Bro Wars VIII: The Last Head-Lie

Everything smells like firecrackers, awful beer, and chlorine.

I crack the double doors open a tad and watch the conga-line of rowdy teens forming a procession around the pool. It’s hypnotic, how casually they’re messing around and jabbering, circling the gargantuan sunken truck like it’s their holy obsidian idol. Drake follows Moe in, and the two proceed to mill about some distance from the celebration of life with vacant gazes upon their flock. You’d think Drake would be more upset about the tens of thousands of dollars in repairs we’d just incurred, but I guess he has the luxury of worrying more about what others think about him.

“So,” Anne-Marie says, flicking blades of grass from her hair, “Did it work? Your dumb, moronic, reckless plan, that is?”

“Yeah,” I reply, “I think we successfully declawed this alpha.”

She frowns. “You know that ‘alphas’ are a willful misinterpretation of wolf sociology, right?”

“How about you try explaining that to Brian and the ‘bros’.”

“Fair point,” she says, tussling her hair free of dandelion pollen with a shrug.

“I just thought,” I admit, “That if we wanted to change things for the better, we’d just have to take things to their logical extreme.”

“Was it really bad enough,” Anne-Marie’s face twists, “To be worth almost dying? Think about it, you’d never get to taste my lips again.”

“I’d rather make out with your toes, thanks.”

“Oh,” she scoffs, “So you’d rather taste the last five streets I’ve been down rather than the last thing I ate for dinner?”

“Gross.”

“That’s my line, coward.”

“The point is-” I pause to roll my eyes. “Let’s just say that if I was any more of a frequent visitor to the guy’s locker rooms, I’d be standing here lighter by one or two testicles and saying all this in falsetto.”

“That bad?” she asks.

I grimace affirmatively.

“Go on then,” Anne-Marie says, tapping me on the shoulder. “Isn’t it time to assess the damage?”

She really is the best, isn’t she?

We enter the poolside holding hands with zero pretense of having snuck out mid-argument. And we ram right into Teddy’s leading end of the conga-line. Practically every single one of the top-ten popular kids between Northwest and Southwest Elm witness the awkwardness written across our blushing faces. In the split-second before the conga-line keeps moving on like it’s none of their business, I can see each of them come to their own conclusion about what kind of ‘really cool guy’ I am to Anne-Marie.

It’s kind of a relief, though.

But not as relieving as Brian’s heavy-ass arms dropping onto our shoulders.

“A-dog! Og-dog! Where’d you guys go?”

“We just had a little talk,” Anne-Marie replies, somehow managing to keep a straight face beneath those beet-red cheeks.

Brian buys whatever she’s selling without a single question behind his eyes. And he turns to wink at me, proclaiming more than whispering:

“Did you tell her about that thing?”

She looks at us, unamused.

“Yeah,” I reply.

“What about the other thing?” Brian asks, winking at me right in front of her.
I meet Anne-Marie’s confused stare. And nod from her to me and back again. She shivers in place, and shakes her head.

“Uh,” I whisper, “Man’s promise, B-dog.”

He shakes his head, satisfied, and then bounds off to accost a flock of his boys that had broken off from the conga-line and gathered in a circle around Drake. Anne-Marie nudges me to follow him, and I oblige.

The guys greet Brian and I with a wave of concerned glances. With perfect timing, Moe emerges from the woodwork and slinks up next to Drake as if he wasn’t hiding two steps away.

“So we were thinking,” starts the twinky shortstop.

The bicurious footballer nods. “Things have been getting a bit extra lately.”

“C’mon guys.” I play up my disappointment. “What’s wrong with a bit of fun?”

Moe’s eyes meet mine, shining with an intelligent quiver.

“I agree,” he pipes in. “Y’all wild. And I’ve been thinking we should tone it down for a while. Can’t be the only one, either.”

A contemplative silence falls over the guys. This is it. The moment that we’ve been waiting for. That me and Brian worked so hard, literally risked our lives to achieve. Even a random fart doesn’t break the group’s concentration. And the first jock nods. Then the second. By the end of it, pretty much the entire group is staring at me, Brian, and Drake.

“Bro, I think we speak for all of us,” says the shortstop. “That you guys are like, really fun to be around. But you shouldn’t be in charge of things anymore. I think we need to hold a vote.”

