The Bad Decisions Playlist (27 page)

“Oh, Shane,” says my mom. “Shane, Shane, Shane. Why do you have to be so dumb?”

“I don't know,” says Shane.

In the background Amy is watching, hugging herself, shoulders high as if she were sheltering from the cold.

“I still love you,” says Shane. “All these years, I always loved you.”

My mom wipes more tears. “I love you too, Shane. I loved you more than I ever loved anyone, and I always will. But, Shane, I don't want to see you ever again. Ever.”

“Yeah,” says Shane. “Yeah.”

She stands on her toes to give him a kiss on the forehead, and then a final hug, and then she steps back from him. He's watching her with helpless longing and sadness, the way you might look when someone you desperately love has died.

My mother turns to me. “Come on,” she says.

I don't move.

“Austin,” says my mom. Then again: “Austin.”

“It was all a lie.”

My voice sounds flat. Shane doesn't meet my gaze, stares at the carpet.

“All this,” I say quietly, gesturing with the flyer without raising my arm, because even that would require more energy than I can summon. “It was all for her. The show, all that, you were just using me. I was just bait.” My fingers open. The paper falls. “You never sent that track to Barry, did you.”

Now he looks up. “Kid . . .” he says. Shaking his head in apology, or helplessness.

I nod.

“Let's go,” says my mom.

I follow her out to her car and we drive away.

∗  ∗  ∗

“Just give me a little more time,” says Josephine.

“You said a week. It's been a week.”

“Austin, it's been three days.”

“It feels like a week. It feels like a month.”

“Austin . . .”

Dusk. I'm at a playground, the one where I broke my arm for Martha Meinke's benefit. One hand holding the phone to my ear, the other anchoring me to the tetherball pole, my body leaning away from it as I circle around and around and around. Trampling five cigarette butts farther into the ring of dirt with each revolution. Thinking of lighting up again.

“There's some party tonight at Jason Goodman's house,” I say.

“Austin, don't you think that's enough parties for a bit?”

“So come hang out. We can just hang out.”

“I can't. Not tonight.”

“Fine. Tomorrow. What about tomorrow?”

“No. I promised to help my dad out at the mall, hand out flyers.”

“What?!”

“Look, it's complicated. I'm trying to play nice. Don't judge.”

We're quiet.

“It all feels like a dream,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I didn't want it to end.”

“No.”

“Have you heard from Shane?”

“No.”

“You angry at him?”

“I don't know.”

“You and your mom talking yet?”

“No.”

“You should try.”

All my mom said when she retrieved me from Shane's was “I have to go to work.” When she got home that night, she made dinner and took hers upstairs. It's been that way since, both of us spending our evenings in our rooms, avoiding each other, my mom leaving for work before I'm up. Roommates who don't speak the same language. Roommates whose countries are at war with each other.

Rick was there the first night, but now he's in Milwaukee on some important Rick business. Which, thank God. Because if I had to talk to him right now I'd say,
Pardon me for a moment
, and then I'd go and ingest every single household cleaner in the broom closet.

I was irritable and itchy tonight, restless restless restless, couldn't write a song, couldn't watch TV, couldn't make it past two panels of Calvin and Hobbes. I paced around the house. On my mom's desk I saw the application to Marymount Academy, a pen resting on it. I left the house and got on my bike and ended up here, calling Josephine for the hundredth time.

“I miss you,” I say, also for the hundredth time.

“I miss you, too,” she says.

“So why not come to the party?”

“Austin, no. And you shouldn't go either.”

“Josephine, just say it. Just say it. Are you breaking up with me?”

“No! It's just that I'm scared,” she says. “I'm scared and I need time away to think, so that I can come back.”

“But you'll come back.”

“Austin, what did I tell you before?”

“What.”

“On the beach. I told you that I'm true. And I meant it. Remember that,” she says. “I'm true. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“So give me some time.”

I stay in the park until the sun sets, smoking that sixth cigarette, and then one more for good measure. I compose another text to Shane that I know I won't send.

Am I angry at him? I don't know. The whole concert, this whole magic week, what was it? Shane's pathetic effort to get my mom to come to the show.

She must have told him no,
Josephine said,
the morning of the concert.

Which makes sense, with everything that happened that day. What was it he said before the flameout?
Just stopping in to say a quick hello to KD. And goodbye.

I
should
be angry. He lied to me, used me. But I guess I sort of used him, too. And there's something else. The way he would look at me, like he cared. Like he was proud of me.

So instead of being angry I'm . . . what? Empty. Empty and confused.

Which is how I end up on my bike again, heading to his house. Going there to ask Shane the question Josephine put to me:
Who are you?

I park my bike at the curb. If he's not home, I'll wait until he is.
Who are you, Shane Tyler?
I follow the walkway toward his front door. Then halfway there slow nearly to a stop.

“No.”

Then pick up the pace again and reach the front door and stand there staring at it, like staring at it hard enough will make what's missing reappear.

The horseshoe. The horseshoe is gone.

“No!”

In its place, thumbtacked to the door, is an envelope.
Austin,
it says in Shane's handwriting.

I don't need to peer through the window or go around back to see if the Rover is there to know. He's gone. Gone for good.

That's
who he is.

Then I do feel angry.

