Last Stop This Town Read online

  Published by Monkey Business Press

  Santa Monica, California

  LAST STOP THIS TOWN Copyright © 2012 by David H. Steinberg

  “A Decomposition” Copyright © 2006 by Jenna Lê, used with permission of the author.

  Book & Cover Design by Keetgi Kogan

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editons and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Summary: The last weekend before high school graduation, as they prepare to go their separate ways, four life-long friends spend a wild and raucous night in New York City that forces them to face their fear of growing up… and growing apart.

  ISBN-10: 1-46-990266-4—ISBN-13: 978-1-46-990266-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62111-222-8

  LCCN: 2012903793 North Charleston, S.C.

  This book was typeset in Le Monde 10 pt. and Dynamoe.

  Yearbooks entries were set in Adam’s Hand, Easy Hand, Tiza, and zombieCat.

  First Monkey Business Press trade paperback edition, 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Keetgi

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  “ONE MORE WEEK.”

  The guys had known this day was coming since kindergarten. Hell, they’d been dreaming about it for years. As the day approached, the constant barrage of lame video-yearbook retrospectives and school newspaper top-ten lists forced them to think of little else. But now that high school graduation was actually upon them, they weren’t so sure how they felt anymore.

  But the one thing the four of them did know was how many days they had left in their high school careers. They probably knew how many hours. So when Dylan Glasco said “one more week” from behind the wheel of his blocky metallic orange Scion xB (known unimaginatively around school as the “Cube”), he wasn’t trying to deliver some big newsflash. He was just trying to break the mind-numbing boredom that came with growing up in the suburbs.

  Dylan himself was the type of guy who could front an emo band, if he could sing, which he couldn’t. He had a vintage Zac Efron thing going on with his hair, which might have rankled the homophobically-inclined if Dylan weren’t constantly having sex with beautiful teenage girls. Growing up tall and good-looking led to success with girls, and years of positive reinforcement had given Dylan confidence. But Dylan never used his power for evil (as least not usually). It’s like Sarah always said, Dylan knew he was good-looking but he wasn’t an asshole about it.

  Riding shotgun was Noah Scott, Dylan’s serially-monogamous wingman and boyfriend to the aforementioned Sarah. It wasn’t that Noah didn’t have the looks to be a player. He could have worked his nice-guy routine and dimpled cheeks into some serious tail if he’d wanted to. He just preferred to actually get to know girls before he hooked up with them. Then, for reasons Dylan never understood, Noah liked to keep hooking up with that same girl, over and over. “It’s called a relationship,” Noah explained to Dylan.

  The Cube was parked in the McDonald’s parking lot, as usual. The four seniors were eating the remnants of their after-school grease fix, and despite the clock ticking down on their high school experience, this was West Hartford, there was nothing to do, and they were bored. So Dylan floated out “one more week” to no one in particular on this hot June day, just trying to sound philosophical.

  Noah bit. “Speaking of which, did you sign my yearbook yet?”

  “I’ll bring them all tonight,” Dylan promised. “Did you losers sign mine yet?”

  From the back seat, Walker Schlossberg piped up. “I know what I’m going to write. Noah’s the logjam.” It was true that Jew-fro’d Walker knew exactly what he was going to write in everyone’s yearbook. He’d been working on his messages for months. He’d narrowed down their years of shared experiences to only the most significant events, those handful of turning points that would truly spell out how he felt about his friends. Then he planned on adding a sprinkle of small, obscure anecdotes—like the time Dylan stole the Red Asphalt DVD from Driver’s Ed and switched it with their health class movie on menstruation. So the fact that Noah still had Dylan’s yearbook and Dylan had everyone else’s was actually kind of frustrating to Walker.

  But Walker was used to being frustrated. The only virgin among the four friends, Walker, despite his name, was a doormat. He liked to say he just really respected women, but the other three guys knew that seventeen-year-old girls weren’t looking for respect. They were looking for someone to tip the scales of their precarious self-esteem by making them feel special. In other words, they were looking for someone who wasn’t a complete pussy.

  The yearbook had come out two weeks ago and it was actually a big deal at Hall High School. Maybe it was because most of the seniors had known each other since elementary school. Or maybe it was because in New England, there were so many colleges that the graduates fanned out across the region, and even close friends rarely attended the same school. Whatever the reason, yearbooks were serious business. People had signing parties, reserved whole pages for their best friends, and really thought about what they were going to say. After all, it was an emotional time in their lives and even the manliest among them bared their souls on those pages.

  Still, Dylan wasn’t above giving Noah shit for hogging his yearbook. “Dude, it doesn’t count towards your GPA. You going to make a photo collage, too?”

  “Hey, excuse me if it takes a while to summarize eighteen years of being friends with you, asshole,” Noah shot back. If trading insults was the way guys show affection, these four were madly in love with each other.