The group marks their approval with flexed biceps.

“Yeah,” says the footballer, “But that’s, like, way too much work, bro. I think we should just put Moe in charge. All opposed?”

Not even Drake stirs.

Moe rubs the back of his head. “Aw shucks. It’s a bit of a big responsibility, guys.”

“You’re like, the second biggest guy here,” Brian says.

This seems to all but convince the others. I smile at Moe.

And he smiles back. “Guess I have no choice then. Now who’s down for a keg stand?!”

Raucous cheers send the wave of meatheads rumbling across the poolside and back to the main party room. I stay behind, opting to watch the last slivers of the sun disappear with my ankles dipped into the chlorinated water. Anne-Marie strolls up and sits beside me, throwing her legs over my lap.

“Guess I’m trapped,” I say.

She smirks. “Yep. And I’m not letting you go until you’ve learned your lesson.”

“I already told you I’m sorry. What, do you need a blood oath?”

“Something like that.”

We laugh so much and lean into each other so hard that we almost go tumbling into the pool. I look into her eyes. She looks into mine.

And she shoves me over the edge.

I sputter and curse and paddle until I’m bobbing above the water having swallowed enough pool water to taste the three parts per million of dehydrated jock piss amidst the chlorine. Pulling myself up once more over the lip of the pool, I give her my best impression of a masked serial killer rising from a misty lake. She, unfazed, just laughs.

So I ask, “What was that for?”

Anne-Marie tussles my drenched, overgrown hair. “That’s for almost dying on me, Goggles.”

My nose is spouting chlorinated goo. Every other fingerlength of me is covered in navy-blue bruises. I’m shivering like I just tried to escape Alcatraz in the dead of winter. Yet she’s looking at my dumb, drenched ass like I’m fresh off the cover of Playgirl. Her gaze holds me captive. But, tragically, it isn’t long before she snaps out of it and fetches me a towel from a nearby rack.

Anne-Marie wraps the towel over my head, and leans in to whisper:

“You know, we don’t have to do this crazy trip.”

“It’s not that crazy,” I reply. “Two minutes ago, I coulda been dead. Two months from now, you could be across the country in California.”

“Fair point. But what about the logistics?”

My mouth parts, only for the truth she’d spoken to stitch it back shut.

She mumbles to herself, “We’d need a car. A week’s worth of clothes each. And like, at least a few hundred dollars for the gas and food expenses.”

“Don’t forget the souvenir money,” I add.

Anne-Marie doesn’t seem to notice my sardonic tone, though. Instead, she nods wholeheartedly. “Yeah. That too.”

“Yeah, well don’t look at me,” I reply, with a shrug-around. “I burned through all my birthday money in advance for this dumb rager.”

“Figures. And I don’t presume you have any savings? No hundreds wadded up in a crusty sock at the bottom of your drawer?”

“Trust me, if my crusty clothes had any money in ‘em, I could probably have started a bank by now.”

“Gross.”

“You asked.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Sure. So what do we do about the money?”

I smirk. “And the car.”

“The money and the car,” She says, correcting herself with an unimpressed, half-lidded stare.

I put a hand to my chin. “So the money’s gonna be the hard part.”

“And the car?”

“Slightly less hard.”

“Go on.”

“So theoretically,” I raise one hand, “If I spend this entire next week grinding work hours in my dad’s asbestos-drenched garage, I might be able to clear the old truck for a week.”

“I could pitch in for at least half the cash,” she says, “My summer job money’s been sitting around gaining interest, and there’s no chance college’ll be cheap enough for it to be remotely helpful.”

My other hand goes up. “All that leaves is the last few hundred. Good thing I’m meeting up with my mom on Saturday.”

“Oh? And where’s that exactly?”

I roll my eyes. “The Pizza place on the corner of Walnut St. She insists on it every time, every two weeks at one on the dot.”

“Does she now?”

“Yeah,” I reply, “And even though she always comes no less than an hour late, she’ll find a way to show up first if I’m ever late by even five minutes.”

“I see,” Anne-Marie says, whipping out her phone and tapping something in. “Corner of Walnut St. at one in the afternoon, you say?”
The look in her eyes makes my hair stand on end. “Mornin’, just what the hell are you planning?”

Her smile is the rainbow over the river Styx.

“You’ll see.”