Son of Destruction by Kit Reed

who was anybody came to Huntington Beach. Sexy Jessie Vukovich was there, but nobody knew where she was staying. Even Lucy came, but not until the last night, her grandmother was that repressive. His heart turns over whenever he thinks of Lucy, which he tries not to do. He slipped his tiny gold football into her hand after the May crowning but she never mentioned it. Everybody but Lucy was there for the week, and there were parties every night. Nenna Henderson was there, he thinks, but in the background, because she wasn’t famous for anything. Not that they weren’t all pretty. In high school certain elements gave you distinction and everyone else was a blur.
    For instance, Jessie Vukovich was famous because she would do it with anybody, and in spite of the cold distance she kept, Lucy was famous for her looks. The cheerleaders you remembered because you all rode the bus to away games and you did what you could with them in the back. When you were team captain you had the best and the sexiest and the most famous, but that was before.
    Nobody at school knew it but Bobby was also smart. He managed to hide it until he got into Harvard, the first in ten years from Fort Jude High. At the time he actually believed getting into Harvard made him better than he was, which turned their senior blast into a curious exercise in detachment.
    All week, at least until that awful Saturday night, Bobby was like a passenger poised at the top of the gangplank, waving goodbye to all those little people on the dock, watching them recede as he left them behind.
    Nothing turns out the way you thought. Most of us handle it, but people like Bobby are inclined to dwell. Something grave happened to Bobby Chaplin between then and now, and long before Grace left him, it broke him in two. He can’t leave it alone and he can’t figure it out.
    People like Bobby actually believe there is a fulcrum, an exact, identifiable point when life tips and everything goes downhill. With people like Bobby, it’s never who they are, or what they did. It’s,
I was going along fine until X happened.
They need something to blame. The problem is, they can’t put their finger on the X.
    He has wasted his life on it. One of his shrinks said,
It’s never what happens that makes the difference, Mr Chaplin. It’s how you handle it.
    Well, he thinks, that’s easy for you to say. He feels bad about what came down at senior houseparties. No. That he was involved. No. That he was out of his mind on vodka and whatever they were smoking and lying nose down in the mangroves when he should have . . . Don’t go there.
    Listen, he finished Harvard
magna cum
in spite of everything; he went to Harvard Law and ended up in finance, great job with a big firm so, fine.
    Then, why is he here? After a year back in Fort Jude, after months of stewing over first causes, Bobby Chaplin is in no condition to analyze.
    It’s crazy, but there’s the outside possibility that Nenna knows. He wants to ask Nenna Henderson – no, McCall – what went wrong in that wonderful, catastrophic senior week, like, what does she remember? Were there warning signs? Maybe she saw things he was too trashed to note, or deconstruct. He thinks now that the event that brought him down is located back then, but he can’t be sure. Too much happened. He was drunk and lovelorn, Buck was drunk and mourning his dead twin brother, Chape was off somewhere getting it on with Cathy, Brad was drunk and vicious and Stitch was just drunk. Nothing was clear.
    If Bobby had stayed sober maybe he’d remember, but you didn’t. They were kids! The parties were great and you were drunk all the time, it was a given; people said things they’d never say and did things they had to be wasted to do. Worse things happened that weekend and he was too trashed to know if it’s his fault.
    The last thing Bobby Chaplin wants to do is stand out here on the front walk strip mining memory lane, but he doesn’t want to go back inside