The Cake is a Lie (22 page)

“
So Jessie’s been riding
around with Mike for like the last week, and Jessie gave Mike a
blowjob for an 8
^th
.”

I raised my eyebrows skeptically. “Man
that sounds so made up. How do you know?”

“
Jessie told people man, and
when it got back to Mike he beat Jessie’s ass. Jessie’s eye is as
big as a melon.” I quickly stood on my tippy toes and scanned the
house for Mike. I couldn’t see him, he must have been laying
low.

“
I don’t believe
it.”

“
Man it’s so true, earlier
Timy W was even talking about it. He called Mike, ‘Tickle me Mike.’
Shit’s so funny. Tim even said Mike has this weird thing with feet
they’d always known about.”

I couldn’t believe Tim would say that
about Mike, they were hella close. This was the gossip of the
century. The excitement got me drunk before I even sipped a drink.
“You know there was this one weird night at your house
Ian…”

I stepped out onto the patio where 30
people were in circles smoking.

“
Yo Caldirolis.” I saw
Justyn and ran over and gave him a hug.

“
Did you hear, Justyn?” I
asked him.

“
Did I hear? Of course I
heard.” He said cockily while laughing. I didn’t say anything back
and let the silence encourage him to back it up.

“
You mean about DMF, right?”
Justyn was referring to the big gossip from two weeks ago about
DMF, one of our class’ legends since grade school. DMF, who spent
freshmen year driving his mom’s car around without a license. He’d
joined drama club this quarter, stopped doing drugs and started
spending all his time hanging out with the drama kids. It was the
talk of the town for a week.

“
Man everyone knows about
DMF. You’re slippin, Justyn.”

We laughed and I start telling Justyn
about Mike while I looked over his shoulder. Jonsen was standing on
the other side of the patio by himself smoking. He looked cold,
distant. Like a caged animal that’d been poked too many times. I
only caught glimpses of him at the parties anymore. He’d dropped
out of school last year and got heavy into meth. He’d been wearing
a big, saggy flannel coat recently that covered him up. The crack
shack was too dangerous to visit anymore, grimy gangsters with guns
hung around with his sisters. It was a completely different scene.
I’d asked him about it at a party before, cut the bullshit and went
up to his face. “So, what’s meth like Jonsen?”

He’d smiled at me, “It’s like super
Adderall Marco… Adderall dumped in toxic waste until it gets super
powers. Look at me Marco, I haven’t slept in 4 days.”

How the mighty had fallen. Jonsen had
his time, he’d been seduced by millionaire’s daughters on their
pool tables. All of it was just a distant memory to him now. All
those unbelievable experiences were now as useless to him as a
memory.

I smiled brightly from
across the patio. It was
my
time now, and his time to suffer, life was just
naturally balanced like that.

I stepped back inside and saw Loren
standing along the wall in the dining room texting on his phone. He
was wearing an all camo green jacket with a blue bandana around his
head. The bandana was one of his latest attempts at starting a
fashion trend, sometimes he wore it around his neck. The camo
jacket was crazy tight, Loren was on the forefront of fashion. I
could even see the bandana catching on, though it was a bit bold
for me. But even fashion geniuses missed as much as they hit, and I
couldn’t help but smile looking at Loren’s trademark
tight-as-possible emo jeans. How did he go so wrong? Punk rockers
wore skinny jeans, he looked like a scene kid on the verge of a
tantrum.

I went over and stood next to him, “Yo
Loren, what up?” Everyone called Loren “Tweez.” I didn’t, I’d known
him since I was five.

“
Oh shnap, what up blood?
I’m getting so fades bruh. You?” Loren glanced up for a second from
his phone. Loren had been trying to incorporate “blood” into the
mainstream for the past month. It wasn’t catching on, a little too
close to ripping off actual gang slang for upper middle class white
kids.

“
I just heard about Mike,
crazy stuff”

“
Aw ya.” Loren wasn’t
interested. It was okay though, I’d thought up what I was going to
say to Loren tonight five days ago.

