“Red Hook cocktails, anyone?”
“Me, me,” Heather purred, and the other girls laughed.
“That is so legit,” Chelsea, one of the blondes, said. “I had my first last week. Wow.” The prospect even made her stop texting and put away her cell phone.
As Men at Work sang, Zack expertly mixed the drinks, which looked like brown martinis and tasted of whiskey. Heather broke open the picnic basket and passed around food, but John didn’t feel hungry. Soon, they were on the second drink, talking about friends he didn’t know, and college plans he didn’t care about. They had all recently graduated and yet appeared so focused. They were younger, but he felt out of his league, felt, depressingly, like he was back at prep school.
He had never fit in. He wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t an athlete, geek, academic star, or secret goth. Since graduating, he had drifted. John didn’t know what the hell he wanted to do. He only knew he didn’t want to be back in Cincinnati. Heather might have changed that, but she was barely with him now. It was a dynamic he had felt so many times before. He fell into a dark silence, feeling the knife he carried in his pocket, imagining what it might do to Zack’s handsome face. It was only a passing thought. His imaginings of how well this night might go were quickly fading.
“And a chaser.” Zack passed around a bag of pills. Everybody took one but John.
“A little ecstasy won’t hurt you, Borders, unless you’re narc’ing for your old man.”
“Look, I don’t like ecstasy. That’s it.” John didn’t even especially like hard liquor, and he was feeling the Red Hooks.
Heather popped one of the pills and drained her glass, letting out a war whoop.
John had never done ecstasy, never done the hookups that were popular in school, especially among the rich Catholic kids at school. He had never been invited. He didn’t even want that. He wanted Heather. But his mind shifted into momentary optimism. Maybe the night would turn into something after all. He retrieved the bag and took two of the pills. Chelsea and Jennifer giggled.
Zack smiled. “Now if anybody wants to use the little boat back there for some privacy…”
The river rocked the boat rhythmically and a sweet smell came from the foliage on the bank. Maybe the boat would sink and he could rescue Heather, be a hero, and she would fall in love with him. The other blonde, Jennifer, was telling a story, the ghost ship of the Licking River…a paddle wheeler in the nineteenth century that suffered a boiler explosion killing everyone on board, but for years people would see that ship at night, passing noiselessly down the river.