How to Lose Everything Read online

  When she'd smoked half her cigarette, she said, “He hasn't talked about anything else since yesterday. It's all about this money. He wants to buy a car—and he doesn't even have his license. He says that next time you're going to find a thousand. You guys stole that money! Right? I mean, it has to belong to someone!”

  “Well, but the door was already open . . .”

  “He said you kicked it in.”

  “No, he's exaggerating,” I assured her. “It was already open. For sure.”

  “It doesn't matter. I still don't want you going back in. It's just gonna cause problems.”

  She threw her cigarette down into the garden below—which always made Schulz's mom incredibly upset—and went back in.

  “I gotta go,” she said, and slipped on a black wool jacket. “I've got a French test coming up.”

  When she'd left the room, Schulz got up. He was wearing a T-shirt and multicolored boxers that were too wide for his skinny legs. He looked like a rooster poking around the farmyard.

  “She should be happy. But instead, she just gets all self-righteous about it. Even though she's the one who cheats,” he said, pulling his pants on.

  “She's cheating on you?”

  “No, not on me. But she started hooking up with me while she was still with her ex. I shouldn't really care, but sometimes I feel kinda sorry for him. I mean, I can understand: It's me.” He grinned. “But who knows what'll happen when she meets someone hotter than me, you know?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, whatever, it doesn't matter. Let's grab some beer at the gas station and get out of here.”

  “Beer?” I asked. We hadn't been drinking much lately. Eric's hash supply had been the focus of our attention instead.

  “Yeah, remember beer? That used to be fun. Let's go.”

  There are two places you can always count on: gas stations and McDonald's, little lighthouses where everything is always the same. A strawberry-blonde girl about our age was working the register, asking the man at the counter, “These two?” The scanner chirped. We each grabbed four beers from the fridge.

  “Forty-three eighty-nine,” the girl was saying.

  Schulz got a bag of chips. I went to the magazine rack.

  “And six eleven is your change. Thank you.”

  Schulz got two Snickers off the shelf. I stuck a Playboy under my arm. He got two minibottles of Smirnoff. “Get four,” I said, and he got eight.

  “And a pack of Marlboro Mediums,” Schulz said to the girl when we reached the counter.

  “A pack of Marlboro Mediums,” she repeated.

  “And a pack of Winstons,” I added. I suddenly had an overpowering urge to laugh.

  “Blue or red?”

  “Uh, the . . .” I couldn't hold the laughter back anymore. I snorted.

  “Sorry?”

  “He wants red,” Schulz said, helping me, but he was laughing, too.

  “Have you been smoking pot?” asked the girl.

  Tears filled my eyes as I pulled myself together. “Uh, no, we were just . . . uh . . .”

  “Thirty-nine fifty-six, please.”

  I pulled the blue bill from my pocket and gave it to her. She gave me my change. We stowed everything in our backpacks, and as we walked out the door, I heard her say, “Bye.”

  We sat down inside the little bus shelter near the half-pipe, the one place it was dry. And for the first time in a long time, Schulz didn't talk about sex. “We're so lucky,” he said. “I mean, it can't get much better than this, right? To us.”

  Making a toast “to us” would normally be a pretty lame thing to do, especially when it's one guy saying it to another—but at that moment I thought it was perfect. He was right: The money really was a huge stroke of luck. Not just because now we could afford stuff like Smirnoff and beer, but also because something had finally happened to us.

  We each took a drink of beer, but since I wasn't used to it anymore, I choked and coughed a bit on the foam. Then we toasted again with our mini-Smirnoffs and chugged them.

  “Tomorrow we'll go back in,” said Schulz.

  Eric sat Indian-style on his sleeping bag, his head bent over a piece of paper. He was rubbing little pieces off a brown bud. He'd pulled his hood over his face so that you could only see his thick red goatee. The bud had dwindled away over the last two days and now only half of it was left. It was still drizzling, and Eric smelled like a wet dog that had been dipped in cologne. “Davidoff. Smells pretty good, huh?”

  “H-has it really been two days since you took a shower? Since Lydia's parents kicked you out of their house?” asked Sam.

  He shook his head. “It's not important to me right now,” he said. “Anyway, it's bad for your skin if you shower too much.”

