Before You Go (7 page)

Jude could almost see the logic behind Corey’s analysis.

Corey continued: “This here, where she asks, ‘Now what are you doing?’ That means she can’t stop thinking about you.” He handed the cell back to Jude. “You’re on her mind, Jude. The girl’s obviously obsessed. Only danger is, she might be a stage-five clinger.”

“I hate that about girls,” Jude countered. “Everything’s in code. They never say what they mean.”

“True,” Corey said. “But you have to remember, they are not of this planet. She’s using a secret language. It’s what girls do.”

“When I asked her what she was doing tonight, she got this weird look on her face,” Jude confided.

“Hmmmm,” Corey murmured. “That’s not good. What did she say exactly?”

“She ‘kind of’ had plans,” Jude recalled, placing air quotes around the key words.

“Oh, I got it,” Corey said, stomping his feet and laughing. “She’s got a boyfriend!”

“You think?”

“Oh, yeah, no doubt,” Corey teased. “I’ve seen this movie before, and believe me, Jude, she’s got a guy stashed away somewhere.”

Jude prodded at Corey with his foot, a little annoyed by him. He decided against mentioning that Becka herself had already admitted to “crushing on some guy”—her words, not his. Maybe it was a problem, maybe not. Corey didn’t know Becka. Hell, Jude hardly knew her.

“She might be in transition,” Corey mused.

“What?”

“Maybe she’s open to change,” Corey said. “I don’t know, I’m not the love doctor. We better get over to the Stallion’s house. He said Lee’ll pick us up over there.”

“Lee has his mother’s car,” Jude complained. “Why can’t he swing by here to pick us up?”

“He’s power trippin’,” Corey explained. “It’s no big deal. We’ll be there in five minutes on our bikes.”

“It’s not raining anymore,” Jude said. “Let’s walk.”

“That’s what I said,” Corey agreed.

Vinnie Canino was the next member in Jude’s inner circle. The boys started calling him Stallion after Corey saw the movie
Rocky.
So Vinnie Canino became the Italian Stallion. The name, shortened to Stallion, stuck as an affectionate epithet between friends; it never went viral. To the rest of the high school, he was simply Canino, or Vinnie C.—always Vinnie, never Vin or Vincent.

Teenage boys are rarely exactly like their fathers. They say the acorn never falls far from the tree—but sometimes it bounces, rolls down a hill, and strays as far from that tree as acornly possible. Especially if it’s a teenage acorn and Dad’s a dud. Few sixteen-year-olds wanted to hear they were just like their fathers, including Vinnie Canino. Except in Vinnie’s case, it was so totally true. He was a younger version of his old man, spit out by the Master of the Universe’s awesome copy machine. A mini-me. A clone. A glance at Mr. Canino revealed Vinnie’s fate. So the best way to describe Vinnie would be to walk up to his house, ding-dong the doorbell, and hope his father might answer.

“Hey, hey, how ya boys doin’ tonight? Stopped rainin’, huh?” Mr. Canino said now, peeking his head out the door, breathing it all in. “Will ya look at those clouds. Beautiful. Am I right or am I wrong?” It was a rhetorical question. Mr. Canino knew he was right; it was never in doubt. He had that confidence all fathers had, whether they had any brains or not.

Mr. Stanley Canino was short and solid, an Italian fire hydrant. He wore expensive pressed jeans, a perpetual tan, and a black satin button-down shirt like a Vegas entertainer. Squiggly chest hairs tried to climb out of the shirt. His black hair was pulled back into an exceedingly tight ponytail, which set Mr. Canino apart from his neighbors, who did not wear ponytails. On weekends he moonlighted as a drummer in a wedding band, playing all the hits from the seventies, eighties, nineties, and aughties. He was a grown-up Romeo, and his lovely wife, Melinda, had benefited from obvious surgical enhancements that had puffed and pulled and plumped things to alarming dimensions. Something about her face seemed off. Vinnie’s mom was at war against both time and gravity, urged on, no doubt, by Stanley Canino’s hirsute zeal and open checkbook.

“Vinnie’s up in his room—you know the way, boys. Come on inside; you’re lettin’ the bugs in.” He smiled brightly, if distractedly, and spoke in a rapid-fire rhythm. Mr. Canino liked Jude and had even jammed with him a few times on old classics like “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Little Wing.” He often pushed CDs into Jude’s hands, sometimes even breaking out the vinyl. Even so, Mr. Canino laughed most with Corey, going down in the boxer’s crouch, the whole buddy-buddy routine. It was a fact. Everybody’s parents loved Corey; he had a natural way of saying the things that parents liked to hear. Not phony, either. Without effort, Corey made people happy.