Blowtorch fury, rage, ambushing me like it did in the booth at the bar, and now the music in my head joins the fray, all discord and noise and jagged edges, and I stagger back and close my eyes and clutch at my head like I'm trying to hold my skull together.

∗  ∗  ∗

Drinking hard, drinking with a destination in mind, one beer, two, pushing to the keg for my third, people saying,
Austin! Good to see you! Yo, you okay? You look kinda intense . . .

Too-loud music, shouted conversations, everything smelling beer-sour, weed-sweet, cigarette-foul. Kids making out in the corners, lines at the bathrooms, kegs out back, rumors of the act of intercourse taking place between so-and-so in the basement bathroom or
in
the
parents' room
on the parents' bed!

On Shane's doorstep when my hearing returned and I could focus my eyes, I tore that note off the door and crumpled it and threw it down and stomped on it, screaming and swearing at it, like I was killing it. Not needing to read it, already knowing the goodbye BS that would be written there:
Dear Austin, I'm so sorry but hope you'll understand that it's better this way . . .

Then I texted Josephine,
you have to call me,
then called her and left a babbled, crazy message as I paced on Shane's front lawn​—​“He
left!
He said he wouldn't leave​—​he promised . . .”​—​then texted her again to
callmecallmecallme,
and then just wrote,
I'm going to the party.
Stomped to my bike, turned around, stomped back, snatched up the flattened envelope and jammed it in my pocket. Then red-lined it to the party, blowing lights and stop signs.

I won't ever leave you again.

The final lie. Who Shane is.

Well, here's to Shane!
I say, on the first round of shots.
To Shane!
on the second.
Bottomsh up for Shane!
on the third. The alcohol finally delivering me to where I want to be, everything a pleasant blurry glow, silly conversations, dancing, sweaty hugs,
Hey, dude! Whassup! High five!
Getting my party on.

Then, “Austin!”

My goodness, does Alison look nice.

∗  ∗  ∗

Alison and I are kissing.

It started when she came over and said, “Austin! It's so good to see you!”

Huge hug.

“Aw, this is so good,” I said, “No, don't let go. Never let me go.” She giggled and squeezed me back, and whispered in my ear, “I'm
so
glad you're here.” Then, “Are you here with someone . . . ?”

“Nope.” That someone didn't even care enough to answer my texts. So forget that someone.

And she smiled and said, “Good.”

I said, “Wait​—​are you still broken up with Todd?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Very sure.”

“Like, completely, totally​—”

“How can I get you to shut up?”

“Well,” I said, “you could try kissing me.”

So she did. She tried that, and it worked really, really well.

Part of me is saying,
Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't,
but the rest of my brain is a thousand pinball machines hitting tilt at the same time, against a backdrop of fireworks, with a side of supernova.

When we resurface, I goggle at her and say, “Why?”

She smiles her naughty smile again and says, “You're not the only one with a playlist, you know.”

Alison and I are kissing, hands everywhere, nothing stopping us anymore. Now she's pulling away, pulling me by my wrist, and we're heading upstairs, squeezing past people, Alison leading me down the hallway and through an open door which she shuts and locks, and
we are the people in the parents' room
, clawing at each other, clothes coming off, leaping onto the bed, Alison whispering, “I have a condom . . .”

And so I go and do something that I wanted to be special with someone who is special, but instead I do it with Alison. And when we stumble out afterward, flushed and sweaty and straightening our clothes, there's Josephine at the top of the stairs. Freezing in place when she spots us, one foot still on the next-to-top step, hand on the banister. Incomprehension turning to shock turning to devastation, and before I can say, “No, Jo​—” she's spinning and pushing her way back down the crowded stairs, knocking drinks aside, people pressing themselves against the walls and the banister, watching her go.

The sum of us / is all there is of me / take the you from this two /

and there's no math that I can do / to even get me back to zero

The air in the mall is overchilled, overaroma'd with fast food smells and cloying perfumes wafting out of candle and cosmetics shops. I dodge past families and old people with those wheeled walkers and herdlets of fourteen-year-old girls. There's a central crossroads up ahead, and I spot Gerald Lindahl, big smile, sleeves of his flannel work shirt rolled up. He's shaking hands, distributing campaign literature.

Then I see Josephine, her back to me, about ten yards beyond where her father is, listlessly offering pamphlets to bored, incurious shoppers. To get to her I have to pass right by her father, and he very nearly clotheslines me with a pamphlet in the face, saying, “Here you go, young man!”

I grab it automatically just as I hear Jacqueline say, “Don't give him one!” and there she is in my way blocking my path to Josephine, moving left and right as I try to maneuver around her. “What are you doing here?!” she snarls, and snatches the flyer from my hand.

Gerald Lindahl is watching us, still with his big politician's smile, like he wants to show that he's in on the big joke and in control of the situation.

“Everything all right?” he says.

“No! This is the guy who​—​hey! Get back here!”

I duck around Jacqueline and start quick-stepping it toward Josephine, who is still facing the other direction, talking with an elderly woman who is examining the campaign materials.

When Josephine fled the party, I chased her, but the party closed around me and she was gone. Only then did I see all the texts from her, the missed calls:
I was at dinner, I couldn't answer. Are you all right? I'm so worried about you . . .

“Josey!” yells Jacqueline, and Josephine turns, her expression questioning, and then she spots me and I see her curse and she spins and walks rapidly away, the old woman looking up in surprise.