The Vast Fields of Ordinary (30 page)

“I should really jet, Ding,” he said. “Dade just sat down. I’m gonna ask him about tomorrow night over a nice gay breakfast.”

I laughed through my grogginess.

“So that was Dingo,” Alex said after he hung up. “Apparently he’s been up all night writing songs with the guys and snorting God knows what. He wants to know if we wanna have a little last-minute shindig tomorrow night. He was thinking maybe the band could come play out by the pool. That’d be cool, right? Get a few kegs, invite a few people over.”

“It could be. I just don’t want the house to get wrecked to all hell. Especially after what happened to the door.”

“It won’t,” Alex said. “I promise. We won’t invite too many people and we’ll try and keep everyone outside. But we’ll have, like, Lucy and Jay and Dingo and those guys. Is there anyone else you can think of?”

I stirred my cereal. The whole idea had that dangerous ring to it, like when you hear someone suggest something your mother spent a good part of your childhood warning you against. In my mind I saw a demolished lawn, vomit on my parents’ bed, and fist-sized holes in the walls.

“We really gotta be careful,” I said. “You and Jay and Lucy is one thing, but Dingo and a whole mess of people is another.”

Alex shot me a look. “You can invite your friends too,” he went on. “It’s not like this is just my thing or something. It’s your house. Do whatever. Set whatever rules you want.”

“Fessica,” I said. “I should really invite Fessica.”

“Montana? You’re kidding, right?”

“It would make her millennium. And it may make up for some things.”

Alex smiled and rubbed my head affectionately. “See, Dade, this is why I love you. You’re such a sweet guy. So nice.”

This is why I love you
.

He went back to eating his cereal. Yesterday’s paper lay in disarray in the middle of the table. He grabbed the sports section off the top and reread all the things he’d read yesterday.

“Why are all football players hot?” he asked. “Not American football. Euro dudes. Soccer. Why are all soccer players so hot?”

“Um, did you just say you loved me?”

He put down the paper and looked over at me. “Did I?”

“You did. You said that you loved me because I was a sweet guy.”

Alex gave me the sideways grin. The charmer.

He pulled on my arm. “Get up. C’mere.”

I stood up and let him pull me over to him and place me on his lap. He kissed my neck and let his hands traveled all over my body. My legs. My arms. The small of my back. He dotted my neck with little kisses. I could feel his boner through the terry-cloth robe, but I wasn’t feeling the same way. I wasn’t sure I was completely behind the party idea, and the news about Jenny Moore had infected the mood of the morning. It felt like I was on some precipice in a dream where at any moment it would reveal itself to be a beautiful vision or a horrible nightmare.

“They found Jenny Moore this morning,” I said.

He stopped kissing my neck. “Oh no.”

“No, not oh no. She’s alive. She ran away or something. Apparently she’s fine.”

“See, this is why I don’t get invested in anything,” Alex said. “I bet she’s not even real. I bet the news stations made her up to boost ratings.”

I tried not to laugh. “You’re insane.”

“You have no idea what kind of world we’re living in, Dade Kincaid.” He smiled at my new name and then sang, “
Dade Kincaid is not afraid of the things of which the world is made.
”

I slapped him playfully upside the head and slid off his lap. I carried our dishes over to the sink and rinsed them out. Outside, the automatic sprinklers came on. The water hissed rhythmically like the opening beat of some ultramodern pop song. When would the girl start singing the lyrics that didn’t mean anything? When would the chorus come and sweep us away in an irresistible wave of saccharine melody and recycled metaphor?

Outside in the pool a yellow raft drifted calmly. Had we always had that raft? We must have.

“So where was she?” he asked. “They don’t know?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”

“Maybe,” he said. “How weird, though. And she’s not talking?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess not.”

“I feel like we’re married,” Alex said. “Don’t you? Not all the time. Just at times like right now. Like we’ll be together forever.”

“Maybe that’s because you keep tacking your last name onto my name.”

“Dade Kincaid? You like it. Admit it.”

“I never said I didn’t. I’m just offering an explanation.”

He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head and looked out at the backyard. “What am I going to do when you go to college? Do you think Fairmont will hire me as a janitor? Everybody needs a janitor. I could sneak into your room and give you blowjobs while your roommate takes a shower.”

My pulse quickened. I shut my eyes and tried to put myself in the moment. I had to bury it all over again. Bury it under the smell of the fresh-cut grass, the hissing beat of the sprinklers, under the image of Alex in my father’s robe, the smell of coffee in the air, the weird hollow feeling in my chest that was distantly related to the discovery the police had made that morning.

“I still can’t believe they found her,” I said.

“You’re really fixated on this, aren’t you?”

I shut off the sink and turned to look at him. “I just feel like it means something. Don’t you? Like, when people see Jesus’ face in a tortilla or something. You know what I mean?”

“I don’t. But that’s fine. I like that about you. How you don’t make sense sometimes.”

