5:15 pm.

Teddy St. George was fucking Leena Crawford in the big storage closet of Jesse Aaronson’s basement rec room when Dave Keller walked into the party. Jesse was on drums, backing up Freddy Fallow’s band as they practiced their stoned, droning version of "Sunshine Of Your Love," which Max Silva was trying to sing.

"Max, give it up!" Dave yelled. Max spit beer on him and Freddy and his bassist Bo Krebs had to pull Dave off the skinny fucker.

"Fuck you, Keller!" Max hollered, and waved a fifth of Jack Daniel’s over his head. He headed off into the backyard to take a leak against the back fence.

"Jesus, who let him drink?" Dave asked Jesse, who was still grinding out little polyrhythms. Freddy and Bo sat down to take shots of the rum cooling in an ice chest behind the sofa.

"I didn’t," Jesse said between snare-shots.

"Hey, man, let him get wasted," said Freddy Fallow, haggling for a gram of greenbud Bo got from his older brother, who was down from Chico.

"Shouldn’t you be, like, practicing for the game or whatever?" Jesse asks, giving up on the drums. He stretches his hands and looks through the backdoor at Max. "Silva! Get the fuck in here!" Max flips him off. Jesse slams the door and locks it.

"MacCready called me in," Dave says. They all look at him. Max pounds on the door, swearing.

"Yeah?" Bo accepts forty for the bag. He didn’t know (as Freddy did, as he had taught Dave and Teddy St. George, now winding down his fuck behind the green door) the sack’s worth at least sixty — Fred could sell half for twice that to some jagoff freshman, and Bo really had no idea.

"When, dude?" Jesse opens the back door for Max, who pulls on his shirt and stumbles inside. He leans up against the green door behind Jesse’s drumkit and listens with a leer.

"Silva, sit down." Jesse says. Max sneers and sighs. He looks at Freddy.

"Fuck, man. I’m fucked up."

"I know," Freddy says, "that’s the idea. We’re gonna jam more."

"I don’t know."

"Yes, we have to."

"Fuck."

"You could use that, too."

"Good luck!" Dave yells. Max punches him on the shoulder. This time Dave takes it with a grin. Max smiles and rolls his eyes around. They both look at Freddy’s coke. 

He stares back. "What?"

They say nothing. Jesse just nods.

"Fuck you. This is for later."

"Fuck who, exactly?" Max asks. 

They all listen through the green door. Leena Crawford had at least made out hard with every one of them. Teddy knew none of this. He likely would not have cared.

"AH!" she screamed. They could say nothing, and only Dave Keller had to consciously try to suppress a hard-on. 

"Jesus," Max Silva whispered. They ignored him.

"AH! AH! AH! OH FUCK! OH! OH FUCK!"

Max looked around. Everyone was desperately holding back wild laughter. He could see it in their faces, in the tears in their eyes. Freddy was doubled over, guffawing quietly into his lap. Bo was gaping like a dead catfish at the door, while Jesse just shook his head and took a shot. Dave clenched his fists and listened. 

"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" Leena screamed. Finally Jesse charged at the door and kicked it open. Neither Teddy nor Leena noticed at first, and all four boys were given an un-obstructed view of Teddy St. George ramming it home in Leena from behind, the sultry redhead who’d fooled around with them in private and snubbed them in public, bent over Jesse’s desk, scattering his CD-ROM discs everyfuckinwhere and yowling. It was a moment frozen in time, and only Max Silva had the slightest inkling it would sum up their entire adolescence for them. He had a confused thought of amazing clarity that lasted a microsecond: This is all we’ll ever be. Then Leena looked up, saw them watching, and shrieked.

Jesse let out a half-hearted snicker, but the rest were too honestly astonished for the half-second it took for Leena to yank herself away from Teddy’s dick with a wet plop and scramble around for her clothes to do anything more than gape in wonder. Tears streamed from her eyes as she scrambled for her clothes. Jesse and Max and Freddy stared, mute.

Sobbing, Leena clutched her clothes to her chest and ran past them, all the way up the stairs. They all looked to Jesse, who cut his eyes to Teddy St. George. Teddy was slowly buttoning his fly. He pulled his T-shirt back on and smiled at the rest of them.

"Slick shit, Teddy," Max said. He shook his head and went back to the couch.

"Don’t be jealous, Silva."

"I’m not. Sammy Klun was telling people she gave him gonorrhea."

"No shit?" Bo said, looking up from the sofa. He didn’t care much either way. He started rummaging through the couch and tried to pour some rum at the same time. 

"You’re sharing, Krebs?" Max said, and sat down, reaching for the rum.

