Comeback Kids

Chapter 7: Finn

"Welcome," I say, making a grand, sweeping gesture out of the passenger seat window of the Ferrari, "to the glorious, tried-and-true Indiana tradition of getting drunk in a cornfield."

Ronan gives me an incredulous look as he parks the car in front of a vast expanse of darkness, the transmission towers that give the field its name -- Towers, real creative, I know -- looming like red-eyed giants in the distance. "Seriously?" he asks, sounding dismayed on behalf of rural teenagers everywhere. "This is what you do for fun in the countryside?"

"Ha! This isn't the countryside. You're not really country unless your house is at the end of a shitty dirt road."

(Which isn't to say I'm not a fan of shitty dirt roads. When I was younger, my favorite part of any back-roads journey would be when we hit the "washboard" and my dad would shout, "Hold on, folks!", as he gunned it over the muddy bumps, the shocks shuddering with such ferocity that it felt like the car was about to fall apart. I can't imagine what would happen to the Ferrari if we drove it off the paved streets of my town. The engine would probably quit in protest after the first pothole.)

"I'll take your word for it," Ronan says dubiously. He shoots a glance at the rear-view mirror and tries to smooth his hair back, something that never goes well for him. (His hair only ever ends up looking spikier than it did before.) I wonder if he's nervous about getting to know my friends, but that wouldn't make sense, because Ronan doesn't shy away from anything, least of all getting strangers to like him. "Who are we meeting here again?"

"My Cross Country friends. They've been dying to be introduced to one of Lightlake's famous reformed delinquents. No pressure, of course."

"Hmm. Reformed is a stretch."

"Hey, don't make me break out the pamphlet," I warn him. While rummaging around in my mom's desk for postage stamps, I stumbled across an old Lightlake brochure, complete with cheesy camper photos and testimonials. (I made a show out of reading them aloud to Ronan on the phone, but he was less impressed by my discovery.) "Changing for the better is always possible. Did you know that eight out of ten Lightlake campers go on to be honor students in --"

Ronan yanks the keys out of the ignition and hops out of the car before I can finish my sentence. "Eight out of ten campers can kiss my ass. If I hear you bring up that pamphlet again, I swear I will drive back to New York."

"Not without gas money, you won't."

"Don't remind me."

I slide out of the passenger seat -- closing the door behind me as carefully as I can -- and wave Ronan over to join me. A few feet away, the road dead-ends at a metal guardrail, plastered with stickers advertising everything from Coors Light to college radio. We clear it in one jump and follow a dirt trail beaten down by generations of tennis shoes deeper into the field. Half-grown corn stalks sway back and forth in the breeze, batting at our ankles and filling the air with a sweet, earthy scent that takes me back to the countless times I've come to Towers. There's always something a bit secretive about it; glances stolen over bottles pilfered from garage fridges, country music turned down low on a beat-up boombox, bursts of laughter drowned out by the droning of cicadas and crickets. You don't wander into Towers by accident. You have to be initiated into it.

The first time I found myself at Towers, I was fourteen. It was the night after the Counties competition, and our team captain -- a loud-mouthed, dark-haired senior that I was obsessed with for reasons that make more sense now -- told everybody to get their asses to the field by 10 PM (there was an or else implied) and tell no one, especially not our coach, under threat of death. I hitched a ride with my seventeen-year-old neighbor Sasha, my stomach full of the sort of butterflies you only get when you're a freshman in high school and surrounded by upperclassmen who are way cooler than you. We were among the first runners to show up. Warm cans of beer were passed around and Sasha offered me a bottle of Sunny D that turned out to contain mostly vodka, an unpleasant surprise. At the end of the night, the team captain stood on a plastic chair and told us all to forget our dismal performance at Counties, because we were gonna kill it at Regionals the next month, no matter what anybody said. (We got crushed at Regionals, too, but I remember the captain's motivational speech better than the race.)