Later on I sat by the pool and wrote while Alex floated along on the yellow raft. He asked where it came from. I told him that we’d had it for ages even though I wasn’t sure that was true. I found a page in my journal that said
Things and people may just appear, but they appear for a reason
. There was nothing else on the page. I didn’t remember writing it. The handwriting didn’t look like mine. It was messier. I wondered if maybe my father had written it, if maybe Fessica or Alex had. Jenny could’ve. That seemed just as possible as anything else.

Alex was wearing cheap sunglasses with hot pink frames. His head was turned slightly to the left. I was pretty sure he was asleep. There was something godly about the way he drifted across the surface of the pool, like a rock star being passed over the heads of his adoring fans. I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to tell him I loved him.

“What are you looking at?”

It was like hearing a statue speak. Apparently he hadn’t been asleep. I didn’t say anything for a while. I looked down at my journal.

“You,” I said.

He smiled, but I couldn’t see his eyes and that made it seem too cool, too far away to be real. I suddenly had the feeling he was laughing at me.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“You,” he said, mimicking my voice.

He brought his sunglasses up to his forehead. There he was. He screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue. I suddenly had the sensation that I’d dreamt all this before. It was stronger than déjà vu. Or maybe this had all been done in some eighties movie I’d seen. That’s what he was. He was The Guy from all those movies they played on cable late at night. The one everyone wants, the one I had.

Lucy came over the next night at around six. I was up in my room trying on every item of clothing I owned. I couldn’t figure out what to wear. There was a new pressure to the evening, one that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. The last party I’d hosted was my thirteenth birthday party.

Lucy was wearing white patent-leather go-go boots and an insane prom dress she’d found at a thrift store downtown. It was lime green with purple sequined zebra stripes. In the meantime, I was in black jeans and nothing else. I think just about every T-shirt I owned littered the floor around me.

“Fashion emergency?” she asked.

“I seriously have nothing to wear. You look like you’re going on a disco drag queen safari.”

“Aw, thanks,” she said. “I was going to wear my hot pink wig, but Aunt Dana freaked out when she saw me. She said she refused to even let me walk two doors down dressed that way.”

“What a buzzkill,” I said as I sifted through the shirts I’d already vetoed twice. “Seriously, Lucy, I have nothing to wear.”

She flopped down on my bed with her feet up by my pillow and her head dangling off the foot of the bed. “Where’s Alex?” she asked.

“He’s on his way here with Dingo and his band. They’re bringing kegs too.”

“Wow. A real live keg party. How frat boy of you.”

“I know,” I said. I gave up going through my clothes and plopped down on the floor. “I can’t believe I’m throwing a party at my parents’ house while they’re out of town. Who am I?”

“Not the Dade Hamilton I met three months ago,” she said.

“So who’s all coming?”

“Me. You. Jay. A bunch of people I don’t know. Maybe this girl Fessica.”

“The one that tried to unzip your pants?” Lucy asked.

“Sounds hot.”

“No, not hot at all. But I hope she’ll come. I sent her a text this morning and I haven’t heard anything back.”

“What about Pablo? Did you invite him?”

“You’re joking right?”

Lucy sat up. “Did you tell Alex about the other day?”

“About Pablo whipping it out in the milk cooler? No way. Alex knows very little about Pablo and me, and I prefer to keep it that way.”

“Do you think he’ll show up?” she asked. “What if he does? What if he does and there’s a fight between him and Alex. That could be romantic, right?”

“Don’t say that. There’s not going to be any Pablo drama tonight.” I picked up a red T-shirt off the floor, the same tattered one I wore to Cherry’s that night with Lucy. “What about this? Is it too casual?”

“For a poolside rock show? Hell, no. What if someone calls the police?”

“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that when it happens. Isn’t that what you do in situations like these? Did you tell Dana that I was having a party?”

“I described it as a gathering. One with a band.”

“She’s totally going to tell my parents,” I said.

“Who cares?”

I considered this simple question for a moment and then said, “You’re right. Who cares?”

I tossed the red shirt aside and put on a white button-up along with a hot pink tie. I looked in the mirror, tried to see myself as someone other than myself. Of course I hadn’t invited Pablo, but for some reason I found myself wondering what he’d think of the outfit.

He’s not going to come, Dade. He hates you. He doesn’t want you
.
And you don’t want him. Remember that.

They came in packs, in congested blobs, fused groups that arrived simultaneously and spilled into each other. Human pools of knowing and acquaintance. Every time I opened the door, there they were. Most of them were friends with Alex, Dingo, or Jay. The rest were friends of friends, people whose exact coordinates on the social line would be revealed later on during drunken conversations by the pool and result in a light shock and disbelief at how we were all connected. Someone would say that the world was small, that everything happens for a reason, that everything that happens,
happens
.

I stood at the kitchen sink and shotgunned beers with Lucy and Dingo’s bandmate Thomas. I was determined to drink away the burden of my anxiety, because I was sure that ridding myself of this was the key to fitting in with everyone else. The less I worried about everything, the freer I would be, and that’s what this was about. Freedom. That night there was nothing wrong with the world. There was no Bert McGraw, no Pablo Soto, no Fairmont waiting to tear me apart from the first real boyfriend I’d ever had. There was nothing outside of the three months of summer. June, July, and August.