Tradition Page 11

  “Don’t change,” Jules said into the center, to all of us. “Please don’t change. This is everything.” She paused and yawned. “This is all I have.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  THE NIGHT AT HORN ROCK

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  We got there late, and the party was already raging. I almost didn’t go, but I told myself I was going for Javi, just in case things didn’t work out with Max, which was stupid, because of course it was going to work out for Javi and Max.

  I’d seen them speaking to each other in the road outside the student center, laughing, and the way Max looked down and away and then stepped closer to Javi when Javi touched his elbow, it was so obvious they were flirting with each other, but not really, because even though nobody would ever say Fullbrook was a homophobic place, I’d believed Javi when he told me he still felt that hesitation, that inclination to backpedal, when he wanted to tickle a boy in the ribs, hold his hand as they walked into the stands to watch the football game, or kiss the boy he liked right there in the sunlight under the branches of the old elm by the admin building. I believed him, all right, and I knew that with the cover of night, the loose, easygoing air of the party, they would feel free to drop their hesitations and fall all over each other in the moonlight just like the rest of the boys and girls around them.

  The cloudless night was a scatter of stars above us, and even though it was the largest party of the year, it was impossible to tell where everyone was, because the party sprawled across the bluffs and into the woods. Somebody had hooked up portable speakers to a phone, and people were dancing all around the base of Horn Rock. It was mostly girls—the boys were all pounding back drinks in the darkness—and as I swallowed the last drops of my own first drink and went to pour another one for me and Aileen, I thought how cool it would have been if none of the boys had shown up and the girls had gotten to rock it alone for once.

  Aileen laughed when I shared this thought. “Seriously,” she said. “That would be awesome. We never get to do that.”

  But she wasn’t fooling anyone. She wanted boys at the party. One in particular. That was becoming increasingly obvious, and she wasn’t very subtle—which made it all the easier to tease her. “That blouse is super cute on you,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  “Is it new?”

  “Yeah. Ordered it last week.” She smoothed the lines of the shirt where it rested on her belly. “You think?”

  I nodded. Took a sip. Took her in slowly. “Absolutely.” She hid her smile in another sip from her drink. “I bet Bax will notice.”

  She darted her eyes away.

  “I think it’s cool, by the way,” I added.

  Aileen straightened. “You two aren’t . . . Or haven’t . . .”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “It’s just that I see you hanging out all the time and . . . I don’t know.”

  “No. No way.” I held my cup high over my head and announced: “I am officially off boys this fall. No boys. I’ve got so many better things to think about. Off boys! You heard it here.”

  Aileen laughed, and I was glad, because I knew where this was going. A couple of the other girls groaned, though, when they heard my pronouncement, but not Aileen. She kept laughing and drinking, and when she held her cup out for another, I didn’t pay much attention, because she seemed perfectly fine. I poured her another.

  “He hasn’t said anything to you about me, has he?” Aileen asked.

  “No.” I hesitated. He hadn’t, but I’d seen the way they looked at each other, and it was cute. He wasn’t the kind of guy who opened up easily and talked about it, though. “But that doesn’t matter,” I went on. “You have to see it too. He’s thinking about you.”

  “Yeah.” Aileen toed the dirt with the front of her shoe. She sniffed, and swirled her cup. She let her weight sink back onto one leg. “Cool,” she said. She drained her drink and held the cup out again. “Have one with me. You’re holding back.”

  I was glad I’d been pouring tiny amounts of vodka into our cups, because I was already having more than I wanted to and I couldn’t believe she was still standing straight. But I followed her instructions, because suddenly that’s what it felt like—like she’d given me an order and I was supposed to obey it. I didn’t like it. It was against rule number one of the year for me: the Freedom to Be Me.

  I poured the drinks, heavily this time, and clinked with her quickly. “Here’s to the party without boys,” I said.