  As it turned out, Eric had spent the night at the half-pipe. For the past two weeks, he'd stayed at the house of his sort-of-girlfriend Lydia, but her parents had had enough of him. In two days he could go to his friend Daniel's, since Daniel's parents would be gone for three weeks. Until then, Eric said he was going to “just sleep outside.”

  “You're crazy,” Schulz said, but Eric just shrugged.

  The water bubbled as Eric sucked on the bong. The sky was still overcast and a mild wind was blowing down from the mountains.

  The asphalt was wet, and since water was bad for the coating on our skateboards, we decided to walk. Sam wore his beat-up Yankees cap and the rest of us had our hoodies pulled over our heads.

  We turned onto Flower Street. The closer we got to the house, the quieter it got. Just before we got to the house, I looked across the street and flinched: There she was again, the same ghostly figure, standing behind the window and ironing.

  “Just like my mom,” Schulz said. “She irons every day.” I realized that the woman wasn't just in my imagination after all.

  “Shouldn't we make sure that no one sees us?” asked Sam. “I mean, the afternoon is n-n-not exactly the best time to be going into a s-s-stranger's house.”

  “Fuck that,” said Eric. “Except for that lady ironing upstairs, there's no one around. And if we came poking around here at night with flashlights, that would be even more suspicious.”

  I'd brought a flashlight and a pocketknife. I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do with them, but having them made me feel like MacGyver.

  The wind blew through the hedges and shook them. The air smelled like herbs. Eric was the first one over the fence gate again, and we followed after him, disappearing behind the hedge.

  The grass was wet and soaked through my shoes. Flower buds and bits of hedge stuck to my ankles. Schulz ran up to the patio and pressed his face against the streaky glass. We turned around the third corner and were almost to the front door when we heard Schulz shout: “Wait! This one's open!”

  We ran back. Schulz pushed against the glass door and it opened effortlessly. We followed behind and found ourselves once again in the empty, dusty room with the clothesline. Apparently, we'd broken the windowpane for nothing.

  Eric said, “So that kid from my neighborhood wasn't lying. He must have come in through the patio door. We were just too stupid to try it.”

  “Or someone else opened the door after we were inside,” murmured Schulz. He'd pulled the collar of his hoodie up over his nose so that only his eyes were visible.

  “There's no way,” said Eric. “Who else would've come here?”

  We went through the rooms on the first floor, as if to check whether anything had changed since our last visit. But everything was just like we remembered: The whole first floor was unfinished. Maybe the owner had started a renovation and never completed it, or maybe it had always been like this. It was like a skeleton.

  I remembered the little flashlight I'd brought from home, and I suggested we check out the basement.

  Our shoes crunched over pebbles as we descended the basement stairs. We inhaled the cold, stale air. Behind his improvised face mask, Schulz whistled the Sesame Street song, which sounded really ridiculo
us. Sam gave him a shove, and Schulz looked like he wanted to shove him back, but by then we were all standing at the bot-tom, and there was no more time for messing around. Nervously, I swept the flashlight beam along the walls. They were bare concrete. A small streak of daylight came in from a window well, but we still needed the flashlight. I moved farther into the room when Sam suddenly shouted. I jumped. In the middle of the room was a mound, a knee-high pile of rocks, soil, and bits of concrete. It was an oblong shape, about six feet long. Next to it, a shovel leaned against the wall.

  “Sh-sh-shit, someone's b-b-buried here! They buried someone! They killed someone! A dead body! This is a g-g- grave. Look, it's a grave, it's shaped like a coffin!”

  “Chill out, Sam,” said Eric, and he took the flash-light from my hand.

  “I w-w-wanna g-g-get out of here.” Sam headed for the steps.

  Schulz whistled louder and even more obnoxiously. Nothing could have been less appropriate than whistling “Sunny Day / Sweepin' the clouds away / on my way to where the air is sweet.” Just as I was about to say “Schulz!” Eric grabbed Sam's shoulder.

  “It's just a pile of rocks. There's no dead body. It's just rocks and gravel. Got it?”

  He took the shovel and poked around in the pile. He tossed three or four large shovelfuls into the corner to prove nothing was under the rocks except more rocks.

