Breakaway (16 page)

By the time Friday night rolled around, I was so tired from school, soccer practice, and work that I really only wanted to go to sleep. It was a bye week for us, no game on Friday, so I could just have gone home to bed. As tired as I was, my mind and body were restless and the thought of being at home was too depressing. I decided to go to a party at the house of some girl I knew whose parents were out of town even though I knew I would probably run into Raine there. I had a feeling, on my walk there, that it wasn't really where I wanted to be, but I didn't have any place better to go.

I ran into Chick almost first thing, in the front yard of the house. It was only about ten, so the party wasn't out of control yet—the noise still confined to the house and only a few people arriving. Chick and I were standing in the front yard talking when Mario got there with Travis in Travis's hipstermobile. I had planned to ignore them but Chick called Mario's name and waved frantically. From the look on Travis's face, you knew he didn't want to talk to us but just shrugged when Mario gestured toward us with a jerk of his head.

“Hey, Chick, Jaz,” Mario said with a nod.

“Hey, Mario,” Chick said, “I talked to Arturo. He said he would still take you back on the team.”

I caught the roll of Travis's eyes as he did his best to pretend he wasn't in a conversation with us.

“I'm not worried about it, Chick,” Mario said, looking over his shoulder as if already bored by the conversation. “I'm not coming back.”

“But the team needs you, Mario. We can't make it to regionals without you. Isn't that right, Jaz?”

Mario still hadn't looked at me. He studied the ground, his shoes, the back of Travis's head, but his gaze never landed on me.

Finally I said, “We'll be fine without him, Chick.”

Now Mario did look at me, his eyes narrowed as he digested the meaning of my words.

“Yeah, well, see you around,” Mario said as he fell in behind Travis to head into the party.

Chick followed them, as if we were all going to party together, but I hung back and let Mario and Travis disappear into the house before I followed.

It was easy enough to find the keg, the one room in the house full of people. Someone was working the tap, filling one red Solo cup after another, and I stepped in to take a beer, more than half of it foam. Not that it mattered. It was some shitty, domestic light beer like Natty Light or Busch. I just took it to have something to do with my hands. I'd spend most of the night nursing the same beer.

As I walked through the house, greeting a few people but not committing to a conversation with anyone, Alexis found me and right away started putting her hands on me. Her breath smelled strongly of some sickly-sweet malted beverage and she was a little unsteady on her feet. It took me a few minutes to untangle myself from her and I promised that I would come back to her once I had gone to the bathroom. This was a lie. I'd spend the rest of the night avoiding her. Either she would try to hook up with me again or she'd want to talk about Sylvia. Neither welcome.

I retreated to the basement, figuring it would take Alexis a while to find me there. It was a full, finished basement with a bar and a pool table and jumbo-screen television the size of the one in Bad Habits where they showed the games. A few of the guys from the soccer team—Eli, Chick, and Mario among them—were hanging out around the fireplace, sitting on the floor and sectional couch. Chick was at Mario's side, eyeing Travis as he lay a strip of toilet paper on the coffee table, saying as he did, “Nah, man, you got to separate it and just use a single layer. Otherwise the ball of paper you get is too big.” Talking like he was some kind of fucking expert about something. Goddamn rich kids and their two-ply toilet paper.

Travis pulled the two layers of toilet paper apart and then started to split it into the small squares along the lines of perforation. Then he took a prescription bottle out of his pocket, probably had his grandmother's name on it, and shook out small piles of white powder on each of the squares of toilet paper.

I thought about yanking Chick up by his collar and pulling him behind me out of the room. But I didn't.

Jordie was at the pool table with a few people from his country club crowd, Raine and Cheryl sitting on tall stools along the wall watching the guys play pool.

“Hey, Jaz,” Cheryl called out happily as I joined the group. It grated on my nerves to hear her use my nickname, but it's not like I could tell her to stop using it.

“Hey, Cheryl,” I said. Raine looked at me but said nothing, crimped her mouth in a tight line like she was mad about something. I figured after what had happened in the cafeteria she was done ever talking to me again. I decided not to care. I had spent too much time worrying about it as it was.

