The Thrashers(9)

“What if they have something on us?” Julian asked, leaning forward in the seat next to her. “We’d all been drinking. The cop that came for me and the girls made it sound like we were being carted away and Breathalyzed.”

“‘Good evening, officer. Am I under arrest?’” Mr. Thrasher recited, turning the car onto the freeway. “‘Am I allowed to call my father? I’m seventeen years old.’ Say it with witnesses. If he denies your request, you better hope those camera phones were on.”

“Oh god.” Zack ran his hand over his face. “Dad, there were a lot of phones in our faces at the party—”

“I know. I’m having Patricia draft a statement.”

“Dad. I don’t need your firm to put out a press release.”

“You do if you five want to go to college.”

Jodi’s eyes widened, and the boys fell silent. “Is that—is that a possibility? That colleges will see?”

“It wasn’t an arrest. How would it go on our record?”

“Just from TikTok?”

“I’m just saying”—he raised a placating hand—“that you need to keep all your records clean.”

The car was silent as they turned off the freeway. Jodi pulled out her phone for the first time since the party and saw thousands of notifications—tags on Instagram, X, TikTok; Snapchat messages, texts, DMs. It would take her hours to go through these and untag herself in the videos taken at the party. But there was nothing from her dad.

“Mr. Thrasher, did you … did you call my dad?”

“No, I was going to leave that to you, Jodi. I didn’t know if he was home.” He turned around in the seat.

“Yeah, he’s here this weekend. I guess I’ll go home and explain it to him.”

He smoothly switched into the left-turn lane and took them away from the nice side of town.

Zack stared straight ahead, tapping his fingers on the armrest. Julian’s gaze was out the window, faced away from her. Despite being the worst student of them all, Julian was all about college. He wanted East Coast, and he wanted it now. If you so much as brought up college applications, he would talk your ear off about which water polo schools were coming to see him play this fall. He needed to get out of Sacramento like he needed air.

Jodi didn’t have that. The only extracurricular she had was art, but with her grades, she could at least get into state school, maybe one or two UCs if she buckled down senior year. Having college ripped from her—that didn’t really scare her. What scared her was Zack going to USC and never speaking to her again. Lucy becoming a movie star and forgetting her name. Paige running for Congress in ten years and trying to bury pictures of them. She’d thought about just moving to LA, finding an apartment, and starting city college there, just to be close to Zack. But it made her feel pathetic.

The car turned onto her street and slowed to find the narrow lane packed with cars and people on lawns. The neighbor three houses down always threw parties on Friday nights, and as Mr. Thrasher slowed to squeeze between a double-parked car, Jodi flushed bright red.

It made her uncomfortable to be seen getting out of Zack’s Mustang on this street, but the BMW made it ten times worse. She felt her neighbors’ eyes on the car as they stopped at her house. Her dad’s old Corolla was in their driveway.

“Thank you,” she said, unclicking her seat belt. “I promise I’ll tell my dad.”

“Have him call me if he has questions. I’m going to look into what Chelsea filed on you all, so if anything happens like this again, we’ll be prepared.”

Jodi nodded, saying her goodbyes. As she rounded the car, Zack’s window rolled down.

“Hey, I’ll text you tomorrow.”

Then Julian’s voice called out from the back seat, “Snapchat!”

Some of the weight lifted off her heart. She walked up the driveway, fumbling the house key out of her bra. They waited for her to open the door and wave before driving off, and then Jodi kicked off her shoes and tiptoed into the living room.

Her dad was just where she’d left him, round belly protruding from the armchair toward the television, infomercials blasting loud enough to wake a normal person. A heavy snore rang to her ears, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Her dad’s snoring was legendary, but sometimes he didn’t make a sound, and Jodi had to press her shaking fingers to the pulse in his neck just to give herself peace of mind.

Hank Dillon was a truck driver for a big delivery company. He would spend six or seven days on the road, sleeping in his truck or stopping at a motel, before unloading and turning back around. He was gone every other weekend, but Jodi was fine with it as long as they had one day a week to get dinner at their favorite hole-in-the-wall or go to the Roseville golfing arena. When he was on the road, Jodi had the Burnses next door for emergencies, or she’d spend the night with her friends. Sometimes if he was assigned to the Florida route, she’d stay with her grandmother and aunt for the week, but it was hard to hear her mom’s sister and mother talk about how much of a failure her dad was. They’d whisper about how Jodi didn’t eat carrots, didn’t exercise, didn’t go to church anymore. It was annoying.

Her dad gave a mighty snore, and Jodi quickly bent to pick up the beer bottles at his feet and took them to the kitchen. She turned the TV off, turned the fan on, and grabbed a glass of water for each of them.