Inexcusable (10 page)

“Killer!” somebody called out.

“Killeeer,” somebody amended.

I waved, kept walking, happy to follow along behind Gigi Boudakian. I wove through throngs, crowds, churning, slapping masses of dancers, slack-limbed roomfuls of rabble, and as we entered each doorway and exited out the other side, I found myself farther and farther away from Gigi, chasing after her vapor trail as she meeted and greeted and veered off into a crowd of lady friends. Then, lost and alone, I stopped.

I was in a room surrounded by food. I did not want any food. The music was good, though. It was the same music I didn't like before. It was great music now. I hated dancing, always did. I liked dancing now. Started, in fact, dancing in place.

Where were the girls? Everywhere, actually. There were girls, as well as guys, everywhere you looked. Everybody said hi.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

Everybody was great. Everybody was really great today. Why were there so many people here? There were not this many people in the school. There could not be this many people graduating. Why were so many of these people strangers to me?

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

But lovely strangers they were. I could dance with any of them.

I started dancing with this tall red-headed girl I had never seen before. Not that I was much of a judge, but I thought she was a great dancer.

“You're a great dancer,” I said. Screamed, really.

“No, I'm not,” she said, going faster, faster, shooting her impossibly long arms into the air. Everybody in the crowd, as if attached to her by strings like marionettes, stuck their hands in the air.

Wow. These girls were great.

I didn't want these girls, though. They were okay, of course . . . but I wanted . . . other girls. Where was Gigi Boudakian?

And where were my girls? My Mary, my Fran. They would love this.

Where were they? I suddenly blued up.

They should have been here. They should have. Why
weren't they? Did they not care? What was so important about tests? All right, I knew tests were important, but the tests were tomorrow and this was today, and today was supposed to be
my
day. They needed to see me having my day. How could me and my day even really be happening if they weren't there to see it?

The tall red-headed girl was not dancing with me now. She had drifted. She was still in my region, but she seemed more in the orbit of another guy. A real football player, not a kicker. A bastard running back.

I picked up an unguarded lemon vodka drink in a bottle and left the room.

Out in the hallway I ran into Delia, who I dated once with no lasting effects. She was drinking, and weirdly dancing, caught as she was in the crosscurrent of reggae coming up from the basement and the electro nonsense of the room I had just left. She had a crowd moving along with her, guys and girls alike, nobody doing a particularly smooth job of things, nobody standing out as notably awful either. It was like a class of beginners at an aerobics class.

“Killer!” the crowd hollered.

What a rush. Never expected that. Must have been twenty of them, all putting a whole lung into it. I never heard anything quite like it, and I have to admit—have to admit that the sound of that name wasn't sometimes a bad sound at all.

“Yoyoyo,” I yelled in return, waving my vodka drink.

“Where is Gigi Boudakian?” I yelled, right up close into Delia's ear.

She pulled away, partly out of my screaming so up close, partly to be coy.

“Killer got a crush,” she said, laughing and pushing me playfully.

“Shut up, I don't,” I said.

“Shut up, you do,” she said, pushing me again.

I felt myself smiling against my will. My will wanted me to be cool and calm, my will wanted me to be stern and secretive. My will wasn't good for anything.

“Ya, I do,” I said. “Got a big ol' crush.”

Delia squealed, like we were still in sixth grade, talking about this crush business. “I don't know where she is,” she said. “I think she went, like, over there,” she pointed, “up there,” she pointed, both hands pointing now, in slightly different directions. “Her cell went out and she was looking for the phone, I think.”

I thanked her and started upstairs.

“You better be careful,” she called, “or her boyfriend's gonna shoot you when he gets here.”

I turned, walking up backward while talking over the music. “Who's the killer? Who's the killer here?”

I hit the top of the stairs and found her, Gigi Boudakian, trying to make conversation on a telephone, a very old-fashioned telephone, black and shiny and shaped something like a dumbbell. She wasn't having a great deal
of success with the phone, but the look on her face said that there was some information coming through.

I waved at her. She looked right through me. I stood right there and refused to be transparent. She stopped ignoring me and stared hard at me. She was scowling at the telephone as if she was trying to intimidate it, and when that did not work she turned on me.

She waved at me, impatiently, aggressively, like a traffic cop. Move along. Nothing to see here.

I moved along, down the upstairs corridor, checking doorways, looking back over my shoulder to see her now gesticulating wildly at whoever was on the phone.

As if I had been expected, as if this was all for me, a door burst open at the far end of the hall, and as I continued staring back longingly, sympathetically, and perhaps obsessively at Gigi Boudakian, I was seized by a cluster of hands and arms and hauled into the room. The door slammed and locked behind me.

“Killer!” Quarterback Ken shouted down into my face as he squeezed me in a headlock.

“Ken!” I shouted back.

“Killer!” he shouted, squeezing a little harder, giving my head a little yank and a twist for emphasis.

“Ken,” I said once more, though it came out now as a kind of strangled rasp.

He let me go, straightened me up, and gave me a proper hug. I hugged him back, looking around at the same time.

We were in a big, lush bedroom that had to be his parents'. Surrounding us in a tight, quiet semicircle was the core of the football team.

A weirdly quiet semicircle. These were not shy guys. There were a pair of twins, Cory and Bam (whose real name was Brian), the two starting offensive tackles who spent the last four years protecting Quarterback Ken. They weighed something near six hundred pounds between them, had received offers from, like, six hundred schools between them, and had the kind of personalities that probably come along inevitably with that kind of bulk and good fortune and the knowledge that somebody huge is always there watching your back. That is, they were loud, aggressive, scary, fun, cool, tense, mean, privileged, confident, unpredictable, unsurprising, lazy with bursts of superhuman antisocial energy. And blond. White blond. They looked like a couple of big Swedish farm boys. They filled a room.