I shot a couple of games of pool, winning easily since everyone else was getting liquored up as we played. Raine kept up a quiet conversation with Cheryl. Sometimes I got the sense she was looking at me, but as soon as I turned my head to check she had already looked away. After a few times I kept my eyes on her, waiting to catch her in the act of looking at me. When she finally did look my way I realized my mistake. Now it looked like I couldn't take my eyes off her.

I felt stupid after that so I surrendered the pool cue even though I had been winning and running the table. As I was headed out of the basement I ran into Chick, literally ran into him, as his feet slid out from under him and he thudded down the top three steps, his arms wheeling crazily.

“Jesus,” I said. “What's wrong with you?”

He groaned and put a hand on the wall to steady himself.

“What are you on?” I asked. “If you say you took any of that Molly shit I'm going to knock you the fuck out.”

He shook his head, then seemed to think better of it. “Rum,” he said. “Drunk.”

“Man, you know you can't hold your liquor,” I said with impatience. “What are you taking shots for?”

“Where you going?” he asked, speaking slowly and carefully the way drunk people do, trying to make like they aren't.

“Get a beer, I guess,” I said.

“Mario's upstairs. He's totally out of it. C'mon.” Chick turned so suddenly that he swayed on the stairs. I put a hand out to steady him and followed him to the living room on the first floor. “He was just here,” Chick said with a frown as he put a hand on the back of the couch and bent over, as if he might find Mario under the coffee table.

We found Mario on the front porch, smoking a cigarette, his eyes open only slits. He was sitting propped up against a large ceramic urn that held a potted plant. Even with his back rested against something, he was having trouble holding his head still and it bobbed from side to side like the head of a puppet.

“¿Est
á
s bien?”
I asked him as I leaned back against the porch rail, arms crossed over my chest.

It took him a long minute to answer, like he was really thinking about how he was before he spoke. “I need a beer,” he said as he picked up a plastic cup that lay on its side beside him, looking at it as if he couldn't remember what had happened to the contents, his words coming out a garbled mess. “So thirsty.”

“I'll get you one,” Chick said quickly and turned to go back inside but I grabbed him by the back of the jacket and held him there. He looked at me questioningly and I just shook my head.

“You seem wasted enough,” I said. “You trippin'?”

“Trippin' balls,” Mario said as he took a sudden interest in his cigarette, his brow wrinkled as he stared at the glowing ember, like he was unsure how it had ended up in his hand. He tipped his head back against the ceramic planter and shut his eyes. “Man, Jaz, you just need to chill. You don't get it, but I'm getting in touch with something, some part of me that's deeper than all this bullshit around us. Maybe we'll never go anywhere, you and me, five years from now we'll still be living in the same hood, you working for Chris. At least when I'm trippin' I'm going somewhere.”

Even if Mario's speech hadn't been so slurred from being wasted, he still would have sounded like a fucking idiot. My eyes rolled back into my head but I held my tongue.

“Is that bad?” Chick asked. “Is it bad if we're all still living in the same neighborhood five years from now? At least we'll still be able to hang out together.”

“Things won't stay the same,” Mario said to Chick.

“Yeah?” I asked. “You going to be all fucked up in the head then, living in your parents' basement? How is that any different than it is right now?”

Mario ignored my insult and returned his gaze to the lit cigarette in his hand. “I get that the idea doesn't appeal to you so much, getting inside your own head, taking a deeper look,” Mario continued. “You've had a lot of fucked-up shit happen to you. Thinking too much about it while you're tripping could make you crazy. You just have to learn to let all of that shit go,” he said, as if it had any meaning.

He stopped talking as he went on the nod and the cigarette burned, forgotten. I slipped the cigarette easily from between his fingers and he didn't notice, his eyes still shut. I took a drag before tossing the cigarette into the front yard, thinking about a time when I would have put him in a fireman's hold and carried him home.

