Almost Kings Read online

  “About twelve point eight or nine.”

  “Sounds right.”

  He pulled out a pen and wrote a few numbers on his hand.

  “Yeah,” he said. “About right. Next time, you give it to the hundredth.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Twelve point nine,” he said. “And that's just one game in, against a good secondary, too.”

  He was smiling now. He rolled his head back against the back of his chair, feeling the metal against his skull. Above us, the stadium light hid the stars.

  Truck came out of the locker room, his hair still wet from showering. A small circle of friends and parents were lining the exit to the locker room and applauded as each player came out. Moms and girlfriends gave their boys hugs. Truck walked up to us, and Dad told him to lean in close. Truck hesitated for a second but then did as he'd been told, and Dad wrapped his arms around him.

  “You did good today,” he said.

  “We won,” said Truck. “That's what matters.”

  “Okay,” my dad said. “I'll get out of your hair. You go have fun tonight.” He turned to me and added. “You too. But you're home by midnight, got me?”

  I nodded, and he wheeled himself back away from us, out of the stadium lights and into the dark.

  “Midnight?” asked Truck when he was gone. “He's getting soft on you.”

  “I'm in high school now.”

  “It was ten for me when I was a freshman.”

  We walked over to join a cluster of his friends gathered around a table near the closed refreshment stand. All the Kings were there: Hass, Wood, Reggie and Miller. Lizzie sat to the side of them, watching jealously as they snuck sips from a hip flask. I sat next to her and she put an arm around my waist.

  “Reggie was just telling me you got into your first fight.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I got a little help from Hass. It was pretty awesome.”

  “Bug took it like a man,” said Hass. He offered me the flask, but Truck grabbed it and took a swig.

  “How about being a gentleman and telling your little friend it's okay to come over and play?” asked Lizzie. She pointed out Kallea, standing near the bleachers and looking at her phone. “She's been checking her messages for like fifteen minutes.”

  I waved to Kallea and motioned for her to come over. She put her phone in the pocket of her hoodie and walked over to us.

  “You two coming to the party at Reggie's place?” asked Hass, and Truck glared at him.

  “It's a six-pack party,” Lizzie said. “As in, you need a six-pack to get in.”

  “You got a couple for me and Kallea?” I asked, but Truck shook his head.

  “Not this time,” he said and took another drink from his flask.

  A few minutes later they were gone. Their cars pulled away, and I stood alone with Kallea by the bus ramp, watching their taillights again.

  I said, “Screw this.”

  “He doesn't want you to go,” she said. “So what?”

  There was a liquor store four blocks away. Two grocery stores with beer aisles a few blocks after that.

  “All we need is two six-packs,” I said. “We must know someone who can hook us up.”

  “Yeah,” Kallea said. “Your brother.”

  Even with a six-pack, would Truck let me in to the party? It would have been easy enough for him to get me one. But he’d set the rules now, and he’d abide by them. If I showed up at the doorstep, beers in hand, he’d let me in. Yes. He'd have to.

  “Okay,” I said. “So we get it ourselves.”

  4.

  The Safeway had cameras and a security guard. Ray's, across the street, had neither. It was half-grocery-store, half-warehouse, the kind of place that sold bulk food side by side with boxes of Cheerios and beer, with aisles laid wide enough for a forklift to drive through and excess goods stacked high overhead. As Kallea and I got to the doorway, I told her to wait in the parking lot.

  “You don't have to do this to impress me,” she said. “Seriously, I just got Akira from Netflix. I know you've been wanting to watch that.”

  “Just wait here,” I said. The doors parted for me as I walked in, and the cool air of the supermarket rushed out at us. I went inside. With every step I took toward the beer aisle in the back of the store, the air got colder, chilling each bead of sweat on my arms and chest. I looked up and down the aisle.

  I had no idea what beer was good, only that whatever my dad brought home wasn't it. An old man walked past me, and he could barely lift the case he put in his shopping cart. Even with the cold, I sweated. I was about to reach for a sixer when some college kids came down the aisle, stacking case after case into their empty cart and talking about beer pong techniques. When two more middle-aged guys walked by, I picked up two six-packs of fancy bottled root beer and put them into my cart.

