Never Always Sometimes

At six, Julia came over to get ready. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn to school, shorts and a T-shirt with the logo of a bookstore in San Francisco. Her feet were bare, but she was holding a plastic bag through which Dave could see a pair of high heels and a few boxes.

“You’re joking with the shoes, right?”

“Hey, if I’m taking part in a cliché, I’m going all the way.” She entered the house, moving past him with a light touch to his ribs. “I can’t wait for that moment when all the other girls take their high heels off to go barefoot and they finally see what a genius I am for not wearing shoes in the first place.”

“I don’t think that’s a high school thing,” Dave said, following her into the kitchen. “I think high heels are more of a grown-up cliché.”

Julia plopped the bag down on the counter and scowled at him. “Don’t take this away from me, Dave. Tonight the universe vindicates my disdain for footwear.” She reached into the bag and took out cupcake mix, some eggs, and a container of rainbow sprinkles.

“What’s all this?”

“The dads said it’s rude to show up to a party empty-handed,” Julia said.

“So we’re gonna bake the Kapoors cupcakes?”

“If I’m being honest, I fully expect the two of us to eat most of these. But yes.”

Dave picked up the cupcake mix and examined it, uncertain about how the gesture would be received by their classmates, but finally deciding that if he was going to get made fun of for being considerate, as confusing as that would be, it was something he could live with. “If we’re going to this party, I guess there may as well be sweets involved.”

“Damn right,” Julia said, leaning over to preheat the oven.

“You are the only two high school seniors in the world that would be baking on a Friday night.” Brett stood at the entrance to the kitchen for a second, shaking his head before going to the fridge and grabbing himself a beer. Dave wasn’t a small guy, six feet and an above-average build, but when Brett stood at his full height, Dave couldn’t help but feel small. Dave was almost a carbon copy of his dad, but in Brett, their mom’s features lived on: the sharp nose and lighter eyes.

“For your information, Judgey McHigh Horse, we’re going to a Kapoor party tonight.” Julia opened a few cabinets until she found a mixing bowl.

“You two?” He looked at Dave, who could only shrug. “I wish I could see that.”

“I’m sure you would take any chance you got to hang out around high school girls again.”

“With you over all the time, I don’t really have a choice, do I?” Brett took a swig from his beer. He’d just turned twenty-one, which was a huge relief for their dad, who’d been letting Brett drink for a while now. After their mom had died, Brett had helped take care of Dave, and in his dad’s eyes, that earned him the right to do anything he wanted. “So what’s with the baking?”

“It’s rude to show up empty-handed,” Dave offered.

Brett laughed.

“Okay, then. Good luck with that.” He lingered by the fridge for a few minutes, finishing his beer. “How are there still Kapoor brothers going to that school? I thought the youngest one graduated the same year I did.”

“The triplets are juniors,” Dave said, pouring sugar and cream into a mixing bowl for the frosting. “And I think there was an oops baby that’s in junior high now.”

“I heard a rumor that the Kapoor parents only procreate because they’re building up an army,” Julia said. In the few minutes since they’d started working on the cupcakes, Julia had managed to get herself covered in cupcake mix. It coated her brown hair and the tip of her nose, and there was a smear of batter on her chin. Dave had to resist the urge to take a picture of her or call her adorable. “They’ve been planning to take over San Luis Obispo for generations.”

“I could actually see that,” Brett said, tossing his beer into the recycling bin and grabbing another can, letting loose a burp that sounded less like a burp and more like a bass line. “Dad, you want a beer?” he called out into the living room, where their dad was likely watching college basketball. There was a grunt of a response, so Brett grabbed another one and set it on the counter next to him.

“Don’t open that,” Dave said to Brett. “We need a ride to the party.”

Brett popped open the new beer defiantly, sucking up the foam that hissed out. “You really need to get your license already. You’re eighteen.”

“This is more of a situation where we intend to, as you and your brainless friends would call it, ‘get wasted,’ and less of a Dave-not-having-a-license thing,” Julia said. “I could have driven if I wanted to.”

Brett shook his head. “You two are so codependent.”

