I don’t think I’ll ever know another guy like Peter. In May of eleventh grade, we lied and got away with it. It was all my idea, but he was more than happy to follow along. I know I’ll never tell, and I’m confident that he won’t either. Strange that our pasts are the events that happen to us and the people we spend time with. Did I create an altered reality for some people at that party or does it just effect Peter and I?

“Robby and Tom think we’re going to do it.” said Peter, flat on his back on the left side of Sarah Chamber’s bed. I was on the right, propped on my elbow, looking in his general direction.

“I don’t think I’m ready for this…..” He rolled over and lay on his stomach. I could see the three moles that formed a tiny triangle on his left shoulder blade. The waistband of his boxers had inched up over his jeans to his lower back, and I noticed they were navy blue and maroon paisley. That reminded me that my father’s birthday was two weeks away and I needed to find him some sort of gift.

“Yeah, sure……” He stifled a laugh and rolled back around, his body facing mine and he began to finger one of my braids with his left hand. He once told me that he liked my sarcastic remarks, that I was like a guy when it came to things like that. I admit that Peter was pretty good with the comebacks.

Peter fell on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Downstairs I could hear the bass-line of a Beastie Boys song begin to play, and a bottle broke followed by some laughing and people saying “Oooohhhhhh”.

Once I had dropped my tray in the cafeteria and everyone turned around to look at me. Down on the carpet (why a junior high would have carpet in the cafeteria is beyond me) I saw the remains of my macaroni and cheese, stewed tomatoes, and crushed carton of milk.

Some people laughed, some people whistled, and some people pursed their mouths into perfect little lipped circles and said “Oooohhhhhh”. The cafeteria aide nic-named “Flapps” (due to the excess of skin flapping underneath her pale fifty-year-old tank-top wearing arms) rushed to my rescue, and helped me clean up the mess. I turn red easily, so naturally I felt my face get hot as I struggled to pick up as quickly as I could.

To this day, I cant decide if I was more embarrassed that Flapps was talking to me as she assisted me, or that I had dropped my tray. Fourteen makes the whole world seem like a critic.

He put his arm down off the bed and brought up a half empty bottle. The Chambers have a whole stash in the basement, and the best part about it is that her dad is a Vietnam Vet and drinks so much that a few bottles missing here and there are never noticed. This was the first party she had ever thrown, but at other gatherings you could always count on Sarah for a bottle or two of hard liquor.

“I have a headache, maybe I’ll put this in my coat and head out with it later.” Peter breathed in heavily and crunched his knees up to touch his chest.

“I’m stretching out my stomach muscles. I did six reps of fifty sit-ups with a twenty-five pound disk on my abs. I’m kind of sore.” He smiled, and re-coiled a few times before lying flat again. Peter stuck one hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a tin of cigarettes.

I accepted and was relived because I hate when he smokes. In fact, I hate smoke, any smoke. When I was ten, my family went camping for a week in July, and Friday night was decided to be “ s’more making night”.

“Smoke follows beauty” my father said when the fire decided to spite me and breathe in my direction. I moved around, switching from stump, to lawnchair, to simply standing and the smoke always headed straight for my eyes. My family laughed, and I finally went at sat alone at the picnic table fifty feet away from the fire to get away. My eyes burned.

Sarah Chambers was throwing the party. She wasn’t very pretty, very smart, or even very popular. But ask any seventeen year old we know and they’ll tell you that drinking in houses beat drinking in the woods or out behind the sewage treatment plant. When alcohol is there and better yet, free, heck, I think we would even go to the home of Jeffery Dahmer if he told us his parents were going to be away for a weekend.

On the surface, Tom was a well-dressed guy with a 4.0 GPA and a rap sheet of clubs, plays, sports teams and volunteer work. What the general public didn’t know is that he cheated in almost all his subjects. He also would get himself elected president of a club due to his popularity, and then have meetings next to never. Why? Because those on the outside wouldn’t know, just those few science nerds that actually wanted to discuss quantum physics once a week like they did last year.

Tom’s plans were good, but he wasn’t a bright guy. I think that one day he’ll finally get find out. He told me once that he was going to be a millionaire once he turned eighteen by getting married to Russian women so they could be smuggled over into America.

