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Patrick’s leaning against the dryer, staring at the floor while the washing machine rumbles hollow-sounding next to him. The tremors pass through the metal into his spine, collecting inside the bowl of his skull. He’s down to his underwear, and he feels uncomfortably naked, all his pale hairs standing on end, socked feet rubbing against the stone floor. Inside the machine swirls last night’s clothes, and among them Pete’s t-shirt, too small for Patrick, which he thought he’d given back already.
He has an hour until he has to be at school. He’s already thinking about desk naps and skipping lunch to hide in the back of the library with his Walkman. No band practice. He’ll come home and do homework. Or maybe take the bus into town and look at all the hundreds of records he dreams of buying, picking them up and running his hands over them carefully then feeling guilty about it when he puts them back.
His mom walks past the open door as Patrick’s shoving his wet clothes over to the dryer. “Good morning, honey,” she says, not surprised and not asking. She’s had two teen boys. She never asks.
“Morning,” Patrick mumbles back. Because it is morning, now, even though it wasn’t a couple hours ago. A couple hours ago was dark windows and someone’s lumpy couch and Yo La Tengo on the stereo, guitars churning, air buzzing, a hand on his thigh that might have been his own, dry eyes blinking up at the popcorn ceiling.
He yawns at the flashes of memory. His bloodstream is cleared out but his head is totally fuzzy. He needs to get some sleep; he’s going to be dead all day, a zombie shuffling from class to class to class to parking lot to front door to bed.
It never occurs to him that he could just skip class, if he really wanted, and just crawl back under his covers. That would be going too far — Patrick’s not that kind of kid.
Patrick has lived his whole life in the modest end of suburbia, in the neighborhood his mom makes just enough to afford trapping them in. He does most of his chores and avoids conversations about the curfew she’s too busy to enforce. He goes to every band practice he can manage and only asks to borrow the car on weekends. He bought his own guitar with his own money. He gets his own rides to shows and parties and back, makes sure he will never owe or beg his way home again. He’s never cut more class than he could make up, or missed school because of a hangover. He never takes a goddamn thing too far.
“Have a nice day,” his mom mumbles from behind her coffee mug. Patrick says “You too,” and skips breakfast.
He goes to school, he comes home, he does his homework. At the bus stop, he pauses and rubs his thumb against the thin leather wallet his dad bought for him when he was fourteen, weighs his options against the last twenty he has, then keeps walking. The air is heavy with rain that doesn’t fall. In the middle of French homework, conjugations lined up like barracks across his desk, Joe texts him about the last minute band practice tomorrow for the gig they’ve got coming up on Friday.
Patrick texts back: Ok. His guitar watches him struggle over irregular verb endings from its spot next to his bookshelf like a reminder. Or a distraction, according to his mom. She thinks he’s going to college.
Practice at Joe’s goes alright, maybe better than usual. They’re actually improving. It makes hope blossom, sickly like early spring sunlight, in Patrick’s chest, because high school has never felt more like wasted hours between real life than it does now.
He’s got no illusions about this band they’re doing — they don’t even have a name for themselves. They have maybe a handful of mostly shitty songs. They’re shuffling drummers like cards. They’ve never made a buck that lasted the end of the night. But music is starting to solidify into a genuine option for his future, in one form or another, and that’s enough to get Patrick grinning stupid over his guitar, practicing alone in his bedroom later.
Pete had been no more or less annoying at practice than usual, draping himself over Patrick like that too-small shirt still sitting in the dryer and saying stupid shit like he would to a girl to rile Patrick up because its funny when guys say that stuff to each other, but it gets to him today for some reason. Patrick tells him to fuck off and play bass. Pete doesn’t, which might explain why he sucks at it. Patrick points this out too; Pete grins wide and says more stupid shit like that passion right there, Patty, that is what’s gonna get us there, we’re gonna go super sonic it’ll be great it’ll be fucking gorgeous, you’ll take us there on your genius Stump rocket and then we’ll all go boom.