“
So who’s your away status
about?” Loren looked up again. Online, Loren’s Aim was
YOUKNOWMYSTEEZ. For the last week Loren’s username had been grey,
indicating he was away, with this message left behind: “Is that
what you call a getaway? Tell me what you got away with, I've seen
more spine in jellyfish, I've seen more guts in eleven-year-old
kids.”

Every day I read the lyrics and thought
about who they could be about. Loren’s social circles extended to
three or four schools. He was always dating some new private school
girl. But there was still a good chance it was about someone at
Shorewood.

“
You know I don’t kiss and
tell, blood,” Loren finally answered after thinking about it for a
second. Mia Illy walked and flashed us a smile.

“
Hey you want this D, girl?”
Loren called out to her. Mia laughed and gave him the middle
finger.

Loren turned to me, “She don’t want to
mess with this shit. My shit’s gnarly bro. I’d mess her whole world
up.” We both laughed. Loren hooked up with a sophomore on the low,
he’d sneak into her room on weekend nights. She told her bff, who
told me, that Loren had a skinny D. As we watched Mia, she came up
behind another senior, Kate, and started grinding on her from
behind. Kate leaned back into Mia and started bouncing her hips
perfectly to the music, the tiniest bit of cellulite wrinkled up so
perfectly on her stomach it made me want to hit something. They
were so unfathomably out of my league it was a luxury just being a
few feet from them.

Loren left me and I headed over to my
next predetermined destination, most of the skinnies were all lined
up together in the narrow kitchen.

“
Marco!” They all
cheered.

“
Did you guys hear about
Tickle-Me-Mike?” I asked. They laughed.

“
Ya, we don’t believe it
though,” Katie answered for the group, “Carol even gave him
head.”

Carol turned bright red and started
laughing. My psyche choked on the image like a Herrin with an
aluminum can in its gullet. Carol delicately pulling down Mike’s
ghetto boxers and gently pulling out his big black dick.

“
Was he like, into your
feet, Carol?” I investigated.

“
No, gross” Kristine
answered for her.

I shrugged, “They say he’s into
feet.”

I kept walking and ran into Jessica
from my grade school. We weren’t friends anymore but we smiled at
each other with the fondness of childhood memories when we saw each
other.

Tonight, something good popped into my
head when I saw her though, “Hey Jessica, remember at Duncan’s
party when you said my butt is a ten?” I asked, hoping to reaffirm
my amazing butt conception.

She laughed, “Ya…We made the whole
thing up though. It was Addy’s idea.”

“
You fucking bitch,” I
lamented with dripping sarcasm. “That lie had sustained me for so
long. Ignorant bliss is real Jessica! It’s real.” While she laughed
I dipped out on the high note.

The night was going so well I decided
to hit one of the coolest circles. I popped in next to Kace in a
totem pole of popular faces, directly across from me was Janae.
Simon Erickson was telling a story,

“
So this bangin’ mammacita,
she’s gotta be at least twenty five, starts feeling up on me in our
tent.” He was talking about a concert festival a lot of people went
to last weekend. My parents didn’t let me go.

“
But I’m rollin’ balls so
I’m not trying to cut.” It was common knowledge having sex on e was
so good that it ruined sex forever. “So I’m touching her all over,
but I’m not letting her touch me. That’s when mamma goes, ‘Which do
you like better? My bootie or my naturals.’ And I’m like, ‘your
naturals are killin’ it right now mama,’ and she goes ‘wrong
answer, the right answer is you better start hitting this right now
or I’m out.’” Everyone giggled.

Janae interjected. “Ugh, I knew that
having sex on e was a myth before I even had sex on it.”

There are hundreds of millions of
beautiful girls. Millions with the exact same jaded, dark eyes as
Janae. It’s was what she did that separated her, her pure
fearlessness was the true wonder.

“
So did you explore her
Dora?” Janae asked.