  The truth was, Noah was stuck. Maybe Walker was planning on wowing the others with his total recall of events both profound and obscure, but Noah simply wanted to tell Dylan how he really felt. How he was going to miss him next year as they went off their separate ways. How much he appreciated Dylan being there for him through the pain and heartache of high school. But Noah wasn’t a poet, and he couldn’t even figure out how to begin.

  Jeff Pike spoke. “One more week of high school and we’re still sitting here in the McDonald’s parking lot like a bunch of douches.” The skinny stoner with short blond hair and an even shorter fuse took a drag off the remnants of the joint he was smoking. Whereas Dylan had outgrown pot in like eighth grade, Noah never really got a buzz off it, and Walker was afraid to even try it, Pike was a true believer in the power of the bud. That’s why Pike alone among the
m ran in two crowds: his life-long friends who tolerated the smoke and the stink and the stupid things he said when he was stoned; and his stoner friends, with whom he actually got high.

  Dylan shifted his weight restlessly. “Pike’s right. Let’s do something.”

  “How about Friendly’s?” Walker suggested, just trying to be helpful.

  No reaction.

  “We can go hang out at Sarah’s pool…” Noah offered, but the other three quickly quashed that idea with a simultaneous, “No!”

  Pike took another hit. Walker waved the smoke away from his face with an effeminate swish. Noah scrounged for any stray bonus fries at the bottom of the grease-stained bag.

  As usual, it fell on Dylan to come up with the real plan. “I know. How about a High Speed Test?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Noah seconded. “Mountain Road?”

  “Seventy-two,” Dylan reminded him.

  “Fern?” Walker offered.

  “Seventy-five.”

  Noah consulted the Google Map in his mind. “How about Brookline?”

  “Ooh, good choice,” Dylan affirmed. He put the Cube in gear and pulled out of the parking lot onto North Main Street.

  The premise of the High Speed Test was simple: How fast could Dylan drive on a particular residential street without killing himself, his passengers, or random pedestrians. Some of these speeds were frighteningly high, especially given the condition of the roads after the snow plows had had their way with them all winter long.

  After a mile and a right turn, they arrived at Brookline, a tree-lined lane with a posted speed limit of twenty-five. It was a quiet road that didn’t lead anywhere important, so it received little traffic besides the four-wheel-drive Subarus that parked in the driveways. Inside the large colonial houses, with their muted colors of aluminum siding, lived an aging population mixed with a few younger families. And unfortunately for Brookline, the road was stick straight and practically begged for drag racing.

  Dylan stopped the car at the end of the street and queued up the Eels’ “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blue.” Satisfied with his selection, he turned to the other three. “Ready?”

  Walker checked his seatbelt. Noah rolled up the bag of McDonald’s and stowed it under the seat. Pike took a last drag off the joint and pinched it out. He rolled up his window.

  “Hit it,” Pike ordered.

  Dylan stepped on the gas. They accelerated quickly, and in no time they were doing fifty down this sleepy lane.

  Noah read off the speedometer, as Dylan was going too fast to even glance down. “Sixty… sixty-five… seventy.”

  They were going crazy fast for this street and Walker, as usual, was the first to crack. “Okay, slow down. Slow down, Dylan!”

  But it wasn’t a “medium speed test,” and Dylan had no intention of braking. Noah kept his eyes glued to the speedometer. Pike started laughing his ass off, feeding off the adrenaline. Walker gripped his seat with white knuckles. But Dylan was confident, feeling invulnerable, focused only on the road.

  “Eighty…” Noah counted off.

  Then Walker screamed, “Look out!”

  Up ahead, an old man on a riding lawnmower was in the middle of the street, making a U-turn back toward his house.

  Dylan swerved, and before anyone’s brain had time to process what was happening, the Cube jumped the curb and drove right across the guy’s front lawn, passing the lawnmower at more than three times the speed limit.

  In an instant, they were on the next block, with the stunned John Deere driver way behind them, shaking his fist at the guys like a cartoon old coot.

  Dylan overcorrected and slammed on the brakes. Unfortunately, that only made the Cube spin out of control. As opposed to the previous maneuver, which felt like it was over in a flash, spinning 360 degrees in the middle of Brookline seemed to last forever. As if in slow motion, Dylan looked over and saw Noah staring back at him calmly, like, It’s been a pleasure serving with you. He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw Walker with his eyes closed, seemingly accepting his certain death. Then, as the car continued to spin into its second rotation, Dylan spotted Pike smiling ear to ear. This was the most fun he’d had in ages.

  Finally, the Cube came to a complete stop right in the middle of the street and stalled out.

  The guys were frozen in shock. They sat there for a moment, stunned, until their hearts started beating again. Miraculously, they were still alive and the car hadn’t hit anything.

  Noah finally broke the silence: “Brookline. Eighty-one.”

  They all burst out laughing.

