Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) (28 page)

“So I ended up going to my second-choice college.” Ryan didn’t sound like he thought this was funny anymore. “Big deal.”

“And you had all these ideas about what you were going to do for a career. We couldn’t keep them all straight.”

“Until I stepped in.” Ryan’s dad raised his OJ glass like he was toasting.

We all looked over at him.

Ryan’s dad took a swig of juice. “I said, ‘Ry, you’re gonna have to make a decision and stick to it. You can’t go your whole life jumping from job to job. Hobby to hobby.’”

Ryan’s expression was strange. He didn’t look upset, exactly, but he definitely didn’t look happy. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You told me to be a paralegal.”

“I didn’t tell you to. You did the research on practical careers, and you made a decision. And you’re doing great. Your mom and I are very proud of you.”

Jacey was staring at her plate. Ryan’s mom looked about to say something, but she didn’t.

Ryan’s dad laughed. “You see these shows and movies glamorizing people in their late twenties and early thirties who are so self-absorbed. Who still haven’t settled down and are, you know, playing video games and bitching about their love lives. And I always think, ‘This is not as complicated as you’re making it.’”

Ryan’s mom served herself more salad. “Young people have a lot more options now than we did.” She’d bought a massive bag of croutons in my honor, and there was an awkward silence as she shook some onto her plate.

“It’s like—” Ryan’s dad settled back and turned to me. “You’re in the restaurant business, right? You can enjoy many different foods. You can like lamb and beef and pork and chicken. But when it comes time to cook a meal, you have to decide what’s gonna be your main course. People don’t trust a leader who can’t make decisions and stick to them.”

I was kind of surprised I’d thought he was so chill. He definitely had a dickish side to him. I wiped my mouth with my napkin. “I don’t actually eat a lot of meals with main courses.” I watched Ryan’s dad take a long swig of OJ. “I eat a bunch of different foods for each meal. And, like, a lot of people I serve send their meals back because it turns out they don’t like them, or they think it needs more seasoning, or whatever.” I wasn’t sure I was, like, rocking the correct metaphor here, but hey. “I don’t think I’d trust a leader who wasn’t willing to provide a wide variety, or consider a lot of different paths to deliciousness. Or admit they were wrong about a choice they made.”

I glanced at Ryan, who shot me a grateful look.

His dad went on. “But I think that amount of choice is what’s hurting young people today. Why not pick something practical to do with your life and take pride in doing it? Instead of puttering around from endeavor to endeavor.” He shook his head. “Young people don’t have any concept of hardship. They think hardship is not being able to buy the newest iPhone.”

“Anyone who’s alive knows what hardship is,” I said, pretty loud.

Silence. So great, Ryan was probably never going to let me near his family again.

But his dad shrugged. “Maybe so.”

We all went back to eating.

We played Cranium after the meal, which was insanely fun. Ryan was real good with the Cranium clay. We watched TV, then got all the food out again around dinnertime for round two.

Ryan and I had planned to leave by eight, but it was nine thirty by the time we started home.

Ryan leaned against the passenger window. “I should’ve taken tomorrow off work. I am
not
gonna want to get up.”

“Aw. I’ll switch places with you.”

“You’ll walk around hunched over, and no one will know the difference?”

I grinned and started singing “Short People” by Randy Newman.

He shoved my arm gently. Looked out the window. “I always do this.”

“Do what?”

“Stay at my family’s longer than I mean to.”

“Yeah, ’cause your family’s awesome. Except for your sister who picks her earwax.”

“I know. We’ve never been able to do anything about her.”

“You all are so cute.”

“Yeah. We’re like a family of meerkats. We’re all tiny and blond, and we turn at the same time if you say something to one of us.”

“I love you all.”

“Except my dad?”

“Your dad’s cool. I’m sorry if I should have kept my mouth shut.”

He shook his head. “I really appreciated that. My dad’s great. He just has, like, really strong ideas. And feels these random urges to express them.”

I drove for a moment in silence. “You wish you saw them more?”

