A QUARTER TO THREE
At a quarter to three, Sarah took one last walk through the house. Everywhere around her about half of the remnants of the party were negotiating amongst themselves – begging for rides, offering rides, calling for rides, splitting cabs. Everyone sounded shaken, as was understandable; whatever plans they had made at the beginning of the party had been long abandoned or forgotten. What snatches of conversation she could hear were terse, careful, and not even remotely drunk-sounding; everyone had sobered up instantly.
Sarah herself was not certain how she was getting home. She thought briefly of calling Vickie before settling on her brother instead – he would probably even still be awake – but she needed to find a phone first.
She paused in the kitchen, where a guy she recognized as the drummer of the band was on the phone, one finger picking at the countertop with a nervous urgency that seemed not to match the hipster rock star image he was casting in every direction: the sweat-drenched straggly hair, the death metal t-shirt worn either ironically or not.
“Yeah, it was crazy. It was fucked up,” he was assuring whatever poor soul he had managed to find awake and willing to answer a phone at this hour. “Just this . . . this flash.” He listened intently to some inquiry. “Not an explosion – no, not a bomb. There wasn’t any sound. No, I don’t know what it was!”
A strip from a mall photo booth was pinned to the fridge – four slightly different pictures of the host of the party and her boyfriend, showing off their nice hair and American Eagle sweatshirts. While staring at it Sarah decided that the drummer wasn’t going to get off the phone any time soon. From the living room, which she had just left – it was littered with paper cups and a few of the more upset and disturbed partygoers, who all looked like they wanted to be left alone – the stereo, which had been playing an 80s compliation on shuffle for some time now, started playing “Back on the Chain Gang”.
The drummer, nodding as he listened to some apparently helpful advice, finally noticed Sarah in the kitchen doorway. He shrugged apologetically and pointed at the phone, as if this was just how it was, as if it was somehow illegal for him to just hang up.
Sarah crossed the kitchen to the patio door and stepped out into the backyard, where the rest of the remnants of the party were milling around. Near the edge of the patio two cops were doing the same thing they had been doing for the past half hour – getting the same vague, unhelpful story from partygoer after partygoer.
One of the cops was now questioning a dark-haired, bespectacled girl who Sarah had kept noticing throughout the evening – she had arrived early with a couple who had loudly broken up a few hours later, the female half of the couple driving off in a huff, the male half sticking around for a little while to down three beers and then bum a ride off somebody he knew.
Both had left well before the flash, leaving the bespectacled girl alone for a few hours to mill around and quickly realize that she knew almost nobody else there. She had evidently decided to channel her intense desire to not be there, along with the nervousness about the flash that she shared with everyone else there, into being far snippier with the cop than was probably advisable.
“Your name?” the cop sighed, taking a moment to rub his forehead in irritation and defeat.
“Wendy. Brownstein.”
“Ms. Brownstein, can you tell me what you saw?”
“I only half saw the flash. I was over there,” she said, lamely pointing in a vague direction.
“Over where?”
“. . . there. Next to the house.”
“Where, exactly?”
Wendy cleared her throat. “That . . . the bench next to the house. That little bench.”
“Just sitting there.”
“I was with . . . somebody.”
“Who?” The cop riffled back through his notes.
“. . . I never got his name.”
“Okay. You were just sitting there?”
“We were making out,” Wendy announced after a moment, having evidently come to some kind of decision; it came out slightly louder than she probably intended.
“Nice,” said some dumb-looking dude standing next to Sarah.
The cop glared at him. If he was a cop from a TV show, Sarah reasoned, he would have some kind of clever, withering quip to shut the dude up; the pained grimace that the cop gave the dude seemed to suggest that he was most assuredly not that kind of cop.
“I see. So you were . . . and you heard something?”
“Just . . . no. I could sort of half see this big flash of light, like an explosion, but there wasn’t any sound. Then everybody started to scream and yell about something. So I . . . we stopped and we looked over, and then we got up and went to look. I couldn’t really see anything. We saw the one kid, the kid who got hurt, we saw him get led into the house. I could sort of see that he was bleeding, but that was it.”
“And your boyfriend?”
“He wasn’t,” Wendy started; then she decided to assume that the cop was just an asshole. “I lost him in the crowd. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“All right. You definitely didn’t see what caused the flash?”
“I was a bit distracted, officer.”
The cop looked like he wanted to growl. Instead he squeezed out a very professional smile and said, “Okay. Thanks for your help, Ms. . . . Brownstein.”
“Any time,” Wendy said. She dropped back into the crowd, brushing right past Sarah as she headed for the house.
“All right,” the cop said. “You.” He indicated a tall kid standing nearby. He was staring at his shoes and looked a little lost.
“Oh. Yes. Hi.”
“Your name?”
“Tony Melchit.”
“Did you see this flash everyone’s talking about?”
“Not really. I was facing the opposite direction at the time. I was talking to . . . to a friend.”
“What’s his name?”
“Her. Her name’s Melissa Preenpaw.” His voice seemed to crack, a little.
Sarah watched a bit more of Tony’s interrogation, and then turned and went back into the kitchen. The drummer was gone, but now there was a line to use the phone.
3/6/08
Labels: s-k song title story project