Simon’s bf had been waiting to jump in,
“When I got back, from outside the tent, all I heard was Simon’s
voice say, ‘Suck my mamma, suck my mamma.’” This got an uproar of
laughter.

“
What does that even mean?”
Aaron asked absurdly.

“
I dunno.” Simon
shrugged.

Everyone was laughing except Kace, he
was focused on me.

“
Nice socks,” He said, half
the group heard him. I looked down at my one grey sock and my one
white one.

My crises autopilot mannerisms
immediately bunched my mouth to the side and brought my eyes
directly into Kace’s. “I heard a crazy, nuts really, story about
you. That you got pulled over drunk last weekend, driving Terra
Richie’s car for her and her friends. And the whole time you were
talking to the cop you had three 5ths stashed under your feet. And
you talked your way out of it.”

Kace stared back at me.

“
For real?” Simon asked,
bailing me out. Kace turned to face the group.

“
Shit was crazy,” he
started. Then Kace went into another one of his bemused stories,
where he humbly recalled a grandiose deed as if he’d just barely
forgotten all about it. Smirking to himself every time he
remembered how cool he was. As if there wasn’t a pool of boiling
narcissism making the whole thing run.

“
Like, usually nothing fazes
me, but when I saw those flashing beams man, woo I knew I was done.
It’s not even my car, and its five deep with wasted girls. I would
of skirted out, but there were so many people in the car…” It was a
fantastic close-call story. We all had them, there was a new one
every week. And yet Kace kept setting the bar somehow.

Halfway through the story a hush
rippled through the party, heads started perking up. I turned
towards the dining room to see Aaron Lo, a Shorewood alumni who
graduated last year, up in a Shorecrest Senior, Blake Riley’s face.
Shorecrest is Shoreline’s other high school. An interstate highway
makes a natural barrier between the more affluent Shorewood side
and our Shorecrest rivals.

I couldn’t hear what Eric was saying
but I could see his tense, flexing neck muscles and his unhinged,
flapping jaw. Eric was a heavy hitter. By reputation there was
nothing Blake could do at this point. Blake heard my telepathic
warning and tackled Eric into a table. In an instant the promenade
became a mob, pushing for a front row seat. I stayed back in the
living room.

Eventually E-Rock popped up. “Yo Marco,
lets bounce, Kate’s having an after party at her house.”

“
Where’s Jay?”

“
He already left.” E-Rock
headed out the door and I went to grab my shoes when I saw someone
had tied all the laces into a huge knot. I thought about whether to
try and untie them but decided I didn’t want anyone seeing me
struggling to free my shoes.

“
Come on Marco let’s roll,”
E-Rock called from the front porch. F-it, my socks soaked up the
wet dew of the grass as I jogged across the yard.

I should have said, “Oh real good one
Kace, making fun of my socks that were made by 14 year old slaves
in Bangladesh.” I could have got him in front of
everyone.

The floodlights above the football
field illuminated the sideways rain, but my coat hood was down. The
raindrops dripping from my soggy hair heightened my gloomy mood. To
an outsider, it might have looked like I was standing with a few
hundred teenagers on the lower bleachers of Shoreline’s stadium. In
reality, it was a social podium I’d been faithfully climbing since
2nd grade. I was placed in the third row from the top, slightly to
the right from center, in between Jay and Justyn.

“
What ya gonna do with all
that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?” The stadium speakers
blasted over the melancholy crowd, Shorewood was losing 28-0. I
wasn’t watching the game, every twenty seconds I turned to sneak a
glance at the top center row where Mark, Chris and the rest of the
coolest seniors were standing. It was the new kid standing next
them, Robby Blue, who had my spirit against the ropes.

He’d only transferred a week ago and
they’d already adopted him as their own. He was that good. It was
like he just dropped out of the universe–with his shaggy dyed-blond
hair and champagne sparkling blue eyes–to crap on my entire world.
I wasn’t even glancing anymore, I was maniacally staring. His good
looks and tall physique were as unique a combination as his black
down North Face vest over his long-sleeved white polo.