You by Austin Grossman Page A

first nights of almost-summer. It was a house party that only Darren was invited to because he ran track that one semester and hadn’t disgraced himself, and that still counted. But Simon and I tagged along because there wasn’t anything else to do, and Darren had the gift of making wherever he went into the place we all wanted to be.
    It was a big party, big enough so we didn’t have to ring the doorbell, big enough to get lost in, and we did. Darren went off to get a beer and say hi to his cooler friends, and Simon and I split up by tacit agreement, figuring we would actually look less dorky apart than together. But I kept track of him. I think that if nothing else, you could say in my defense that I noticed Simon in ways that none of the others did. I noticed what he did, what he was like, and what he thought.
    Simon didn’t know what to do, so he stood in the first-floor hallway next to the stairs, so people would pass him on the way up or down and not stop to notice that no one was talking to him and he wasn’t talking to anyone else. He pretended to sip his beer, and all he could do was notice what the house was like and make a map of it in his mind—where the rooms and corridors branched out, where the monsters and the treasure would go. Where the jocks and the Goths and the nondescript middle-range types were standing. Where the girlscongregated. He tried to imagine that it was a dungeon he could explore, or at least that there was a treasure chest involved. He tried to imagine it was made of asterisks and dots and ampersands, and in his mind he was the plus sign. He breathed in the concentrated smells of beer and sweat that accumulated. He watched the other students arriving, meeting their friends, going upstairs, or spilling out onto the lawn behind the house to trample the pachysandra and decapitate the agapanthus blossoms.
    If the house were a dungeon then it was upside down, and the treasure and the mad wizard would be on the top floor. He climbed the stairs, stepping between and over two girls having a conversation about field hockey.
    By eleven thirty Simon was in a curious state, not sleepy but hazy from the heat and damp air and mist of alcohol that surrounded the house. He wandered down the hall, straying vaguely toward quiet and cool air. The truth was, high school was almost more than he could stand, and he was not a wimp except in the most strict and physically literal sense of the term. He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn’t ever studied for any of them. The house was a new one, a huge three-story box on a low hill. Until a few years ago there was a small one-story house on the site, a dirty pale blue with a permanent accumulation of newspapers out front, whose owners were somewhat mysterious. They’d disappeared, and the whole lot was bulldozed, and the new house was canary yellow, maybe four times the size of the old one, with curious classical touches—columns and broad steps out front, a temple to a pagan god remembered only for its class connotations. On the way in, Simon had rapped on one of the columns with his knuckles—hollow.The third floor seemed to be all guest rooms and half baths, like a dormitory.
    He crept into one of them, wary of disturbing a couple, but it was empty. He went to the window. His own parents owned a liquor store and lived across town in a house not unlike the one this one had replaced. It was near the end of the school year. He looked down across a wide green lawn scattered with stray revelers, and out over the maze of old trees and amber-lit streets of Newton that he’d biked through to get here, a