Tom Perrotta - Nine Inches

Always was, Liz replied. From the day that we met.

“Anyway,” Sally went on, “we’re in a really tight spot, or I wouldn’t even bother you. You do so much already.”

Liz released a martyr’s sigh. She felt the all-too-familiar, almost-pleasurable sensation of buckling under pressure, surrendering to the inevitable.

“It’s okay,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

SHE ARRIVED at the high school a few minutes before midnight, making her way down the rumpled, confetti-sprinkled red carpet leading to the side entrance. It must have been quite a scene a few hours earlier — a swarm of well-wishers cheering and blowing kisses at the graduates as they paraded in, a fireworks display of flashing cameras — but right now it was desolate, just Liz and a bored-looking cop sitting in a folding chair by the metal doors, beneath a hand-painted sign that said CLASS OF 2011 YOU ROCK!

The cop had his head down — he was watching something on his iPhone — but Liz recognized him right away as the meathead who’d written her a ticket a few years ago for rolling through a stop sign on Whitetail Way. Just a glimpse of his Jersey Shore physique brought it all back to her: the way he’d ignored her when she tried to explain that her daughter was late for practice, and then his crazy overreaction when Dana attempted to get out and walk the rest of the way to the field, which was only a couple of blocks away.

Remain in the vehicle! he’d barked, placing his hand on the butt of his holstered gun. Dana was only thirteen at the time and barely weighed a hundred pounds. If you exit the vehicle, you will be placed under arrest!

And then, out of spite, knowing they were in a hurry, he’d made them wait in the car for what felt like an eternity while he checked Liz’s license and registration, a routine task that should have taken a minute or two at most. By the time he finally strutted over to deliver the ticket — along with a condescending lecture about driving more carefully in the future — Liz had had enough.

Just so you know, she told him, I’m going to be writing a formal letter of complaint to the police department about your rude and unprofessional behavior. And I’ll make sure the mayor gets a copy.

Go right ahead, he shot back, his face flushing pink beneath the bronze of his permanent tan. My name’s Brian Yanuzzi. With two z ’s.

Liz never wrote the letter — Tony convinced her it was a bad idea, feuding with the cops in a town as small as Gifford — but she had cultivated a lively private grudge against Officer Yanuzzi in the intervening years, cursing under her breath whenever she caught a glimpse of him directing traffic around a construction site, or sitting in his cruiser in the center of town, monitoring the pedestrian crossings. He was such a vivid figure in her mental universe that she was surprised, and even a bit disappointed, by the bland friendliness on his face when he looked up from the phone, as if she were any other well-meaning taxpayer.

“Evening,” he said.

“Hi.” She made a point of not returning his smile. “I’m a volunteer?”

“Too bad,” he said with a chuckle. “Looks like you got the short straw.”

“Looks like we both did.”

“Least I’m getting paid.”

Liz nodded, conceding the point. She could hear music leaking through the closed double doors, the muffled whump, wah-whump of the beat, a girlish voice floating on top. She wondered if she might be able to get in a little dancing later on, if adults were allowed to join the fun. She hadn’t danced in a long time.

“So how’s it going?” she asked, not quite sure why she was prolonging this encounter with a man she actively disliked. It was almost as if she were giving him a second chance, holding out for a sign of belated recognition — Hey, wait a minute, aren’t you that lady… ? — some scrap of proof that she wasn’t as completely forgettable as she seemed to be. “Everyone behaving themselves?”

“They’re good kids.” Yanuzzi’s face seemed softer than she remembered, a little more boyish. “Not like when I was in high school.”

“Tell me about it. My graduation night was insane. The little of it I can remember.”

“Oh, yeah?” The cop looked intrigued, as if he were seeing her in a new light. “You were a party girl, huh?”

“Not quite,” Liz told him, making a conscious decision to leave it at that, to spare him the details of that disastrous evening, the Southern Comfort and the tears, the fact that she’d made out with three different guys, none of whom she’d even liked, and then thrown up in Sandy Deaver’s kidney-shaped pool, thereby ensuring that her classmates would have at least one thing to remember her by at their upcoming twenty-fifth reunion. “I was just young and stupid.”

Yanuzzi nodded slowly, as though she’d said something profound.

“So were those kids who died,” he observed. “They were just young and stupid, too.”

THOSE KIDS who died.

Liz had been hearing about those kids for the past twelve years, ever since she’d moved to Gifford. The accident was fresh in everyone’s mind back then, five friends speeding in a Jeep on graduation night, open containers, no seatbelts. Good-looking, popu­lar, three boys and two girls, never in any kind of trouble, just a terrible mistake, the kind kids make when they’re drunk and happy.

The memory of those kids was a dark cloud hanging over the town. You’d see people having a hushed conversation on a street corner, or a woman touching another woman’s arm in the Stop & Shop, or a man wiping away a tear while he pumped his gas, and you’d think, Those kids who died.

There were memorial services in the fall, the football season dedicated to the memory of the victims. Everywhere you went you saw their names soaped on the rear windows of cars, usually listed in alphabetical order, along with the date of their deaths, and the phrase IN LOVING MEMORY. The school district increased funding for drug and alcohol education; the cops cracked down hard on underage drinking. And on graduation night the following June, Gifford High held the first annual All-Night Party, a heavily supervised affair at which the graduates could celebrate in a safe, substance-free, vehicle-free environment. Parents loved the idea, and it turned out the kids liked it, too.

Over the past decade the All-Night Party had outgrown its sad origins, maturing into a beloved institution that was the source of genuine local pride. Each year’s cohort of junior parents vied to outdo their predecessors in the lavishness of the decorations and the novelty of the offerings — a Nerf-gun war, a circus trapeze, a climbing wall, sumo-wrestling suits, and, memorably, an enormous Moonwalk castle that had to be deflated well before dawn, due to highly credible reports of sexual shenanigans unfolding within remote inner chambers. More recently, the party had gone thematic — last year was Twilight and vampires, and the year before Harry Potter, complete with lightning-bolt face tattoos, a Sorting Hat, and a Quidditch tournament in the gym. For this year’s theme, the Committee had given serious thought to The Hunger Games — too depressing, they’d decided — before settling on Gifford Goes Hollywood, a more open-ended concept that accounted for both the red carpet outside and the lifelike Oscar statue that greeted Liz when she entered the building, an eight-foot, three-dimensional replica of the trophy with a sign taped to its base: FOR BEST PERFORMANCE BY A GRADUATING CLASS.

SALLY WAS manning the Volunteer Sign-In table along with Jeff Hammer, the presidente-for-life of the Gifford Youth Hockey Association, and a ubiquitous figure at local athletic and charitable events. Hammer didn’t bother to acknowledge Liz’s arrival — he’d been cold to her for the past several years, ever since Dana had quit a promising hockey career to focus on indoor soccer during the winter season — but Sally’s greeting was so warm Liz barely registered his snub.