Then he’d go pro if he were lucky, or else get into coaching or something, and he and Stacy would get married and raise some kids and hit up Baja or TJ over Christmas breaks and buy a kick-ass summer place on Lake Chelan with a Jacuzzi. Stacy would be sure to get into SF State, so they’d see each other all the time.
And seriously, how sick was college going to be? Pledging some frat and playing ball all over the country and partying with his teammates and frat brothers every weekend. In the fall, he’d be off to sunny California (technically, acceptance letters wouldn’t come until March, but the Stanford athletic department said he was as good as in). He’d lost his virginity to Stacy, been given a sweet Jeep for his sixteenth birthday, and ended up good and wasted at about a hundred crazy-fun parties. He’d been to state twice and nationals once. And really, what right did Peter have to be pissed at some aging high school history teacher, when his own life was so freakishly, criminally good? In his three and a half years at Hamilton, he’d started on the basketball team four times. Of course the only alternative to going through all that stuff, to slowly losing your looks and your teeth and your hair and finally your mind, was to bite the big one early, which nobody wanted to do.
It was just one of the many mysteries of getting older, along with male pattern baldness, midlife crises, and erectile dysfunction. Peter’s dad had recently admitted that even at the age of fifty-two, he sometimes woke up with the absolute certainty that he was only twenty-four, with his whole life still spread out before him like an untouched Thanksgiving dinner. But it turned out that wasn’t how it worked at all. As a little kid, Peter had figured that once you reached a certain age, somebody just handed you all the knowledge you’d need in order to be an adult. The thought had never crossed his mind, that a teacher might be jealous of a student. If I had to do what he does every year, I’d probably end up hanging myself in a supply closet or something.” And he’s stuck in this shit school teaching the same shit history over and over again. “You have all this potential, you know? Like your whole life in front of you. She did have great hair, though-a shoo-in for best in school, when yearbook time came around-long and latte brown, the same smooth, glossy texture as a basketball jersey. Peter had never understood why she did that maybe she’d seen it in a shampoo commercial or something. ” She flipped her hair to one side of her head, then back again. They’d already been talking about this for fifteen minutes, which, in Peter’s experience, was about fourteen minutes longer than his girlfriend liked to talk about any serious subject. He’d been staring vacantly at the sky, replaying his brief conversation with Mr. “IT’S NOT THE END OF the world,” Stacy said.
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