Usually.

“Hey guys,” I said, letting go of Ken to go shake hands.

“Yo, Keir,” Bam said warmly, “good to see you. I was hoping you'd make it.”

“Good to see you, Keir,” Cory said, offering me a handshake like a fistful of warm rigatoni.

The whole room was like this. Cool. I went around the semicircle of football players as if it were a reception line for the president's birthday party.

“James,” I said, nodding at James, our lanky and beautiful wide receiver with the great legs but the hands of stone. James spent the year blazing around the field, looking like a threat, catching very few passes but looking fab doing it.

“Arthur, Phil, Jon-Jon,” I said to our pudgy pack of defensive linemen. I realized our players were even good enough to have arranged themselves by position, as if there were some chart someplace that instructed offensive players to hang with offensive players, defensive with defensive, with our fearless leader Quarterback Ken there to stir the ingredients as necessary.

I was special teams. It is just a saying. It is just a term, and a kind of stupid term to boot, in that glorious way only sports can be that stupid. But momentarily, it had meaning for me. I was a kicker, the kicker, neither offense nor defense, untethered, unaligned, unmarked. I could go where I wished, mingle as I wished, do exactly whatever I wished.

Kicker not cornerback. I was never a cornerback, really.

As I stood mutely with my associates and homes of the last few years, the music thudded along the floorboards, up through my shoes and into my bones from all the other places in the house where people were acting like there was a party going on.

“Hey,” Ken said as he came up behind me and slipped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed me once more.
But it was a warm squeeze this time, a soft and gentle squeeze.

“Hey,” I said back, turning to catch his face right in mine. “No parents, huh?”

He giggled, sort of distractedly, as if somebody in a far corner of the room had said something.

“No,” he said, “no parents.”

“No parents,” James said with a similar giggle, and they all appeared to take this as a cue to disperse. A few guys spread out over the generous expanse of the Quarterback Ken family bed. A couple more went to hang precariously by a wide-open window, while one or two more seemed to merely hug the walls looking for plaster cracks.

Ken started guiding me toward the dresser.

“Ya,” he said, his head brushing alongside mine as he nodded, “that's their graduation present to me. They cleared out. I have until Monday, free-range, full amnesty, no questions asked as long as nobody gets injured, nothing gets broken, and no authorities arrive on the premises. Or if any of that does happen, it's covered up by the time they're back.”

He was giggling again by the time he had finished speaking and we had reached the highly polished cherry-wood top of the dresser and its great big mirror staring us in the faces.

Quarterback Ken's face had a strange, lopsided, unrecognizable smile, like he had had a stroke but that it
wasn't an unpleasant thing. My face, I was shocked to find, looked shocked.

“What is this?” I asked, looking down at the silver tray.

“What do you think it is?” he asked.

“I wouldn't know,” I said.

“Oh, I think maybe you would know.”

“I think I don't.”

“Would you like to know?”

“Well, Ken, that's why I asked in the first place. To know.”

“No, no,” he said, dramatically undraping his arm from me so he could bend low and address the tray.

He picked up the short green plastic straw and inhaled a straight white stripe.

When he stood back up again and tried a smile on me, the live half of his face had sunk to meet the floppy half.

“But that doesn't tell me what it is,” I said.

“It's whatever you want,” he said, pointing like a general over a battlefield map. “You want to go up, you stick to this area over here. You want to go down, then these here are what you're looking for. Then, of course, we have whatever combination of the two you might be interested in.”

I took a half step back. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“If that's what you want,” he said, reaching down toward my leg. My kicking leg.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and brought him back up. “Really, Ken,” I said. “All this stuff . . . serious stuff?”

“Serious as it gets,” he said proudly.

I shook my head. “That's, um, that's beyond me, I think, Ken. That's . . . you have to be, like, a freak to be doing that stuff.”

“Nah, nah, nah, nah,” he said. “You're talking about injecting. This isn't like that. This is just for laughs. Strictly recreational . . . although
seriously
recreational.”

As if we had settled something there, he nodded at me, patted my cheek a couple of times, then went at the silver tray again, this time taking one from column A, one from B. The Swedish farmers, cashing in, I supposed, on years of faithful service protecting the quarterback's body, were now edging up to collect on the debt.

Ken stepped aside to let them in.

“Your choice,” he said, glassy-eyed, his speech slowing as he tried to blink away the wet eyes and twitchy nose.

It might be understating things to say that I was no choirboy. Truth is, I had no aversion to the occasional stimulant. Probably that was the issue, that maybe I'd have been better off with some kind of aversion. Not that I was inclined to go mental on cocaine or whatever. Just that . . . it tended to keep me
going,
beyond the point when I should have been finished. It was like being kept in the game long after you should be taken out and so you spoil it for everyone.

I thought about mistakes I had made in the past. I thought about when things went wrong. And I realized it was never an issue of
intent,
but of
intensity.
I was a good
guy, recall. I could do things and be okay. I could join in and have fun and not cause problems. I didn't have to be afraid of any of this stuff. I didn't have to lock myself away from the action, as long as the action didn't get too hot.

“Right, just a line, then,” I said, stepping up. “But mix it, one from column A and one from column B together. To balance me out.”

“Ah, a very sensible guy,” Ken said, and right away did the required scooping and mixing.

Without fuss I bent into it, and it bent into me. I straightened up, shook my head like a horse. My head filled and sped up. Eyes went wide, all went bright. My heart raced and mellowed parallel, like I had two partner hearts working together, and only just now they were broken open and shown to me.

I had two whole hearts. How could I have missed that? Lucky me.

I saw my reflection in the mirror, overexcited and overcharged, and I backed away.

“Now you'll have another,” Ken said with a big grin.