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