Empire Falls

missing out on. It turned out to be one hell of a party, all right, and it was already in full swing by the time Jimmy Minty got there. Actually he’d arrived earlier in the evening, but then drove around, trying to work up enough nerve to knock on the frat house door. In fact, he’d finished a six-pack before deciding what the hell. When he finally rang the bell, the door was answered by a big guy who had a sixteen-ouncer in his left hand and a passed-out, bare-assed girl slung over his right shoulder, her long dark hair hanging straight down, almost to the big kid’s knees, her blue jeans and panties bunched around her ankles. Jimmy, trying to pretend that this wasn’t such an unusual sight, explained that he was a friend of Billy Barnes, and the big kid said, “Like I give a shit. Grab yourself a brew. You want a sniff?”
    “What?” Jimmy said, feeling angry and confused.
    “Dollar a sniff,” he explained, and then another guy came over and stuffed a wrinkled bill into his frat brother’s shirt pocket, which Jimmy now noticed was full of them. This new kid asked Jimmy to step out of the way, then grabbed and lifted the girl’s ankles so her knees rested on his shoulders. Then he leaned forward, inhaling deeply. “That,” he said when he’d finished and let the girl’s legs drop, “is one sweet pussy.”
    “So,” the big frat kid said to Jimmy Minty, who hadn’t moved. “You want a sniff, or are you just going to stand there staring?”
    “I was looking for Billy Barnes,” Jimmy Minty reminded him.
    The kid nodded in drunken comprehension. “Nice ripe pussy and you’re looking for Billy Barnes.” He shrugged. “To each his own.”
    Well, it was a pretty wild party. Jimmy drank a beer from one of three identical kegs, wondering if that was all he’d be allowed, not being a member of the fraternity. It was hard to imagine you’d get more than one freebie by dropping Billy Barnes’s name, but apparently he was wrong. When he went back to the kegs, one of the frat boys tripped the spigot, without ever looking at him, as if it were the proximity of the empty cup he was acknowledging and not the person holding it. The beer flowed through the tap slowly, and the boy kept talking to a girl (this one fully clothed) without feeling the need to check on Jimmy’s cup. When he interrupted their conversation to ask if he’d seen Billy Barnes, the frat kid frowned and said, “Who?”
    When he woke up the next morning, Jimmy’s head ached so bad that for a long time he just lay still, not even daring to open his eyes. He was vaguely aware of having spent a restless night, chased from one nightmarish dream to another. When he finally opened his eyes, he was in a strange room. Staring at the ceiling was about all he could manage, because even the slightest movement resulted in wave after wave of rolling nausea and pain. It was quiet, though, and from this he deduced that he was alone. Relieved, he closed his eyes and must’ve gone back to sleep, at least for a while, because when he opened them again the headache, while still nauseating, didn’t seem quite as intense.
    What worried him was that whoever this room belonged to was likely to show up at any time and demand to know what Jimmy was doing in here. He wouldn’t even know who Jimmy was unless by chance this happened to be Billy Barnes’s room, and what were the odds on that? He couldn’t remember much of what happened the night before, but he did recall asking after his old friend over and over and getting the distinct impression that Billy wasn’t held in particularly high esteem by his frat brothers. Not that this surprised him all that much, since Billy didn’t have many friends in high school either, except on the hockey team, and that was only because he could skate circles around just about anybody in Dexter County.
    At any event, if this wasn’t Billy’s bed, Jimmy thought he’d better vacate it as soon as possible, so he closed his eyes one last time, counted to three, sat up, and swung his legs onto the floor. Then he closed his eyes again and waited for the crashing waves of pain in his head to subside. When they did, he immediately saw two things in the dim early-morning light. The first was that he was naked, which put him in mind of the bare-assed girl everybody had been paying to sniff the night before, and in a wild intuitive leap he wondered if something of the sort might’ve happened to him after he passed out. Had