Californium (24 page)

M
e, Keith, and Treat are standing on the back patio looking out at an empty backyard. Treat reminds us that only dorks show up to parties on time. “We got a can't-miss formula. Free beer and a band. Totally punk rock.”

The words are barely out of his mouth when a couple guys who lettered in Academic Decathlon come walking in through the side gate.

“Great,” Keith says. “Dorks.”

Treat snaps his chin up like he made those guys appear. He grabs a couple fake beers from one of the coolers, walks across the grass, and slips one to each of them. They're all thanks and head bobs because neither one of them has probably ever had a guy that looks like Treat actually be nice to him.

“See?” Treat says when he gets back to the patio.

“That's two people,” I say.

“Yeah,” Keith says. “That just makes this a Math Club party.”

Treat folds his arms. He's wearing his black Buzzcocks T-shirt, the one with the sleeves cut off so it matches his sleeveless Levi's jacket. “Come here,” he says, and waves me and Keith over to a little red cooler hidden behind the big ones. He digs down below the Löwenbräu on top and pulls out bottles of Coors. “This is the real stuff.” He clicks the caps off one at a time and hands them out. “It'll help us relax.”

“Awesome,” Keith says and takes a big drink from one like it's a soda. He pops the bottle out of his mouth and coughs with his whole body, and some beer foams out of his lips and crackles down onto the cement.

“You okay?”

Keith sucks in a deep breath and wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Fizzy,” he says, his voice hissing like he has a cold.

“You don't suck it,” I say and pull the bottle up to my mouth. “Tilt it back and let the beer come to you.” This is how Uncle Ryan showed me one summer at Seaside Heights. I've only done it with birch beer, though, so when the real stuff hits my throat, it's bitter and the back corners of my mouth squeeze like they're trying to stop it from getting to my throat.

I only mean to show Keith how it's done and that's all, but Treat clinks my bottle, then Keith's, and we all take a good draw. This time the beer washes around and then attacks the insides of my cheeks. I swallow and a breeze swirls around inside my skull. My mouth tugs at itself again and there's still a taste in there, kind of dry and slowly going away. Almost good.

Treat takes another good swig and opens the glass sliding door to the house. “I'm going to tell Lyle people are starting to show up.”

They are. It's mostly freshmen and sophomores forming into small circles out in the grass, standing and looking over at the coolers. When one guy breaks free and comes over to the patio, Keith says, “Grab a beer.” The guy looks relieved and waves up his group. A few more people break off, get a beer, and head back to re-form their circle. Pretty soon, everyone's getting chattier and goofier and breaking off old groups and re-forming new ones around the yard.

I'm nearly to the bottom of my beer when two girls wearing ripped-up jeans and T-shirts come walking around the side of the house to the patio. One of them has this black leather jacket, kind of Fonzie but with buckles and silver studs. The other girl has short black hair spiked up and flaring out.

Keith's digging out a couple beers for them and I say, “Do you know who that is?” because it's Cherise and Edie. Cherise is the one looking tough with that jacket and thick black eyeliner. Edie's eyeliner is in these long thin lines that make her eyes look sharp and less relaxed than usual. Up close, she's got purple streaks in her hair, like fireworks arching up into the sky right before they explode. Her striped shirt is supertight, and her jeans have two massive slits in them, one by each thigh.

I hand Edie a beer. “Where'd you get those?”

She pushes a leg out, the slit parting like a curtain to show lots of skin. “I made them.” She takes a sip of her fake beer, wrinkling her nose a little as she pulls it away. “Are you guys nervous?”

Keith takes a swig of his beer and it looks smooth now the way he lets it come to him. “I'm a little nervous.”

Not until my bottle is an inch from my lips do I realize how
light it is, that I must have finished it off on the last drink. “Me too,” I say and tip the bottle back anyway.

Cherise is looking out into the yard. “Where's Treat?”

“He's around,” Keith says. “Probably making changes to the set list.”