  She smiled. We sipped. But the hoots and hollers of the boys in the woods behind us rushed ahead of them like ghosts clearing the path before an army.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  The problem with this party was that everybody was going. Nobody was supposed to talk about it, but everyone had been whispering about it for days. I was worried the teachers knew about it too and we were all going to get busted. “We’ve been doing this forever at Fullbrook,” Hackett kept telling me. “It happens every year. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  It was tradition. Just like the ties and the motto and the tree and the ivy crawling up the brick front of the admin building. Everything was tradition. Even the fall party at Horn Rock. Hackett had explained it all. He took on the burden of organizing it all for the rest of us. Everything was going to be fine, he said. It always was.

  The problem, at least for me, was that Freddie insisted the hockey team head to the party together. “Let’s face it,” he said. “We suck at football. Hockey’s our game. Let’s hit the party like champions.”

  He was saying it again as he held out his Solo cup for me to clink. “To the championship.”

  I nodded and tapped cups.

  Most of the hockey team was around us. Despite how I felt about Freddie, the team mattered. The game mattered. They all cheered as Freddie knocked back his drink, but I looked out to the clearing beyond us. Lit by the pale glow from the nearly full moon, Horn Rock rose like a giant gray tusk from the edge of the bluff and jutted up into the night sky.

  Music was playing, and someone had lit candles and stuffed them in divots around the rock, but they weren’t strong enough to provide much light. It was almost impossible to tell who was who from a short distance, except, as I continued to look out from the woods, I recognized two silhouettes in the clearing, and smiled.

  I started to walk away, but Freddie called me back. “Hey. You ghosting already?”

  “Nah,” I said, trying to sound casual. “Party time.”

  I left them all doing shots in the darkness behind me and made my way to Aileen and Jules. They didn’t recognize me at first, and I called out, so I wouldn’t be some creeper just popping up silently behind them. Javi and Max heard me and walked over too. We stood in a tight circle, so we could see each other, and as we did, I couldn’t help thinking about how there were five of us—just one more and we would have made a team out on the ice. But I was glad no one else was around and it was only us. We were our own kind of team, and I wished we could have peeled away, had our own party, like at Wendell.

  But it didn’t last long. We all clinked glasses and Aileen was about to say something, when Hackett broke into our circle. Javi gave him a stink eye, but he didn’t notice. Hackett had already dug up most of the bottles he’d hidden around the clearing and he was passing out cups and pouring shots of vodka as he walked around. “Refills?” he asked us. He smiled goofily, and I wondered how many he’d had himself by then. He poured out a drink for Javi and Max and then propped his pouring hand and bottle on Javi’s shoulder.

  “Easy,” Javi said. He steadied Hackett. “Why don’t I play bartender for a while?”

  “Be my guest,” Hackett said, handing Javi the bottle.

  “Where’s Gillian?” Jules asked him.

  “Not drinking,” Hackett said, clearly annoyed.

  “Maybe yo
u should go find her?” Jules said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe.” He bobbed his head, a little too long, not tracking his movements. Then he smiled. “That’s still the coolest T-shirt at Fullbrook,” he said, nodding to Jules. Her hoodie was unzipped, so the yellow Happy Daze T-shirt was visible.

  “Those days are over,” Jules said quickly.

  He nodded, then turned to Aileen. “You too,” he said. “You look great tonight.”

  Before she responded, he winked at me like she wasn’t even really there. I’d seen it in other guys’ eyes all year and just ignored it. Or maybe even felt like I deserved it. Condescension. That knowing look of superiority. I was less than them and they let me know it—even with only a glance.

  “Go find Gillian,” Jules said again.

  “Yeah,” Hackett said, pulling back. “All the fun she’s having.” He stumbled toward the crowd dancing on the other side of Horn Rock.