While I stood there contemplating Mario as he sat huddled against the potted plant, two cop cars pulled up at the curb, no lights or noise. Stealthy. “Cops,” I said. “Let's go.”

When he didn't react I kicked his shoe. No response. Nothing.

“Wake up, man,” I said as I grabbed him by the sleeve of his jacket and shook him. Still nothing.

I didn't really decide anything, just turned and let myself back into the house, left Mario to his fate. Once upon a time I would have stayed with him, wouldn't have let him go down with the bust by himself. I don't know what had changed or even when. But I knew we were both on our own now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Chick followed me and we left Mario on the front porch and went back into the house. I wasn't going to raise the alarm, figuring we had about two minutes for a head start.

“We're leaving Mario?” Chick asked, his voice rising with worry. “Really leaving him?”

“Stay with him if you want,” I said over my shoulder. “Or carry him yourself. I'm not getting busted.”

Chick stumbled behind me to the kitchen, the brightest room in the house. The keg was dead now and was tilted on its side as it floated in a tub of melted ice. A few people were hanging out, talking and sipping from a bottle of liquor.

Raine, her distinctive head of hair immediately recognizable, was leaned over the sink, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth. As I drew close to her the stink hit me like a wall. Before I even saw the mess in the sink, I knew she had just finished emptying the contents of her stomach into it.

She turned at the sound of my approach, her eyes widening as she saw me, but she seemed too sick to care all that much that I had just caught her puking. Chick was so out of it he didn't even notice the puke and gave Raine a goofy smile and a wave, his eyes narrowed into a stoner slit against the glare of the kitchen light.

Without really thinking, I picked up Raine's hand, the one that gripped the edge of the counter and said, “C'mon. Cops are here.” I pulled her along as I walked toward the door on the far side of the kitchen. Mutely she followed me as I pulled her behind me through the door and into the garage. I didn't bother to look for a light switch but headed for a door at the back of the garage, ambient light from outside dimly glowing through the four panes of glass in the top half of the door.

“What do you mean the cops are here?” Raine asked, looking to both Chick and me for an answer.

I only grunted in response as I fumbled with the door that opened into the backyard. “Shit,” I said. “Dead bolt.” A few seconds later I located the lock, feeling for it in the dark, and had the door open.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Cops are out front getting ready to bust the party so I'm taking the back way out,” I said.

“What about everybody else?” she asked, her voice vibrating with worry.

“What about them?” I asked.

“Man, Jaz, I think we should go back for Mario,” Chick said, bobbing on his toes like he was anxious or had to pee or something.

“You want the cops to find you here? Drunk?” Instead of waiting for an answer, I picked up Raine's hand again and jerked my head at Chick for him to follow, then started walking across the backyard toward the fence.

We reached the fence, an eight-foot wooden privacy fence, and I started to walk along the length of it, hoping to find a back gate. After a minute I stopped and said, “No gate. We'll have to go over.”

“I can't,” Raine said. “I'm wasted.”

“I can't either,” Chick said, “wasted or not.”

“Sure you can,” I said with confidence I didn't feel. They were both pretty trashed. “There's a ledge. About halfway up. Just pull yourself up onto that and you can get your leg over.”

“The ledge is four feet off the ground,” Raine said, ready to accept the fact that it was hopeless. “Maybe if I wasn't wasted. Maybe if I wasn't wearing this,” she said, gesturing at the short skirt she was wearing over tights.

“I'll help you. C'mon, Chick,” I said. “Up and over, man.” Chick looked up at the fence like he was looking at a mountain. I gave him a leg up and he managed to get one leg over the fence. He lost his grip as he struggled to get his feet under him on the other side, then disappeared suddenly over the top and landed heavily with a yelp on the other side. Jesus, between the two of them weighing me down, I thought we were busted for sure.

Then I put a hand on the top of the fence and pulled myself to a standing position on the wooden cross-brace. As I steadied myself by holding on to the top of the fence with one hand, I offered my other hand to Raine. I pulled her up onto the ledge beside me, a narrow strip of wood barely two inches wide, then said, “Now throw your leg over and I'll lower you down the other side.”