The boys knew to slip off their shoes upon entering; it was that kind of house, and the Caninos were that kind of family. The furnishings were ornate and stunningly ugly. Lots of brass—everything seemed to shine—and no chair looked like it would be comfortable to sit on.

Vinnie was in his room, blasting rap, doing curls with forty-pound dumbbells, alternating with sets of push-ups. He was shirtless and glistening, the room smelling of stifled air and sweat. There was a full-length mirror on the closet door that got plenty of use.

Vinnie was upbeat.

“Hell, yeah, I’m ready to go out,” he told the boys. “I’m up for anything, why the hell not? Let’s lock and load and burn this damn town
down.
”

Not in those words exactly, but that was the prevailing Canino sentiment. Vinnie approached life like a Labrador puppy. He was bounding, enthusiastic, flowing with excess energy, good-natured, and often clumsy. Though Vinnie wasn’t a natural fit with Jude and Corey, in real life these kinds of accidental friendships happened all the time. Sometimes the people you hung out with were just old habits, like the worn pathways of shortcuts to school. People got comfortable with each other, tolerant, and accepting. Vinnie was a nice guy and good for a laugh. The Stallion always had money and, like his friends, hadn’t yet found a better way to spend the days and nights—though he was working on it, pretty much full time. Like a fisherman on a pier, Vinnie forever angled for some girl’s affections. That was usually the first question out of Vinnie’s mouth. “Where the girls at tonight? Any parties? Anything going on?”

The Stallion knew the answers would be dismal—the basic info had already been texted and digested—but that was Vinnie, ever the optimist. He was preternaturally on the prowl. There was a girl out there somewhere in the sea, maybe an acrobat or an escapee from some carnival eager to perform unspeakable acts. It was only a matter of putting out the right bait and reeling her home.

Stallion took a quick shower, shaved, splashed on cologne (chum for the ladies!), and was ready by the time Lee, a red-haired senior, showed up in his mother’s Explorer. He pulled alongside the curb and honked.

Stallion charged out the front door and called, “Shotgun, no blitz!”

Corey and Jude never had a chance. When it came to calling shotgun—the right to sit in the front passenger seat—the Stallion was the fastest draw in the East. By adding “no blitz,” Vinnie protected his claim from the dreaded “blitz attack,” when another passenger could still run ahead to reach the passenger door first. The boys followed the official rules of shotgun, a strict set of guidelines that were accepted as if Moses himself had carried them down from the mountaintop on stone tablets. Even amateurs knew that if you yelled “Shotgun!” you got to ride in the front seat. But there existed several complex clauses and loopholes. For example, shotgun could not be called in advance or from indoors or if the caller was not wearing shoes. The boys knew this as “the Canino Addendum,” a rule instituted after barefoot Vinnie had run outside while his guests slipped on their sneakers by the front door. A driver’s girlfriend was not required to call shotgun; it was assumed. And so on.

Safely ensconced in the shotgun seat, Vinnie patted his pockets. “Hold up, I forgot my wallet,” he grumbled. Vinnie realized he was in peril of breaking the reentry rule, which stated that a passenger surrenders shotgun status if he goes back inside for any reason. Resigned to his fate, a downcast Stallion headed back into the house while his thick cologne formed a trail behind him, streaming off his head like the pillowy exhaust from a jet.

By the time Vinnie returned, Corey had positioned himself in the front seat. From the back, Jude had barely noticed. He’d just received another text from Becka.

I just got my hand stuck in a can of Pringles!

ELEVEN

“I talked to the Duffmeister today,” Vinnie announced from the backseat. “He’s a hurting unit.” Vinnie was referring, of course, to their friend Terry O’Duffigan, aka the Duffmeister. According to Vinnie, Terry had gotten his hands on a bottle of vodka the previous night and had attempted to drown himself with it. Turned out to be a bad idea.

The big problem with drinking, Jude believed, was drunk people. They usually acted like idiots. At parties or in the woods with friends, Jude always stayed in control. The Duffmeister was something else entirely. He changed personalities. After a couple of beers, Terry became an outsize version of himself—louder, funnier, happier—until he passed out or threw up. But it never seemed to faze him. Terry liked drinking, maybe too much. Some guys were like that. Girls too.