  “Guess we have some catching up to do,” Javi said, trying to laugh it all off. He poured himself and Max another shot. I pulled my cup away so they wouldn’t pour me more. I’d pretended to knock back a shot with the hockey team too. Nobody else seemed to care, but I was still worried about getting caught. I’d convinced myself that if the party was busted and I could prove I hadn’t been drinking, it wouldn’t be so bad. Coach might let it slide. Breaking curfew, being in the woods at night, those weren’t offenses for the review board. Drinking was. No matter how much I wanted to hang with this new team, there was no way in hell I was getting kicked off the team I’d been bought and paid for to keep pucks out of a net.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  Like usual, Javi was livening the party. He scrambled up Horn Rock and took command immediately. I shrugged and gave him my best whatever will you do now pose.

  “Look who’s on top of the world,” he said down to me.

  The spot he’d chosen was too perfect. From where I stood, the moon bloomed like a giant elephant ear off the side of his head. “Step to the right,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention to anything else—just trying to set the tableaux—and when Javi finally shuffled into position, the whole moon glowed behind him, casting a pale corona around his head.

  “Perfect!” I shouted. “Now you are the man in the moon!” I held my cup up and tried to rally a few of the people around me. “To the man in the moon,” I cheered. “May he reign in the sky forever!”

  “Hear, hear!” he shouted back, stirring a low rumble of cheers in the crowd around the rock. And Javi and I went back and forth, calling out toasts, invoking the sky, celebrating nonsense with nonsense until we had everybody cheering. He sprayed us with vodka, and even though there were little screams of delight all around us, I heard a sigh, and I knew it was Bax behind me. Luckily Javi noticed it too.

  “And for my second decree,” Javi yelled, “I demand that our very own James Baxter wipe that look of gloom from his face.”

  I agreed. Fun. One break. One night of everything working out okay. A small piece of the peace we found at Wendell, but at Fullbrook for once—that’s all I wanted, for all of us.

  Someone turned up the music and we started dancing again, and Javi ticked off his fingers in the air, one, two, three, then dropped himself into the crowd and bodysurfed through the hands, which eventually plopped him down in front of me and Max.

  “Is this your party or Hackett’s?” Max joked.

  Javi put his hands on either side of Max’s face and stepped close. “Mine,” he whisper-shouted. He’d lost the bottle he’d been holding when he was up on the rock, and he held out his empty cup. “Do not go thirsty into that frat-party night!” he yelled, and we dipped back into the crowd to find another bottle.

  When we found one, I poured a bit into all three of our cups, but I didn’t put much in mine, because I already felt more light-headed than I wanted to, and it felt like the party was only now, finally, getting started.

  Max, it turned out, was also much funnier than I realized, and while we sat against the rock, near the edge of the bluff, and looked out at the river and the treetops on the other side of it, he did his amazing impressions of Coach O’Leary. “Hey, foo-bawl. Hey, hey, foo-bawl!” he mumbled. It was syllable for syllable a Coach O announcement at lunchtime. “We gotta hit that bus early today. Hey, hey, early, you hear? Don’t be late.”

  “Red Hawks,” Javi said, trying to sound like Coach O but not even coming close.

  “Red Hawks,” Max said. “Red Hawks. Red Hawks, RedHawksRedHawksRedHawks!”

  “Eeeow.” I tried to screech at the end, like what I thought a threatening hawk might sound like, but it didn’t sound dangerous at all.

  “Oh my God,” Max said. “That was perfect. What if people did that every time at the end?”

  “Don’t they?” I asked.

  “Uh, no. Not like that,” Max said.

  “That was way more like a sexy cat meow than a bird call,” Javi said. He and Max laughed.

  “You mean like a terrifying fisher-cat call. None of this sexy cat nonsense. I would never want that image in Coach O’s head around me.”

  “No, of course not.” Max said.

  “I don’t know,” Javi said. “Coach O could be kind of sexy,” he joked.

  “Ugh!” Max said. “If you think a decomposing bag of moldy peas is sexy.”

