Never Always Sometimes

It wasn’t long before more people started showing up and the Top 40 hits started blasting. The beer-pong players kept getting louder, the trash talk unraveling into something a little more ridiculous but, Dave had to admit, a lot funnier (“My mom could have hit that shot while conceiving me!”). In came Grant Stephens, wearing of all things his letterman jacket. “I didn’t even know those existed in real life,” Julia said. The rest of the football team showed up, too, some of them hulking inside their striped polo shirts. Juan and Abby, the longtime basketball couple, arrived with their arms around each other. Dave had always thought that they pushed the limits of the school’s PDA policies, but in comparison to their performance that evening, they apparently held back quite a bit of affection on a day-to-day basis.

All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those ungroupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three, friendships that were fairly similar to Dave and Julia’s; people they knew the names of but not much more. Every one of them was pulled in the direction of the beer, then they regrouped into their little planets of social comfort, slowly orbiting around the room and briefly interacting with other planets before making it back to the beer and then hurtling away from it again, their voices louder and their arm gestures more erratic with every trip. Here they were, all these people gathering to drink in abundance and in a variety of ways, chugging beers, taking Jell-O shots from tiny cups like the kind they gave you in the nurse’s office, writing with Sharpies on Melvin Olnyck’s face as soon as he passed out on the couch, Alexandra and Louise from Dave’s economics class making out against the wall right by family photos of the innumerable Kapoor children, even though Dave had never guessed that they were friends, much less a couple.

“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?”

Julia nodded. “I can’t believe this has been happening the whole time we were in high school.”

“I was just thinking that,” Dave said. He finished off his beer and took a few steps to place it atop one of the many beer can pyramids that had started popping up around the house. “I’m gonna try to find the bathroom. Don’t get swallowed up by this madness.”

“Wait, Dave, before you go.”

“Yeah?”

God, she was beautiful. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the alcohol and the warmth of so many people inside the house. She stepped out of her high heels, suddenly the height he’d always known her to be. Relief visibly washed over her. She closed her eyes for a second, her toes curling and uncurling against the sticky kitchen floor. “That felt so good I might start wearing high heels just for the pleasure of removing them.” She sighed with a smile. “Okay, I just wanted you to witness that. You can go pee now.”

He smiled at her, then made his way through the groups of increasingly drunken classmates to find the bathroom.

EMPTY COLORING BOOKS (#ulink_5c3e4ccd-91b7-5222-a8bb-525562b7725d)

DAVE FLUSHED AND washed his hands, drying them off on his jeans since the single hand towel was clearly soaked through. He glanced briefly at himself in the mirror, wondering what he would look like in a polo shirt and then shaking off the thought, or more like shuddering it away the way he did with nightmares. This had been an interesting experiment, but now it was time to find Julia and go back to their little world of two.

Except that the party had rearranged itself while Dave was in the bathroom. The number of people in the kitchen had doubled. Beer pong was over and now there was a new game being played, one he’d seen Brett and his friends play, though he’d never really cared enough to try to understand it. Julia wasn’t where they’d been standing for most of the night.

He surveyed the room but couldn’t spot her, which surprised him. He was so used to looking for her that he felt unreasonably skillful at it, as if no matter how many people were around his eyes would easily land on her. Her presence called out to him like a beacon.

“Dave!” Vince Staffert shouted on his approach, clearly drunk. “Yo!”

“Hey, Vince.”

“Come play flip cup with us. We need one more.” He put his arm around Dave’s shoulders and started pulling him away from the wall.

“Uh, I don’t really know how to play,” Dave said, trying to hold his ground.

“Dave, you got into UCLA. I’m sure you can figure out a drinking game.”

Caught off guard by Vince knowing that about him, Dave stammered, “I—I shouldn’t. Julia and I were just about to go.”

Vince sometimes asked Dave for help in math class, and from those few interactions, Dave had always thought of him as a nice guy. He knew there was another side to Vince, football player that he was, but all he’d ever seen was someone big and quiet and not so good at math.

“This house is not that big. She’ll find you.” Vince pulled him to the kitchen table. Cups were scattered and stacked across the surface, little puddles of beer pooling together. The other team consisted of two guys and two girls, none of whom Dave knew on a first-name basis, though he’d seen them around school.

“Guys, I’m not sure you want me on your team.”

“Yeah, I agree,” one of the other football players said to Vince.

“AJ, don’t be a dick. Here,” Vince said, pouring some beer in a cup, which by the looks of it had been used many a time throughout the night. “The game’s easy,” he declared and explained the rules in a few seconds. “Got it?” Once, Dave and Julia had misread a flyer and, thinking they were about to see an author they loved, had accidentally attended a reading at the library by the West Coast’s leading researcher on menopause. So it’d be hard to say that this was the most out of place Dave had ever felt. But it was close enough.