“Amateur,” Lee scoffed.

Vinnie laughed. “He was up all night, calling Ralph on the big white telephone!”

That got a laugh from everyone. The Duffmeister would be hearing about it for weeks.

“Did he get caught?” Corey asked.

“What do you think?” Vinnie answered. “He was hacking into the toilet bowl. Those things echo! ‘Help me, heeelllp me!’” Vinnie whined in a slurry voice. “Duff’s parents were cool about it, but he decided to lie low tonight.”

Jude tapped a message into his cell:
Drivin around. Bored. U?

The boys were not big partiers. In fact, as a loose group, they could more easily be identified by what they were
not
rather than what they were. Not geeks, not freaks, not burnouts. In that sense they were like the color black, actually an
absence
of color, defined by what it was not: not blue, red, orange, green, heliotrope, or puce. On aimless nights like tonight, when they had no fixed plan other than to “get out,” Lee often grew irritable. He steered his mother’s car down different roads, pulled into fast-food places so they could buy fries and shakes, or on warm nights lean against the bike racks like a shaggy band of brothers, harmless outcasts in basketball kicks, before shoving off again to specifically elsewhere.

Lee pulled the Ford to the curb. He demanded, “Where now, geniuses?”

Shrugs, silence all around.

“I am
not
going to drive around all night if there’s no-freakin’-where to go. It’s stupid and I’m sick of it.”

The guys knew it was all bluff. Lee loved sitting behind that wheel; he just liked complaining about it
almost
as much. As the oldest among them—Lee would be a senior next year—he held a status and a power that made him the King of Saturday Nights. He wasn’t about to surrender his only true advantage. He snapped, “Gas costs money, you know.”

Yup,
yawn
, they knew. So they dug into their pockets, pulled out slim wallets or crumpled bills, pooled their resources, and handed up twelve bucks worth of good times on the asphalt wonderways. Freedom to burn.

“Okay, great,” Lee muttered, organizing and refolding the cash. On principle, he refused to chip in. And what could anyone say to that? He asked again: “Where now?”

It was the conversation Jude dreaded. The “What do you wanna do now?” routine. For days and weeks, months and years they batted the same words back and forth.
What do you want to do? I don’t know: What do you want to do?
It made Jude’s ears ring, a big heavy bell clanging inside his skull. Here they were, done with finals, with nowhere to go. Jude felt trapped in the soft, cushioned boredom of suburban life. Maybe a good place to grow up, and maybe okay for settling down, but Jude was in neither of those places. He was in between, a lit fuse, a teenage rocket exploding, and he felt there was nothing for him on this Wrong Island.

They ran through the usual list of options: the beach, the woods behind the high school, Canino’s basement, Mill Pond, the bowling alley, and on and on. One by one, the ideas were shot down before they could even take wing, like slaughtered ducks on a lake, blood and feathers everywhere.

Jude half considered bagging out altogether—go home and play guitar, watch TV. But he’d take too much crap for bailing now.

“How about the Amityville Horror House?” Corey suggested—fascinated as he was by close encounters with the paranormal. So off the boys went, relieved to have a destination. It was the crucial distinction between wandering around all night like four lost losers or having a purpose. To everyone’s surprise, a squirming Vinnie produced a slim bottle of brown liquid from deep in the nether regions of his jeans.

“Sweet, where’d that come from?” Lee asked.

“Uranus, I think,” Corey commented, frowning.

Vinnie grinned. “I raided my father’s liquor cabinet. He gets bottles all the time as holiday gifts. He’ll never miss it.”

Vinnie unscrewed the cap and gave the bottle a sniff. “Bourbon, boys. Bottoms up!” He lifted the liquor to his lips and slugged down a shot.

“Save some for the rest of us,” Lee complained. “Pass that bad boy up front.”

“Lee—” Corey chided.

“What? You want to get out and walk?” Lee countered, snatching at the bottle. “I’m going to take a sip, that’s all. Since when did you join Mothers Against Drunk Driving?”

Lee offered the drink to Jude, who declined. “Nah, I’m good.”

“Oh, that’s right, you like the runner’s high,” Vinnie teased. “Is it really true, though? After a long run, do you feel all tripped out?”

Jude shrugged.

“The runner’s high,” Lee scoffed. “If I run around the block, all I want to do is throw up a lung.”