of the summer and the fitful, mercurial rain showers of early fall.
It worked for them right up until the day of the accident.
It was November 21st; Sam likes to think he would have remembered it anyway, but that date was stamped across so many court documents that he couldn’t forget if he wanted to.
It was a Friday, gray and bitingly cold, papery dead leaves rustling off tree branches with every gust of wind, and it had begun as a good one.
He and Jake had started the day with twenty stolen minutes behind the hedge, waking up unnaturally early for teenagers to achieve it.
It was an experiment, largely to see if they could get away with fooling around before school, and if it was worth the punishing hour and unfortunate temperature.
They could; it was. They prepared to part ways pleased with their efforts, pink-cheeked and grinning at each other, and then, sounding shy, Jake said, “Hey, uh. Anthony’s having a thing at his place tonight that’s definitely going to get out of hand. ”
“Poor bastard,” Sam said, with feeling. “He should put a moat around the yard and fill it with alligators.”
Jake laughed, but only briefly, and sounded forced-casual when he said, “Well, sure, but there probably isn’t time.
Anyway, I thought I’d see if you’d be interested in watching someone else experience The Horrors.
No worries if you’re still perma-grounded, or just, uh, don’t want to or whatever, but.
” He shrugged, the movement uncharacteristically stiff. “Just a thought.”
“I am still perma-grounded,” Sam admitted, “that’s the thing about the ‘permanent’ part, but they can’t keep me as their prisoner forever. Let me put out some feelers, see if I can slip away for a few hours? I’ll let you know.”
“Great!” Jake said, too loud, and then wincing dramatically: “Okay thanks bye!” He vanished into his own yard before Sam could say anything else.
Sam, at that age, had been many things, but he had been far from fluent in the language of romance. So it had taken most of the day, as he recalls, for it to occur to him to wonder if Jake had, in fact, asked him out. On a date.
Once this had occurred to him, it was all he could think about.
He thought about it through his afternoon classes, and on the bus ride home, and as he remembered to his surprise and pleasure that his house was going to be empty for the evening.
His parents were heading to the Horseshoe Heights High Fall Fundraiser, along with every other parent in town, and they were dropping the triplets off at a slumber party on the way.
It was the first time Sam had been trusted alone in the house for more than an hour since the party.
This was the first stroke of bad luck in what must have been the unluckiest day of Sam’s life: It might all have gone differently if everything hadn’t felt so weighted, so important.
If Sam hadn’t been so nervous about making another mistake, or less fixated on doing what seemed like the right thing; if his parents had been slightly more paranoid, and one of them had stayed home that night to guard the house against teenaged hordes; hell, even if the triplets had been home, and thus Sam’s responsibility, it all would have played out a different way.
Shame it doesn’t work like that. Shame that whatever happens stays happened, even if you spend over a decade thinking through all the ways it might not have.
What did happen was that David and Mara left with the triplets around six.
Sam didn’t even wait until they were out of the driveway to dash back towards the hedge, but Jake wasn’t waiting for him.
His used Volkswagen was still in the drive, as were his mother’s Range Rover and the black Mercedes sedan his father generally drove.
This was odd: Sam knew that Mrs. Thompson was chairing the HHHS Fundraising Committee, and that she’d have murdered Mr. Thompson for skipping that night’s event.
They should have left an hour ago, at least.
As if in response to this thought, Sam heard the back door slam, and the sound of footsteps, voices he recognized as belonging to Jake’s parents:
“Patrick, please. If you would calm down, we could talk about this.”
“What is there to talk about? Apparently, the situation is what it is! Apparently, everyone knew but me—”
“We all thought you did know—”
“Oh, well, what a comfort.” A brief, bitter chuckle; then a sigh. “Just get in the car, Lauren, all right? I can’t do this right now, not if I have to go to this damn rubber-chicken dinner and make small talk with the likes of Barry Wheeler.”