involved pouring a greenish puddle of olive oil onto your side plate, meant to be soaked up by bread.
Rank watched as Kyle dumped some kind of brown syrup onto the plate to mingle with his olive oil. The two formed a greasy yin-yang.
“That’s disgusting,” said Rank.
Kyle glanced up, smiling at him indulgently like a kindergarten teacher. “It’s balsamic, man. Try some.”
I’d rather try my own toe jam, Gordon Sr. opined in Rank’s head. So Rank made himself lean over and wipe his bread on Kyle’s plate.
“It’s good, right?” said Kyle.
“You know what else is good on bread?” grunted Rank. “Like, butter.”
Kyle was about to crack a joke at Rank’s ill-bred expense, when Adam, who had been silently hoovering his minestrone this whole time, remarked, “Why don’t you just fucking order some?”
Kyle and Rank both turned to stare at him, but Adam hadn’t bothered looking up from his soup. A couple of moments of silence went by, not at all in keeping with a celebratory evening among four raucous pals. Kyle dabbed a chunk of bread into his yin-yang, frowning, as Wade sat gazing obliviously out the window as if hoping for a glimpse of his neo-hippie beloved. Adam finished off his soup, not bringing it up to his face and slurping the dregs as Rank would have done, but tilting the bowl this way and that and fiddling with the spoon forever to catch every drop and morsel. Rank watched Adam until finally Adam noticed he was being watched.
“What?” said Adam.
“What,” repeated Rank. “You know what.”
Adam stared at him through his glasses. “What?” he said again, scarcely moving his lips.
“You’ve got a bug up your ass is what,” said Kyle.
There was something about Kyle’s rejoinder that broke the spell of hostility bouncing between Adam and Rank. It had taken shape abruptly, for no fathomable reason, and Rank was relieved to feel it dissipate. It was the opposite of what he wanted to happen that night, but he’d felt helpless against its weird surge.
Adam turned to Kyle. “I do not.”
“Yeah, you do,” said Rank, settling comfortably into the familiar ganging-up-on-Adam group dynamic. “It’s up there so high you probably can’t even feel it anymore.”
“It’s way up there,” agreed Kyle. “Impacted-colon up there. Way, way up.”
“Like the Friendly Giant,” exclaimed Wade, as if waking out of sleep. This was so left field, they all cracked up.
“I have been locked in my room studying for the last three days,” admitted Adam. “I’m ready to kill someone.”
“You wanna punch me?” said Rank. “I’ll let you punch me in the face.”
“Maybe later,” said Adam, smiling at his empty bowl.
Press pause. Zoom out. Look at the four of them giggling, pouring wine for one another, sitting around the table in their jeans-and-sweater nice guy uniforms, the occasional, innocuous swipe of hair gel and heavy whiff of Drakkar cologne. Fresh-shaved faces and napkins in their laps.
They’re just kids — let’s remember this, okay? That’s the thing to keep in mind as this particular evening spreads itself against the sky.
Two bottles of wine at the Italian restaurant and Rank’s lasagne ended up being basically a trough of mozzarella and therefore one of the most wonderful things he’d ever consumed — so the mood has improved by the time they hit the student pub. It’s early and there are not a lot of people there but that’s okay because the boys don’t want to be tempted to stay for more than a couple of hours anyway. They have promised one another to conduct a pub crawl this night, as half-decent a crawl as is achievable in a town of only three pubs. They will start at the U, then hit the Leeside across from the strip mall to try out the karaoke machine, and finally polish the evening off at Goldfinger’s nice and late when the action tends to be at its plastered, orgiastic apex. This, of course, another Kyle directive. Rank, personally, has experienced the aforementioned apex night after night — could frankly do without the apex. The apex often involves middle-aged women in various stages of undress laid out completely insensible on the dance floor, if not perilously animated, trying to climb up onto the bar and lead the crowd in a confused singalong/striptease. Or else some guy trying to break into one of the VLTs using the cranium of anyone he happens not to like the look of. Or vomiting. The apex often entails a great deal of human throwup.