  Javi picked up some leaves beside him and threw them at Max. “I’m more an eau de forêt kind of guy.” He smudged a few more in Max’s shirt, did a backward somersault, and pressed himself up to his feet quickly. Max swung around and followed him, and I did too, because I was swept up in all the silliness. We wove through the dancing crowd, then out past the rock and into the darkness of the woods along the ridge of the bluff. After a few minutes, Max actually caught Javi and held him in a bear hug. When he put him down, Javi spun in his arms so they were face-to-face and kissed him. They paused, staring at each other. Then they kissed again, more slowly, Javi reaching up to Max’s face and brushing it with his fingertips. They kissed and kissed, paused for air only for a moment, and kissed again.

  They breathed each other in and out. Javi’s strong arm held Max to him like he was terrified a wind was about to blow them apart. Tears beaded at the corners of my eyes, and at first I thought maybe there was a wind and it was drying out my eyes, but that wasn’t it, I wasn’t crying for them, I was crying for me. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t want to be wrapped up in someone’s arms like they were, but I didn’t want to be lonely, either. I just wanted to feel a sense of being on my own and not alone at the same time.

  And I would have stood there all night like that if Javi hadn’t leaned over and said, “Hey, Jules, a little privacy, please.”

  I slunk away, not even finding a voice to say I was sorry. I wasn’t sure where to go. I realized we’d all kind of abandoned Bax and Aileen too. It struck me that they might have found each other, which, in an odd way, made me feel left out. I felt a little gutted, and I wove through the trees, listening to the noise coming from Horn Rock, and I suddenly wished for a fire, or something where no one would accuse me of being weird if I just stared into it silently. Because as the shrieks and howls of the party swooped and echoed around me, I realized that I was exhausted. Exhausted from caring too much and having to care too much about all the Fullbrook sexist bullshit, because the normalization campaign had fizzled out, and even if I did finish the designs for all the posters I wanted to put up, who would stop to read them? Who would stop to see them? So terribly few. I was exhausted from trying to change things and exhausted from rallying myself again and again to keep thinking I could. I was exhausted just listening to the boys’ laughter booming and rolling out over Horn Rock like thunder. One more year. God. Could I actually make it another seven months? Just seven months, just six months. I was exhausted. This urge all year to be alone felt so much like that final mile in a run, when you kind of want to give up because your legs hurt so much, but you push through it a
nd the pain starts to fade again, and you feel the surge of pride for not giving up. That’s what I wanted. That surge of pride. Me, on my own, doing everything I damn well pleased and getting into college and getting the hell away from everyone and all their expectations, getting to where I could start from scratch and live the life I wanted to live.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  “Cheers,” Aileen said, knocking her cup against mine. We’d lost Javi and Max and Jules somewhere in the woods behind us, and it occurred to me that Aileen and I had never really been alone, just the two of us. I was glad for it, but I couldn’t still the jitters bouncing in my stomach.

  “I’ve come to this party every year,” she said, staring toward the crowd dancing ahead of us. “It’s cool. It’s kind of weird to think it will be my last one.”

  “And it’s my first,” I said. “I can’t believe we can all get away with it.”

  “I know.” She paused and took a drink, her face and blond-white hair all so pale in the moonlight. “But the teachers. They don’t want to know. I think they’d rather not think about it.”

  “It’s easier to believe we’re all tucked into bed safe and sound.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But we’re not.”

  She glanced at me quickly, then looked away, toward the rock.

  “Tucked into bed?” was the line I was going to say next—almost felt like the line I was supposed to say next, like we were playing at a script and we both knew what I would say. I’d been at these kinds of parties before too. Not at Horn Rock, but in the barn at the Dolphy brothers’ house, or in Jenna Trudeau’s basement, or elsewhere. By the time I was a junior, I was pretty damn sure in the first few minutes of talking to a girl if we were going to end up in the closet making out, or in the woodshed, peeling off some of our clothes. It’s so weird like that. Knowing. I got nervous every time all the same, but still. You could just feel it coming.