Dave blushed, but Julia kept on mixing cupcake batter without missing a beat. “It’s not codependence, it’s attachment,” she said.

“Attached at the hip, maybe,” Brett said, drinking from his beer. “You should take it easy on the booze; you two probably share a liver. You won’t last an hour at that party.”

Julia scowled at him, then clapped cupcake mix off her hands in front of his face. “Why the hell not?”

Brett coughed, brushing the white cloud away from his face. “You’re too... I don’t know. Artsy.”

Julia laughed. “I don’t paint, write, sculpt, or play any music. I don’t think you know what artsy means.”

“I think he’s trying to call you intelligent, but in a derogatory way,” Dave said.

“I mean that you go to parties ironically, barefoot, and you bring cupcakes.” He took another drink, mulling something over in his head. “You’re right, artsy was the wrong word. I should have said clueless. The Kapoor parties are legendary for being wild. I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourselves into.”

“I’m sure the beer-pong tournament will be really intimidating,” Julia said, turning back to the cupcake batter. “You know, I had second thoughts of going before you came in. But now I’m sure it’ll be a blast. I can’t wait until I see that glimmer in someone’s eyes when they start thinking high school days are the glory days. Like the look in your eyes, Brett.”

Brett looked around the kitchen, giving his derisive laugh that was more like a snort. Dave could tell he was trying to think of a comeback. After a while, Brett scowled, muttered something about cupcakes, and then went into the living room to rejoin their dad. Watching TV was their favorite thing to do. They did so silently, never acknowledging that it drew them together. Sometimes Dave felt like joining them, but it seemed to belong just to the two of them. Dave didn’t mind so much; he had his own silent way of feeling close to his dad: They cooked for each other, meals that Dave’s mom used to make for all of them.

“You have to teach me how to do that. I never get the last word with him,” Dave said, dipping a finger into the frosting to taste it. There was something delightful about watching Julia move about the kitchen recklessly, a trail of batter and eggshells in her wake. The tiled floor was a mess when she was done with it, polka-dotted with vanilla extract. Her fingerprints were all over the black cabinets and on the stove. A pile of dishes sat in the sink, way more of them than she had needed. On his own, Dave was a bit of a neat freak. But when Julia was nearby, messes seemed beautiful, life’s untidiness easier to comprehend.

“So this is how tradition falls,” he said, taking a seat on one of the stools at the breakfast counter. “With cupcakes and the Kapoor army.”

“Better a bang than a whimper,” she said, easing onto the stool next to him. She reached over and brushed something off his shoulder, as if he were the one covered in ingredients. “Plus, don’t be so dramatic. It doesn’t suit you. We’ll watch a movie next Friday, when we get bored of this. And them.”

Dave nodded, understanding what she was getting at, though maybe not in the exact way she’d meant it. Julia kept mostly to herself at school, and by extension he did, too. He was friendly enough with classmates, though, especially when Julia wasn’t around to draw his attention. There were a couple of guys he might even go so far as to call friends, though he never really spoke to them outside of school. Once or twice he’d hung out with them, gone to lunch and then played video games in a curtain-drawn den. There’d been dog hair on every surface, a stale smell of Doritos in the air. Their conversations had bored him, and within an hour or so he’d found himself longing for Julia’s company, an urge so sharp it felt like homesickness. He had no trouble being alone. But if he was around anyone, he wanted it to be Julia.

“You’re right,” Dave said, the worry over the party melting away. “I might even try breaking the promise to never go streaking while we’re at it.”

“I’ll make sure that the picture goes viral and you live the rest of your life in regret and shame.”

“You’re such a good friend.” Dave put a hand on top of her head and shook lightly. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Show up to parties empty-handed, for one.”

Dave chuckled, dipping another finger into the frosting. “You have to admit it’s kind of weird, though. Doing this after avoiding it for so long.”

Julia shrugged, using her pinky to steal the frosting from his finger before he could lick it away. “I don’t think it’ll be that bad. Just see it as a brief social experiment.” She hopped off the stool and went to the oven, peering in through the glass to check on the cupcakes. “My mom did this once.”

