The reason Adam looks so squinty and diminished this morning. It’s not the hangover, or the glaring overhead bulb.
He’s not wearing his glasses, is the thing.
“My folks are only three hours away,” he adds. “I’m taking off next week.”
Right, Adam’s “folks.” Adam’s folks, who are divorced, but still “friends.” Still friends. As if marriage and friendship are of the horse and carriage variety. Imagine having “folks,” and they are “friends”: chucking each other on the shoulder, getting together in bars to shoot some pool. Rank opens up the fridge again and sticks his head inside because he doesn’t want Adam to see his face. He has to appear to be looking for something, so he grabs the bottle of cola.
“I told you, man,” he says, staring down at the cap as he unscrews it. “I gotta work.”
Some of us, he wants to say, don’t have “folks” waiting three hours away. Some of us have tiny screaming lunatics instead, waiting in an empty house with a fresh-dead mother congesting every room.
Adam is just standing there and even though Rank has already unscrewed the cap he finds he is too sickened to drink. He stares at the bottle in his hands. If Adam doesn’t go back to bed soon, Rank is going to say something shitty to him. He can feel it creeping up his esophagus and filling his throat with sour. Something irrevocable.
24
08/11/09, 9:35 p.m.
ONE BIG BLOWOUT BEFORE they go their separate ways for Christmas, Kyle insists. Just the four of them. The Boys. The Overseers of the Temple. Kyle is a young man of acute social instinct. It could be that he senses the group has lost cohesion in the past month or so, that the guys are not as tight as they once felt themselves to be. Kyle is not having it. Kyle, at heart, is a sentimental goof — having grown up with only sisters, he calls the other three his “brothers,” insists they’ll be together unto death. Sometimes he rhapsodizes about the four of them going into business together, assigns them each a role based on their diverse talents and gifts (Rank always seems to end up doing the heavy lifting in these scenarios), making scads of money, buying real estate, Italian suits, vacationing with their supermodel girlfriends and, eventually, once wild oats have been thoroughly sown, their children — so beautiful and gifted you’d think they’d been engineered in labs.
Maybe Kyle intuits that these rhapsodies of his — these fantastic future scenarios he’s mapped out for the four of them — are not as heartily indulged by his compadres as once they were. It used to be the boys would join in. Wade would mostly grin and nod while trying to weave a rock star subplot into Kyle’s reverie, and Adam would shake his head and try to explain to Kyle that four guys can’t just start their own business out of the blue (“You need capital. And you need, like, an idea other than just ‘a business’”) and Rank would tell Adam to shut up and insist that they should locate their offices in Trump Tower in New York City. Or, if not Trump Tower, then directly across the street in order to draw inspiration.
“We’ll get an idea, eventually,” Kyle always assured Adam. “An idea will come. What’s important, right now, is the concept. And the concept is us. The four of us are a winning proposition, my brothers, no matter how you slice it.”
Except that lately when Kyle spoke this way, the only one to react with the old enthusiasm was Wade with his reliable grin and nod. Adam would look at his lap. Rank would tilt his head back and finish whatever he was drinking.
And so the boys needed to get together before Christmas, Kyle decided. The boys needed a night on the town, just the old crew — the original four.
“I gotta work,” said Rank.
“I need to study,” said Adam.
“Guys, don’t be dicks,” pleaded Kyle. “When’s everybody’s last exam?”
Everyone but Rank already knew their schedule by heart. Rank was in the process of deciding whether or not to even write his. On the one hand, there was no point; on the other, if he didn’t, it would raise the kind of questions among his friends he wasn’t prepared to face just yet.
Besides, what was wrong with indulging in his college life a little longer, even if it meant the hassle and needless stress of sitting down to write exams, even if he