The Boy Recession (21 page)

Derek’s parents are letting him have a party because, as of tomorrow, he hasn’t had to go to the emergency room in six months, which is a long time for him. The party is in Derek’s backyard, which is huge, with a swing set, a tree house, and a deck full of rusty lawn chairs. Derek’s back
yard is a lot like Derek himself—it’s fun, it’s messy, and it catches on fire sometimes. Like right now.

“This bonfire is
not
properly contained,” Darcy says when we come around the deck and see the big, leaping flames and the smoke.

“Do you know if Derek has a license for this? Or buckets of water? Where is the so-called host?”

Darcy stomps off to find Derek, and soon Aviva leaves me, too.

“There’s Eugene with the boy binder,” she says excitedly. “Here, hold my scarf.”

This isn’t a big party like homecoming. Derek just invited people he’s friends with—Dave, Damian, and a few other guys, who are fighting over whether or not to put more wood on the fire, and coughing a lot from all the smoke—and a bunch of girls. Pam and Amy took two of the rusted chairs up on the deck and, sitting in them like they’re thrones, are whispering to each other about everyone down below. There are junior spandexers on one side of the fire, all texting, and sophomores fighting over a bag of marshmallows, and freshmen at the edge of the woods, hunting for sticks to put the marshmallows on.

Just as I look up at the tree house, Hunter comes out of it. When he sees me, he stops, gripping the sides of the open doorway, and grins. Then he clambers down the wood ladder and jumps off four rungs before the bottom.

“Hey! You’re here! I’m glad you’re here!”

When Hunter runs up to me, I’m happy that he’s not awkward and polite anymore, and I also wonder if he’s a little bit drunk. When he hugs me, I think he smells like beer, but I’m not sure.

“How’s it going? Did you help make the fire? It’s huge!” I say.

“Derek was the one building it up bigger,” Hunter says. “And Damian was the one trying to contain it. So it’s been kind of a balancing act.”

“I think Derek’s winning out,” I say, watching sparks shoot up from the fire.

“Yeah, it’s getting pretty scary over there,” Hunter says.

Typical Hunter, he hops up onto the railing of the deck and balances there, swinging his legs. He beckons me closer.

“C’mere,” he says. “I’ll protect you if the fire gets out of hand.”

“Oh, yeah?” I lean on the railing, next to Hunter’s legs. “You remember how to stop, drop, and roll?”

“Uh… not really,” Hunter says, laughing and shaking his head. His hair is growing out—now it’s long enough to fall across his eyebrows but not to cover his eyes. That’s the perfect length.

“But we’re all good, ’cause Derek’s mom is a volunteer firefighter.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Well, she learned so much about putting out
fires from Derek growing up, she just figured she could help out.”

“Kelly! Kelly!” Aviva is running across the lawn to me, with Eugene trailing behind her. “I can’t decide which one!”

So that’s how we end up helping Aviva pick out a male escort. Even Darcy is impressed with Eugene’s organization; each profile in the boy binder has two pictures, a head shot and a full-body shot, and lists essential information: age, school, height, weight, extracurriculars, hobbies, and dance ability (which ranges from “occasional
Dance Dance Revolution
participation” to “so good he could back up the Biebs”). Also, the boy binder isn’t just the boy binder—Eugene has girls in there, and reminds us all that “Julius is totally cool with same-sex couples at the prom.”

“He thinks he’s being politically correct,” Hunter whispers to me, waving some smoke away from my face. “But he’s just trying to make as much money as possible.”

“What about this one?” Eugene says, tilting the book toward Aviva. “Great jawline
and
he gets a twenty percent discount at Banana Republic.
Ooh
, or this guy. I love this guy. He’s half Filipino and knows how to samba.”

“Ooooh…”
Aviva looks intrigued.

“
This
guy is a senior, and he’s debating between Cornell and Dartmouth.”

“That one’s for Darcy!” Aviva says. “What do you think, Darcy? An Ivy guy!”

“I don’t need a date!” Darcy protests, crossing her
arms. “I don’t even wanna go. I have to, because I’m the president.”

“Well, I need a date,” Derek says, leaning over our shoulders and looking at the binder. “And I don’t want to dance by myself, even though I look good doing it.”

Derek stands up and starts dancing, waving his lanky arms over his head and closing his eyes.

“You look ridiculous,” Darcy tells him. “Sit down.”

