“Don’t be stupid.” I want to rewind the whole evening, rewind the past few weeks, go back to the moment when Rob leaned over, rested his chin on my shoulder, and told me he wanted to sleep next to me, go back to that quiet moment in that dark room with the TV blue and muted in front of us and the sound of his breathing and my parents sleeping upstairs, go back to the moment I opened my mouth and heard “I do too.”
“You are. You’re cheating. I knew it.” He lurches to his feet and looks around wildly. Chris Harmon, one of Rob’s best friends, is standing in the corner laughing about something, and Rob stumbles over to him.
“Are you cheating with my girlfriend, Harmon?” Rob roars, and pushes Chris. Chris stumbles and knocks against a bookshelf. A porcelain figurine topples over and shatters and a girl screams.
“Are you crazy?” Chris jumps back on Rob and suddenly they’re locked together, wrestling, shuffling around the room and knocking into things, grunting and yelling. Somehow Rob gets Chris down on his knees and then they’re both on the floor. Girls are shrieking and jumping out of the way. Someone cries out, “Watch the beer!” just before Rob and Chris roll up against the entrance of the kitchen, where the keg is sitting.
“Let’s go, Sam.” Lindsay squeezes my shoulders from behind.
“I can’t just leave him,” I say, though a part of me wants to.
“He’ll be fine. Look—he’s laughing.”
She’s right. He and Chris are already done fighting and are sprawled on the floor, laughing their heads off.
“Rob’s going to be so pissed,” I say, and I know Lindsay knows I’m talking about more than just ditching him at the party.
She gives me a quick hug. “Remember what I said.” She starts to singsong, “Just thinkin’ about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow….”
For a moment my stomach clenches, thinking she’s making fun of me, but it’s a coincidence. Lindsay didn’t know me when I was little, wouldn’t even have spoken to me. She has no way of knowing I used to lock myself in my room with the Annie soundtrack and belt that song at the top of my lungs until my parents threatened to throw me out onto the street.
The melody starts repeating in my head and I know I’ll be singing it for days. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. A beautiful word, when you really think about it.
“Lame party, huh?” Ally says, coming up on the other side of me. Even though I know she’s only pissed Matt Wilde didn’t show, I’m glad she says it.
The sound of the rain is louder than I thought it would be and it startles me. For a moment we stand under the porch eaves, watching our breath condense into clouds, hugging ourselves. It’s freezing. Water is falling in steady streams from the eaves. Christopher Tomlin and Adam Wu are throwing empty beer bottles into the woods. Every so often we hear one shatter, and the sound comes back to us like a gunshot.
People are laughing and screaming and running in the rain, which is coming down so hard everything looks as though it’s melting into everything else. There are no neighbors to call the cops for miles. The grass is churned up, great black pits of mud exposed. Headlights are flashing in the distance, in and out, on and off, as cars sweep down the driveway toward Route 9.
“Run for it!” Lindsay yells, and I feel Ally tugging on me and then we’re running, screaming, the rain blinding us and streaming down our jackets, the mud oozing into our shoes; rain so hard it’s like everything is melting away.
By the time we get to Lindsay’s car I really don’t care about the awful way the night turned out. We’re laughing hysterically, soaked and shivering, woken up from the cold and the rain. Lindsay’s squealing about wet butt marks on her leather seats and mud on the floor, and Elody’s begging her to go to Mic’s for an egg and cheese and complaining that I always get shotgun, and Ally’s yelling for Lindsay to turn on the heat and threatening to drop dead right there from pneumonia.
I guess that’s how we get started talking about it: dying, I mean. I figure Lindsay’s okay to drive, but I notice she’s going faster than usual down that awful, long, penned-in driveway. The trees look like stripped skeletons on either side of us, moaning in the wind.
“I have this theory,” I’m saying as Lindsay skids out onto Route 9 and the tires shriek against the slick black road. The clock on the dashboard is glowing: 12:38. “I have this theory that before you die you see your greatest hits, you know? The best things you’ve ever done.”
“Duke, baby,” Lindsay says, and takes one hand off the wheel to pump her fist in the air.
“First time I hooked up with Matt Wilde,” Ally says immediately.
Elody groans and leans forward, reaching for the iPod. “Music, please, before I kill myself.”
“Can I get a cigarette?” Lindsay asks, and Elody lights one for her off the butt she’s holding. Lindsay cracks the windows, and the freezing rain comes in. Ally starts to complain about the cold again.
Elody puts on “Splinter,” by Fallacy, to piss Ally off, maybe because she’s sick of her whining. Ally calls her a bitch and unbuckles her seat belt, leaning forward and trying to grab the iPod. Lindsay complains that someone is elbowing her in the neck. The cigarette drops from her mouth and lands between her thighs. She starts cursing and trying to brush the embers off the seat cushion, and Elody and Ally are still fighting and I’m trying to talk over them, reminding them all of the time we made snow angels in May. The clock ticks forward: 12:39. The tires skid a little on the wet road and the car is full of cigarette smoke, little wisps rising like phantoms in the air.