Justin Taylor: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Angela turned back to look at me. I was just standing there, still in the doorway. I hadn’t even shut the door.

“Come on,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s all good.”

We went to Kenny’s room. He led, then Angela, then me. I was hemming close to her, like a newborn doe to its mother, and accidentally mashed her heel. “Sorry,” I said, and took a big step to one side. I felt like I was in a spotlight, on a stage. Kenny sat down on the gray-carpeted floor, leaning against his bed, and reached underneath, behind the dust ruffle. He pulled out a small green bubbler. He had his Oakleys pushed up onto the crown of his head like a tiara. He pulled the metal stem out of the bong and put his nose to the base. “I think this water’s still good,” he said, then sat it down by his knee while he broke up buds.

We sat with him on the floor.

A few bong loads made it around the circle, then Kenny reached under his bed again. This time he pulled out a shoe box. “Our cousin Jeff hooked me up when I was up there,” he said, meaning Maine, presumably. This was the first conversation we’d had since 1995.

In the shoe box were concert bootlegs — cassette tapes. The Grateful Dead, the Disco Biscuits, the Dave Matthews Band, and worse things. Cousin Jeff, I learned, had taken Kenny to this two-day campout concert thing called Lemon-wheel, thrown by a band called Phish at a decommissioned air force base near the Canadian border and named for a Ferris wheel they’d brought in for the occasion. The experience had apparently made a strong impression on Kenny. “Life-changing stuff, man,” he said, and rummaged, picked out a Phish tape, crossed the room, and popped it in. He hit PLAY, didn’t like what he heard, fast-forwarded to the end of the side, flipped it, and hit PLAY again. A guitar and piano were caterwauling. A cow bell went off like a dull shot. Something sounded like a vacuum cleaner.

After a while, Angela got up and left. It was impossible to tell how long, since the songs on the tape seemed to have no beginnings or ends, but rather melted into and out of each other. She said something I didn’t quite catch that amounted, I think, to “Good to see you, Brad,” and then she was closing Kenny’s door behind her. A few seconds later I heard her bedroom door shut, followed by the twice-muffled rumble of Skinny Puppy or Jack Off Jill or NIN or more Manson — whatever it was she was into. And now we were alone with each other. Kenny had his eyes closed and was bopping his head, rhythmically, though not exactly in rhythm with the music. He was parallel to it, I thought, or maybe the rhythms related in some way I couldn’t follow. I stared at him. Christ this was strong stuff, not like the dirt weed I’d been buying from a junior named Omar, stuff that made you giggly for a half hour then left you with nothing but a headache. The busy, winding music fragmented my thoughts, alienated my mind from itself. Things felt murky and televised. I couldn’t help looking at Kenny — really drinking him in. He was stunning and I was seized with awe at the change he’d made, everything he’d sloughed off and become. I was still awkward, peripheral — the same as ever, save for the recent development of a downy mustache you could only see when the light was right. Jealousy washed over me, a sensation so powerful it was indistinct from either hatred or lust. The feeling lasted a deep stoned moment, which is to say I have no idea for how long. I felt choked, throat tight with need, mouth dry as if it had been swabbed out with a cloth. I wanted nothing but to cross that room and go to him.

I forced my gaze to the window. A dumb little grapefruit tree, the neighbor’s hedge, a blue recycling bin. Cars in driveways. Yes, anything normal. His bedroom walls were the same, sponge-painted pale blue over an eggshell base, but the old outer space — themed border was gone. There were music posters now: Bob Marley with his head thrown back, laughing; a garish Steal Your Face on black light felt; a full-page photo of the guys from Phish had been torn from a recent issue of Rolling Stone and taped to the wall by his desk. But wherever I looked, my eyes invariably wound up on him again: quickly away, long circle back. His eyes were closed. He was in deep space. I was fidgeting, making adjustments to hide a formidable erection.

“Totally bitchin’, isn’t it?” Kenny said, thankfully without opening his eyes. He meant about the stupid music, or maybe the quality of the drugs.

“Yeah dude,” I said. “For real.”

Angela would tear out of the school parking lot, wheels squealing because why? Because fuck you, is why, she’d have said if anyone had asked her. But who would ask? I loved the sound of the old family car yowling like an agitated cat. We’d pick up drive-thru burgers or Taco Bell, head back to their place, and get ripped. Her fat friend, Dawn, another goth, drove a black Suburban. She’d follow us back to the neighborhood, drop her car off at her house, then walk over.

Dawn was loud. She caked her face in some powder that couldn’t hide the craters in her cheeks; instead it cast them in white relief. Her eyeliner, black, ran in the heat. She believed she was making progress in the study of witchcraft and was objectionable on more or less every level. Angela said she believed in Dawn, that the fat girl did know magic. They would hang out with us as long as Kenny didn’t put his music on, which he inevitably did, because he hated Dawn fiercely. Indeed, she was one of the few subjects he allowed to trouble his easy-does-it-no-sweat veneer, I think because she reminded him of his old self. She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.

Kenny and I never talked about — even mentioned — the old days. I knew that to do so would be to betray him all over again. It was a shame, though, because Angela was attached to Dawn, and I was hard-fallen for Angela, and I think on some level Kenny knew this, and in our whole lives he was never anything but kind to me. He would hold out on the music for as long as he could stand to.

It doesn’t get cold in South Florida until after New Year’s, and it doesn’t even get that cold. No scarves and gloves. A few weeks of sweater weather is about it. But November? Forget it. You could go swimming. We should go swimming, I thought. I was standing in the Beckstein kitchen, stoned to the gills, pouring myself a glass of orange juice.

“That’s stupid,” Dawn said.

“I don’t know,” Angela said. “Sounds kinda nice. Swimming high. Like the womb or something.”

“I don’t have a suit,” Dawn said.

“Go home and grab one,” Angela said. “We’ll wait for you, or if you want I can come with.”

Dawn gave her friend what was clearly intended to be a withering look, but Angela didn’t. This was to all of our surprise, including, I think, Angela’s. She said, “Well, I’m going to go change.”

Kenny loaned me a pair of shorts. I put them on in the guest bathroom, then helped him move the stereo out back. Dawn was sitting upright on one of the lounge chairs, smoking a clove. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. She was already sweating.

“Not even gonna dip your toes?” I asked.

“Better not put on any of that hippie shit,” she replied.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her, “do you live here?”

“Neither of us lives here,” Dawn said to me.

“Hey Dawn,” Kenny said, “why don’t you shut the fat fuck up?”

Angela came out of the house. She was wearing a black bikini with string ties that rode low on her notchy hips. Her legs were a bone-white mile. There were freckles on her chest and face, a mole on her left shoulder. She seemed to catch fire as she stepped out from under the overhang and into the undiminished autumn sun. Her toenails, I saw, matched her fingernails, and both matched the bikini. Okay, I remember thinking, I’ll just be in love with them both then.