“Yeah.” His voice was soft. “I know why you spend so much time with your friends. When you get around the right people, it just . . . changes you from the inside. And you forget about the robot you are at work, or the dick you are when you have to wait too long in line at the store, and you’re just totally you, and it’s perfect.”

I nodded. “You nailed it, man.”

“That’s how I feel about you.”

I smiled at him quickly, then looked back at the road. “Me too. About you, I mean. Not about me.”

He got really quiet after that, and I figured I was missing something. This was a thing that had been happening most of my life: People around me would get sad—not just
I really wanted to eat at Thai Spice but I forgot it’s closed on Mondays
sad, but
deep
sad—and I’d understand sort of what they were feeling and why. But I didn’t get there all the way. It was like we were snorkeling together, but the other person had an oxygen tank and that thing that goes in your mouth when you scuba dive, and suddenly they’d just dive down into the sea, and I’d be left up at the surface with my snorkel, wishing I could follow them.

I was the right guy to go pick Gould up at the hospital, because I wasn’t gonna judge and I could keep a secret and I knew the best place to get a milkshake afterward. But I was the wrong guy to figure out exactly what Gould was feeling and help him deal with it.

We were approaching the exit for Silverton, and suddenly I had an idea.

I turned to Ryan. “Can we make a stop?”

“Uh . . . sure.”

I saw him trying to peek at the gas gauge.

“Just for fun,” I said, pulling into the right lane. “There’s nothing wrong.”

“What’s fun in Silverton?”

I didn’t answer. I took the exit and headed toward the state forest. “Do you like stars and stuff?”

“Um, at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night, when I have to work in the morning? I suppose.”

“Come on. I just want to stop for a few minutes.”

He laughed. “Okay.”

We reached the entrance to the forest, and my mind was still on people’s sadness. Even my grief when Hal died hadn’t seemed to match my friends’. I
had
watched news about the trial—the others were like,
“No, we can’t even stand to hear about it.”
I’d been the first one to go back to Riddle. Whenever we were hanging out, I’d wanted to tell funny stories about Hal, but for a while, the others gave me weird looks if I was like,
“Hey, remember that time he tried to make a frozen Slip’N Slide?”

Dave had said recently that the way he remembered it, the four of us hardly spent any time together after the funeral. He remembered the group almost falling apart—like we all just diverged and left each other alone.

I didn’t remember it like that. Maybe we hadn’t spent a lot of time together as a group, but I’d still seen each of them pretty regularly. Except Gould—Gould had been hard to contact. And he hadn’t lived with Dave at the time, so it wasn’t like I could just go pound on his bedroom door when I visited Dave and force him to come out.

I really didn’t think I missed Hal any less than they did. My mom kept telling me people dealt with grief differently. I used to have nightmares about Hal that I only told her about. Not really nightmares about his death, but nightmares that he had survived the rope scene but was badly injured, and we’d just gone on with our lives, thinking he was dead and never knowing better.

I turned into the picnic area of the forest.

“Is this some kind of Lovers’ Lane?” Ryan asked. “Makeout Point? Tail Trail?”

“Sort of.” I parked in a gravel lay-by and shut off the engine.

We walked past picnic benches and dark shelters, to a grassy area with a few scraggly bushes. I took off my hoodie and spread it on the grass, and we both sat on it. The sky was cloudy, so not that many stars. But I always liked night clouds even better than day clouds. And, man, you could
breathe
out here without feeling like you had your mouth around a car’s exhaust pipe.

“Sorry,” I said after a while. “I shouldn’t be keeping you out late.”

“It’s fine. I hardly ever get out of the city.”

“I know. I was just thinking how awesome breathing is out here.” Now that we were sitting here, I felt weird about the reason I’d made this stop. So I waited until we’d shot the shit for a while and then brought it up, clumsily as Collingsworth trying to walk from his bed to his food bowl.

“This is where we scattered Hal’s ashes.”

He turned to me so fast I kinda flinched.

“Sorry if that’s a creepy thing to spring on you. But I love this place, and, I mean, the wind carried him off, so it’s not like we’re sitting on him or anything.”

“Oh.” He nodded, like he was trying to figure out what to say.

“I know it’s a little weird.”

