Chapter 8 #2
“I worked on this for a year; we are going! And you like Barry,” was the last thing Sam heard Mrs. Thompson say.
Then the voices were replaced with the sound of car doors opening and closing, and the thrum of the Mercedes’s engine pulling them down the drive.
He didn’t think anything of it—the Thompsons argued all the time, about nearly everything—but he did wait for Jake for an increasingly embarrassing twenty minutes before resignedly going back into his own house.
He started making himself dinner, checking his phone for messages at shorter and shorter intervals while trying to tell himself it was fine.
Of course it was fine. High school parties started late, that’s all it was.
The gnawing sense of dread in his stomach was from the Hot Pockets he ate when he got home, probably. Nothing to worry about.
It was about an hour later that Jake pulled into the driveway, honking the horn to announce his arrival and immediately giving Sam quite a lot to worry about.
The car he was driving was the first problem.
It was not the little green car Jake usually tooled around in, which had been two of his siblings’ before it was his, and their grandmother’s before that.
Nor was it his mother’s frankly enormous car, which Jake was very occasionally given leave to drive if, for example, he needed to transport a huge number of PTA file boxes to the front office on Lauren’s behalf.
No, that night Jake was behind the wheel of his father’s maroon 1966 Jaguar E-Type convertible.
Sam knew it was a 1966 Jaguar E-Type convertible because he had never heard Jake’s father talk about it without rattling off its full name, and Jake’s father talked about that car a lot.
Once, when Patrick had happened past the house on a walk while Sam and his family were out front doing yard work, they’d all stood and chatted for a few minutes.
After he’d walked away, David had muttered, “Good Lord. You’d think that car was his mistress, the way he talks about it,” and Mara had let out a shout of laughter before slapping him on the arm and telling him to watch what he said in front of his daughters.
Jake should not have been driving the Jaguar.
Jake should not, based on his father’s general vibe and energy and also explicitly stated rules, even have been looking at the Jaguar.
The car had its own special bay in the garage, its own dedicated rags and shammies, its own set of tools and polishes and oils no one else was allowed to touch.
Patrick had joked more than once—enough times Sam himself had heard him say it—that he loved it more than any of his family members.
So it was worrying, to say the least, to see Jake sitting behind its wheel in Sam’s driveway.
But not as worrying as—after bursting out of the house and running over to the driver’s side window to demand, “Okay, how are you driving the Jag?”—catching the smell on Jake’s breath.
Sam knew he was drunk from the first whiff, even before he started talking.
“Oh, I took it,” Jake said, glassy and blank. “Juuuuust took it. Why shouldn’t I take it! He’s never going to like me anyway.” His gaze focused on Sam and sharpened as he beeped the horn, suddenly grinning. “Anyway, come on, get in! We’ve got a party to get to.”
“Jake,” Sam said carefully. “I think maybe you should get out? So we can talk about, um. Whatever’s… going on… first? It seems like maybe you’ve been drinking, and—”
“Oh my God, are you really going to do that?” Jake complained, pulling a face. “Be Mr. Responsible? Right now? You don’t have to babysit me, Sam, you know.”
Sam had felt, even then, that this was below the belt.
It was especially rough coming from Jake, who knew that Sam resented how much time he spent left in charge of his sisters, and who was not typically prone to saying anything harsher than, “I’m so sorry to tell you this, I really am, but you are, in point of fact, off-key. ”
Jake must have been surprised by it, too, because he blanched, and his face fell, and he sounded genuinely remorseful—agonized, even—when he said, “Sam… sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll get out.”
True to his word, he turned off the car and got out, and Sam made his first mistake of the night: He did not immediately snatch the keys out of Jake’s hands.
It didn’t occur to him that it was an option to do so, although it would later, and he’d spend a long time kicking himself for not having done it.
This was, at least, a productive mistake: More than once in the years since, Sam has taken the opportunity to remove car keys from the hands of someone overserved, and he’s fairly certain he’s saved a few lives that way.
But that night Sam was too young to understand the mercurial nature of the drunk, the way rationality comes and goes across their internal landscapes like so much wind.
So he didn’t take the keys, or insist that Jake come inside, or leave the Jaguar safely in the driveway, or call his parents, or Jake’s parents, or anyone.
Instead he peered down into Jake’s eyes and said, “What happened?”
“What happened,” Jake repeated, vacant, leaning back against the car and tapping his fingertips against his thigh.
“What…. happened.” A pause, and then, in an oddly bitter tone for something Sam would have thought would be good news: “Well, I got into Juilliard, first of all. That happened. Early decision. Got the letter today.” His lip curled up into a slight sneer as he added, “Hooray for me.”
“Jake, that’s great?” Sam wasn’t able to keep the confusion out of his voice. “I mean, isn’t it? It’s what you wanted, right?”
“It is what I wanted.” Jake’s voice was hollow; wobbly. “What I want. It is.”
Sam waited for more. When nothing came, he asked, tentatively, “So… what’s the problem, then? Do your parents not want you to go or something?”
“Oh, no, they’re thrilled,” Jake said, and then his face twisted and he added, “Were thrilled, anyway. It’s so prestigious, you know.
Great bragging rights with the artsier circles they move in, and they’ve already had one kid go through one of Ivies, so, you know, it’s all gravy, right?
!” There was an edge of hysteria entering his tone that didn’t match the words, but Sam still wasn’t ready for the abrupt non sequitur: “Listen, I seem gay to you, right?”
