missing was a case of Bounty paper towels, because this former cheerleader was a squirter, and by the time we were done there was a mess all over the backseat of the Buick, and, even worse, all our body heat and friction had baked it into the fabric. There was no way I could bring my parents’ car home smelling like diluted girl pee. We’re not Germans. I had to fix this.
At some point the sun started to rise over the mountains. That could mean only one thing: Home Depot was about to open. I dropped Alexa off back at the party house, where her car was parked, and then ran to the Depot to get some of that industrial-strength carpet cleaner they use at motel crime scenes. Right there in the parking lot, I got to scrubbing like Lady Macbeth.
I’m not complaining, I promise. I had no problem diving in and cleaning out that backseat. I was like a toddler who fingerpaints his bedroom walls with the poop from his dirty diaper and then stands back to admire it. Yeah, Mom, I did that. I made this mess. Or at least, I made her make this mess. I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
A few nights later, as the parade of house parties marched on, I switched things up and left with a girl named Meg whom I barely remembered from high school. Meg was a year older than me. From a high school hierarchy perspective, there was nothing exceptional about her—she wasn’t a Regina George type or a cheerleader or Megan-Fox-in-Transformers hot. Nothing that would have made her stick out in my memory. She was just a cool person who was fun to talk to that night and whom I knew about as well as anyone knows half the people they were friends with on MySpace. In essence, I liked her profile picture and wanted to slide into those PMs. Fortunately for me, her privates were not set to private, and by the end of the night she wanted to go back to her place so that I could put MySpace into HerSpace. I was excited, because I was getting kind of tired of fucking in my parents’ car. There’s only so much you can do in a sedan.
Spoiler Alert: Be careful what you wish for, boys and girls, because you just might get it.
There’s something you need to understand about where I grew up: There are actually two Santa Barbaras. One is fabulously wealthy and posh, with huge homes, lush gardens, and amazing views. People like Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Cruise have houses there. Sometimes people call it Montecito, other times they’ll call it the American Riviera, and it’s as beautiful as the pictures in the brochure. Then there is the Santa Barbara with houses that look like they washed ashore after an Indonesian tsunami fifty years ago and came to rest under some palm trees. That’s the Santa Barbara I am from.
That’s the Santa Barbara that Meg’s house was in. If you even want to call it a house. It was so small that Meg and her family probably qualified as being homeless in the state of California. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than 900 square feet.
When we got to the front door, she put her finger to her lips. “Keep it down when you walk inside, my parents are sleeping,” she instructed me. Keep it down? I wasn’t worried about waking them up with my voice, I was more concerned with stepping on them or hitting them with the door when we walked in.
“Okay, but won’t they be able to hear us, you know, doing stuff?”
“No, we’ll go out to the garage. My brother has it built up pretty cool. We’ll be alone in there.”
What is this place, the Goonies house? Is your brother Josh Brolin? Is he going to be in there fondling a chest expander and eye-fucking me? I had so many questions, but I put them all aside because Meg was going to let me trust-fall into her vagina, and insulting her home was a surefire way to fall on my face.
“All right,” I said. “Lead the way.”
We tiptoed through her dollhouse kitchen and she guided me into the garage, which she illuminated by pulling the string on a single forty-five-watt bulb suspended from an I-beam that held up the roof. I was right. It did look like the Goonies garage. There were posters of fast cars