  Kallea watched me through the glass doors as I got to the register. I put the root beer sixers on the checkout stand, and the cashier rang me up.

  Maybe I could sneak into the party with these. Truck would be tipsy by this point. He probably wouldn't notice. I could even scuff the label on the side of the pack, make sure the “root” didn’t show. No. He'd know. And he'd be mad. He was always mad when I tried to lie to him, just like Dad.

  I paid for the root beer, and the cashier put the bottles into a paper bag. Kallea rocked from side to side in the parking lot, looking ready to sprint. We would show up at the doorstep of Reggie's place and get laughed out. Kallea would say it was fine, then sit at the far end of the couch as we watched some movie.

  “Wait,” I told the cashier. “I forgot something.”

  I carried the paper bag with me as I walked back to the beer aisle. The bottles clinked against each other, and the cooling units at the back of the store hissed like breath. When I looked around, I saw no one. Fast as I could, I picked the bottles out of the bag and put them back where I'd first found them. Then I took two sixers of real beer and put them into the bag.

  I looked over my shoulder. No one there. I spent some time walking through the snack aisle and grabbed a bag of Oreos. The brown bag holding the beer had gone damp at the sides, and I imagined it bursting at the bottom, the beer shattering against the peeling tiled floor. I peered down the aisle and saw no other customers in line. My heart beat a dozen times for every step I took toward the cashier.

  “That's it?” she asked, looking down at the Oreos, then at the bag.

  “Looks like it.”

  She scanned the Oreos and handed them to me. I put them in the bag on top of the beer. Kallea was giving me possum-in-the-headlights eyes from the parking lot.

  “Hey,” said the cashier, her eyes darting back and forth between me and the bag. “I know you, right? Ron Wheeler's kid?”

  “I usually shop at Safeway.”

  “You ever hear from your mom?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Must be tough on you all,” she said. “I knew your dad in high school. He was a good guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked down at the bag in my cart. The wet spots on the bag’s side had grown larger and threatened to tear.

  “Well—” She paused. Another customer waited behind me, her cart full of vegetables and paper towels. “You tell your dad that Laurie said 'hi'.”

  I pushed the cart toward the exit to the store. As I walked, I had the sudden image of a guard shooting me from behind, the way the bullet would enter my back and spray out from my chest, trailing blood and pieces of my ribs. Then the doors opened and the warm air brushed against me.

  “Holy shit,” said Kallea, once we were safely around a corner. “You even got good stuff.” She was breathing fast but smiling, as if she'd walked into the store with me and made the same escape.

  I smiled and breathed out. The surface of my skin had started to warm again, but I still felt cold in my muscles.

  “Let's go,” I said. “Be good and I'll let you have one.”

  5.
<
br />   Twenty minutes later, we stood in front of Reggie's place, a two-story, six-bedroom McMansion twelve blocks up from the Boulevard. It stood in the center of a new development and its neighbors sat mostly unsold and empty. Every light in the house was on, and the windows shook from a T-Pain song, the stereo's bass knob turned all the way up.

  “Nice house,” said Kallea. “Reggie's the really fat one, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lineman.”

  As we walked up to the door, Wood dipped a girl over the balcony, his short, muscled arms straining against her weight. A bottle fell from her hand and crashed into a bush on the ground floor.

  “Hey!” she said, slapping at him, but she was laughing.

  “Don't hit too hard or I'll let you go.”

  “No you won't.”

  He pulled her up, pressed her up against the balcony, and kissed her hard on the mouth. She let him pull up her skirt as he pressed against her with his jeans.

  “Should we knock?” asked Kallea.

  I handed her a six-pack before I rapped loudly on the door. A few seconds later it flew open, and Hass stared down at me. He'd duct-taped a sixer to the front of his pants like a fanny pack, and the bottles inside were all of different colors.

