The Vast Fields of Ordinary Read online

  “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.

  Things and people may just appear, but they appear for a reason.

  “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.

  Chapter 19

  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 l
ime 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.

  Lucy belched hugely and then slapped me on the back. A smaller one came up through my body, the little brother of whatever Lucy had just let out. Thomas let out a lost-boy howl and the insanity of the fact that my kitchen was crammed full of people I didn’t know filled me with the rawest sort of happiness, the kind that comes to life in your chest and gives off sparks. I wondered if everyone felt like this all the time, if I was the last one to arrive at this ecstatic destination.

  The kids swimming in my pool were wearing their tightywhiteys or nothing at all. My Ultimate Vas Deferens Playlist was blaring from every speaker in the house with everything from Introducing . . . the Vas Deferens! to Emotional Aviary Death Watch heartily represented. Lucy and I were in my backyard watching two Asian girls have a break-dancing competition when one of the sophomores who worked at Food World came up to me and put his hand out for a high five.

  “Great party, Hamilton,” he said.

  I put my hand out stupidly and let him slap it.

  “Look at you,” Lucy said after he walked away. “Mr. Popular.”

  It was then that I saw them. Jessica Montana and Judy Lockhart. They’d just stepped onto the back porch along with four of their friends. They were looking around, their faces registering a nervousness I’d never seen on them before.

  “Is that that bitch from Bert’s party?” Lucy asked. She raised her glass. “Hi, ladies!”

  It took a moment for them to realize we were talking to them. Judy gave us a strained smile and wiggled her fingers in a pathetic and somewhat snotty hello. I waved back, surprised by the fact that I was sorta happy to see them there. As much as I wanted to pretend that there was nothing outside of this summer, there was, and whether or not I wanted to admit it, this was sort of my last bash. In some ways, it wouldn’t have been complete without them.

  “Who invited them?” Lucy asked.

  “Not me,” I said. “But it’s cool. Whatevs.”

  “Are you okay? Feeling good about things?”

  I nodded. At first it was more to convince myself that things were fine, but then I realized that things really were okay. I was happy, and the most beautiful part of it was that it didn’t seem dependent on anyone. My happiness didn’t feel tethered to Alex or Lucy or anybody else. It was mine, independent of everything else.

  “Let’s go inside and check on the band,” I said.

  Dingo and Alex had turned my mother’s meditation room into the band’s green room. The speakers in this room were turned off, as were the lights. Everyone was sitting on my mother’s Balance Pillows. A shirtless Dingo was strumming an acoustic guitar while Thomas and Louis watched. Thomas was running his fingers over a new tattoo that ran across his abdomen: the word Iowa in a florid cursive font. There were two dark-haired girls passing a cigarette back and forth and giggling from behind their curtains of hair. Someone had lit my mother’s candles, and the walls were a production of overlapping silhouettes. Dingo was singing a song about killing his stuffed animals. I made a mental note to burn sage in this room before my mother came home.

  “Alex told me he’s writing a concept album about the toys of his youth,” I whispered to Lucy.

  “Sounds completely cutting edge,” she said. “In a masturbatory man-child sort of way. How can you kill toys? Toys aren’t alive.”

  “I think Dingo probably had a very different childhood than most people.”

  “Can you keep it down please?” one of the dark-haired girls said. She was trying to sound authoritative, but her friend burst out laughing and then she did too. “We’re trying to listen to this amazing song.”

  “It’s fine, ladies,” Dingo said, still strumming. “This is Dade’s pad. He can do what he wants. Plus, my music is meant to exist in the hallways of life, and in the hallways of life, there is
always distraction.”

  “I like the way this room feels,” one of the girls said. “I feel like there’s a portal in here somewhere.”

  “I’m heading downstairs to check things out,” I said to Lucy.

  “I’ll stay up here and hold down the crazy,” she said.

  I left them there and went downstairs. The house was full of people. It lacked the anarchic vibe of Jessica’s party earlier in the summer. There were no freshmen dancing on top of the coffee table, no frat boys howling like banshees when a big-breasted girl walked by. There were people chilling out everywhere, nodding along to the music. Out by the pool a group of thirty people were watching Jay juggle some oranges that he’d found in the refrigerator. I stood watching from the back porch. I wondered where Alex was, where he’d disappeared to.

  And then I saw him. He was standing in the back of the crowd with Fessica. He was taller than she was and he had to bend down a bit to talk to her. At one point he was smiling and pointing over everyone’s heads at Jay and his act. Fessica was smiling too, clutching a bottle of beer and looking a little less tragic than usual. After an eternity of ponytails she’d finally let her hair down, and it made me think she was making steps away from the place she’d been for so long. Alex noticed me and excused himself. Fessica looked over and saw me and waved. I smiled and waved back. Alex sauntered up toward the porch. His swagger, his boyish gait. Another thing I adored about him.

  “You don’t look stressed,” he said.

  “I’m not. It’s a miracle.”

  “I figured you’d be a mess,” he said.

  “I did too. And I’m not even stoned. Shocker.”

  “Total shocker,” he said.

  He moved in and kissed me. He did this thing where he softly bit my lower lip, and there was always a split second where I thought he wasn’t going to let go, where I truly thought he was going to bite my lip off out of some primal desire to quite literally devour me. I put my hands on his chest and I swear to God I could feel things moving around inside him. I decided it was his affection for me, a shimmering blue circuit of light that made his entire body give off some invisible force that rendered me completely powerless, a light and force that also lived in me.