My girlfriend Charlotte and I had been fighting that afternoon, on the courts after off-season tennis. She’d accused me—let me see if I can get the phrasing exact—of “shirking class presidential responsibilities in regard to the Junior-Senior Luau.” She said it in this particularly snotty way, as though I should have been ashamed. As though her predicted failure of the annual Junior-Senior Luau would galvanize me into calling an emergency SGA meeting that very second.
I was dripping sweat and chugging Gatorade when she’d sauntered onto the court in a strapless dress she’d been hiding beneath a cardigan all day. Mostly, as she talked, I thought about how sexy her bare shoulders looked. I suppose I deserved it when she told me that I sucked sometimes and that she was going to Jonas’s party with her friend Jill, because she just couldn’t deal with me when I was being impossible.
“Isn’t that the definition of impossible?” I’d asked, wiping Gatorade off my chin.
Wrong answer. She’d given one of those little screams that was sort of a growl and flounced away. Which is why I showed up to the party late, and still wearing my mesh tennis shorts because I knew it would antagonize her.
I pocketed my key lanyard and nodded hey to a bunch of people. Because I was the junior class president, and also the captain of our tennis team, it felt like I was constantly nodding hello to people wherever I went, as though life was a stage and I was but a poor tennis player.
Sorry—puns. Sort of my thing, because it puts people at ease, being able to collectively roll their eyes at the guy in charge.
I grabbed a Solo cup I didn’t plan on drinking from and joined the guys from tennis in the backyard. It was the usual crew, and they were all well on their way to being wasted. They greeted me far too enthusiastically, and I endured the back slapping with a good-natured grimace before sitting down on a proffered pool chair.
“Faulkner, you’ve gotta see this!” Evan called, wobbling drunkenly as he stood on top of a planter. He was clutching an electric green pool noodle, trying to give it some heft, while Jimmy knelt on the ground, holding the other end to his face. They were attempting to make a beer funnel out of a foam pool noodle, which should give you an idea of how magnificently drunk they were.
“Pour it already,” Jimmy complained, and the rest of the guys pounded on the patio furniture, drumrolling. I got up and officiated the event, because that was what I did—officiate things. So I stood there with my Solo cup, making some sarcastic speech about how this was one for The Guinness Book of World Records, but only because we were drinking Guinness. It was like a hundred other parties, a hundred other stupid stunts that never worked but at least kept everyone entertained.
The pool noodle funnel predictably failed, with Jimmy and Evan blaming each other, making up ridiculous excuses that had nothing to do with the glaringly poor physics of their whole setup. The conversation turned to the prom after-party—a bunch of us were going in on a suite at the Four Seasons—but I was only half listening. This was one of the last weekends before we’d be the seniors, and I was thinking about what that meant. About how these rituals of prom, the luau, and graduation that we’d watched for years were suddenly personal.
It was slightly cold out, and the girls shivered in their dresses. A couple of tennis-team girlfriends came over and sat down on their boyfriends’ laps. They had their phones out, the way girls do at parties, creating little halos of light around their cupped hands.
“Where’s Charlotte?” one of the girls asked, and it took me a while to realize this question was directed toward me. “Hello? Ezra?”
“Sorry,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “Isn’t she with Jill?”
“No she isn’t,” the girl said. “Jill is completely grounded. She had like this portfolio? On a modeling website? And her parents found it and went crazy because they mistakenly thought it was p**n .”
A couple of the guys perked up at the mention of p**n , and Jimmy made an obscene gesture with the pool noodle.
“How can you mistakenly think something is p**n ?” I asked, halfway interested at this turn in the conversation.
“It’s p**n if you use a self-timer,” she explained, as though it was obvious.
“Right,” I said, wishing that she’d been smarter, and that her answer had impressed me.
Everyone laughed and began to joke about p**n , but now that I thought about it, I had no idea where Charlotte had gone. I’d assumed I was meeting her at the party, that she was doing what she usually did when we had one of our fights: hanging out with Jill, rolling her eyes at me and acting annoyed from across the room until I went over and apologized profusely. But I hadn’t seen her all night. I pulled out my phone and texted her to see what was going on.
Five minutes later, she still hadn’t replied when Heath, an enormous senior from the football team, sauntered over to our table. He’d stacked his Solo cups, and had about six of them. I suppose he meant it to be impressive, but mostly it just hit me as wasteful.
“Faulkner,” he grunted.
“Yeah?” I said.
He told me to get up, and I shrugged and followed him over to the little slope of dirt near the lake.
“You should go upstairs,” he said, with such solemnity that I didn’t question it.
Jonas’s house was large, probably six bedrooms if I had to guess. But luck, if you can call it that, was on my side.
My prize was behind door number one: Charlotte, some guy I didn’t know, and a scene which, if I’d captured it via camera phone, could have been mistaken for p**n , although that wouldn’t have been my artistic intention.