-1-

It’s ironic when to think of how it all went down. I mean, how we ended up in the hole. We weren’t exactly channeling Nostradamus. We were nothing but a bunch of horny teenagers, looking for a place to smoke and drink and bitch about our shitty lives. We got together to hang out at least once a week in those days, and we didn’t know it then, but we were about to grow up in a hurry.
News flash: I’d had a bad fight with my mother. Back then it always seemed like she was looking for ways to get on me about something I should be doing. I didn’t study enough, didn’t work hard enough, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t see how much she was hurting, how she loved me or what a fuck up I must have seemed to everyone else. I was almost eighteen and high school was just about over for me, and all I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and have a little fun before life moved in for the kill.
The thing was, my mom was sick. She’d had progressive Multiple Sclerosis since she was in her early twenties, diagnosed before she had me. It’s a slow disease, but living with my alcoholic father didn’t help matters much, and by the time It Happened, she was in a wheelchair and heavy drugs were all that kept the pain away.
Maybe I felt burdened by having to do so much at home, maybe I just I just didn’t want to listen, or maybe I was just an asshole. But it seemed like the fighting was getting worse and worse and neither one of us knew how to stop it.
That particular night my mother wanted me to write a letter to a professor she knew at Bates College, letting him know how much I wanted to be a “Bates man.” I wanted to catch up with Jimmie and debate the quality of the reefer we’d pinched from his older brother. The reefer won. After dinner she rolled into her room and took the wine bottle with her, and I knew I wouldn’t see her again that night (after my father died, she’d taken to doing this quite a bit). So I snuck out the window, figuring I’d be back in again in an hour or two. Bye-bye, mom. If the end of the world comes, don’t wait up for me.
Jimmie was down the block in his red-and-gray Bondo ’98 Mustang, tapping his fingers against the wheel to some old song by the Who as Tessa and I arrived. We drove to McDonald’s for a shake and fries. Big Sue and Jay were already there, and all we spent the next half an hour sitting around a table and making fun of Dan, who was working the counter.
“Wear the little hat,” I told him. “It makes you look really buff.”
He flipped me the bird and stomped into the back. “How about the hairnet, then, big boy?” I called after him.
If I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have found him so easy to tease. Hell, maybe I would have done a lot of things differently. But I didn’t, and I can’t exactly take it back. As my mother would say, what’s done is done; work on what’s to come.
“Are those new Vans?” I asked Tessa, while Jimmie, Big Sue and Jay were in line buying items off the dollar menu. She had these cute little doll feet, and I knew her nails were painted red underneath because she wore sandals a lot. I guess you could say I had a crush on Tessa, but then again, half the world might say the same, if they saw her. She was barely over 5 feet tall, with these huge dark eyes and soft mouth, and she probably weighed all of 100 pounds. But the weight was in all the right places. In those days I always wondered why she bothered to hang with me. She’d moved in next door right around the time of my father’s death, and we had become close friends pretty quickly. She didn’t seem to mind my weirdness and humor at the most inappropriate moments, and she didn’t mind my friends. The obvious answer was that she had a crush on Dan, but she’d never shown much interest in him. Maybe it was the pot.
Anyway, these new shoes of hers were red and black with pink laces, all the rage these days. The sides had a skull and crossbones pattern. “Designed them myself online,” she said with a small half-smile. “You like?”
“They’re cool. I was thinking of getting some Skechers if I can save up.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Skechers are so out, Pete.”
“As in ‘so out they’re coming back again?’”
“I don’t think so.”
“What are you talking about?” Jimmie said. He was back from line with a tray full of Micky D goodness.
“Skechers, dipshit,” I said. “I was thinking of getting some.”
“Micha Barton was wearing them on E last night, eh,” Jimmie said. He had this annoying habit of saying ‘eh’ at the end of a sentence as if he were Canadian or something. “They even made a point of talking about it.”
“Probably paid her a million bucks,” I said. “And what the hell were you doing watching E?”
“I think Micha’s hot.”
“Sure, if you like 12-year-old anorexic boys.”
“Where are we going to get high?” Jay said, plopping back down in his seat. He was all business when it came to pot. He was voted the most likely to end up in rehab. I think he needed it to take the edge off. His parents put more pressure on him than anyone, because he was egghead smart and was headed to Yale. His dad was a grad, and Yale banners and books were displayed all over the house like a roadmap they’d put up for Jay’s life. Talk about pressure, all right. All that was missing was the huge, blinking neon arrow: this way to the psych ward.
Jay was a conspiracy theorist. If you asked him about the government, he’d get this glint in his eye and go off on top-secret organizations and futuristic weaponry and spy satellites and plots to control the world. I wonder now how right he was; but back then, I just laughed it all off or made fun of him, the way I did most everything. The joker, the class clown. The shrink I went to for one week called that a defense mechanism. I called him a few names bad enough to keep me from going back there ever again. A good shrink might have smiled and nodded and pointed out that my defenses were raised yet again, but this guy was lousy and I think we both knew it. I was probably better off in the end.
We went through the usual locations as we ate, all of them getting vetoed for various reasons. Then Sue spoke up. “My grandfather finished the shelter last week,” she said.
The table fell silent. “That crazy bastard,” I said. “Someone ought to tell him the USSR is long gone. What’s he afraid of, anyway?”
“North Korea. They’ve got nuclear weapons that can hit us from over there. He read about it on the Net.”
“It’s true,” Jay said, tucking some of his long, unruly black hair behind his ears. Smart as he was, he’d say the grass was purple if Sue said it first. But this was right in his wheelhouse. He pushed his large round glasses up on the bridge of his nose, looking remarkably like that actor who played Harry Potter in all those billion-dollar movies. I even used to call him Potter for a while, as a joke, until he told me he hated it (I might be a smart ass, but I’d like to think I’m not a complete jerk).
“They’ve been secretly testing long-range missiles,” he said, “and we already know they’ve got nukes.”
“So? We’ve got a missile shield, right?” Jimmie said. “Shoot the fuckers out of the sky.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?” Jimmie made a noise like a firing rocket, and pantomimed his two hands coming together. “Bam,” he said. “Just like that. Gone.”
Dan had appeared from out of the back at some point during the conversation. His shift was over, and now he stood over us, letter jacket in hand, like a guy who’s ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. I knew he hated this job, and only did it because he needed the money. Football was his passion. But high school was almost over, and he wasn’t going to college. No athletic scholarships for players from little Podunk schools like ours, and his grades were lousy. He was like the guy who worked all day in the paper mill and lived for the weekends, drinking himself silly down at the bar with his buddies. I wondered if he might just become that paper mill guy, in a few more years.
He punched me in the shoulder a little too hard, and I pretended not to feel it. It was our little game, I guess. Hurt like a son of a bitch. Some game.
“Who cares about North Korea? The shelter’s probably stacked with food and it’s empty. Is that your point, Sue?”
“I know how to get in,” she said. “He’s asleep by now. Nobody will ever know.”
We looked at each other across the table. Jay nodded. Tessa just smiled. That was the end of the discussion.
We all jumped into Jimmie’s car and headed out to the island.