“Went to a Kapoor party?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “No, goof. She came back to the States, got a regular job. This was when I was around nine or so. She worked at a bank, tried to go back to school. She calls it her ‘social experiment with the sheep.’ Six months later, she’d taken off again, even happier to return to her unordinary life.”

Julia leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms in front of her chest, not really meeting Dave’s gaze. She knew she was being transparent, but she’d never been good at hiding her feelings when it came to her mom.

“I see what you’re doing. You’re drawing parallels between us and your mom so I will feel as cool as she is.”

Julia smiled and tossed a towel at him. “If it is too lame we’ll just leave. We can even have a secret signal.”

Dave groaned. “Why a secret signal? We could just turn to each other and say, ‘This sucks,’ and then leave.”

“Will you get into the spirit of this thing, please? Our secret signal will be to start a dance-off.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“And you love me for it,” she said, smirking.

o o o

The Kapoor house was near school, about a fifteen-minute walk away. It was a route they were deeply familiar with, having driven it, walked it, and ridden their bikes down it countless times. But the streets took on a strange feel that Friday night, like walking into your own house and finding the furniture rearranged. The trees looked funny somehow, leafier than usual, or taller, or ominous. Okay, they looked pretty normal, but it felt weird noticing them while on the way to the Kapoor house for a party. Even walking next to Julia joking around felt a little strange in this context.

When they arrived, Dave rang the doorbell, confused by the relative silence coming from inside the house. He’d expected the rhythmic thumping of what passed for pop music. He crinkled the tinfoil covering the tray of cupcakes as they waited for someone to answer. Julia leaned on his shoulder as she stepped into the high heels, the soles of her feet gray from the sidewalks. Once she was in them she grimaced at him. “Why,” she said, not a question, he knew, but a complaint.

One of the Kapoor triplets opened the door, the collar of his polo shirt popped up, the sight of which always caused a dull ache somewhere in Dave’s chest. Julia let out a short “Ha!” at the sight of the red plastic cup in his hand.

“Beer’s in the fridge, the sink, and the bathtub. We’ve got a game of beer pong going if you guys want next. Shots of tequila start once someone brings tequila.” He closed the door behind them and then peeked under the tinfoil of the cupcake tray. “You guys made cupcakes?”

“Um,” Dave said, eyeing the closed door with an increasing sense of regret.

“Cool,” the Kapoor said, letting the tinfoil drop back down. Then he walked past them through the empty living room and toward the kitchen.

“I think we’ve made a terrible mistake,” Dave whispered.

“Of course we have,” Julia said. “That was the point.” Then she started making her way across the shag carpet, gingerly stepping ahead as if tiptoeing through poisonous bushes. She held out her arms for balance, and Dave walked by her side so she’d have him to lean against.

“I’ll have you know that I’m about to start a dance-off.”

“Oh, shush. We’ve only had one interaction. And he wasn’t all that amusing.”

Dave stopped walking, nearly causing Julia to tip over. “Julia. A red plastic cup full of beer and a popped collar. On a polo shirt. The only thing that would have topped that introduction to the party was if he WOOHed at us.”

“Your standards are too low. This might be the only high school party I ever go to. I want to see plenty of it.”

“So you can look back fondly at the glory days?”

Julia poked him in the stomach, which he kind of took as the equivalent of when he grabbed her head and shook. “Goof.”

They stood there in the empty living room for a second, mostly just smiling at each other. Dave imagined that if anyone walked into the room at that point it might look like they loved each other in the same way.

“Come on,” Julia said. “The night is young. We have a lot of people to make fun of.”

In the kitchen, the two other Kapoor triplets stood at one end of a plastic lawn table. They were setting up red plastic cups into a triangle on the table, pouring little measures of beer into each one. They, too, wore polo shirts, though each a different color and with the collars blissfully kept down. Three other guys, vaguely recognizable from school, lingered by the table, arguing about who had called “next.” A girl was at the speaker system choosing songs. She was wearing sneakers, not high heels, but Dave decided not to point that out.

“Not exactly what I’d imagined,” Dave whispered to Julia.

“Pretty underwhelming,” Julia agreed.