  “Bug!” he said. “Hell yes! Come on in, man. What you packing? You want to trade?” He pulled a green bottle from his six-pack, I held mine out, and he swapped them. “Look at you. Fancy microbrews and shit. Didn't know your family had such a sophisticated palate.”

  He pulled an opener out of his pants, popped the cap off one of my beers, and handed it to me. I took a drink, and it tasted better than I'd expected.

  “Come on in,” said Hass. “Just don't leave those beers lying around. People take the good stuff as quick as they can. No respect.”

  Kallea followed us in, closing the door behind her. The bass was louder inside, and I barely heard Hass as he pointed out the dance floor and the bathrooms. All around, guys in letterman's jackets ground up against girls in skirts too short to wear to school. The guys were thick, the sons of ranchers, with ropey muscles and scrunched-up faces and brown and blonde hair shaved down to the skin. The girls wore shimmering lip gloss, and raccoon mascara or too much foundation. Everyone's skin was still baked brown from summer, the girls legs thin and dark as oak saplings. I had only imagined so much skin.

  We were only a few steps in when I felt Truck's hand on my shoulder. He looked down at the beer and asked, “Where'd you get that?”

  “I got it.”

  Truck’s face was already pink, his pupils dilated, and he swayed slightly. It had only been an hour since the game, but that had been long enough to get him thoroughly trashed. He was about to say something more when two arms wrapped around his stomach from behind.

  “You do realize it's a party, right?” asked Lizzie. “You should at least look like you're having fun.” She glanced over at me and Kallea. “Shouldn't you two be dancing or making out or something?”

  Truck looked at my beer again and said, “Who bought you that?”

  “I got it myself.”

  Lizzie nuzzled up to Truck and bit his ear. She didn't let go, rubbing her teeth gently up and down, rolling the lobe between them.

  “You've got expensive taste in beer. Or she does,” he said, looking at Kallea. “You get to stay. Tonight. I've got to go deal with this girl before I lose an ear.”

  He put his hands on Lizzie's waist, ready to toss her over his shoulder like he used to, but she stopped him and moved his hands to her stomach.

  “How about we take a walk somewhere?” she said, and he led her away through the party and upstairs. As they disappeared from view, Lizzie said something that made Truck laugh hard, and he turned around to look at me and Kallea. Then he was gone.

  The guys had cleared Reggie's couches and coffee table out of the living room, and people crowded there to dance. Some guy with a laptop had plugged into Reggie's sound system to DJ. The music was loudest here, and I don't know what Kallea said as she leaned over my shoulder and shouted into my ear. I just nodded and smiled as we joined the dancers.

  Kallea pressed her chest pressed up against mine, and I felt the damp warmth of her body. With her so close, touch became my only sense: the beat of the music, even the image of Kallea in front of me disappeared. We'd gone to a dance in middle school as friends, but we hadn't been so close then. Teachers had gone around pulling kids off of each other when they ground too close together, but Kallea and I hadn’t even needed a warning.

  Now the crowd pushed at us from all sides, pressing us against each other. We could have been in a crowded subway or an elevator—except she wanted me this close and pulled me closer. Without wanting it, I felt myself go hard against her leg. We met eyes, and I could tell she felt it, but she didn't pull away.

  She leaned over at the side of my ear and shouted again.

  “What?” I shouted back.

  “We should drink more!”

  We left the dance floor and went to find our beers. We'd left our sixers on a coffee table, and they were mostly empty now, but there were still a couple left for each of us. I found a sticky opener on an end table and opened two fresh bottles.

  “This is fun!” she shouted. “Cheers!”

  An hour later, we stood in line for the bathroom. Kallea and I had downed three beers each, but we weighed barely anything, hadn't eaten since dinner, and had never gotten drunk before. The world pulsed, and I leaned against a wall to stay steady. I prayed whoever was throwing up in the bathroom would finish soon so I could follow suit.