She tries to pull him down into a chair, but he starts to run away, and Darcy gets up to chase after him. Aviva is arguing with Eugene over prices—it’s $300 to rent one of his escorts, and that doesn’t even include the ticket she has to buy for him.

“Shouldn’t I get a discount?” Aviva says. “You don’t have to pay a guy as much to go out with me as other girls. I mean, I’m fun and I’m hot! Doesn’t hotness count for something? It’s, like, a job perk.”

“Hotness as a perquisite…” Eugene muses.
“Hmm…”

While Aviva’s negotiating and Darcy is chasing Derek up the tree house’s ladder, Hunter turns to me and reaches out to wave smoke away from my face.

“You think Darcy’s gonna give in?”

I shake my head. “No way.”

“Derek can be pretty convincing. Hey, I bet you five bucks she gives in.”

“Deal.”

We shake on it, Hunter putting that hand I know so well in mine. As I pull my hand away, he says, “I’m at least
a better prom date than Derek. I promise you that. I dance way better than him.”

“Oh, you can dance?”

“I can dance!” Hunter says. “I can box step, I can shuffle ball change. You’ll be impressed with my moves.”

“I look forward to that.”

“And I’m going to wear a real suit. A real suit, with shoes,” Hunter promises, leaning toward me, and I wonder again if he drank before this.

“Oh, with shoes?” I smile. “That’s good, if we’re gonna be dancing.”

“I’m gonna give you that flower thing, and everything. I’m gonna be a good date.”

“I know you are,” I say. “That’s why I asked you.”

“That’s why you asked me? ’Cause you knew I’d wear shoes?” Hunter doesn’t seem drunk when he says this—he seems kind of nervous, like he’s covering up some real feeling by joking and he’s waiting for my answer.

“That’s not exactly why I asked you,” I tell him. It’s so nice outside, and there’s that good bonfire smell, and I start wondering if Hunter will kiss me tonight.
Or should I kiss him?

“Yee-haw!”

Just then, Derek leaps from the tree house and hits the ground. Hard.

“Oh, Jesus,” Eugene says, standing up to see what happened. “I think I heard that
crunch
like when I broke my collarbone.”

“The bag of pretzels?” Hunter stands up, too.

“The bag of pretzels,” Eugene confirms, nodding.

I have no clue why they’re talking about pretzels, but I don’t have time to ask, because all of us are running down from the deck and around the fire to get to Derek. Darcy climbs down from the ladder and kneels right in the dirt next to Derek, who’s rolling to the side and moaning and pulling his knee up to his chest. She pulls his head into her lap and starts taking his pulse. All of us surrounding them are waiting for Derek to stop moaning and say something. Finally, he does.

“I almost made it six months,” he says, and slumps down against Darcy’s knees. He grabs his ankle while she takes off his hat and soothingly rubs his head.

“She’s a goner,” Hunter tells me. “You owe me five bucks.”

I smile at him through the smoke. “Oh, I’ll pay you back.”

He smiles at me, too—this cute smirk that curls one side of his mouth up—and I’m pretty sure we’re not going anywhere as friends.

O
pen up,” Eugene says.

When I open my mouth, Eugene sprays some horrible-tasting breath-spray crap on my tongue. Usually I would complain, spit it out, or accuse Eugene of poisoning me—but not tonight. Tonight I’m on my best behavior. I didn’t get pissed when Eugene put gel in my hair. I didn’t get pissed when he sprayed me down with cologne. And I let him shut me in his bathroom with his barber, Roberto, to get a straight-razor shave. Tonight, Eugene is the boss of me.

Eugene is also the boss of eleven other dudes. His escort scheme actually turned out to be pretty successful—seven senior girls and five junior girls got dates. Aviva’s going with this dude who Eugene has a man-crush on, and Amy’s going with this huge blond dude who looks like Peyton Manning if he got punched in the nose. Man, Eugene
is going to clean up on this deal tonight. Although I guess he’s got a lot of expenses, too. He’s got to pay all these guys to be here, and he also rented all the tuxes (he rented mine, too, but I paid him). When I got here, there was this huge rack of suits in Eugene’s living room. It took me, like, fifteen minutes to find the one with my name on it.