  Eric pointed the flashlight over the ground, but there was no floor, or at least not a real one. The whole base-ment was just a layer of gravel.

  “They didn't even put in a floor,” said Eric.

  In the meantime, Sam had lit a cigarette, which he was smoking with a shaky hand. He kept murmuring “g-g-ghosts, ghosts,” and glancing alternately left and right. He looked almost disoriented.

  Schulz was still whistling. “Can you tell me how to get / how to get to Sesame Street.”

  “I've had enough of this. Let's go back up,” said Eric.

  Quickly, but still slowly enough that we wouldn't trip, we teetered up the steps into daylight. In contrast to the basement, the first floor now seemed almost cozy. Sam had gotten up his courage again. Or at least enough to give Schulz a sharp kick in the shin.

  “Stop it with the fucking Sesame Street song!”

  Schulz gave a muffled “ow” through his face mask and finally stopped whistling.

  “Why the hell is there no floor? Who builds a house without a floor?” I asked.

  Schulz laughed nervously.

  “D-d-dumbass,” said Sam. He took off his hat and rubbed his close-cropped hair. “Maybe there really was a body downstairs.”

  “I doubt it,” said Eric. “It's just a construction site. You watch too many horror movies.”

  “Why d-d-don't we toke up here?” Sam asked.

  “Because you just flipped your shit,” said Schulz.

  “Y-y-you're scared shitless and whistling Sesame Street the whole time!”

  While Schulz was deciding what to say, Eric had already unpacked the bong. We were going to do it: We were going to smoke up in this spooky old house.

  I liked the way the musty air mingled with the sweet-smelling weed. It was as if someone had stopped time inside this house, and now time was starting up again because we were doing something no one had ever done in here before.

  Afterward, we went up the stairs to the second floor. But instead of sticking together timidly, like last time, we each went our own way. Sam ran into the room at the end of the hallway and I followed him. It was a living room with a piano and a dusty green velvet couch. Oil paintings of hunters and deer hung from walls covered in patterned beige wallpaper. Schulz shouted loudly from another room, but I couldn't make out what he was saying. I went to find him as Sam was opening cabinets full of dishes.

  Schulz was standing in a small bedroom, one story above the patio and two stories above the grimy basement. He'd pulled the mattress off the bed, and dust particles were swirling through the air. A pile of envelopes appeared, shaded yellow and sprinkled gray with time.

  Schulz let the mattress fall with a jerk. We hurriedly opened envelope after envelope. In the meantime Eric was inspecting the flooring around the second floor. When Schulz and I went out into the hallway, envelopes in hand, he was kneeling at the end of a long reddish Persian rug and trying to roll it up. Underneath was light gray linoleum, offering a glimpse into the past, back when this house was brand new. Eric, rolling chaotically, kept tangling up the rug and having to start over. When he finally found a small bundle of old envelopes, Schulz and I couldn't contain ourselves anymore. We flipped out. We grinned and cackled. I think we even kissed each other, which somehow made perfect sense under the circumstances and somehow wasn't gay. Eric tore open the envelopes, slashing them into pieces, greedily, angrily, until finally he found one with a stack of blue bills inside. My hands were covered in dust and dirt, and the parchment-like paper of the bills slid haltingly over my fingertips. Schulz dug into the bundle, grinding it.

  Sam ran back to the hallway, almost tripping over Eric.

  “W-w-what is it?”

  Just like before, Eric threw the money up in the air. Only this time, it wasn't just a few bills. Dozens of hundred-mark bills fluttered down through the stale air. They fell to the floor like autumn leaves. Outside, summer began.

  I wanted to get going. But before I did, I counted the bills again. I'd been doing that a lot lately. It was fun. (Except for the fact that the paper smelled like old people and stuck to my fingers.)

  It was Friday evening, a little after seven. I'd talked to Sam on the phone a couple of hours earlier. He'd sounded stressed out, like he was in a hurry; his sentences were short and clipped. He'd said that he was at home in bed, smoking weed, and that there was going to be a “session” at Daniel's house later. Sam never used the word “party”; it was always a “session.” Daniel's parents were on vacation, and Eric had been staying there since the day before.