  Without another word on the subject, Dylan simply turned the ignition back on and drove off.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THAT EVENING, DYLAN sat in his bedroom listening to Keane on his iPod and finishing his yearbook entries as promised. Aside from a few dusty soccer trophies and a photo of his mom, Dylan’s room was surprisingly undecorated. No Star Wars sheets or Clash posters here. Dylan was never much of a collector in the first place, but the simple white sheets and bare walls made it hard to believe that a teenager lived there. It was almost as if Dylan had considered his room temporary lodging for the last eighteen years.

  He was almost done signing the yearbooks—he’d written most of the messages yesterday in study hall—but he wanted to go over them one more time just to make sure he was setting the right tone. These were his best friends, after all, not some random acquaintance like portly Stu Wexley, whose yearbook Dylan signed in the hallway between periods with three lines about (1) playing soccer together in sixth grade, (2) the time Stu ate fifteen chicken cutlet sandwiches in the cafeteria on a bet (and later puked up his guts), and (3) the retarded substitute teacher they’d had one day in Spanish class who fell for the old “Mike Hawk” gag during roll call.

  Dylan picked up Noah’s yearbook first and started skimming through it, stopping at a picture of Noah with Sarah at the Halloween Dance. They’d gone as Wall-e and Eve and they looked happy. But by the Valentine’s Day Dance (two pages later), you could tell they were losing that loving feeling. And anyone who’d witnessed the fight they had at Prom (too recent to make it into the yearbook) would have had a hard time explaining why they were still together. Now, Dylan didn’t mind his friends’ girlfriends messing up the guy dynamic, but if Sarah was just going to yell and cry and pout all the time, he felt that it was his duty as Noah’s best friend to push him in the direction of dumping the bitch.

  Dylan had written on the page Noah saved for him on the inside cover (the most prestigious real estate in the yearbook):

  Noah—

  Where to begin? We’ve been friends since kindergarten, when you were putting dolls in the pretend oven and making the girls scream. That’s when I thought, this kid’s pretty cool.

  Alot of funny shit has happened over the years. Mr. Swanson catching us ditching class to go see Batman Begins. Monica Krasnitz’s bat mitzvah (remember her cousin Jennifer? Told you she’d let you get to third base!). And don’t forget about that ski trip junior year. Dude, NEVER ski drunk!!!

  So many memories it’s hard to pick the ones to write about. But every time I think about something big in my life, you were right there with me. First time I got drunk? Your Dad’s Johnny Walker Red. First time I got laid? Okay, maybe you weren’t there, but you were the first one I told. You are such a big part of my life, it’s hard to imagine how I could have made it through high school without you. You’re like a brother to me and I’m really gonna miss you next year.

  I hope things work out with Sarah, but if they don’t, just remember that you’re a smart guy probably the smartest guy I know and you’ll find what you’re looking for if you look hard enough.

  Your friend,

  Dylan

  Dylan corrected a couple of mistakes (“‘a lot’ is two words,” he remembered Mr. Travoli harping on him), then put Noah’s yearbook aside and turned to Walker’s.

  If Noah was Dylan’s wingman, Walker was more like the little brother Dylan n
ever had. After all, Walker was alternately clueless and pathetic, and it was hard not to assume a superior attitude to someone who let so many opportunities to score slip through his fingers. Accordingly, Dylan had signed Walker’s yearbook with a bit of a pep talk:

  Walker—

  You’re a great guy, man, and pretty soon girls are going to pick up on that. Trust me, you are going to get laid like crazy in college. I just think you’re the kind of guy who girls appreciate when they’re older.

  At least Dylan hoped so. After all, this was the same Walker who spent nine months secretly pursuing a cute girl from his chemistry class, consoled her for an entire weekend when she found out her boyfriend was cheating on her, then stood by while she forgave the scumbag and lost her virginity to him the next weekend!

  I think you just need a little more confidence. Like that time you stood up to Marc Jenner. You didn’t think you had it in you, but boom! One punch in the nose and the pussy starts crying like a little bitch.

  I’m not saying you need to punch girls.

  That’s as far as Dylan had gotten signing Walker’s yearbook. He decided to scratch out the last line and continued writing:

  Look, man, I don’t want to lecture you. I just want you to know that you’re a fucking cool dude and as soon as you realize that, so will everyone else. I’m gonna miss your sense of humor and all the funny shit you say.

  You are going to have a great life.

  —Dylan

  Dylan put Walker’s yearbook aside and turned up the volume on his iPod. It was the Breeders’ “Cannonball,” and he had a soft spot in his heart for female alt rock from before he was born. He flipped open Pike’s yearbook and reread what he had written:

  Pike—

  From the first time I met you and you were doing whippets in the back of home ec class, I knew you were one crazy motherfucker—

  Pike wasn’t the kind of guy you got mushy about, but you could always count on him for something outrageous, like the time Dylan found him in his parents’ basement naked, playing Call of Duty with a bong rigged to a snorkel. Or his Ninja phase, where Pike carried a pair of nunchucks wherever he went (that particular affectation ended suddenly when one day Pike literally knocked himself out).