The prom doesn’t start ’til eight, and we don’t meet up for pictures ’til seven, so I had no clue why I had to be at Eugene’s house at five. But he’s got this dude assembly line set up, and he’s methodically checking us over and fixing us up—first, he sprayed everyone with cologne and gelled our hair. Then came the breath check, and now he’s tying bow ties and putting our pocket squares in our jackets.

“Whoa,” Derek says from the couch, where he’s stretched out with his cast propped up on cushions. The tree-house leap left him with two broken bones in his ankle. “Watching this is such a trip. Eugene looks like a child laborer in a Ken-doll factory.”

When Eugene reaches the end of the line, he says, “Looking good, boys! Everyone go get your corsages out of the fridge. They’re labeled. Do not—I repeat, do
not—
take the wrong color. I can’t handle any color clashing tonight.”

The other escorts file into Eugene’s kitchen, but I hang back with Derek and the D-Bags, who are on the couch, watching TV. The D-Bags were not part of the dude assembly line. And you can tell when you look at them, because they kinda look like crap. In Derek’s case, it’s not his fault. He’s got a cast halfway up to his knee, and he’s on
crutches, so he had to have his mom put his tux on. By the time they figured out what to do with the pants, they were super-wrinkled. He’s also wearing his baseball hat, even though Darcy told him not to wear it. Everyone’s pretty pumped to see Darcy’s face when she sees him.

Dave is wearing a suit, not a tux, and he actually owns it—the thing is, he’s owned it since he was thirteen and going to someone’s bar mitzvah, and it’s too small. Dave is a small dude, but his suit is even smaller, and the pants are too short, so you can see his white socks. This senior girl asked Dave, because she was so desperate for a date she was willing to put up with Dave being mean to her. I guess she didn’t have the money for an escort.

Damian’s going with one of Maddy Berg’s friends who plays
World of Warcraft
with us. They were both online playing at, like, 2
AM
one night, and somehow they decided to go to the prom together. Damian rented a tux, but he got one with a white jacket, so he’s super pale in this white jacket and black pants, and he looks like a ghost waiter. Derek keeps trying to order drinks from him.

Usually I would be over there on the slacker couch, screwing around with those guys and being a total mess, with pieces of potato chip in my hair and my fly open or whatever. Not tonight. Tonight, I’m not even sitting down; I’m pacing around Eugene’s family room because I don’t wanna wrinkle my pants.

“Yo, Derek,” I say. “Are you guys gonna practice at all?”

But the D-Bags are busy daring one another to eat parts of their corsages. Of course Derek goes first.

“Ew, dude!” he says, laughing and making a face as he moves the piece of leaf around in his mouth with his tongue. “This thing is plastic!”

“You bought Darcy a plastic corsage?” Damian asks. “I don’t know if she’ll be cool with that.”

“Crap. You bought mine, too,” Dave says, trying to pull the sleeves of his jacket down. “You are the cheapest bastard. Give me my fifteen bucks back.”

“Yo,
Derek
!” I say, walking over to the couch, all official in my nice tux. “Can you guys, like, go rehearse, please?”

Derek looks up at me. “Huh?”

“The thing! My surprise… thing! Can you go practice it? The instruments are out in the garage.”

“They’re in the garage?” Derek says. “How are they getting to the prom place? Because I can’t lift shit.” He nods at his cast.

“Roberto’s driving them over,” I say.

“The
barber
?”

“Eugene hired him for the whole night, and he shaved everyone already, so…”

The D-Bags mumble and bitch under their breaths, but they give in and head for the garage. As Damian passes me, he claps his hand on my shoulder and says, “Breathe, Hunter. You seem a little uptight.”

All the escorts start coming in with their corsages, and Eugene sits them down on the couches in front of the TV.
“All right, boys!” he announces. “We’re gonna get a little education in dance-floor etiquette and conversation!”

When the movie comes on, there’s a bunch of people from the 1700s or something doing some English version of square dancing while a few dudes play the violin. The guys are in what looks like Revolutionary War gear, with popped collars, and the girls have some push-up-bra action going on.

“Eug, what is this?” I ask him.

“
Pride and Prejudice
!” Eugene says, tossing the DVD remote to one of the guys on the couch and coming back to stand with me. “Girls love this shit. Trust me.”

One escort turns around to say, “This version’s not bad. But I prefer the BBC miniseries. Six hours. I own it, if you’re interested.”

When the guy turns back around, Eugene tells me, “I got him from the divorced parents’ meeting.”