  Kallea leaned up against the wall beside me. Her head hung loose on her neck and rested against my left shoulder. She'd taken off her sweatshirt, and whenever I looked over at her I saw down the front of her low-cut dress.

  “Ted! Kallea! Question: Have you. Ever. Been. Drunk?”

  We looked up to see Emily Sanders, her eyes unfocused, a shoe missing. I'd never seen her outside of a Quiz Bowl practice, much less trashed. Unlike Kallea, she hadn't taken off her hoodie, despite the house sweltering from body heat. She was wearing as many clothes as the rest of the girls put together.

  Emily started laughing hard for no reason, and we joined her. She fell against me, and her body felt like as Kallea's had, pressed hard against me. But Emily's smell was different, and her arms and chest felt limp.

  “I need,” she said. “A toilet.”

  “There's a line.”

  She swallowed, and her face went white. We rushed her over to the kitchen to find a sink full of dishes, but Emily didn't care. I'd never seen a pretty girl throw up before, and I looked away as Kallea held Emily's blonde hair back while she retched over the sink.

  “What the hell?” asked Reggie from behind us.

  “Those plates were dirty anyway,” said Hass. The two of them sat across from each other at the kitchen table, a growing collection of cans and bottles stacked between them.

  “I'm sorry,” said Emily. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

  “Better get her out of here,” said Hass. “She got anyone she can call?”

  “No,” said Emily, crying now. “Don't.”

  Kallea filled a cup with water and handed it to her. Emily took small sips.

  “It's okay,” said Kallea. “We'll get you home.”

  “I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

  “You can probably hit up Lizzie, once Truck's done with her,” said Hass. “Smart money says she's sober, unless she's drinking for two.” He slapped his belly, and Reggie snorted with laughter, but Hass didn't join him. “What you giggling about, fat boy? You could have triplets in there for all I know.”

  6.

  Two hours later, most of the party had cleared out. Kallea tagged along with Lizzie when she drove Emily home, the car's windows open, the younger girls' heads stuck out the sides to make sure they wouldn't puke on the seats. Hers was one of the last cars to leave.

  I walked back through the house and out through the sliding gl
ass door in back to see who was still around. I counted only six of us now. The randoms, the hangers-on, the couples, the football fanboys, the girls, the freshmen, sophomores and juniors were gone. Now it was just me and the Kings.

  They sat in Reggie's backyard on logs and old lawn chairs around a fire that lit the Kings' faces red and orange. Everyone was drunk and still drinking. They laughed and threw things in the fire, howling at bad jokes or when beer cans exploded in the flames, and for a moment, I saw them as five different breeds of dog.

  Miller: a poodle, pampered and well-groomed.

  Reggie: a bull dog, fat and waddling.

  Wood: a lap dog, small, forever barking for attention.

  Hass: a doberman, sleek, protective, dangerous.

  Truck: a golden retriever, the quiet pack alpha.

  “What you give this one?” Hass asked. He held my yearbook in his hands, the page turned to my grade, the new freshman class. Reggie bent over to look at the photo Hass was pointing out with a pen.

  “Maybe a four?”

  “You think anything with a wet hole should get a four. Girl gets a two.”

  Hass wrote a two under the girl's picture and handed it to Wood.

  “Gina, Gina, Gina,” said Wood. “I would definitely hit that. Sober.”

  “That's not a score,” said Hass. “And she's like two inches taller than you. Maybe we need to get you some heels.”

  “I'd give her a solid eight,” said Wood, ignoring Hass. “Cherry, I bet.”

  Miller looked over Wood's shoulder and nodded.

  “Definitely an eight, but Zack told me he hit it already.”

  “Fuck Zack,” said Hass. “He probably paid her. Preppy queer.”

  Miller self-consciously ran a hand through his hair. He was the only one of them without a buzz cut.

  They kept passing the book around the circle, rating the girls. I sat sunken into my chair, watching them and then the fire, then them, then the fire. The knees of my jeans felt hot enough to burst into flame, and I didn't move them.

  “Bug!” said Hass. “It's your little friend! What you give her?”