There’s something a little off about Gould’s house. It’s on an affluent street and it’s clearly very well-to-do judging by the size and architecture. It’s mostly in darkness, someone obviously forgot to turn the lights on, and it has the echoey feel of a place people moved into and never got around to fully unpacking their things in. We wait in the dim, cavernous entrance hall and watch as Gould makes his way down the stairs. He has a drink in his hand and pauses dramatically at the landing to take a couple of swigs.
“Do you mind?” says Chase. “We’re all waiting for you. You’re thirty-five minutes late.”
“Geez, sorry Dad.”
Chase forces a loud breath out of his nose and glares at Gould, who has the decency to take the last few steps two at a time.
When he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he says, “Holy shit, Lukey. You brought your A game tonight.”
Then he wrestles Luke into the type of hug that looks a lot like an attempt to tackle him to the ground. My body temperature rises by at least four or five degrees.
“Shotgun!” cries Gould when he releases Luke.
“Luke already called it,” says Chase.
“That was for the last trip, you all got out of the car, the laws of shotgun clearly state…”
“I don’t mind,” says Luke, “I’ll ride in back with Jessie.”
Gould’s face falls and he looks from Luke to me and then back to Luke. We clamber into the car and Chase gives Gould another death stare as he piles into the front passenger seat and struggles with his seatbelt.
“What?”
“You can’t drink in a moving vehicle, Gould. There’s this little thing called the law. Theactuallaw. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”
Gould makes a face and chugs the rest of his beer noisily. He crushes the can in his hands and then tosses it out onto his front lawn.
“Sometimes I don’t know about you, you know that, Gould? I really don’t.” Chase is up to here with Gould and it’s making me like him a lot more than I previously did.
“What’s the big rush anyway?” asks Gould.
“Izzy is already at the place. She’s been standing on the sidewalk waiting for us for half an hour. It’s late. It’s not safe,” says Chase.
“Well tell her to go in then, we can meet her inside.”
“She can’t. She has Jessie’s fake ID, if she goes in, he’s not going to be able to get in.”
“That would suck,” says Gould, looking back at me with a strangely expressionless look on his face.
“Is she okay?” asks Luke. “Is there anyone with her?”
“Yeah,” I answer, “She just messaged. She’s okay. She’s there with a couple of friends.”
“So, d’you like, message her a lot?” Chase tries and fails to keep his tone breezy.
“Not really.” I mean to leave it at that, but even from the back seat, I can see Chase’s jaw tighten. It clenches and he pushes down a swallow. It’s not rage. It’s fear, and it affects me despite the fact that I thought it wouldn’t. “You might want to let her know you’re into her, Chase. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Um, she couldrejectme.”
“So, then you get back up and dust yourself off. At least you’ll know.”
He drives on in silence, as Gould cranks up the volume and drums both hands on the dashboard in time to the music.
“Say I did decide to let her know, how’d you think I should go about it?”
“Tell her you like her tits,” bellows Gould.
Chase slows the car down to ten miles per hour. “Do you want to walk? Yes or no, Gould, do you want to walk the rest of the way?”