Patrick tells Pete he’s crazy and fails to shrug him off because he’s smaller and has an older brother already and knows when to resign to a bigger body. Lately when Pete touches him there’s a vibration that starts up in the base of his skull and it makes it hard to think. He’s been pulling his punches less, which makes Pete wheeze and laugh like an asshole, and Patrick wants to hit him even harder until Pete finally shows him some fucking respect or his skull caves in, whichever comes first. Patrick wants to use the ammunition he’s been collecting from their kinder, quieter moments, wants to say something so toe-curlingly cruel that he cries. But he doesn’t know Pete’s limits, and it’s not Patrick’s band, ultimately. Like every other thing in his stupid life, it’s not up to him.
Patrick thinks sometimes that he’s got to be the angriest person he knows, because it doesn’t look like anyone else is walking around on the verge of catching fire every single second of every single day. Sometimes his body aches with the tremors he has to keep in. Sometimes he wants to scream until his lungs collapse.
“That would be irresponsible,” Pete tells him. “You’re our singer now, Lunchbox, remember?”
Joe watches them with his big round eyes and tells them to shut the hell up and focus, guys, c’mon, we’re supposed to actually get paid for this gig, Pete did you call your guy about drumming for us on Friday and Patrick bites his cheek until he tastes pennies and ignores the way Pete looks at him and then doesn’t look at him.
After practice Joe drives him back to his mom’s house, grumbles about needing gas but doesn’t stop, which Patrick is kind of disappointed by because he wanted Sour Patch Kids and the delay. Sometimes it’s easier to not be home.
The house is empty when he gets back and it stays that way until Patrick comes down to grab a Sprite and finds his mom getting wine drunk at the table, staring intently down at the wood grain, mouth pursed in that tell-tale shape.
“Hey,” he says.
She blinks up at him, registering, eyes not quite in focus. “Hi.” Her head dips a bit, and she looks like she might say something else, then doesn’t. It’s familiar and unfailingly disturbing to see her like this: absent, hazy, drink-dumb. She stops being his mom in these moments while he still has to be her son. He prefers it the other way around.
No Sprite in the fridge. He digs behind the orange juice and the milk carton and ends up with a Coke instead. He sips at it with the door still open, cold air on his face, wishing it would make his head feel as fuzzy as the bubbles do on his tongue.
His mom says something behind him, voice in a croak. Patrick turns around and the fridge closes right as he says, “What?”
“Are— Do you,” she pauses, frowning at herself, speaking in the slow, easily lost rhythm of someone truly wasted, “dinner tomorrow? Will you be home?”
“Um,” Patrick glances at the dark window above the sink and suddenly realizes the rain is finally coming down. “No, I’ve got the band tomorrow. We got a gig.”
His mom’s still frowning. “Okay.” Then, after a pause, “Make sure you do your homework.”
“Okay, mom.”
“I mean it, Patrick. Homework comes first. Before…”
“Yeah.”
“Before any band.”
“Yeah, mom, I know.”
“Because music… music is important, important to you, but it’s not— you need college. You need an education, or you won’t be… life will be hard. For you.”
“I know.”
“I want you to have a good life.” Her voice is thick like soup. “You’re my baby.”
Patrick nods wordlessly in the doorway. His throat aches, just a little.
“Your father—” she starts, and frowns deeper, and Patrick really, really doesn’t want to hear it, so he cuts her off with a quick okay and escapes upstairs.
The gig goes alright. They don’t get paid.
The guy Pete got to drum isn’t great but he’s steady, probably steadier than most of the guys that have laid a beat behind Patrick while he tries to do anything else but acknowledge the audience standing around him, so that’s something. Patrick’s hoping he’s available in the future, maybe even to join the band, right up until he laughs at two of the few repeat faces in the crowd from their previous shows and calls them ugly cows. That kind of stuff doesn’t really bother most people, but Patrick can never let his mom find out about a guy like that being together in a band with him.
Not that Pete doesn’t say the same shit and worse sometimes. Patrick knows him, though, and he doesn’t know this guy. That makes a difference.