His intentions were good, but socially speaking, I doubt the idea would work.

First of all, I think there are a lot of poor ladies in Russia, I don’t think they’ll have a million dollars to fork over for the hand of Todd in “marriage”.

On CNN I saw lines of people waiting for days just to get a loaf of bread. You can’t make money on good intentions, and you can’t screw over government either. Maybe he’ll learn the hard way, or, maybe he’ll talk it up like he does everything else.

Robby and Tom, the towns finest examples, the high school heroes. Robby wrestled and made it to the state tournament. After he won, every business from the pizza place to the carpet store had some sort of tribute on the billboard out front.

The best was when the obstetrician/gynecologists’ office put a big sign on the lawn that said, “That’s our Robby making us proud!” It was originally put there because his mother was a part time nurse, but I fancied thinking that it was because he had slept his way around the school and that the office was getting a lot of business from girls wanting pelvic exams. A little disgusting, that’s why I never told anyone that.

“Ha!” He smirked and started to tickle me. We kissed a few times, and then he abruptly stopped.

“Want to see what Robby gave me?” Peter put his hand into his other pocket, got a confused look on his face, and then reached into the other. He pulled out a condom. This was the first time I had actually seen a condom. It looked so innocent in there, so nonchalant, just sitting in its little nest, not wanting to be disturbed…..

Was he saying that we weren’t going to have sex? I really hope so because I was nervous enough as it is, not to mention that I hadn’t showered that day.

I always thought that Peter was a thirty year old trapped in a seventeen year old’s body. He had a different mindset than Robby and Tom, because he always thought about consequences to his actions, and realized that nobody, even him was invincible.

He never went bridge jumping like the other guys did. Not because he was a chicken, but because he wasn’t stupid.

Still, Peter wanted so hard to impress his friends. He took up playing guitar, and spent $650 dollars spur of the moment on an electric and amp. I think he was going for Hendrix or Clapton, but he never got there in any way, shape or form.

To put it nicely, he sucked.

Peter tried hard, but after seeing that it didn’t work, he sold it for half as much to a kid in the sixth grade, talk about demeaning! That kid picked it right up and started playing the chords to a popular radio song on the alternative station broadcasted in our area.

I felt bad about the whole Robby and Tom thing….Peter never lives up to their expectations because he’s a good guy, and good guy’s live for themselves and not for their friends…….

I jumped off the bed and slammed the door shut. On looking out into the hallway before, I saw a group of people congregating on the staircase, holding cups and joking amongst themselves.

I saw this one kid whip his head back to laugh really loud, and right when I slammed the door shut, he turned and our eyes met. I know he would run downstairs and tell people that I had done that. Word travels fast at a party, especially when two people might be “doing it”.

“Come on Peter! Stand up!” I urgently whispered as I leaped onto the bed and pulled him to his feet. We were both standing and began to jump up and down. His brown hair parted down the middle waved from side to side, like a lop-eared rabbit I had once seen at a farmers market.

Slowly his smile turned from confusion to realization and he emitted some noise while I tried hard not to giggle. After about five minutes, we stopped and flopped back on the bed, breathing hard and trying to catch our breath.

“I think I hear Sarah!” I could hear Sarah, shrieking, probably at Tom…”That’s my parents bedroom! That’s my parent’s bedroom! I hope they didn’t spill vodka on the sheets in my parent’s bedroom! Why did you let them go in there?!?!”

“Might as well, let’s stay in here a couple of minutes.” That was intelligent of him, we needed time to “put our clothes on”.

“Did it happen, man, did it!?!?” Robby led a whole crowd of people that waited outside the bedroom door, greedy parhana's ready to feast on the flesh of a wild story and confessions of two good kids turned bad.

It’s weird how situations like that can bring out the best and worst of people. Peter and I became closer until we turned one day into best friends and couldn’t be anything but that. We knew each other too well, I thought of him as a brother and nothing more.

I’m not sure how many people think that we slept together that night, but from what happened that next Monday, the whole school was full of people who had “been there when it happened”. A girl in my math class claimed to have even stood hidden in the closet at the time. Yeah, sure. Lies love to breed……