  I'd tried to tell Sam that I was feeling guilty about the whole thing, and I could understand why he was stressed: Standing up to Eric was impossible. Eric was completely unwilling to give any ground in a disagreement. But Sam kept insisting that we needed to lay low and “keep quiet.” “Just keep quiet,” he kept saying. To him, that was what mattered most. “Keep quiet,” over and over again. He didn't stutter when he said it—and that was something new.

  After leaving the house on Tuesday, after our second visit, we went to the grocery store and filled a shopping cart with beer, Oreos, Gatorade, and individual refrigerated pizzas. The pizzas were supposed to be microwaved, but we usu-ally just ate them cold—they still tasted good that way. At checkout Sam had carefully handed the cashier a hundred- mark bill. Without hesitating, she'd put it into the register and counted out Sam's change. Afterward, we brought the shopping cart down to the half-pipe with us. For some rea-son, I really enjoyed the sound of the wheels as the cart clattered down the asphalt. The rattle was almost soothing, and the faster we went, the more hypnotic the sound became—so I kept pushing it faster and faster. Eventually Sam and I broke into a full run, and at the smallest bump in the road the cart kept threatening to tip over. It made us laugh. When we finally got to the half-pipe, it had started to rain, so we left the cart there and went home.

  As I was counting up the bills, I suddenly remembered: I had found a letter among the leftover empty envelopes after we'd divided up the money. I'd secretly taken it, and now it was sitting in my desk drawer. Up to that point it hadn't occurred to me to read it. I didn't have time now, so I put it in my bag, took five bills from the bundle, shoved them in my pocket, and headed out.

  On the local train were some men in suits and ties and some pudgy middle-aged women.

  No one spoke. The wheels knocked rhythmically against the tracks. Tock-tock, tock-tock, tock-tock. The silence of the passengers got on my nerves. The rain had stopped, and a slanted light from the west shone over fields of sprouting corn. Tock-tock, tock-tock, tock-tock. I picked out one of the men with a suitcase and
stared at him. His head drooped limply while his wearied eyes scanned the columns of his newspaper. He wore a frayed tan sports coat, rimless glasses, and in the middle of his head yawned an abyss crisscrossed by a few glistening brown hairs. He looked ridiculous. He must have been in his midforties. He made me sad. Tock-tock, tock-tock, tock-tock. He also made me angry, sitting there in such utter mediocrity, reading the same stupid newspaper on the same train route at the same time every day, year after year after year. My parents were always trying to get me to read the newspaper. But newspapers were just thick layers of boredom: boring people writing about boring things, and all of it just intensified the boredom. And then one day all that boredom would just swallow everything up. That was what it really amounted to, if you were honest. I slid my hand into my pocket and rubbed the bills between my fingers like a magic lamp. Tock-tock, tock-tock, tock-tock. I remembered the letter again and took it out, but the train was starting to slow so I put it back in my pocket.

  Daniel lived in a townhouse near the abandoned home. All the front yards on his street had only enough room for a couple of bushes. In the back, hedges demarcated a series of tiny little plots for dads to go out and grill marinated pork chops in the summer. When I rang the doorbell, Eric opened the door to greet me, not Daniel. His figure filled the entire doorframe. He stood on the doorstep, legs apart, as if he were master of the house. There was a ketchup stain on his T-shirt that somehow didn't make him look ridiculous. Nothing ever made Eric look ridiculous, only cool. With a generous movement he held out his hand, welcoming me in. When he said my name, per usual, his voice was quiet. “We're playing Tekken,” he added, and shuffled down the hallway toward the living room.

  I heard Daniel snickering. Daniel was a runt, a little leprechaun. Some people thought he was a late bloomer and would eventually shoot right up. But we were in our late teens now, and the growth spurt had yet to happen. At seventeen, he was all of four feet, eleven inches. But despite being vertically challenged, he was spared the fate of so many other short guys: No one made fun of him. How he did it was a mystery. Daniel got along with everyone, from the punks to the Turks. Junior-year girls liked him, and so did the seventh-grade girls who wore too much makeup. Despite a sort of ratty appearance, emphasized by his slightly crooked front teeth, his face was attractive. His small body was tucked into the corner of the black leather couch, his hands glued to the controller, and from under his hat two glassy eyes peered briefly in my direction.