Beside her, Stacey Moore had gone Bond Girl, both hands clasped together into a gun she held under her chin. In a long copper dress, the junior looked like a sexy penny fresh off the mint, the material catching all kinds of odd light from the cafeteria. Her blond was cleaner than Kaylyn’s, but cinched back tight against her skull by unseen scalp mechanisms. Her long, slim limbs seemed to crowd her own boyfriend out of the picture. Though Bill had loved her, found her warm and lovely and amusing, Stacey had always appeared awkward to him. She slunk her shoulders—in this photo too—as if she wanted to erase some of her height, embarrassed by the longitude it took to accommodate her presence. One sharp elbow looked like it might dig into Ben Harrington’s chest. He had been caught both trying to put his arm around Stacey and yet avoid catching that elbow in a rib. As a result, it looked like he was dancing badly to a rap song, his other arm dropping a finger to some unseen beat. (What might it have been in ’02? “Hot in Herre”? “Bombs Over Baghdad”?) In his stasis the baby-faced Harrington seemed to be attempting embryonically to preview the musician garb he’d someday wear. Bill and Rick had tormented him for the black fedora, cocked forward on his head here, and the black jacket over a black crew neck with a single gold chain sparkling. Who had he even been imitating? More importantly, did he realize how brashly that sweet baby grin of his clashed with the ensemble? It looked like a Halloween costume. His sideburns were also too long, nearly down to his jaw.
There were other people on the fringes of this picture. You could spot the stunted Dan Eaton beside Hailey Kowalczyk, her voluptuous figure still years away from widening. She had a smooth plastic face with spots of rosacea on her cheeks and forehead. She appeared to have dragged Dan into the frame, behind her Rainrock Road crew of Lisa and Kaylyn, who at the point of this photo had undergone some bitchy high-school-girl falling-out. And poor Dan looked like he wanted to be transplanted off the planet. Into some Fortress of Umbilical Love where he could limply marvel at Hailey in solitude. When Bill had seen him earlier that night, Dan had been uninterested in this picture. He’d handled it like the thing might poison him.
The night this photo was taken, Bill and Rick stayed in the basement of Harrington’s house, sneaking Kaylyn, Lisa, and Stacey in after midnight through a window. Rick and Kaylyn disappeared into Doug Harrington’s tool-draped workspace and fucked on the edge of the table saw after Rick made sure it was unplugged. (“Had the worst vision outta a horror movie right when I got off,” he drunkenly reported.) Harrington and Stacey took the bathroom, and after finishing, they sat in the basement rec area watching The Princess Bride, tossing M&M’s into each other’s mouths from across the couch. He and Lisa had gotten the night’s activities out of the way at the Brew, and in the dark, he’d imagined her as Kaylyn the entire time. Her Vietnamese heritage bled out of her in the starlight and Kaylyn’s German bled in, until in that dim halo he could see each girl as the other.
Funny, he thought, folding the picture back up, how you could look at anyone’s high school homecoming picture from any middling town or suburb in America, and they all looked like stock photos, the image that came with the frame, identical teenagers doing identical teenage shit and hoping it wouldn’t end because what lay beyond was too unknown.
He heard the door of the liquor store chime and popped his head up in time to see a short, unkempt figure stalk in. He sat finishing his cigarette.
After a moment the man reemerged and looked at Bill the way you’d check to see if a dog in the pound was actually the one your parents told you had run off. Unruly dreads bobbed around his face, playing Velcro with gnarly, gnatty stubble. Clothed in baggy jeans with white bleach stains and a dark zippered sweatshirt despite the warmth of the night. A big chain looped from his belt to a wallet in the back pocket. He’d added a bottle in a brown paper bag to his accoutrements.
“Whoa. Bill Ashcraft.”
Bill held his whiskey aloft. “The one and only.”
“Where in the pits did you come from?”
Bill studied the face: a coyote scowl, thick platypus lips, a disappointed menace in the eyes, but so very white bread underneath the posture—a specimen plucked from the suburbs and spray-tanned with disaffection. Familiarity flickered but winked out. “Sorry, it’s been a fucking hippo of a day. We went to school together?”
“Dakota.” He stuck out a small, delicate hand. His eyes were furious and careless and nihilistic. It was like locking gazes with a torturer.
Bill clamped the cigarette and shook the hand, though the name still meant nothing.
“Sure, man.”
“Bill motherfucking Ashcraft. You back in town?”
The trigonometries of his patter were familiar. The Ohio drawl acting as interlocutor for an urbanized, hip-hop patois gleaned from interaction with young black men mostly via CD.
“Sure. Maybe. Who knows. Up here running an errand and Jonah handed me your number.”
“No doubt I can hook you up.”
Suddenly he remembered the kid. Exley. Dakota Exley. He’d been without dreads then, just a mushroom of bland brown hair. A petite little fucker a grade ahead, Dakota had skulked around with a skateboard and no friends. At least, he’d had the skateboard until Ryan Ostrowski, a football-playing Beaufort lacky, cornered Dakota in the parking lot for the LOLz. He’d torn Dakota’s skateboard away, shoved him to the ground, and hit him so hard over the spine that it cracked the wood. Kids stood around watching the way they do.
“You backed me up. Sorta,” Bill remembered, a glow of unexpected camaraderie blooming. “During that whole T-shirt debacle, you came up and said something to me that wasn’t ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”
“What can I say? You had a point.”
Bill slapped his new friend on the back and stood. “C’mon. Let’s boogie.”
They ambled away from the liquor store, searching out a place to make a deal. Clouds moved in overhead, blotting out the stars in large dark-white patches of spilled, glowing paint.
Let’s call it a defining time of Bill’s young life, but for very different reasons than it was definitional for most. This was fall of his junior year, right before basketball began, and all that was on his mind were those last days of freedom before the season swallowed all his time and energy. He and Lisa were having the kind of exhausting amounts of sex only teenagers can truly manage, and then, one Tuesday morning during earth science, Mr. Masoncup got a call. He hung up, turned on the television in the corner of the room just in time for the class to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. All they could do was watch in total, undiluted awe as the first tower fell. Hailey Kowalczyk sat beside him in that class, and when the South Tower began pancaking down in a cascade of gory gray glory, she ate a breath of air, buckled back so fast her desk shrieked against the tile, and said two words that, for Bill, would come to define the event and all that came in the aftermath.