Jesse walked past him, yanking it from his hand. "You’re done, Silva." Max scowled at him. Dave walked by and swatted Max in the head.

"Goddam it!" Max yelled, and hopped up, red-faced. Freddy sighed, rolled his eyes. He sat Max back down and gave him some greenbud to roll. Teddy came back in and preened around the room. He took a hit from a roach smoldering on a souvenir Oakland A’s ashtray next to one of Jesse’s spare amps, then took a shot of rum. He stood in his glory, to everyone else’s general indifference. Fuckin’ prick, Max thought. He would have been honestly surprised to learn that everyone else was thinking, to some degree or another, the same thing.

"Well, are you proud of yourself, Teddy?" said Fred Fallow, who had picked up his guitar and started strumming something that sounded like some acoustic Pearl Jam song.

"Yes."

"Where’d she go?" Max said, looking around.

"Who cares...Silva, you rolled that fucking thing yet or what?" Bo said. 

"Hey, Bo," said Max.

"What?"

"Hey! Hey, Bo..."

"WHAT?"

"Just sayin...like, hey man, what’s up?"

Bo sneered at him. He’d found a Barely Legal under one of the cushions and flipped through it, only pretending to look bored. Only Dave knew how much tail Bo really got: not much, but Krebs liked to lay it on thick. He thought he was a smooth jackhole, and Dave let him play it out. 

"Hey, Teddy," Jesse said, looking around from his stool behind the drum kit, "where did she go? Did she leave? I hope she left."

Teddy looked at him, face bland. 

"I don’t know," he said.

"Well, find out."

"Why?"

"Cuz it’s my fucking house. And if she’s curled up in a ball and crying or something, I’d rather she, like, do it at home."

"She went upstairs," Max said, putting the finishing touches on his joint. He flipped it to Dave, who caught it between two fingers and admired it. The weird fucker really could roll, Dave thought.

Teddy shot Max a nasty look. Max stared at him innocently.

"Stay out of it, Silva."

"Fuck you, St. George."

"Teddy?" He looked up. Freddy Fallow stood in the middle of the room like some stoned referee with a Fender Telecaster strapped across his torso. 

"Yeah?"

"Go find her." Freddy said, and motioned for Jesse to play. He looked at Max. Teddy made a face and sauntered toward the stairwell, moving as slow as possible.

"Lemme burn this," Max said, and Freddy rolled his eyes. He cringed at what Jesse had started to bang out. "Jesus fucking Christ, Aaronsen, can’t you play anything but 4/4 time?"

Dave fired up Max’s bomber and they toked in relative silence. Freddy and Jesse were playing completely against each other, but somehow it sounded right. At this point in his life, Max Silva was not yet the jazz aficionado he would later become, but his appreciation for gestures and actions that existed just behind the melody, just above or below the accepted range of behavior, mood, style and speech was already pretty well developed. As a freshman, Max had gotten into a nice steaming shitpile of trouble, the type of thing that he seemed to trip into without really trying.

He wrote a story, Dave knew, and while Max never once talked about it, they were "friends" in the sense that he could tell when Max was getting pissed off. He remembered a story about his dad...his mom rarely brought him up, but it was always some oddball fucking story out of nowhere...what did that shit with Max remind him of? Something about spray paint, road signs or mailboxes. Fuck it. Didn’t matter. Dave waited for his dad to speak up, but he didn’t. He was relieved.

Max could write, they all knew that. He could sing, too, but it would be awhile before he could comfortably own a certain grizzled rock star aura that he was capable of but unpracticed at projecting. At this point, writing was the one thing, and probably the only thing, that gave Max any real confidence. He had out-written everyone in the College Prep English class that quarter. Dave hated those essays, but he watched Max whip them out without really trying...an in-class essay about a character from Romeo & Juliet. Fuck. Dave scribbled some nonsense about Tybalt (because who’d fuckin’ pick Tybalt? Juliet’s cousin, killed by Romeo, a mouthy hardass. Dave liked that...he barely skimmed through the play, but the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio was pretty cool.) Max had written his on Mercutio, going on and on about how Mercutio proves that Shakespeare was bitter and pissed about love... that’s why the lovers die at the end, and one of Shakespeare’s best characters — good old Mercutio — dies in the middle of a bunch of selfish, bloody bullshit.

That kind of thing. 

Dave got the joint going and passed it to Max, who peered at him through the smoke as he hit it. Max held it in, then looked at him.

"Yo, so what were you saying when you got here? What the fuck happened—" Max blew out the smoke, then passed the thing on to Bo "—in MacCready’s office?"

