Chapter 12: One Night at the Schuler House
Downstairs, in the Schuler living room, three guys stood in a loose cluster near the kitchen doorway, watching the staircase with the hollow expressions of men who had just watched something happen to someone else that they very much wished had happened to them.
Jim Levenstein. Paul Finch. Kevin Myers — though Kevin had just come downstairs and was therefore the only one with any firsthand information about what was happening on the second floor.
"So?" Oz leaned in. "How'd it go?"
Kevin made a face that was technically a smile. "Vicky wants the moment to be right. The place, the timing — all of it. She has a whole framework."
"A framework," Jim repeated.
"She's thought about it a lot," Kevin said, with the diplomatic tone of a man who had heard the framework explained more than once.
Oz and Finch patted his shoulders with the solemn sympathy of pallbearers.
"Hey," Jim said, looking between them. "Can we maybe acknowledge that Kevin has a girlfriend? An actual girlfriend? As opposed to the rest of us, who are standing in someone else's living room watching a couple of party cups and trying to look like we're having a good time?"
Finch straightened his collar. "I'm having a fine time."
"You've been standing in the same spot for forty minutes."
"I'm surveying the room."
"Even the straight-A kid has lapped us," Oz said, with the distant quality of someone staring into a void. "Owen Carter. AP Calc Owen Carter walked in here with Karen Jackson and went straight upstairs and we are down here talking about Kevin's girlfriend's framework."
A pause.
"I want to go home," Jim said.
"We just got here," said Finch.
"I know."
Kevin looked sympathetically at all three of them. Then his attention shifted to the staircase, where he'd left Vicky in the second-floor sitting room.
"I should probably get back up there," he said.
Then, from the second floor — a scream.
Not a scared scream. More of a startled, deeply revolted scream, followed immediately by the appearance of a girl at the top of the stairs, descending at speed, wearing an expression and a stain on her shirt that told the whole story without requiring any dialogue.
The four of them looked at each other.
They went upstairs.
Steve Schuler — starting linebacker, party host, human weather system — was kneeling on the bathroom tile with his arms around a toilet, engaged in a deeply sincere and non-metaphorical dialogue with his own bad decisions.
The door was open. Word had traveled fast.
"Kevin," Steve managed, between rounds, recognizing the laugh. "I'm going to kill you—"
He was interrupted by his own stomach.
Kevin leaned against the doorframe with the serene expression of a man who has been wronged and vindicated in the same evening. "You barged into our room, kicked us out, grabbed the first cup you saw on the nightstand without looking, and drank the whole thing." He shook his head. "Steve. Buddy."
"What was in the cup?" Oz asked.
Kevin leaned in and told them.
The reaction was immediate. Jim doubled over. Finch, who prided himself on composure, lost it entirely. Oz had to sit down on the hallway floor. Kevin watched all of them with the satisfaction of a man who had not planned this but was fully willing to accept it as justice.
"Steve," Oz wheezed, pointing, unable to form a complete sentence.
"The look on his face when he realized—" Kevin started, and then couldn't finish because he was laughing too hard.
Steve, unable to retaliate and unable to leave, remained exactly where he was.
News of this traveled through the party in approximately ninety seconds. It hit the phones of people who hadn't come. Parents in three separate households were baffled by the sounds coming from their children's bedrooms at ten-thirty on a Thursday night.
Then — from the room at the end of the hall — music.
Not from a speaker. Live.
A voice, starting low, warm, almost conversational:
"Loving you — is easy, 'cause you're beautiful—"
Jim stopped laughing. Oz looked up from the floor. Finch straightened.
The hallway went quiet in stages, like a wave moving backward from the source.
"Making love with you — is all I wanna do—"
People emerged from rooms. Drifted toward the sound. Girls materialized from the stairwell, from the sitting room, from wherever they'd been — moving slowly, unconsciously, the way people move toward something they can't name but can feel.
Kevin found Vicky in the hallway, already there, arms wrapped around herself, head tilted slightly.
"Vicky—"
Every girl in the hallway turned and looked at him simultaneously.
He closed his mouth.
The song built. The voice found its ceiling and then, impossibly, kept going — a note that should not have been sustainable, that climbed past the point where trained singers stopped and kept ascending anyway, clear and unrestrained and completely unself-conscious.
The hallway crowd pressed together. Someone opened the adjacent guest room so the overflow could stand against the shared wall and listen through it.
Nobody talked.
Nobody left.
Steve Schuler, still in the bathroom, had gone completely quiet.
It lasted — by Jim's watch, which he checked twice because he didn't believe the first reading — just over an hour.
Later. Outside.
The party had dissolved slowly, people drifting out in small groups, quieter than they'd arrived. The Schuler cul-de-sac was cold and clear, and Chicago in late autumn did not negotiate with anyone about the temperature.
Kevin walked Vicky out. Her best friend Jessica fell into step beside them, hands shoved in her jacket pockets.
For half a block nobody said anything.
"That," Jessica said finally, "was not a normal thing."
"No," Vicky agreed softly.
"I've been out with a lot of guys." Jessica kept her eyes forward, her voice taking on the quality of someone reaching a conclusion they hadn't expected. "A lot. I have never — not once — heard anything like that. Not even close." A pause. "Karen Jackson, of all people."
"She seemed really happy," Vicky said. There was something careful in her voice.
"She was happy," Jessica said. "We all heard exactly how happy she was." She glanced at Vicky sideways. "How's Kevin's framework situation going, by the way."
Vicky was quiet for a moment.
"I'm going to talk to him tomorrow," she said.
Jessica nodded once. "Good call."
They walked another half block. The streetlights made orange pools on the wet pavement.
"A guy like that isn't going to stay in Karen Jackson's orbit forever," Jessica said, more to herself than to Vicky. "Just saying."
Vicky looked up at the sky — the Chicago night, amber-gray with light pollution, a few stars managing to show through anyway.
"Yeah," she said quietly.
In the room at the end of the hall, the music had long since stopped. The house was almost empty. Somewhere downstairs, Steve Schuler was lying on his own couch with a cold washcloth on his face, which was either a consequence of the evening's events or a metaphor for them.
Owen sat at the edge of the bed, back against the headboard, looking at the ceiling.
The System, characteristically, had been tracking everything.
"Owner."
"Yeah."
"Wild Card probability increasing across three secondary contacts. Vicky. Jessica. Kevin."
Owen absorbed that.
American Pie, he thought. Right there in front of him — Jim, Oz, Finch, Kevin, Vicky — the whole ensemble, exactly as advertised, just lived-in and slightly less cinematic in person. Still funny. Still painful in the way that teenage sincerity was always a little painful to watch.
But real.
All of it more real than the TV version had any right to prepare him for.
"Noted," he told the System.
Outside, Chicago went quiet, the way it only did after midnight when even the city decided it had made its point for the day.
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