Page 13 of The Strawberry Field
Well, Tommy flirted. I mostly watched.
He had the kind of smile that made girls forget whatever they were saying mid-sentence. Naturally confident, charming. I didn’t mind fading into the background. I was shy, and it gave me space to learn his rhythm.
One afternoon, a girl invited us to a party. Her name was Bethany—blonde, cute, loud, a girl who wasn’t used to being told no. Her parents were out of town. The party was at their lake house. It was the kind of situation you know is a bad idea and go anyway because everyone else is.
Tommy drove that night, picking me up at my house just after seven o’clock. I had my license as well, but no car to drive yet, so I was happy to bum the ride from him in the Jeep his parents gave him for his sixteenth birthday. On the drive to Bethany’s place, he left the top down and cranked the music. The big Bose speakers Tommy installed in the back of the Jeep blasted AC/DC, and I remember thinking how great it was to be nearing adulthood with all its infinite possibilities and to have found a new friend as great as Tommy.
I’d had plenty of friends at Franklin County High School. I played on the football team, not in any capacity that would set state records, but respectably. There had been something about my last year in school, though. Maybe it was the fact that I had as much desire to lose myself in a book at lunchtime as to talk about plays for the following weekend’s upcoming football game.
Whatever the reason, there hadn’t been anyone I could call a best friend. Tommy was someone I had more than just the surface stuff in common with. He liked books and learning, too. And while I had every reason to suspect his family life was a lot easier than mine, both relationship-wise and materialistically, none of that seemed to matter when it came to the ease with which we were able to talk to each other about stuff I didn’t talk to anyone else about.
After hanging out a couple of times, it became clear to me that Tommy didn’t need to get raging drunk to have a good time. Some of my friends from high school did, although I still hadn’t figured out how a massive hangover the next morning was necessary to have fun on the weekend.
The clincher for me on the subject of alcohol had been my brother’s DUI and subsequent jail time just after his eighteenth birthday.
He’d had a head-on one Saturday night on 122 after leaving a party around two a.m., smashing into a woman taking her elderly grandmother to the hospital in the middle of the night for an asthma attack. He’d nearly killed both of them, and as far as I could see, it was by the grace of God that he had escaped vehicular homicide. That experience had jackhammered fear into the core of me.
It just wasn’t worth the risk.
And so, that night at the party when Tommy decided to have a few beers, I volunteered to be the designated driver. We stayed at Bethany’s until almost twelve-thirty. My curfew was one o’clock, so I went looking for Tommy, finding him upstairs in Bethany’s bedroom with the door cracked. When I stuck my head in, it was to see Tommy and Bethany making out on her bed. Tommy raised up on one elbow. “That you, Jake?”
“Yeah,” I called out from behind the now-closed door, dropping my head back and staring at the ceiling. “Sorry, man,” I said, “but I’ve got to get home.”
“Ask your mom if you can crash at my place.”
So I asked, and to my surprise, she said yes—half asleep, probably, and not in the mood to argue. I waited downstairs until Tommy reappeared, hair a little tousled, grin sheepish.
He tossed me the keys.“You drive. I’ve had a little too much.”
I slid under the wheel, excited to be driving something other than my mom’s Chevrolet station wagon. Tommy gave me directions to his house as I drove. With the top down, the night air was cooler than earlier, but it still felt great, and I remember thinking as we rolled down the two-lane country road that it was damn great to be young and alive and able to go out on a Saturday night with a friend.
I’d never been to Tommy’s house by road. I’d seen it from the water, but it was a beautiful old place, the house handed down from his grandfather. He had told me one afternoon that his parents had renovated it, and that he secretly liked all the new creature comforts over the version his mother had lovingly referred to as stepping back in time. Whatever it was called, I’d known when we stepped inside the foyer that night it was, indeed, a home. There was the lingering smell of baking in the air, something like chocolate chip cookies or banana bread. My stomach had rumbled, and I remembered not eating dinner that night. My mom had been home from work when I left, and the refrigerator empty except for a couple slices of hardened American cheese and a bottle of mustard.
Tommy made straight for the kitchen, waving for me to follow, even as he gave me the “Shh” sign so we wouldn’t wake up his family. The lights were off, and he flipped on the switch as we walked into the room.
A pretty girl sat on the barstool at the counter, her plate filled with what looked like a half-eaten slice of apple pie, a dollop of vanilla ice cream melting down the sides.
“Hey, sis,” Tommy said, making a beeline for the refrigerator. “What are you doing up?”
“Waiting for you,” she said, taking another bite of her pie.
“Told you I’d be late,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“Jake, this is Sawyer, my sassy baby sister. Sawyer, Jake.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she said back. “And I’m not a baby.”
Tommy had already told me that his sister was fifteen, but if I hadn’t known that, I would have guessed she was older. She was mature for her age, both in posture and looks, and I found myself glancing away and not meeting eyes with her, the same way I did when the popular girls in high school tried to talk to me at lunch.
“Where’d y’all go?” she asked.
“To a party,” Tommy said, pulling stuff from the well-stocked refrigerator and placing it on the island countertop across from Sawyer.
“You want a sandwich, Jake?” Tommy asked.