They waved hello to the six people at the party, and after casually obliterating a couple of cupcakes, they each grabbed a beer and stood near the beer-pong table, listening to the Kapoors trash-talk the two guys who’d won the argument and taken next game. Every now and then Dave would help by picking up the Ping-Pong ball and handing it over, then wiping the dirt-flecked remnants of beer against his jeans.

“What about this did Brett feel we couldn’t handle?” Dave asked.

“The excitement, I’m sure.” Julia sipped from her beer can and looked around the room, disappointed. Good, Dave thought. Next week they’d be back to their movie night.

It wasn’t long before more people started showing up and the Top 40 hits started blasting. The beer-pong players kept getting louder, the trash talk unraveling into something a little more ridiculous but, Dave had to admit, a lot funnier (“My mom could have hit that shot while conceiving me!”). In came Grant Stephens, wearing of all things his letterman jacket. “I didn’t even know those existed in real life,” Julia said. The rest of the football team showed up, too, some of them hulking inside their striped polo shirts. Juan and Abby, the longtime basketball couple, arrived with their arms around each other. Dave had always thought that they pushed the limits of the school’s PDA policies, but in comparison to their performance that evening, they apparently held back quite a bit of affection on a day-to-day basis.

All the recognizable cliques came by, and so did those ungroupable stragglers who were known by their little circles of two or three, friendships that were fairly similar to Dave and Julia’s; people they knew the names of but not much more. Every one of them was pulled in the direction of the beer, then they regrouped into their little planets of social comfort, slowly orbiting around the room and briefly interacting with other planets before making it back to the beer and then hurtling away from it again, their voices louder and their arm gestures more erratic with every trip. Here they were, all these people gathering to drink in abundance and in a variety of ways, chugging beers, taking Jell-O shots from tiny cups like the kind they gave you in the nurse’s office, writing with Sharpies on Melvin Olnyck’s face as soon as he passed out on the couch, Alexandra and Louise from Dave’s economics class making out against the wall right by family photos of the innumerable Kapoor children, even though Dave had never guessed that they were friends, much less a couple.

“This is kind of weird, isn’t it?”

Julia nodded. “I can’t believe this has been happening the whole time we were in high school.”

“I was just thinking that,” Dave said. He finished off his beer and took a few steps to place it atop one of the many beer can pyramids that had started popping up around the house. “I’m gonna try to find the bathroom. Don’t get swallowed up by this madness.”

“Wait, Dave, before you go.”

“Yeah?”

God, she was beautiful. Her cheeks were slightly flushed from the alcohol and the warmth of so many people inside the house. She stepped out of her high heels, suddenly the height he’d always known her to be. Relief visibly washed over her. She closed her eyes for a second, her toes curling and uncurling against the sticky kitchen floor. “That felt so good I might start wearing high heels just for the pleasure of removing them.” She sighed with a smile. “Okay, I just wanted you to witness that. You can go pee now.”

He smiled at her, then made his way through the groups of increasingly drunken classmates to find the bathroom.

EMPTY COLORING BOOKS

DAVE FLUSHED AND washed his hands, drying them off on his jeans since the single hand towel was clearly soaked through. He glanced briefly at himself in the mirror, wondering what he would look like in a polo shirt and then shaking off the thought, or more like shuddering it away the way he did with nightmares. This had been an interesting experiment, but now it was time to find Julia and go back to their little world of two.

Except that the party had rearranged itself while Dave was in the bathroom. The number of people in the kitchen had doubled. Beer pong was over and now there was a new game being played, one he’d seen Brett and his friends play, though he’d never really cared enough to try to understand it. Julia wasn’t where they’d been standing for most of the night.

He surveyed the room but couldn’t spot her, which surprised him. He was so used to looking for her that he felt unreasonably skillful at it, as if no matter how many people were around his eyes would easily land on her. Her presence called out to him like a beacon.

“Dave!” Vince Staffert shouted on his approach, clearly drunk. “Yo!”

“Hey, Vince.”

“Come play flip cup with us. We need one more.” He put his arm around Dave’s shoulders and started pulling him away from the wall.

