Joe
I'd spent the better
part of the last two hours this morning being chewed out by Trevor's
mom, who kept asking where he was and demanding I put him on the
phone as I catapulted myself as fast as possible through the lost
journey down I-76 in the bowels of Pennsylvania and, now, Ohio. I had
the set of clothes he'd abandoned in his basement, along with his
iPhone and wallet. Idiot.
Of all the fuck-ups
Trevor had been involved in, this was easily the biggest one and it
tasted a little too much like one of those Hangover movies, which are
very funny in a frat-boy way but that leave much to be desired when
you're the friend who has to rescue the main character. If this woman
Darla had a Capuchin monkey in that little potting shed where Trevor
was snoring behind her, then that was it. I was done.
Darla came out of the
shed, closed the door and smiled at me like a crazy, wild woman. What
the hell had Trevor gotten into? This place looked like something out
of My Name Is Earl. This wasn't funny anymore. Eleven hours of
driving had been bad enough. Doing it alone, listening to all of the
recorded lectures for my health care law class, which I had to get an
A in, in order to secure my spot at BC Law, had been bad enough. But
showing up here and being ocularly devoured by this curvy, bouncy
chick who had just bagged Trevor was over the top.
Ruining one of my
brand new shoes on her porch made me resent the trip even more. Most
of all, though, I knew that Mrs. Connor was going to rip me a new
asshole if I didn't get Trevor home immediately. Of all the parents
among my friends, the Connors were the most controlling. Trevor
didn't care, but that's because most of us wanted what our parents
wanted for us. He didn't.
It was seamless and
easy to just say, “Sure, OK, what do you want me to do?” But
Trevor was different. Trevor was a wild, wild beast. The kind of guy
I admired and wished I could be, but who scared me, too, because I
couldn't grasp how my best friend since kindergarten had turned into
a complete stranger when it came to everything music. Once we started
our band it was like a demon rose up from him and made everything
irrelevant – unless it was music. Our music. Playing bass was an
afterthought for me, something I squeezed in so I'd have an excuse to
hang out with Trev. At first it was just us – he played guitar and
sang, while I fumbled around and taught myself how to do some basic
chords. We added Trev's next-door neighbor, Liam, and a drummer from
the debate team at the neighboring high school, Sam.
A band was born.
Trevor drove everything, though, from the rehearsals to gigs to just
being a fucking maniac about it. He was like Tucker Max on the prowl
for pussy – except Trevor wanted sound. Harmony. Awesomeness
through the chords and the lyrics and all of it, like a man
possessed. Getting high after practice was the only way to get him to
come down.
That he stole all my
stolen peyote and ended up naked wearing only a guitar held some sort
of symbolism, but right now I couldn't dissect it. Literary essays
weren't high on my priority list.
She wouldn't stop
staring at me, this Darla chick, standing in the sun with her mouth
open a bit, lips glistening. I got that a lot. Women kept calling me
all sorts of names like a young Patrick Dempsey, only cute, or 'that
Italian dude from Vogue'. My parents had pushed me into modeling but
I didn't like it. Too much attention – not my style. This whole
mess with Trevor was too much attention, Darla now openly watching
me, making me think she was a little unhinged.
I could see what
Trevor saw in her, though, There was something kind of magnetic about
her. She wasn't particularly our type – as if we had a type. We
didn't really have much choice in the women that we interacted with –
it was more whatever was there, like eating at a buffet and thinking
that those were your only choices, ever. There were no women who
looked like her at school and when she said, “How about we go get a
cup of coffee?” I had a feeling she didn't mean Starbucks.
Trevor snorted awake
just as she said the words and then sat up, his rock hard dick poking
out from under the thin blanket. He looked just like he'd looked the
night of his party, completely naked, a smattering of hair down his
chest thickening where it thickened on all of us. The fucker had that
perfect athlete's body completely effortlessly, never needing to work
out like I did. He just could jump on a bike and go for a hundred
mile ride or take a kayak out for a ten mile journey without
conditioning his body in between. It filled me with instant rage to
think how effortlessly everything came to Trevor – even wild women.
“Hey, Trev, fancy
meeting you here,” I said. Darla snickered.
“Oh, God, Joe,
you're here.” If that was supposed to be a tone of gratitude
it wasn't even close.
“Yeah, about that,”
I said, pulling out my phone. “Your mom is psycho right now.”
“Fuuuuuuuck,”
he groaned, holding his head in his hands.
Darla walked back into
her...whatever you call this shack, and motioned for me to come in. I
walked in. Cool little place she built, actually. Did she live here?
Is this how it worked in trailer land? A chicken half-flew past, some
kind of guinea hen that looked starved. A kitten followed it. It was
missing one leg and had a pink bow around its fluffy white neck, like
a quality control reject from the Hello Kitty factory.
Darla stood with her
back to us, off to my right, while Trevor leaned back and plunked his
head on the pillow, grinning madly at me. I rolled my eyes and looked
for a place to sit down. There wasn't any so I just grabbed a spot on
the floor, on a carpet square that reminded me of kindergarten. She
had a bunch of them strewn in neat little patterns around the floor.
I guessed this shed was about what? 8'X8'? Something like that –
no bigger than the one we used to store our tractor mower in at home.
If this was her home then Trevor and I were worlds away from
Sudborough.
She opened a can, the
snick of a seal being broken, and then I watched her do
something with a manual can opener. They still make those? I heard
the sound of water pouring and then the slow gurgle, a sound I knew
from my Grandma's house. It was a coffee maker, the kind that used a
basket filter and had a pot. Not like the one at home – we used the
Keurigs now or Mom pulled out the espresso machine.
Trevor looked at me
and said, “What the hell happened to me?”
“I don't know, man,”
I said. What the hell did happen to you? I thought. “Like I
told you, you took all that peyote.”
“You're the one who
got it,” Trevor protested.
“I got it out of the
evidence room. I didn't think you'd sit down and eat all of
it.”
“All of it? I
really ate all of it? I thought I must be remembering that
wrong.”
Darla turned around,
her eyes wide with surprise. “You ate all of it?” she asked
Trevor. He just shrugged. Whipping around to me, she asked, “How
much was there?”
“I don't know.” I
held my hands up to try to indicate the size of the bag and Darla
started choking with laughter.
“Holy shit, Trevor!
No wonder you were high as a fucking kite when I found you and that
was...how long? Twelve hours? More than that? After you went missing.
You're crazy.”
The look he shot her
was more intimate than anything I'd ever seen him give anyone,
including me, his best friend. “It got me here, didn't it?” he
said.
She softened and
smiled back, matching his affection. “I hope,” she said, “it
won't take another giant bag of peyote to get you to come back.”
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