* * *
• • •
WE TALKED ABOUT IT for weeks. It was so good. We got every detail out of Richard and Max, her face as it leaned back on the seat, how the smell of tuna fish was so strong Richard worried it would be in his car forever. How they both jizzed on her, like champions.
We asked if they had talked to the girl since. We kept asking, and finally Max said he had. She was grounded for being drunk but other than that she was fine. He said she would do it again. Maybe with more of us.
No way, we said. You’re lying.
I’ll show you. When’s the next party? But none of our parents were leaving town anytime soon.
When we got back from winter break, we found that other kids were talking about it, too. It was suddenly a thing people knew. When they asked, we said nothing. We were gentlemen. But somehow all of the details became known anyway, and it was a joke everywhere. How do you find a private school girl in the dark? Just follow your nose.
It kept us going through the worst time of our senior year. It was a welcome distraction. Something to talk about besides when the next party would be. Something to think about other than our college essays. We were already supposed to have turned the final drafts in to our English teacher, Mr. Kaminsky. We hadn’t even written them. We had nothing to say for ourselves. The example college essay was a kid who had lost a leg to cancer and had learned to play soccer with a prosthetic. He had made the all-state team. His essay was about overcoming adversity.
That wasn’t really fair.
All we had to overcome was pressure, school, our state championship, and the sinking feeling that we weren’t good enough. But writing about playing lacrosse, even when you worried that you weren’t good enough, wasn’t good enough.
And then, at the end of that very long first week of January, we learned that Richard and Max were in big trouble.
* * *
• • •
THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE of Coach’s office was painted bright blue, with a yellow stripe at shoulder height. The stripe traced the inside of the office, like a pothole painted along with the road. It crossed the locker room door, dipped into Coach’s office from the left, and then exited on the right side. From there it traced behind a long glass case holding all our school’s trophies. State championships stretching back five yards and five decades down the hall.
Have a seat, Nick, Coach said. Have a candy. I don’t know what the flavors are. Take a yellow one. School spirit. It’s probably butterscotch.
The office was tiny. Coach had told us once that the architect had forgotten to account for an office for the gym teacher and so they’d had to convert a closet. We assumed he was joking but his office really was tiny. When you sat down, your knees nudged up against his desk, and your back was nearly touching a bookshelf piled with binders that was about one sneeze away from tipping over. It was not usually good news when you went to talk to Coach in his office, and the smallness of the space just added to the pressure.
Even Coach seemed nervous as he asked, How’s your family, Nick? How’re your folks? Everything good?
I took a yellow candy. It turned out to be lemon. All good, I said. I tried to think of any recent fact about my family worth sharing and couldn’t.
Coach was leaning back, his hands folded across his stomach. He kind of squinted, like he had a headache. There were a couple of things I was afraid he was about to bring up. The first was a scholarship I was hoping to hear about from the University of Maryland. Then there was my game, which was not so good. There was also my face-off percentage, hovering now definitely under fifty. I was working on that, though; that very morning I had decided to stop drinking, to get back in shape. There was also half a joint in a plastic bag in the Altoids tin in the cup holder of my car, which was now sitting in the school parking lot. I’d put it there the night before, on a trip to the grocery store. I was hoping to run into Haley, and I wanted to have something to offer her. I did not see Haley, and I forgot to take it back out, so now there was a joint in my car and maybe drug-sniffing dogs had found it and Coach was about to tell me that I was caught. Coach looked down at his folded hands, and I knew it was bad.
You’re a good kid, Nick. I know you and Richard are good friends, and I know that you care about this team.
I nodded, trying to keep the right expression on my face. I wanted to look serious, but not guilty. Coach was talking about our weekends, and about how what we did once games ended on Friday nights was our business. Boys are boys, he said. Then he laughed to himself, looked up at the ceiling. Believe me, I know what it’s like to be a boy. He shook his head and didn’t say anything for a second.
Yeah, I said, to remind him I was there.
He squinted again, and exhaled. Okay, Nick, here’s the thing: an old buddy called me this morning.
Coach was a retired police officer. At the end of sophomore year, when I got my learner’s permit, he’d asked me to come with him to pick up the new uniforms for the spring and had let me drive his car, and all over town he had pointed out the places where the cops like to sit to give tickets to high school kids. I never got a ticket, thanks to him. All of Coach’s old buddies were cops.
Seems two of my guys allegedly drove a young lady home after a party last month.
I said, Oh.
We both know who. Hold on, don’t say anything yet. You don’t have to get anyone in trouble.
The story that Coach told me, that his cop buddy had told him, was the same story that I had heard from Ham and Alan and Dave and everyone else at school, although Coach slid quickly over the specifics. When you’re a cop, you see parents sleeping on the job, he was saying. All the time. Parents want cops to do their jobs for them. This mother—I want to ask her why she’d let her daughter get like that? What kind of parent is she that her daughter is out drinking at all hours?
Yeah, I agreed. Most things can be traced back to the mother’s fault. This was something my mom liked to say, but the way Coach laughed when I said it, I saw that it meant something different to him. I didn’t really have time to think about it, though. Because then he told me something new: the girl had attempted suicide.
It took me a second to understand what Coach meant by Tylenol and vodka. He said, She seems to need some kind of psychiatric-type help.
When I understood, I had to say it out loud to be sure. She killed herself?
No! No. Just an attempt, he said. Still, it’s a hell of a thing. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. The kind of thing that can derail a young man’s life. He looked me right in the eye. Nick, he said. I sat up straight. Richard left his team jacket on the stoop.
I was slow to understand, I’ll admit that. But once he said that I got fucking pissed. I couldn’t believe it. It was like they’d been set up.