Cherise and Edie nod, real serious. The way Keith says “set list,” it's like we really are a real band. Treat's Mohawk is as big as ever, and even though Keith's wearing a plain white T-shirt, he's written
Muck the Fan
on it big in black marker, and it looks good with his collared long-sleeve shirt unbuttoned over it. I've got Treat's black Minor Threat shirt underneath my Packy jacket, which makes everything okay the way it covers the fact that this shirt is way too big for me. And even without Mohawks, me and Keith have our hair messed up and stiff with hair spray Keith stole from his mom.

Cherise tugs at Edie's shirt and Edie gives her an
All right, already
look. “We're going to go walk around a little,” Edie says.

The yard is changing by the second. You can't see all the way to the deck/stage anymore. Every few feet is a clump of people and this chatty murmur hovering over everything. I don't even realize Petrakis is talking to us until Keith taps me. He's got a six-pack of Pabst in one hand and shakes our hands with the other. It's actually a normal handshake, not like he's trying to prove he can bench-press a Pontiac. “Good party, little dudes. Where's the beer?”

“In your hand,” Keith says.

He laughs and I point to the coolers. “Right there.”

Petrakis half turns his body, like a door opening, and a
couple football players walk by and start fishing around in the coolers.

“You gonna spit on people?” Petrakis says. “Like van Doren does?”

“You know it,” Keith says and clinks his beer bottle to Petrakis's cans.

“How 'bout you?” he says to me.

“I might just throw up on them.”

Petrakis clinks my empty beer bottle. “Kick ass.” He looks out into the yard and tells Keith he wants him to meet some of the guys from the team. It's been a good season and they think Keith really is a good-luck charm.

The yard is full now, the groups grown together into a single mass of people. I don't recognize anybody, and that's what gets my stomach tightening again. My eyes go to the grass, trying to focus on the most basic thing I can see, a single blade catching some light from the back of the house. For a minute, my head rises above the murmur, blocks out the sounds of people laughing and asking their friends when they think DikNixon will get there. It's just chatter and blur until the clacking of wood gets me looking over at the side fence. There's a guy in midair, one hand on the fence and feet flying over sideways. He thumps to the ground and three more guys pop up and over right behind him. Everybody along that side of the yard looks and you don't need much light to know that a guy in combat boots with cropped hair and three friends behind him like bodyguards has to be van Doren and the rest of Filibuster.

Van Doren looks out at the yard while a couple of the
Filibuster guys come over and grab four beers. They bring him one and he barely tilts his head at all, instead lifting the bottle, letting the beer come to him, then dropping his hand so the bottle slides through until the last second when he catches it with two fingers around the lip. It dangles there the way you'd hold a lantern or something, like he's forgotten he even has it until the next sip.

Keith comes back then, a new beer in hand. “How's he do that?”

“I don't know. My uncle Ryan never had a move like that.”

Van Doren looks right at me. His eyes move just a bit to the side, to Keith, then back to me. He doesn't blink or look away either. He walks through the middle of his own group and over to us.

“Good crowd,” he says.

It's a great crowd. Bigger than Ted Two or Three. Maybe as big as them combined. So I nod, but Keith doesn't. He looks down at his beer, the cap still on, studying the label like it'll say
Vintage 1925
and he can talk about what a good year that was. “It's not bad.”

Van Doren looks at Keith without moving his head. “Not bad? I'd have been shitting bricks if this many people showed up the first time we played.”

Keith looks up. “I'd be shitting bricks too, but it's not our first gig.”

“Then you know better than to wait too long to play,” van Doren says, his eyes back on me. “So you don't lose the crowd.”

Me and Keith nod and van Doren steps back and looks us over. “Okay, then, boys, break a face.”

As soon as he turns around I say, “We better play soon or he might.”

“We can wait a little longer,” Keith says. “Make them really want us.”

I just want to get it over with now. It's like one of those huge tests you've been dreading all day and keep thinking:
T
hree hours from now I'll be taking it,
then
two hours,
then
forty-five minutes.
The closer it gets, the less chance for the teacher to go home sick or the Soviets to attack and save you. “Where's Treat?”