"Shit."

Bo looked up. "You shit in his office?"

Max scowled. Bo brayed his stoned laughter. Jesse stopped bashing his cymbals long enough to hurl a drumstick. It hit Bo just left of dead-center in the forehead, and he went sprawling off the couch in a showy display of agony.

"You motherfucker!" Bo cried, and for a second stood red-faced and seething in the middle of Jesse’s basement. Jesse stopped and watched him, interested. He wanted to see if the dumb half-redneck, half-Mexican would charge, throwing himself over the drumkit, clawing and grunting. He’d seen Bo do that shit before—in the absolute fucking worst times and places — once in the middle of a party out at the thatch of trees in the Montezuma Hills everyone called Mickey’s Grove (Jesse had no idea why that place was called this, and doubted anyone else did...it’d been called that since time out of mind). Jimmy Reeder had come stomping into the party, shocking everyone (they’d thought Reeder was still in Juvenile Detention in Fairfield for possession of marijuana and running from the cops). He’d bumped his chest — not so scrawny anymore, they all had time to note — into Bo’s, one of those ape-like signals of a challenge. Jesse couldn’t really remember the dialogue, but like the best action scenes, it was only the set-up. Reeder thought Bo had snitched on him (which hadn’t been possible; Bo was actually sick with the flu when all the shit with Reeder had gone down, Jesse hung out with him and watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure way too many times), and wanted a fight. Bo initially refused, since he’d been trying to get into Amelia Borenden’s sister Amanda’s pants (girl was in eighth grade, and what she’d been doing out there, Jesse never knew...he’d heard later that some little junior high girl had been raped at that party, but it was only a rumor, and died down after a few weeks), and Bo knew damned well that while fighting may spice up a kegger, it glued the girlies’ legs shut good and fast. Bo turned away, but Reeder socked him anyway, and Bo came back with the grunts and hisses and hands twisted into eye-gouging claws—damned creepy, as Jesse Aaronsen recalled. Krebs won that fight, too... knocked Reeder the fuck out. Jesse couldn’t remember if Bo got laid at all, though. But he knew Bo was fucking crazy, and capable of almost anything at any time. Max and Dave were watching, but Freddy Fallow just stood there tuning his guitar, calm as a monk.

"Krebs," Fallow said, almost offhand, and Bo locked his glare onto him, "will you relax for once in your life?"

"Hey, fuck you!"

"Fuck you, Bo. Can’t you just chill? Why is everything a fucking test of your manhood?"

Bo looked confused for a second, then just sat down, looking disgusted. "Ain’t a test of my shit, or no shit," he muttered, or something like that, then he picked up the joint from where it lay smoldering on the floor.

"Shit, Bo!" Jesse said, "did it burn through the carpet?"

"Missed the carpet," Max said.

"Good."

"Silva." Max looked up at Freddy. "We jammin’?"

"Me?"

"You gotta sing, man."

"Uh, maybe..."

Bo snickered. "You really wanna hear Silva fucking sing, man?"

Freddy just looked at him. "He can sing pretty good. As long as he’s got his balls in hand, yeah?"

Bo looked at them, back and forth. Max clearly didn’t like it, but everyone knew that there were times when Max Silva knew how to shut the fuck up and let shit lie. He didn’t say a word.

"Yeah," Freddy said, and fiddled with the knobs of the body of the guitar, "sometimes you just gotta grab yer balls and yank, you know?"

Max nodded, and a smiled spread across his face...and Dave watched, fascinated, as Silva’s eyes got more bloodshot as he looked at them. He’d never seen that happen before, at least not right as he watched. 

"You want me back on the bass?" Bo asked, but not with any real interest. Freddy thought he was a good player, but he was dumb and dangerous...well, he thought, maybe that’s what makes him a good player. 

"Yeah, eventually," Freddy said. "Silva?"

"Hold on a few, man, damn." Max looked at Dave. "Shit...uh...oh, hey...what were you saying about MacCready’s office, man?"

Dave just smirked and settled back on the couch. It kind of stank...of old, stale beer...of piss, and pot, and sex...but that’s kind of what he liked about it down here. He gave Silva his most cynical look. 

"What? You finally wanna hear my fucking story, asshole?"

Max appeared to deeply think this over. He looked at Dave. 

"No, you prick, I don’t. But I know you’ll pout later, and I’ll fucking feel bad when I jerk off, and I fucking hate that."

Bo burst out laughing, and Jesse joined him. Freddy smiled, and so did Dave.

"All right," Dave said, "I got called out of P.E. and into MacCready’s office..."