that means, bro?” He nudged me in the arm.
I finished my second beer, took the unopened can from Blaire, and said, “You know she won’t go through with it.”
That kid, Steve, stood at the opening looking in.
Brad shouted at him, “Careful or you’ll be dragged in!”
Blaire snickered, “You’re a walking cliché.”
Brad signaled to me and I tossed him a beer. “Yeah?” He cracked open the beer and took a gulp. “You know what they say about being judgmental?”
This went on—back and forth—for longer than it should have. I listened and I observed the conversation from where I sat, on a flat rock, drinking the beer probably way too fast.
Blaire wouldn’t let up.
Brad was too oblivious to care about anything Blaire could say.
Eventually the conversation made its way back to me. Brad saying something like, “Why the fuck do you keep this chick around?”
But that really wasn’t a question. Brad’s good at acting like an asshole because he is an asshole. I can’t stand the guy. But he’s there. He’s around. We were freshmen when we met. I think it was biology. Yeah, that was the one. We both sucked at the subject. We were failing and quickly facing summer school. We got assigned to some peer group for people who suck at science. We had to be tutored by substitute teachers, meaning we had to take the class twice in one day. It was horrible. Brad being around made it a little less horrible but only because he knew how to get the answers. He knew people.
He still knows people. I don’t think anyone really likes the guy but they see value in how he can slack his way through anything.
Brad gets his way. Brad always has beer.
I guess we’re friends because I’ve gotten used to him being around.
Sort of like most people, I get used to them and, in time, it’s all the same.
This is as close to getting along as I’ll probably ever know.
But yeah, Brad can be a real asshole and I was the one to break up the argument. It was easy—all I had to do was tell Brad to shut up and catch up.
“I’m on my third.” I dangled the can. “Which one are you on?”
That was enough to end it, but nothing would change the fact that Blaire wouldn’t end up having much fun. Not that she would have. This is what Blaire always does. She spent most of the afternoon sitting on some far rock working on homework assignments for next week. I let her do her thing. We all did.
She was doing my homework too.
Steve, Brad, and I stood at the opening of the tunnel.
Brad went on about all the girls he wanted to try to get with before graduation, like it would be that easy. “I’ve known the girl since, like, second grade. No way she’ll turn down a strapping young lad like me.”
Steve sipped from his beer. “Strapping young lad?”
Brad shrugged. “Got it from the band. I looked up the meaning.”
Then I said something, because it was a good time to say enough without really having said anything: “You, looking up something?”
Brad laughed. “Yeah, bro, it can’t be all porn. Got to sprinkle in stuff to keep trackers off my trail.”
That made Steve laugh.
That made me take another drink.
Steve said something about how Samantha—a girl I don’t know, but a girl who both Brad and Steve seemed to have been talking about quite a bit—just got into Yale. That impressed Steve, and, for Brad, it seemed to only confirm her status as irresistible.
They talked about how Brad will get all carpe diem and just ask her out. Doesn’t matter that she has a boyfriend. Doesn’t matter that Samantha wouldn’t go for a guy like Brad.
They both talked the same way everyone talked—about how there wasn’t much time left.
Either get it done, what you want to do, or you’ll never get your due.
Then the conversation turned toward something about our plans before graduation. Steve had his. Brad had his would-be lays. Blaire would have plans too, if she were part of the conversation. I looked back at her, busy highlighting some passage from some book for some essay we both had to finish by some deadline.
Lucky.
At some point she’d come up, Becca.
“You can’t waste prom on her, dude. You’ve already wasted years on her when you could have been seeing other girls.”
I did my best to maneuver around the topic. I’m usually good about this, but see, it might have been the alcohol and how it mellows me and I say stuff I shouldn’t say or worse. By “worse,” I mean being able to say anything at all.
And looking back, I got really drunk that afternoon.
Drunker than I should have. Even Steve got on me about Becca. He talked about how my situation took me off the radar, how nothing good can come from being trapped like that.
I’m not going to go into the exact words, because I can’t be sure how it was said, but being in that kind of situation is as bad as it gets. It put me on the spot. It made me the conversation rather than part of it.
Blaire found it amusing. I know she did. I didn’t look and I didn’t hear anything, but being in this situation is what Blaire’s been putting me through since we first met. I just wanted them all to shut up, you know? I wanted it all to wash clean, having them there but on mute, so I didn’t have to try.
The company I keep... Looking back at that afternoon, it feels like I was stuck on an island with a handful of mortal enemies. It didn’t feel at all like a chill time among friends. You get what you put in, I guess.
I chose to stick around Brad. Blaire lingered and I did the same thing.
Yeah, I went with them to Falter Kingdom of my own free will.
But alcohol and competition go hand in hand, and all it took was one mention of the tunnel and Steve shut up. It was obvious that he had never run the gauntlet.
It was a little less obvious that I hadn’t either. Every other time I’d hung out at Falter Kingdom, I’d gotten out of having to run. The trick is to wait until it becomes a possibility, the talking about running, and you encourage whoever it is who’s being pressured to run, but when he turns it on you, don’t freeze. Don’t stop and worry. Don’t say no. You pretend to think about it. If there’s beer, take a sip. By the time any pressure is given, you can ask someone who hasn’t run and have him mess up and take on the pressure. So he ends up running and you don’t. That’s how it works.
End of lesson, or whatever.
But yeah, I was drunk and on a short fuse. Brad was selling Steve on the whole thing, legend
