Or for Orange Grove, at any rate.
But Logan’s question brought him up short. His stomach continued to feel too wiggly and too light and altogether too uncomfortable, but in a way that was kind of exciting. He imagined how it might feel to kiss Nate, and smiled at the sudden tingle in his groin.
Did he really have a crush on Nate?
“But, you know,” Logan said quietly, interrupting Cody’s thoughts, “just out of curiosity, you don’t have the hots for Jamie, do you?”
Cody laughed, confident that in this at least, he could speak the truth. “No. As far as I’m concerned, Jamie Simpson is all yours.”
“From your lips to God’s ears, my friend.”
Over the first few weeks of the school year, Nate seemed to see less and less of Cody, and more and more of the people from the Grove.
He didn’t like them. It didn’t take him long to figure that out. Yes, in some ways they were more like him than Cody was, but there was a rebelliousness there that made him uncomfortable. And despite his dad’s claim that there was a rich Asian history in the area, nobody would guess it by looking at the inhabitants. With the exception of one Hispanic family, every single kid at Walter Warren High School was Caucasian. Nate thought no racial tension should have meant no racism, but the Orange Grove residents displayed a casual prejudice toward anybody who wasn’t white, as well as toward anybody who lived in the trailer park.
Nate had never heard so many racist jokes in his life.
There was also way too much sex. Nate was a virgin. He’d had a couple of awkward make-out sessions with girls back home, but he’d never felt compelled to test the girls’ boundaries by sliding his hand into their shirts or down their pants. The kissing had never exactly felt right, and he assumed someday he’d meet a girl who did feel right. Until then, he figured he’d have to wait.
Except suddenly here he was, in the windblown boonies of Wyoming, with girls coming on to him in ways they never had back home. Christine Lucero and Jennifer Parker both made their interest in him quite clear. It should have been flattering—maybe even arousing—but it wasn’t. He’d been embarrassingly familiar with his right hand back in Texas, but since moving to Warren, even masturbation didn’t appeal to him the way it used to.
And the sex was only the beginning. There was more alcohol than he was used to. More marijuana. More of everything. Two weeks into the school year, he let Brian and Brad drag him to a party in the Grove. It was at Jennifer Carrington’s house, because her parents were out of town, but Nate had a feeling the gathering hadn’t been her idea. He could tell by the way she rushed around putting coasters under drinks and telling people not to smoke that she was nervous about her parents finding out.
Nate downed a beer and was handed another. Logan and a couple of jocks were playing quarters on the coffee table with three of the cheerleaders. Another group was stair surfing. The entire room was sweet with the tang of marijuana. Three boys in the corner were laughingly contemplating the possibility of burning down one of the haystacks in a field outside of town.
“What if the whole field burns down?”
“That’d be rad!”
Nate walked on.
He found a small group in one of the bedrooms, gathered around a dresser. Brian and Brad, plus another guy and a girl who Nate had seen at school but didn’t know. Brian glanced up as Nate walked in, then smiled.
“Hey, man. Just in time. I swiped this from my dad’s dresser this morning.”
“Won’t he notice?” the girl asked.
“He never has before.”
Nate assumed it was pornography of some kind, and he moved closer, trying to get a glimpse between the bodies. But what he saw made him stop short.
It was a marble cutting board with white powder already sorted into neat little lines. “Cocaine?” he said, stunned.
“Shh!” they all said at once, turning toward him, and Nate felt his cheeks begin to burn. He’d seen cocaine in movies and on TV, but at a party? No. None of his friends in Texas had ever even considered it. But once again, here in Wyoming, he found himself the odd man out, feeling like the lone prude in a group that seemed to know far more about the world than he did.
Didn’t they even care that his dad was a cop?
He waited until they’d all turned back to the tray before ducking out of the room. He left his half-full beer on the coffee table and walked home. Brian and Brad cornered him the next Monday in school, wanting him to promise that he wasn’t planning to tell his dad.
“It’s not a big deal,” Brian told him. “Just keep it to yourself, all right?”