32
The Postprom Hangover
CHARACTERISTICS: Dry mouth, sore feet, headache, regret, and more headache again.
ANTIDOTES: Water, window shades, deep-fried pancakes, waffles, and chicken, all topped with syrup. As much greasy food as the human body can physically handle.
Norris’s sleep was the heavy, all-encompassing quicksand that restores and drains with equal measure.
He slept through his first urge to pee, past his second urge to pee. In the brief, fleeting moments where awareness came knocking, he swatted it away. How much was a mattress? He could probably get another. He slept until the sun beating through his open windows no longer bothered him. There were dreams, brief flashes of coherence, and he slept through those as well. The dream of himself naked at Anderson High: he slept through. The dream of him holding a crying infant: he slept through.
He slept until his brain could no longer ignore the screaming agony between his ears. Was this what being hungover was? Norris’s mouth was dry, and he was officially starving. Wincing against the late afternoon sun, he stumbled into the kitchen.
There was a ghost sitting at the table.
“Hi, Dad,” Norris said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He threw his mother a look, and she answered by placing a glass of ice water in front of his chair, along with two aspirins.
“Sit,” she said softly, gently touching the spot she’d slapped a few hours prior. “We need to talk.”
Norris obeyed, noticing an old sports bag he recognized by the door.
“How are you feeling?” his father asked with a look somewhere between pity, admonishment, and amusement.
“Like crap,” Norris said, crushing the tablets between his teeth and chugging the bitter powder with a gulp of water instead of swallowing it because he still didn’t know how to do that.
“What are you doing here?”
“Well,” Felix said. “The thing about your teenage son drunk dialing you, and his mother calling you an hour later to tell you he’s in jail—it’s hard to get a full night’s sleep after that.”
Drunk tank; not jail, Norris thought but did not say.
“I thought you’d be more upset,” he said sheepishly.
“Oh, I’m goddamn furious, kid.” Felix smiled. “But I remember what a hangover looks like.”
Judith raised her eyebrows as if to say I’m sure you do, which everyone noticed, but the table unanimously decided to leave unacknowledged.
“Anyway, the yelling comes later. When it will stick to your sober mind,” Felix replied. “Six hundred dollars on a last-minute flight. Believe me; there will be yelling. Not to mention the hotel I’m going to have to get now . . .”
“We have a kid together.” Judith sighed. “The couch pulls out.”
“Thank you, Judith,” Felix said. “I like to rest between my yelling fits.”
He turned back to his son, thankfully still using his calm, sensitive-to-hangovers voice, and asked: “So, kid. What do you want to do?”
There it was again, the question Norris was seemingly being asked on all sides. What do you want? In this case, the specifics of what his dad was asking seemed pretty clear. Do you want to stay in Texas, where you are so clearly failing at life, or come back to Canada and allow things to return to not-quite-how-they-were-before, but close enough?
Norris thought back to his conversation with his mother in the Anderson High parking lot, which now felt like a full eternity ago; of the bargain they’d made that day. You have to give it a shot. If we’re going to pack it all up and go back home, which I’m putting on the table, then you have to actually try.
But he had tried, hadn’t he? He’d made some friends. He’d gotten a job. He’d started a hockey team. He’d gone to the prom, for Christ’s sake. He’d given it the best shot he possibly could have, and what did he get in return? One relationship that could only be classified as a failure. Another that crashed and burned before it even began. He’d made a scene, said some rude things, narrowly avoided an actual fistfight. He’d probably lost all the friends he’d made, considering they were Maddie’s friends and not his, anyway. He’d certainly never go to another prom again.
Norris had asked the universe, and it had come back with a resoundingly clear answer: trying, American high school–style, was not a good look on Norris Kaplan. Texas was not a good place for Norris Kaplan.
“Mom, Dad.” He looked back and forth between their faces, which so mirrored his own. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I think I want to go home now, please.”