Last Stop This Town
Read Last Stop This Town Online
Authors: David Steinberg
Published by Monkey Business Press
Santa Monica, California
LAST STOP THIS TOWN
Copyright © 2012 by David H. Steinberg
“A Decomposition” Copyright © 2006 by Jenna Lê, used with permission of the author.
Book & Cover Design by Keetgi Kogan
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editons and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Summary: The last weekend before high school graduation, as they prepare to go their separate ways, four life-long friends spend a wild and raucous night in New York City that forces them to face their fear of growing up… and growing apart.
ISBN-10: 1-46-990266-4—ISBN-13: 978-1-46-990266-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62111-222-8
LCCN: 2012903793 North Charleston, S.C.
This book was typeset in Le Monde 10 pt. and Dynamoe.
Yearbooks entries were set in Adam’s Hand, Easy Hand, Tiza, and zombieCat.
First Monkey Business Press trade paperback edition, 2012
Printed in the United States of America
For Keetgi
CONTENTS
“O
NE MORE WEEK.”
The guys had known this day was coming since kindergarten. Hell, they’d been dreaming about it for years. As the day approached, the constant barrage of lame video-yearbook retrospectives and school newspaper top-ten lists forced them to think of little else. But now that high school graduation was actually upon them, they weren’t so sure
how
they felt anymore.
But the one thing the four of them
did
know was how many days they had left in their high school careers. They probably knew how many hours. So when Dylan Glasco said “one more week” from behind the wheel of his blocky metallic orange Scion xB (known unimaginatively around school as the “Cube”), he wasn’t trying to deliver some big newsflash. He was just trying to break the mind-numbing boredom that came with growing up in the suburbs.
Dylan himself was the type of guy who could front an emo band, if he could sing, which he couldn’t. He had a vintage Zac Efron thing going on with his hair, which might have rankled the homophobically-inclined if Dylan weren’t constantly having sex with beautiful teenage girls. Growing up tall and good-looking led to success with girls, and years of positive reinforcement had given Dylan confidence. But Dylan never used his power for evil (as least not usually). It’s like Sarah always said, Dylan knew he was good-looking but he wasn’t an asshole about it.
Riding shotgun was Noah Scott, Dylan’s serially-monogamous wingman and boyfriend to the aforementioned Sarah. It wasn’t that Noah didn’t have the looks to be a player. He could have worked his nice-guy routine and dimpled cheeks into some serious tail if he’d wanted to. He just preferred to actually get to know girls before he hooked up with them. Then, for reasons Dylan never understood, Noah liked to keep hooking up with that same girl, over and over. “It’s called a relationship,” Noah explained to Dylan.
The Cube was parked in the McDonald’s parking lot, as usual. The four seniors were eating the remnants of their after-school grease fix, and despite the clock ticking down on their high school experience, this was West Hartford, there was nothing to do, and they were bored. So Dylan floated out “one more week” to no one in particular on this hot June day, just trying to sound philosophical.
Noah bit. “Speaking of which, did you sign my yearbook yet?”
“I’ll bring them all tonight,” Dylan promised. “Did you losers sign mine yet?”
From the back seat, Walker Schlossberg piped up. “I know what I’m going to write. Noah’s the logjam.” It was true that Jew-fro’d Walker knew exactly what he was going to write in everyone’s yearbook. He’d been working on his messages for months. He’d narrowed down their years of shared experiences to only the most significant events, those handful of turning points that would truly spell out how he felt about his friends. Then he planned on adding a sprinkle of small, obscure anecdotes—like the time Dylan stole the
Red Asphalt
DVD from Driver’s Ed and switched it with their health class movie on menstruation. So the fact that Noah still had Dylan’s yearbook and Dylan had everyone else’s was actually kind of frustrating to Walker.
But Walker was used to being frustrated. The only virgin among the four friends, Walker, despite his name, was a doormat. He liked to say he just really respected women, but the other three guys knew that seventeen-year-old girls weren’t looking for respect. They were looking for someone to tip the scales of their precarious self-esteem by making them feel special. In other words, they were looking for someone who wasn’t a complete pussy.
The yearbook had come out two weeks ago and it was actually a big deal at Hall High School. Maybe it was because most of the seniors had known each other since elementary school. Or maybe it was because in New England, there were so many colleges that the graduates fanned out across the region, and even close friends rarely attended the same school. Whatever the reason, yearbooks were serious business. People had signing parties, reserved whole pages for their best friends, and really thought about what they were going to say. After all, it was an emotional time in their lives and even the manliest among them bared their souls on those pages.
Still, Dylan wasn’t above giving Noah shit for hogging his yearbook. “Dude, it doesn’t count towards your GPA. You going to make a photo collage, too?”
“Hey, excuse me if it takes a while to summarize eighteen years of being friends with you, asshole,” Noah shot back. If trading insults was the way guys show affection, these four were madly in love with each other.
The truth was, Noah was stuck. Maybe Walker was planning on wowing the others with his total recall of events both profound and obscure, but Noah simply wanted to tell Dylan how he really felt. How he was going to miss him next year as they went off their separate ways. How much he appreciated Dylan being there for him through the pain and heartache of high school. But Noah wasn’t a poet, and he couldn’t even figure out how to begin.
Jeff Pike spoke. “One more week of high school and we’re still sitting here in the McDonald’s parking lot like a bunch of douches.” The skinny stoner with short blond hair and an even shorter fuse took a drag off the remnants of the joint he was smoking. Whereas Dylan had outgrown pot in like eighth grade, Noah never really got a buzz off it, and Walker was afraid to even try it, Pike was a true believer in the power of the bud. That’s why Pike alone among them ran in two crowds: his life-long friends who tolerated the smoke and the stink and the stupid things he said when he was stoned; and his stoner friends, with whom he actually got high.
Dylan shifted his weight restlessly. “Pike’s right. Let’s do something.”
“How about Friendly’s?” Walker suggested, just trying to be helpful.
No reaction.
“We can go hang out at Sarah’s pool…” Noah offered, but the other three quickly quashed that idea with a simultaneous, “No!”
Pike took another hit. Walker waved the smoke away from his face with an effeminate swish. Noah scrounged for any stray bonus fries at the bottom of the grease-stained bag.
As usual, it fell on Dylan to come up with the real plan. “I know. How about a High Speed Test?”
“Sure. Why not?” Noah seconded. “Mountain Road?”
“Seventy-two,” Dylan reminded him.
“Fern?” Walker offered.
“Seventy-five.”
Noah consulted the Google Map in his mind. “How about Brookline?”
“Ooh, good choice,” Dylan affirmed. He put the Cube in gear and pulled out of the parking lot onto North Main Street.
