Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,6

the closed door with an increasing sense

of regret.

“Cool,” the Kapoor said, letting the tinfoil drop back down. Then

he walked past them through the empty living room and toward the

kitchen.

“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Dave whispered.

“Of course we have,” Julia said. “That was the point.” Then she

started making her way across the shag carpet, gingerly stepping

ahead as if tiptoeing through poisonous bushes. She held out her

DAVE 27

arms for balance, and Dave walked by her side so she’d have him to

lean against.

“I’ll have you know that I’m about to start a dance-off.”

“Oh, shush. We’ve only had one interaction. And he wasn’t all that

amusing.”

Dave stopped walking, nearly causing Julia to tip over. “Julia. A red

plastic cup full of beer and a popped collar. On a polo shirt. The only thing that would have topped that introduction to the party was if he

WOOH ed at us.”

“Your standards are too low. This might be the only high school

party I ever go to. I want to see plenty of it.”

“So you can look back fondly at the glory days?”

Julia poked him in the stomach, which he kind of took as the

equivalent of when he grabbed her head and shook. “Goof.”

They stood there in the empty living room for a second, mostly

just smiling at each other. Dave imagined that if anyone walked into

the room at that point it might look like they loved each other in the

same way.

“Come on,” Julia said. “The night is young. We have a lot of people

to make fun of.”

In the kitchen, the two other Kapoor triplets stood at one end of a

plastic lawn table. They were setting up red plastic cups into a triangle on the table, pouring little measures of beer into each one. They, too,

wore polo shirts, though each a different color and with the collars

blissfully kept down. Three other guys, vaguely recognizable from

28 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES

school, lingered by the table, arguing about who had called “next.”

A girl was at the speaker system choosing songs. She was wearing

sneakers, not high heels, but Dave decided not to point that out.

“Not exactly what I’d imagined,” Dave whispered to Julia.

“Pretty underwhelming,” Julia agreed.

They waved hello to the six people at the party, and after casually

obliterating a couple of cupcakes, they each grabbed a beer and stood

near the beer-pong table, listening to the Kapoors trash-talk the two

guys who’d won the argument and taken next game. Every now and

then Dave would help by picking up the Ping-Pong ball and handing

it over, then wiping the dirt-flecked remnants of beer against his jeans.

“What about this did Brett feel we couldn’t handle?” Dave asked.

“The excitement, I’m sure.” Julia sipped from her beer can and

looked around the room, disappointed. Good, Dave thought. Next

week they’d be back to their movie night.

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

DAVE 29

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