Afterwards they go over to a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Pete’s and there’s mostly straightedge dudes there so it takes a while for the booze to show up, but when it does it’s someone’s dad’s cabinet whiskey and it goes down like a throat punch. Before that happens the music is already up way too loud and Pete’s getting that cheerful kind of aggressive that Patrick doesn’t want any part of, grinning big and agitated and shouting across the house and breaking things just to hear them break, so Patrick and Joe shuffle through unfamiliar rooms until they show up in the kitchen at just the right moment and then things start getting kind of weird, politics that go over their dumb drunk heads while they slip out to the porch.
Joe borrows a cigarette and Patrick stands a couple steps away, feeling the smoke tickle the back of his throat and draw his lungs tight. Joe doesn’t notice at first, practicing smoke rings. He likes to show them off, thinks it’ll get him girls or cred or whatever, which is important to Joe.
They chat for a while with a guy who dropped out of college to roadie for a hardcore band that disintegrated before it ever made it out of the Midwest and now does sound for a lot of the local basement clubs. Patrick is fascinated and keeps staring at his lip ring, which is much cooler than Joe’s, and asks a bunch of annoying little kid questions about his setup. The guy answers them all, biting at the metal when he thinks and it makes a clicking noise that Patrick can feel in his own teeth. His skull is buzzing again.
Beyond the door something crashes loud and the cool sound guy goes inside to see what’s up. Everyone on the porch complains about the guy whose house they’re at, and his group of friends, which may or may not include Pete but probably does right now. Someone says something about going somewhere else. Then a house lights up like a beacon a few streets over, and soon enough they’ve all ditched the yelling behind the door and stumbled across the suburban asphalt to a warmer, wetter party.
Patrick sinks into the feeling. Sinks and sinks and sinks. It’s like dunking his head underwater and resurfacing somewhere else. The in-between runs down the drain.
It’s like this after every gig. Gigs are an oasis. High school is taking too long, and parties are a way of killing time: lose a couple hours, lose a couple nights, and pretty soon it all starts to add up and weeks go by with Patrick barely in them.
He drinks whatever is in the cup someone hands him. After the whiskey, everything goes down easy, his throat open and relaxed, and when he tells this to the raccoon-eyed girl next to him, she giggles and shoves her fingers into his mouth and a bunch of people are watching him swallow with interest and disgusted glee.
“Nice party trick.”
Patrick can’t tell if she means it kindly or not, so he says thanks and wipes the spit off his lips and forgets to stare at the floor. For some reason, he’s imagining Pete doing that to him and laughing the same way, grossed out and delighted and maybe a little mean. It’s not hard to picture. Pete likes making fun of him.
Her grin is salacious as she comments, “You know, I’ve never seen a guy show off that he doesn’t have a gag reflex before,” and puts the emphasis on guy, so Patrick knows she’s wondering.
“Yeah,” he mumbles, looking around dizzily at a living room he’s never seen before, the striped rug under the coffee table, the fake plant next to the flatscreen, the ugly plates up on the mantel. “Yeah, um, it’s not usually like that. I mean, I have one. A gag reflex. I’m just,” he meets her eyes then looks back at the plates and imagines shattering them, “you know. Drunk.”
She finds this funny, and wants to know more about it. He’s distracted by the guy to her left who keeps staring, and pretty sure he’s going to vomit if she puts her fingers down his throat again. His heart throbs, once, so hard and sudden that he feels sick in his whole body.
“I need some water,” he announces, and escapes.
The thing about parties is that they fracture. Patrick doesn’t know where Pete ended up, or Joe for that matter, or which series of rooms and hallways and houses brought him to the door he’s standing in front of which might lead to a bathroom or a bedroom or a basement staircase. The door is white and there’s a chip in the wood just below the handle, a groove torn forcefully and abruptly that left splinters like rows of shark teeth. The handle is silver, and warm under Patrick’s sweaty palm. The hand on his shoulder shifts to his nape, cupping the base of his skull like it’s trying to smother the vibration buzzing beneath the skin. His blood is boiling. He leans forward.
When Patrick gets home there’s moths that have been dead against the porch bulb for hours and his mom has left a note on the table about tupperware in the fridge. Forgot you weren’t coming home for dinner so I made extra, it says. Get some sleep this weekend. Love you.