“Uh, I don’t really know how to play,” Dave said, trying to hold his ground.

“Dave, you got into UCLA. I’m sure you can figure out a drinking game.”

Caught off guard by Vince knowing that about him, Dave stammered, “I—I shouldn’t. Julia and I were just about to go.”

Vince sometimes asked Dave for help in math class, and from those few interactions, Dave had always thought of him as a nice guy. He knew there was another side to Vince, football player that he was, but all he’d ever seen was someone big and quiet and not so good at math.

“This house is not that big. She’ll find you.” Vince pulled him to the kitchen table. Cups were scattered and stacked across the surface, little puddles of beer pooling together. The other team consisted of two guys and two girls, none of whom Dave knew on a first-name basis, though he’d seen them around school.

“Guys, I’m not sure you want me on your team.”

“Yeah, I agree,” one of the other football players said to Vince.

“AJ, don’t be a dick. Here,” Vince said, pouring some beer in a cup, which by the looks of it had been used many a time throughout the night. “The game’s easy,” he declared and explained the rules in a few seconds. “Got it?” Once, Dave and Julia had misread a flyer and, thinking they were about to see an author they loved, had accidentally attended a reading at the library by the West Coast’s leading researcher on menopause. So it’d be hard to say that this was the most out of place Dave had ever felt. But it was close enough.

Dave sighed. He and Julia had avoided all of this because they’d wanted their high school years to be a little more unique than everyone else’s. And yeah, they were here to see what they’d successfully avoided, but Dave had meant to just be an observer.

Dave surveyed the room one last time for Julia. The blue of her eyes, those three freckles on her neck. But she was nowhere around, and so he checked his phone. A text from her was waiting on his screen. Went off to explore the craziness on my own. Best story at the end of the night wins. Godspeed.

He smiled at the words, at what a great idea it was. Julia could turn any situation into something inherently more interesting. You’re on, he wrote back, already looking forward to reuniting with her, though he had no doubts she would have the better story.

Then he gave Vince a nod and turned his attention to the game.

o o o

Seventeen wins in a row later, Dave could feel the alcohol practically bubbling in his veins. It felt a little like doing a somersault underwater and then coming up really quickly, your head spinning and sending a warm tingle down your spine. Dave, it turned out, was prodigiously good at flip cup. He’d yet to fail at flipping a cup over. Every time it was his turn, he’d swallow the beer down in a second or two, and with one deft move of his hand, the cup would be upside down on the table without so much as a wobble.

Vince was nearly in hysterics, throwing a meaty arm around Dave’s neck, high-fiving everyone in the vicinity with his other hand, yelling about them being the world champions until no one else wanted to play them.

He and Vince walked outside without discussion, as if they were magnetically drawn to the fresh air. Dave looked around for Julia, wanting her to be nearby, longing to just exchange stupid jokes back and forth like they’d been doing for so long. He was going to break away and look for her, but then he noticed the briskness of the air and the way everyone seemed to be smiling and he took a seat with Vince on a bench.

“How come we’ve never hung out before, Dave?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. He burped, then chuckled at the thought of two dudes drinking beers and burping together. “Probably ’cause of Julia,” he added. “I’m usually trying to spend my time with her.”

“I’ve always wondered, are you two dating?”

“Nah. Just friends,” Dave said, a line he was used to delivering with as little emotion as possible, as if he were a spy trying not to be discovered.

Vince crushed his beer can in his hand and placed it by his feet. He put his hands on his knees—smaller hands than Dave would have expected from someone Vince’s size. “Since the truth serum known as Keystone Light is coursing through my veins, I’m gonna open up a bit here. You ready for it?”

“I’m ready,” Dave said, wondering what Julia would make of the conversation.

“You can handle it? Peering deep into my soul?”

“To be honest, right now it kind of feels like I can peer into everyone’s soul.”

“That sounds pretty scary to me,” Vince said with a smile. He ran a hand over his head, which was shaved recently, only the thinnest layer of fuzz starting to show through. “I am so in love,” he groaned, putting his elbows on his knees and slouching over. “Two years, man. She’s like some sickness I can’t get rid of.”