Bill watched an owl—possibly imaginary—streak magnificently across the diving darkness. “You hated me?” he asked.
“I wasn’t exactly sitting at the center of the lunchroom.”
He walked slightly behind Dakota, each of them swigging whiskey. Bill’s shirt was baggy enough, but he worried about the bulge on his spine. He stretched his back, the tape stressing skin. He had to get this shit off. But the idea of smoking some green or snorting a rail had wormed too deep.
“You’re down with Jonah Hansen now,” Bill noted. “He was like the social chair back when.”
Dakota had a look of permanent resentment carved into his features, which made him impossible to read. He kept picturing the kid with that clean part right down the middle. The spasming dreadlocks must have been the work of years. “Doesn’t mean we’re tight.”
“Had a few beers with him tonight. Eaton and Beaufort too.”
“Yeah, I see ’em around.”
“Ever talk to Beaufort?”
“Nope.”
Bill scratched his balls. “And I thought I was the sad-sack, washed-up ex-jock.”
Because he’d had that beer with Beaufort, now he couldn’t get Tina Ross off his mind, and all the weird shit that had gone down because of her. All these years later, he still saw her snickering at him, that image somehow the totem of all that had gone on with his stupid T-shirt wars. When had their brief fling happened? He remembered the milk shake and making out on the couch in his basement (pretending to watch a movie, his mom pretending to do laundry to keep an eye on them). He remembered how she’d petted his dick without taking it to the next step. When her mom picked her up, Bill curled into a fetal coil in his bed, feeling that ache in the testicles that made you want to simultaneously come, shit, vomit, and die. She’d ghosted him after that. Why had he been so furious at her? Wasn’t her fault. She hardly had a thought in her head that hadn’t come from her youth pastor. Yet when he heard the rumors, he’d felt glee. His turn to laugh at her.
“Thought I’d still loathe him. Beaufort, I mean.” His memories kept jerking him around in bumper car collisions. His mind had the consistency of quantum foam. “I actually felt sorry for him.”
They passed an ExxonMobil station, bright sign beaming its massive con. The searing fluorescent white cast a fog over his speeding, bleeding brain. Then he admitted the obvious:
“I suppose in high school I would’ve hated me too.”
“It’s relative. You and Harrington, y’all two were cooler than most.”
His friend’s name echoed in the stillness, the very sound a weary refugee dragging an ache to his dry throat. “Ever listen to his music?”
“Huh?”
“Harrington. His albums.”
Listlessly kicking a plastic Slurpee cup, sending it skittering across the road, memory gave birth to memory in botched C-section bloodletting. Dakota rolled up a sleeve, and he saw a tattoo on his forearm in florid script: Money Power Respect.
“Maybe I checked ’em out a while back. Didn’t care for it. Kid had a dim view on things.”
“A dim view? Can you even blame him—”
“No offense, man, but you buying anything?”
They came to the intersection of South Main Street and Newark Road, where a cardboard box of a building, which had over the years shuffled through being a sub sandwich joint, an athletic apparel store, and a real estate office, currently idled in vacancy. Brown paper taped to the interior of the windows obscured whatever copper-wire-salvage scene lay within. They stopped at the crosswalk. Dakota was right; he really needed to be on his way. Get this deal done and the night on-withed. Then he remembered his truck.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“Yo?”
The thousand dollars he’d left in the glove compartment seemed more important now. “Forgot my cash. Don’t suppose you’d take plastic?”
Dakota threw up his hands. “You call me all the way out here and ain’t even got cash?”
Bill pffffed. “One of those nights, man.”
The glowing mid-stride crosswalk guy beckoned. Then he felt the dealer’s stiff hand tap his shoulder, guiding him to cross the street.
“Hey. We gotta move.”
“Kinda need to be on my way.”
“No. I mean we really gotta move.”
Bill followed his gaze to the distant traffic light where a police cruiser waited, the hood looking like a hungry lion. Dakota picked up the pace, and even though they weren’t doing anything—just a couple old acquaintances out for a late-night stroll—he knew Dakota had illicit this or that on him, and Bill, well, he had no idea what he might have in tow.
“Don’t want those fuckers even seeing us. Let’s get to the football field. Then we can talk deals.”
The prospect that Dakota might spot him a joint—hell, that sounded like honey in the famine. They hustled toward New Canaan High. Bill hummed another Harrington song, one of home and sky and heat and road, as they made their way toward his chosen place of worship.
He was never sure who he missed the most, but Ben Harrington was the friend he frequently found himself talking to in his head. Harrington who’d had a tenderness, a disinclination toward a hard heart. Hell, Harrington’s real name was actually William, and he’d gone by Will until kindergarten when the two of them became friends. Just like that, he began going by his middle name, Ben, to settle the confusion—the kid changed his name for their friendship. As a boy he probably spent more time at the Harringtons’ than at his own house, flirting with his sisters, nosing around Doug Harrington’s incredible garage with every dangerous power drill, saw, and sander one could imagine. He had a special fascination with Harrington’s father because he’d been a star guard at New Canaan back in the seventies. He was also a hard, often unpleasant man. When he heard the song “Trouble in Hand,” which included lyrics like Born in the same town you’ll die in dumber, he wondered what Doug thought.
“Way back, I planned to write the album so he’d stop speaking to me,” Harrington said. “Turns out I didn’t need to work so hard.”
By then Harrington was living in L.A. Bill found this appropriate, as the kid had always looked the part. Floppy blond locks, a year-round tan, and big white teeth straightened with seventh-grade braces to resemble wall plaster. He was Americana prepackaged, belonging on the glossy spread of an Abercrombie ad. His love songs all sounded like they were written for Stacey even though, like Bill and Lisa, they broke up in 2003. There was a sappy, precocious energy that reminded Bill of the way Harrington had doted on her.
Maybe he should’ve looked closer at his friend back in high schooclass="underline" the anxiety, the uncertainty that probably fueled a lot of artist types. He’d smoked more pot than the rest of them, but so what? When they visited each other in college, Harrington would always want to score prescriptions. Once he showed up with a bottle of Vicodin. Another time they snorted Oxy, and Bill discovered the one drug he hated because for whatever reason it made it so he couldn’t piss no matter how full his bladder was. Over the years, he watched his friend’s music career accelerate, watched him play in bars and small clubs, saw fans begin to attach themselves. His sound was retro-Dylanish, pretty but insipid, not really Bill’s thing, but he at least appreciated all the references, the inside jokes. They’d met up in Chicago while Harrington was on his second self-financed van tour. Before the show, Bill had himself a peak into his friend’s backpack, which looked like a fucking pharmacy. Vic, Val, Oxy, Hydro, Norco—Harrington had a serious set of pals. But Bill operated by the principle that you don’t intervene in people’s coping mechanisms—however they faced down the storm. So he stole two Vals, and went about feeling like sexy melted marshmallow the rest of the night.