Dave sighed. He and Julia had avoided all of this because they’d wanted their high school years to be a little more unique than everyone else’s. And yeah, they were here to see what they’d successfully avoided, but Dave had meant to just be an observer.

Dave surveyed the room one last time for Julia. The blue of her eyes, those three freckles on her neck. But she was nowhere around, and so he checked his phone. A text from her was waiting on his screen. Went off to explore the craziness on my own. Best story at the end of the night wins. Godspeed.

He smiled at the words, at what a great idea it was. Julia could turn any situation into something inherently more interesting. You’re on,he wrote back, already looking forward to reuniting with her, though he had no doubts she would have the better story.

Then he gave Vince a nod and turned his attention to the game.

o o o

Seventeen wins in a row later, Dave could feel the alcohol practically bubbling in his veins. It felt a little like doing a somersault underwater and then coming up really quickly, your head spinning and sending a warm tingle down your spine. Dave, it turned out, was prodigiously good at flip cup. He’d yet to fail at flipping a cup over. Every time it was his turn, he’d swallow the beer down in a second or two, and with one deft move of his hand, the cup would be upside down on the table without so much as a wobble.

Vince was nearly in hysterics, throwing a meaty arm around Dave’s neck, high-fiving everyone in the vicinity with his other hand, yelling about them being the world champions until no one else wanted to play them.

He and Vince walked outside without discussion, as if they were magnetically drawn to the fresh air. Dave looked around for Julia, wanting her to be nearby, longing to just exchange stupid jokes back and forth like they’d been doing for so long. He was going to break away and look for her, but then he noticed the briskness of the air and the way everyone seemed to be smiling and he took a seat with Vince on a bench.

“How come we’ve never hung out before, Dave?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. He burped, then chuckled at the thought of two dudes drinking beers and burping together. “Probably ’cause of Julia,” he added. “I’m usually trying to spend my time with her.”

“I’ve always wondered, are you two dating?”

“Nah. Just friends,” Dave said, a line he was used to delivering with as little emotion as possible, as if he were a spy trying not to be discovered.

Vince crushed his beer can in his hand and placed it by his feet. He put his hands on his knees—smaller hands than Dave would have expected from someone Vince’s size. “Since the truth serum known as Keystone Light is coursing through my veins, I’m gonna open up a bit here. You ready for it?”

“I’m ready,” Dave said, wondering what Julia would make of the conversation.

“You can handle it? Peering deep into my soul?”

“To be honest, right now it kind of feels like I can peer into everyone’s soul.”

“That sounds pretty scary to me,” Vince said with a smile. He ran a hand over his head, which was shaved recently, only the thinnest layer of fuzz starting to show through. “I am so in love,” he groaned, putting his elbows on his knees and slouching over. “Two years, man. She’s like some sickness I can’t get rid of.”

“Who?”

“Carly,” he said quietly, though no one was paying enough attention to them to hear. “She’s all I think about.” Vince looked so sad all of a sudden.

“Does she know?”

“I was always waiting for the right time to tell her, then she met some guy from Pacific Beach. At one of our games, no less. She’s been dating him for over a year, and I’ve barely been able to sleep since. I wake up at four a.m. thinking of things to say to her, and I repeat them to myself until my alarm goes off and it’s time to go to school to stop myself from saying it.”

Dave made a little hum of agreement in the back of his throat. Inside the house, people were taking pictures of themselves on their phones, making faces, kissing each other on the cheek. Their eyes were glazed over, and everyone seemed to be either shouting across the room or whispering into someone else’s ear. He couldn’t remember who Carly was. “You could tell her anyway. Just to get it off your chest.”

“I don’t want it off my chest, though. It keeps me close to her. Plus, she’s happy, and it’s not my place to disturb that.” He sat back against the bench and smiled sadly. “Is that weird?”

“Nah, it’s not weird. Actually, Julia and I have this list...” He stopped himself when he couldn’t think of how to phrase what he wanted to say without calling Vince a cliché. So many people were quietly in love that he and Julia considered it part of a normal high school experience and had therefore sworn it off. But Dave hadn’t really thought about it in those terms in a long time. Pining silently was a cliché, which meant that people were constantly in love with each other without saying a thing about it. How much unrequited, unspoken love filled up the halls every day? How many kids in class felt exactly like Dave did on a day-to-day basis? “You’re probably not alone,” Dave finally settled for. “I’m sure most of us are thinking about someone else when we’re in class.”

“Yeah, but that’s mostly horniness.”

They chuckled, then Dave finished his beer and crumpled it like Vince had. “Do you want to talk more about Carly?”