“Somewhere,” Keith says. He swishes the beer around in his bottle and flicks his head like something is over my shoulder. “Guess who.”

Over by Mrs. Dumovitch's rosebushes is a circle of girls away from everyone else. It's dark over there except for the garden lights along the ground and the light shimmering through the bottles they're holding. Wine coolers. I can't tell one silhouette from the other at first; then the shape of Astrid's hair appears. It's parted down the middle tonight with the Farrah Fawcett feathers on each side. It couldn't be less punk rock, but it's so perfect.

One of the girls, Sascha, comes walking over to the patio. She's wearing these dark blue jeans that are about as tight as security at the Kremlin. Keith grabs a beer for her, tucking his own beer into his armpit, using both hands to dry the new bottle off with the bottom of his shirt.

She clinks the bottle with one of the rings on her fingers and doesn't take it. “I'm fine,” she says. With Keith holding a beer in each hand now, it's like Sascha's got him handcuffed. She
pushes open Keith's collar and inspects his neck. “Looks like I'm going to have to freshen up your marks tonight.”

Keith nods and tries not to smile too big. “Maybe I should mark you too.”

Sascha puts a hand on the back of his neck and pulls him closer. It looks real sexy the way her head tilts sideways and her mouth opens just a little right as she starts kissing him. She pulls away and pushes him back a little. “Better. Much softer that time.”

“Thanks.”

“If you play good,” she says loud enough for me to hear, “you can mark me somewhere no one can see.” You might think she'd smile with that, leave it open in case she wants it to be a joke, but it's not. Her face is serious, her eyes locking Keith up until she walks away.

Keith sips a beer and holds it there until Sascha's turned completely around. He pulls the bottle from his lips and it's the wrong one, the one with bottle cap still on it.

“Smooth,” I say.

“She is,” Keith says and turns to me. “We need to play
right now.
”

“Okay. Where's Treat?”

Even in a yard full of people and just patchy light, it should be easy to spot a Mohawk sticking up. But we don't see him.

“He's got to be in the house,” Keith says and looks out at the deck/stage. “You go check and I'll stall.”

“How?”

Keith steps over to the coolers to pop open the bottle he got for Sascha and a second new bottle, which he gives to me. “Flip on the utility lights when you see me up there; I'll do a sound
check.” He nods once, looking more excited than nervous, and heads into the crowd.

I step inside the glass sliding door and close it, the house as quiet as a confessional. Nobody is even looking at the deck/stage when Keith hops onto it without using the steps. I flip the switch and the deck/stage lights up, even brighter now that it's night and so dark back there. Everyone in the yard turns around. There's a muffled cheer that dies down as Keith steps into an orb of light. Behind him, the DikNixon logo glows in white light and Keith picks up the bullhorn: “Check, check, check. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Check-check. Fuck-fuck.” Every time he says “fuck” a few people cheer, then a few more after the next one, and even more after the one after that until everyone is getting into it. “Check. Fuck. Check, fuck,” he says faster and faster. “Check, fuck, check-fuck, checkfuck, checkfuck, checkfuck.” Everyone's cheering and Keith waits until they quiet just a little before yelling, “Fuck Czechoslovakia!” The yard explodes in a roar. Van Doren and the guys from Filibuster are at the front edge of the deck/stage, holding up their beers, saluting Keith as he waves and sets the bullhorn down.

Mr. Krueger always tells us it's important to be thorough so you don't have to go back and check what you've already checked. So I look for Treat in the bathroom, the kitchen, the hallway, and his own room. In a corner of the dark Two-Car Studio there's this guy and girl making out, arms and hair twisted up and fused together so you can't see who's who or where one person ends and the other begins. “Treat?” The guy's head peeps out at me. No Mohawk. “Sorry,” I say.

Now I'm nervous. I mean, it's easy to lose a person in a crowded backyard, but not the lead singer of the band that's about to play, and not at his own house.

I'm down to two rooms, Jewell's and Mr. and Mrs. D's. The last thing you want to do is go into a guy's parents' room, so I step into Jewell's room, running my hand along the wall for the light switch.