“It’s not. I just didn’t know.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d done this. Taken him to this place that was maybe technically supposed to be a sad place for me—just because I thought
he
was feeling sad. But this wasn’t a sad place, and I guess I wanted to show him something that really
confused
me.

Because when I thought about Hal and the forest, sometimes I felt like Hal definitely wasn’t alone. He had, like, trees and birds and hikers and the air and all the seasons. And the rest of us were tied to this place by him, and he got to spend forever in this badass forest that was way better than a roached-out apartment in the city.

But then I thought about this one night a few months before he died. He’d been crashing at my place for three days, and I kinda needed him out because he kept leaving his weed stuff around the living room, and my landlord was the type of guy who’d come in every week to look at the wiring or comment on the tub rust or whatever. And one night Hal had harder stuff than weed, so I was like,
“No, man. You gotta go home.”

That makes me sound shitty, like I knew my friend had a drug problem or something, and all I could think was, you know, don’t get me in trouble. But the others and I had talked to Hal a million times about, like,
“Hey, are you sure this is just once in a while, or is it becoming a problem?”
And as far as I could tell, he really wasn’t crazy addicted. He was just a dude who did what felt good in the moment, and once in a while what felt good was illegal. But always drug-illegal, not, like, murder-illegal.

I told him I’d drive him home, and he was doing the whole,
I don’t feel like going home
thing. And I was just like,
“Why? Tell me why. I’m listening.”
But he wouldn’t give me a reason, so I got him in the car, and I played his favorite music, and I asked if he needed to stop for food, and I tried to talk to him about this guy at work he’d been trying to get with, but he was just kind of a prick about all my efforts.

I got to his apartment and took him inside. At least four roaches scattered when I turned on the light, and the place smelled like tar and macaroni salad. There were dishes piled in the sink, the microwave was open and looked like someone had barfed in it, and I thought,
Dude, no wonder you don’t feel like being here.
I tried to get him into the bedroom, but he said it was too hot in there and he wanted to sleep on the couch. So I helped him onto the couch and pulled a blanket over him. Rinsed out the least gross cup in the sink and brought him some water. All this mom stuff. He was quiet through all of it.

And as soon as I started to say good-bye, he wanted to talk about the guy at the drugstore where he worked.

Then he wanted me to play him a song.

“I don’t have my guitar
.”

“
So just sing.”

I sang.

He said he’d go sleep in his bed, if I’d come in with him and see if I thought his mattress needed to be flipped.

What twenty-four-year-old had ever fucking flipped a mattress for any reason other than spilling beer or puking on it?

But I went to the bedroom and got him resettled in there. He had these
sheets
that were, like, jersey cotton, with tiny white sheep all over, and every once in a while, one dark-blue sheep. I was pretty sure my grandmother’d had those same sheets. I told him I had to go, and he just stared at the wall. Eventually I patted his shoulder and left, but I had this bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the night. I imagined him lying awake, feeling totally abandoned.

Which was ridiculous in a way, because he was an adult man who could figure out options if he was lonely. But wasn’t ridiculous at all if you thought about just . . . humans.

So sometimes now when I left the forest, I thought I was leaving Hal someplace peaceful, someplace where he was laughing at me for having to go back to the city and the noise and the roaches.

But sometimes I worried I was leaving him somewhere he didn’t feel like being, somewhere lonely.

Last year, Gould, Miles, Dave, and I had gone to see some movie where a young guy lived in a gross house and drank and did drugs and, like, hired a hooker and cried in her arms instead of having sex with her. At the end, he drove his car into a pole, and you weren’t supposed to know whether it was suicide or an accident. Gould had been
pissed
.

“I hate that. Everyone who dies young in movies is either this perfect innocent or this tragic douche bag.”

I’d kind of liked the movie.
“What do you mean?”

“I mean if someone
living
is in their twenties and drinks or experiments with drugs or fights with their partner or spends hours lying on the couch feeling sorry for themselves, then we’re just like, ‘Yeah, that guy’s in his twenties.’ But if they
die
and they did all that, then it’s like they were always in some metaphorical fast car careening out of control, destined for tragedy.”