Xander is my Xanax dealer.
Yes, you heard that right.
Xander is also—well, I guess was also, since I now live several hundred miles away from him and don’t have access to Wi-Fi—someone I hooked up with from time to time. One of those times happened to be the same day Alanna forgot her lunch in the fridge. She stopped home from the school where she teaches to grab it, which is how she stumbled upon Xander and me under a blanket on the family room couch when we should have been in fifth-period Spanish. Xander pulled up his pants and literally just ran for it, which left me naked and alone with a very angry stepmother who had now forgotten, for the second time that day, all about her Tupperware of minestrone soup. That’s when she said the thing she said. And then I punched her. And then, three days later: intake.
5
XANDER IS THE RICHEST KID in school. His dad is from Germany and owns a semipro basketball team in Düsseldorf, which is why he has a full-sized basketball court in his basement with the team’s logo—a snowy owl with its wings spread wide—painted onto the floor in the middle of center court. This is ironic because Xander himself failed PE last year, as did I, which is actually how we met. Coach Townsend was making our class run the mile, but neither Xander nor I would do it. For a week straight, we both refused to change into our gym uniforms. Coach was more confused than angry at our behavior.
Every day he’d say to us, “You guys know you have to run the mile to pass gym, right?”
We’d nod.
Then he’d say, “So, basically, by choosing not to complete this one simple task, you are ensuring your failure of this course.”
We’d nod.
“And there’s nothing I can do to help you from here on out.”
We’d nod again, this time sympathetically, just so he understood it was nothing personal. We both liked Coach Townsend well enough; we just didn’t feel like running the mile. Shaking his bald head, Coach would then jog off, and Xander and I would spend the next forty-five minutes sitting together in the bleachers, flirting happily while the other kids ran around the gym, showing off for each other like unneutered cocker spaniels at the Westminster dog show.
It goes without saying that Xander hates his dad. Kids like Xander always hate their dads. But actually, I’m a fan of Mr. Konig. Not that I’ve ever met him or anything; he works, like, ninety hours a week. I just like the idea of him—I like his style. I like the fact that the basketball court isn’t even the most ostentatious aspect of his home, or even of his basement. That designation goes to the wine cellar, which is adjacent to the basketball court, just off the laundry room. It’s a wide space, dimly lit, with limestone walls and carefully regulated cool air that smells like crushed grapes and money. There are so many rare bottles of wine in there that there’s actually a code to open the door.4 A guy like Mr. Konig could choose to donate his cash to cancer hospitals or famine relief or even snowy owls, which I’m pretty sure are endangered, but what does he do with it instead? He stockpiles expensive booze. He doesn’t even try to pretend like he’s a good person, which makes him different from most other adults I know. Give me an unapologetic greed monster over a hypocrite any day.
On this particular night, the night of my intake, Xander was furious because he’d just learned that his dad had kicked him off the family phone plan.
“He says I’m spoiled and I’ve never had to work for anything and I don’t understand the value of money,” Xander fumed. “Well, who does he think made me this way?”
“You know,” I said, “things haven’t been so great at my house, either, since my stepmom walked in on us. Thanks for asking, though.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, running two hands through his wild Teutonic curls. “God. I hate the way they control us.” He drummed his fingers on the polished hardwood of the basketball court, then leaped up suddenly.
“Come on!” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. “I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“We’re gonna drink my birthday bottle tonight.”
“Wait—I thought your birthday was in March.”
“It is. I’m talking about my birthday bottle.”
I was confused.
“When I was a baby,” he explained, leading me across the court toward the wine cellar, “my parents bought this French Bordeaux that was bottled the year I was born. It’s been down here aging ever since. The idea is you open it on your twenty-first birthday and it’s supposed to be this way of starting your adulthood with something beautiful and rare and classy instead of, I don’t know, ten shots of Fireball or whatever.”
“God,” I said. “That’s—I mean, that’s kind of cool. Do you really want to ruin that over a phone plan?”
“Yes.” He tapped the code into the security system and pulled open the door. “Screw him. And anyway, it’s already been aged seventeen years. It’s still going to possess a gorgeous mouthfeel.”
I rolled my eyes. I had no idea what “mouthfeel” meant, but I certainly wasn’t going to give Xander the satisfaction of asking. He loved to show off his wine knowledge to me because oenology was one of the very few fields that he knew more about than I did. He rummaged around the wall until he found the bottle, coated in a fine layer of dust. Rubbing it with the hem of his polo, he explained to me that back in the year of our birth, the Bordeaux region of France was incredibly hot—crazy, record-breaking hot—and also incredibly dry, with droughts that didn’t break until mid-August. This meant that most of the wines from that year and that region turned out to be crap. But this one, he said, was meant to be, for complex reasons having to do with clay and soil and shade and shadow, utterly sublime.
“I don’t think we should do this,” I told him. “By the time you turn twenty-one, you might not hate your dad anymore.”
But it was too late. Xander had already sliced off the foil at the top and was attacking the cork with an opener he’d lifted off a hook on the wall. There were crystal-stemmed glasses above us, hanging upside down and twinkling like chandeliers, but he took the first swig straight from the bottle.
“Whoa,” he said, handing it to me and closing his eyes as he swallowed. “Incroyable.”
If someone had told Xander that twenty-year-aged Cheetos were a delicacy, he would have eaten a handful and had the same reaction. The thing about Xander was that he had no mind of his own—no real taste. I thought to myself, as I took the bottle from him, that I couldn’t wait to get out into the world, the big world, the world outside of high school, where I could meet guys who actually knew something about life and didn’t have to fake it.
I took a long drink of the stuff, and you know what I tasted?
Dirt.
Heat.
Dry wind.
Gravel and clay and loam and worms.
I know, it sounds disgusting, right?
It wasn’t.
It was, in fact, incroyable.
I kept thinking, as we passed the bottle back and forth, our lips and tongues staining red, that this Bordeaux from France was bottled when Xander and I were just a couple of newborns who’d never hurt anyone or done anything wrong, who were made of nothing but love and milk and hope and promise. The wine was an inversion of us. It just kept getting better and better, while Xander and I kept getting worse and worse.