I would've moved him

Being in the National Honors Society at our school means you have a GPA of 3.6 or higher and you probably live in one of the nice neighborhoods. You are probably in the advanced placement classes because your parents called and made a fuss, and you probably are a college application whore. I am more than willing to admit to being an app whore, but not so much to the other things. I mean, who would?

So, as part of our obligation to society, NHS decided to sell these cute little shamrocks for a buck apiece to support muscular dystrophy research. They're awful cute little shamrocks, they say "$1 closer to a cure, from the heart of ______" and then the person you sold it to writes their name in the blank. Then, once they're all sold, of course you gotta hang the things up somewhere where everyone can see how much closer we are to a cure. And since I hadn't done anything really for NHS since about Christmas, and since my best friend is the president of the club, and was just about begging for a volunteer to hang the damn things in the lobby, I said I would.

This kid named Mike got guilted into helping me.Mike's a nice kid I guess. A good looking kid. He looks like he belongs at a prep school in England or Wales. Not that I even know him, really, but I would say he is one of those nice-neighborhood kids that keeps a low profile (nice-neighborhood kid, by the way, is a polite way of saying snobby-neighborhood kid). You don't hear about him getting kicked out of lacrosse for beating the shit out of some freshman, for instance. And then you don't hear about his dad calling the coach and having a hissy and getting him back on the team. Even though he had never done any of those horrible things, and even though he had been in the same crowded AP classes with me all these years, I never had a full conversation with Mike before now.

He reached for some tape and a shamrock.
"So, how's it going?" typical. Going well. College? Haven't heard back yet. He hadn't either. We wished each other luck. I noticed that all of the shamrocks I was hanging up seemed to be from the heart of Mickey Mouse and The Terminator. No one really sold their seven shamrocks, obviously. We just bought the damn things ourselves.
"So did you hear about Ricky Trickle?" No I hadn't. As a matter of fact, Ricky was one of those kids you DID hear about beating the shit out of a freshman. He had such a reputation, that some people liked to call him Dick Trickle. You had to admit that the name did lend itself quite easily...

"So what about him?" I asked.

"Oh, well a bunch of us were at Peter Ivanov's house the other night" he hesitated, "ya know, Peter, the tall kid from Russi-"

"Yeah I know who Peter is." Just because I didn't go to the same parties doesn't mean I'm some monster who doesn't know one of my own classmates. God. He went on:

"Right, well, we were all at Pete's, doin, you know, the usual. And Ricky gets totally plastered, right?" He was working himself into a comfort zone now, "and he totally passes out, just like, cold, on the floor. And he's still got his shoes on, so he's fair game, right?" I wasn't sure that I was understanding. Mike, the nice kid with the low profile, continued:
"So, by the end of the night, the guys had all taken a piss on him." I guess I was supposed to think that this was hilarious. But since I didn't, the following pause was extremely awkward. I came across my own stack of shamrocks from the hearts of "Fitzwilliam Darcy" and "Elizabeth Bennett". I had thought about making one from "Tchaikovsky" but thought that might be a little obvious.

"So you guys all peed on him? that's funny." I said. "Ah, Mike, I hate to do this to ya man, but if I don't run I'll miss my bus and have to foot it, you don't mind if I leave you the rest of these to hang up?" He didn't mind, and I got the hell out of there.

As I walked to the bus stop, I thought about how I wasn't sorry for not spending that much time with Mike, the low profile NHS kid who pisses on his friends at keggers. I thought about what I would do to my friends if they ever pissed on me, or let me get drunk enough to merit a pissing on. I reflected that Mike's most prized organs seemed to be intact, or at least he wasn't walking bandy legged, so Ricky Trickle could not have inflicted the same punishment as I would have devised.

And who the hell do you think pulls up behind me as I walk up the hill? In his huge honking SUV with the dented door and crooked hood ornament? Who do you think rolls down the window and asks if I want a ride home? Yeah. Dick Trickle himself. I had to take my headphones off and say, "what?". I wasn't even sure he was talking to me at first. Ashamed to say it, but I was a little afraid to accept a ride from him. I mean, I hadn't talked to this kid in literally six years. Not a word. Why was he suddenly offering me a ride? I skeptically climbed into the front seat (literally, climbed, those SUVs are beasts). And I hate to say it, but the very first thing I said to the guy in six years was, "So I heard you got peed on." He swore and slammed his fists on wheel. I wasn't too alarmed, because although I didn't hang out with him, Ricky had a reputation for these sorts of little-big-man outbursts. The kid probably doesn't weigh twenty pounds more than he did in grade school when I was in mad eight-year-old love with him. He wondered out loud, how that could have gone around so fast.

"Ok, so the guys peed on me. But in their defense, its not like they all took turns and pissed on me, that's not how it was at all."

"You mean, it was an accident?"

"Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I was raving drunk, and I passed out next to the toilet." He was telling it like a war story. "And so, whenever someone came in to piss, they usually missed, so. . ."

"You mean, no one moved you from the bathroom floor?" I was trying to hide the fact that I was appalled. I tried very hard to say it offhand, like I saw it happen every weekend. In real life though, I have only been to one keg party. I was there for a total of twenty minutes to pick up a friend who had called for a ride. It took me ten minutes to locate her in the bathroom, five minutes to help her finish barfing, and another five to get her into the car in a casual sort of way. I'm not advocating against keggers. I think they are an indispensable part of high school life. Underage drinking is not what appalls me at all. I just don't think people should have to get peed on is all.

When Ricky finished telling his war story, I wanted to say something like, 'well, I guess you won't get that drunk again any time soon....' but I didn't want to sound like a crusader. They had kind of pegged me as a virginal crusader-against-drinking-type anyway. We picked up the familiar conversation of colleges. He hadn't heard back from anywhere yet. But he wanted to go to UVM to study computers and engineering.

He pulled up my street without me having to tell him which one, and even more remarkable, he recognized my house. The last time he was there was for my seventh birthday party, when he bought me a little butterfly necklace. I was sure that meant he wanted to marry me, and I wore the necklace every day as a token of my undying love for him until it fell off and was lost some two years later in fifth grade. I hopped down from the car without mentioning my astonishment at his remembering where I lived. I didn't want to draw attention to it, or make him think I was creeped out. I just said, "thanks for rescuing me from the shame train (that means the bus)" and with a half fake laugh, he revved the engine and sped away.

I know it's none of my business, and I get that people grow apart, and Ricky's not even the type of person I would willingly spend an evening with, even if it wasn't at a keg party. But I think I would've moved him off the bathroom floor anyway.