In spite of the circumstances, Sam—who had still, after all, been a teenage boy—smirked. “Well, yeah. I’d guess you seem gayer to me than you do to most people, even.”
Jake would have laughed at that, usually; he didn’t. Instead, he pressed: “Sure, sure, but I mean. My vibe. My affect. It’s not, like, particularly heterosexual, right?”
“Ah,” Sam said, half-afraid it was a trap, but, “No, I wouldn’t describe you like that, personally.”
“Right!” Jake threw his hands in the air.
“Nobody would! Because I’m not! And I thought it was, you know, one of those things we don’t talk about in my family, because it’s inconvenient, or uncomfortable, or whatever.
Like Uncle George’s pills, or Mom’s ‘tennis instructor,’ or that whole weird thing with Aunt Elizabeth’s job!
” He scrubbed one hand over his face, laughing wearily.
“Turns out my dad just… didn’t know. No idea. Had never picked up on it once.”
“Oh, God.” Already knowing it must not have been good based on… well, everything, Sam asked again: “What happened?”
“Oh, you know,” Jake said, in a fake-cheerful tone so played up it bordered on singsong.
“First he made a comment about how I’d have to be careful at a school like Juilliard, and how we’d have to have a talk about the realities of the world, because I might attract the attention of a certain kind of man and not know what to do.
And then my brother said, ‘I think Jake knows exactly what to do with the attention of that sort of man,’ and everyone laughed, except my dad, who said, ‘What?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘What did he mean?’ and then my sister said, ‘Jesus Christ, Dad, do you not know Jake’s gay?
’” Jake sighed, heavy and hard. “And then, uh. It all got a little… shouty.”
Sam winced. The Thompsons, he knew, could really shout; more than once he’d heard them from his own backyard. He’d often wondered if that wasn’t what had driven Jake to find the hidden spot behind the hedge in the first place: hunger for somewhere that no one was yelling.
Sam’s own parents had been very low-key when he came out to them.
To his deep and secret shame, Sam felt they’d been a little too low-key.
It’s not like he’d wanted a blow-up fight, but “Okay, kiddo, pass the bread” had been a bit of a let-down.
His father had said it in the same tone he would have used if Sam told him he was thinking about getting a burrito for lunch.
He did not, obviously, say any of this to Jake.
He also did not say what he should have said to Jake: “Oh no, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry!
Why don’t you come inside and tell me all about it.
” If he had just said that, they could have gone into the house, and Sam could have swiped the keys when Jake dropped them on the counter, and they could have waited until their various parents got home to deal with the Jaguar, which would have remained safely parked.
Mr. Thompson would have been angry, probably, but Mr. Thompson was nearly always angry.
It wouldn’t have, say, altered the course of both of their lives.
But instead, because he was a teenager, and an idiot, and panicking, what he did say was, “Shit. Well. I mean. At least now it’s all out in the open?”
Even years later, Sam doubts he’ll ever forget the way Jake turned to look at him, the long, still moment they spent staring at one another.
Jake looked empty, blank, and then briefly his eyes closed and his face creased in devastation, making Sam wonder if he was replaying the whole incident in his mind.
When he opened his eyes again, there was a gleam in them Sam didn’t like at all.
“Out in the open!” Jake said, with a false, brittle brightness.
“That’s right! Always better that way, isn’t it?
To get things out in the open? That’s what this whole day was supposed to be about!
” His tone cracked into a snarl on the last sentence, and before Sam could stop him, he turned and wrenched the car door back open, throwing himself inside.
“Come on, then, get in. We have a party to go to.”
“Jake, please,” Sam said, desperate, “please wait. I really don’t think you should be driving, let along driving that—”
“Sam,” Jake said, stonily calm, as he turned the key in the ignition, “I am taking this car, and I am going to this party, and there is nothing—do you hear me?—nothing you can do to stop me. If you don’t want to go, fine.
If you don’t want to be seen with me, fine!
Stay here, if that’s how you feel. But I. Am. Going.”
Over the years Sam has relived this night many times and many ways, spun out all the things he might have changed to make it go differently.
But the next decision he made, he has never bothered rethinking.
Sam, then or now, could not have let Jake drive the Jaguar away in that condition by himself.
He couldn’t have climbed into the passenger seat or thrown himself in front of the car, either.
He’d heard too much from his parents about impulsivity and drunk drivers, and knew that doing either of those things was likely to end in injury or death for them both.
So, although at any point before that moment he could have sent things careening down a different track, it was already too late when Sam said:
“God, fine, scoot over, then. If we’re doing this, I’m driving.”
Jake scooted down accommodatingly enough, clambering with drunken grace over the gearshift, but he smirked when Sam climbed in and slammed the door. “Do you even have your license?”
“Yes,” said Sam, who didn’t. What he had was a learner’s permit and parents who, between them, had not been able to bring themselves to give him more than three cumulative hours of lessons.
But those lessons were certainly enough to know how to return a car to a home which sat directly behind his own.
And that was, in all honesty, the only thing Sam ever intended to do.
His plan was simple and direct: drive the car back to Jake’s house, refuse to give him the keys, wait until he calmed down, and then invite him over to eat freezer-burned ice cream and watch terrible made-for-TV movies.
It was well thought out, that plan. It should have worked.
They were halfway to Jake’s when disaster struck.