the summer before my junior year

The summer before his junior year at Placerville High School marked a pivotal period in Charles Decker's adolescence, a time when his first experiments with marijuana and a humiliating sexual failure at a coastal party deepened his isolation and set the stage for the violent breakdown that would culminate in the hostage crisis. This season, bracketed by the innocence of a road trip with his best friend Joe McKennedy and the cold aftermath of rejection, became a turning point in Charlie's deteriorating mental state, one he would later recount to his captive classmates in Room 16 as part of his attempt to explain—or perhaps justify—the rage that had consumed him.

The Trip to Bangor and First Marijuana Use

Charlie and Joe drove to Bangor to spend a weekend with Joe's older brother Pete McKennedy, a twenty-one-year-old University of Maine student working a summer job with the Bangor Sanitation Department. On Friday night, Charlie got drunk for the first time in his life alongside Pete, Joe, and several of Pete's friends, and the next day Pete took them to the university campus, which Charlie found pretty in the July heat, though most of the coeds had left for Bar Harbor or Clear Lake. There Pete spotted a friend named Scragg Simpson, a big man in paint-splattered jeans who invited them to a party at a camp owned by Dana Collette's parents near Schoodic Point, promising unattached women and suggesting they bring marijuana. Pete then led them to Jerry Mueller, whom he described as the biggest dope dealer in the Orono-Oldtown-Stillwater triangle. Charlie, privately excited and apprehensive, had expected a stereotypical drug den but found instead a small man with a constant grin, a collection of bluegrass music, and a bright yellow button reading "GOLDILOCKS LOVED IT." When Charlie asked about the Tarr Brothers, revealing his own taste for country and bluegrass, Jerry warmed to him immediately. Jerry produced a small cigarette wrapped in brown paper, which Pete lit and passed around; Charlie, who did not smoke cigarettes, drew slowly as instructed, finding the smoke sweet, heavy, acrid, and dry. Half an hour and two more joints later, Charlie realized he could visualize the banjo chords from Flatt and Scruggs' "Russian Around" as bright steel threads shuttling like looms, and he tried to describe the sensation to Joe, who only looked at him in a puzzled, fuzzy way. They stayed until almost five o'clock, and when they left, Charlie was wrecked out of his mind. Pete bought an ounce of grass from Jerry, and Charlie later reflected that this was the last really happy time he could remember.

The Party at Schoodic Point

The drive to the coast was long, and all three were still very high, unable to talk without giggling. Pete had been to a party at the camp before, and they took only one wrong turn before finding the narrow mile of gravel marked PRIVATE ROAD. The heavy bass of music was audible a quarter-mile away, and so many cars were stacked up that they had to walk from that point. The cabin was packed with what seemed like a million people, every one of them drunk, stoned, or both; the smell of marijuana hung on the air like a heavy mist, along with wine and hot bodies. Two lights dangled from the ceiling, one red and one blue, giving the place the feel of a funhouse. Dana Collette, a short, almost pretty girl with bleached hair and the shortest dress Charlie had ever seen—a bright fluorescent orange that seemed alive in the weird lighting—greeted Pete enthusiastically. When she moved, the hem of her dress swirled around the lace bottoms of her panties. Pete produced his Baggie of weed, and Dana led them to a relatively unoccupied corner behind a stereo speaker, where she produced a huge scrolled water pipe from a low bookshelf groaning with Hesse, Tolkien, and Reader's Digest condensed books. They toked up, and Charlie, finding the grass much smoother through the water pipe, began to get very high indeed, his head filling with helium. Every time Dana bounced up to greet a new arrival, Charlie could look straight up her dress to where her underwear was sheathed in the gauziest of blue nylon. He watched her cross and uncross her legs, and a few filaments of pubic hair, nine shades darker than her bleach job, strayed out of the lacy leg bands. He later told his classmates that he had never been that horny and doubted he ever would be again, his organ feeling large enough and long enough to pole-vault on.

The Failed Sexual Encounter

Dana suddenly whispered in Charlie's ear, her breath tickling the dark channel, telling him to go out the back door. She pointed, and he followed her finger, chuckling at what he thought was a particularly witty thought. She laughed lightly and said, "You've been looking up my dress all night. What does that mean?" before kissing his cheek softly and giving him a little shove. Charlie, stoned and horny, almost fell twenty feet to the tiny white shingle of beach below, but he walked carefully down a flight of weather-washed steps, holding the railing, his feet feeling a thousand miles away. The scene was frozenly beautiful: a slip of a moon, a ghost of a breeze, the Atlantic pinpointed with uncertain nets of light from the moon, and a faint curve of an island far out to the left. He slipped off his shoes and waited. But as time passed, unease crept in—something about the shadow of trees on the wet, packed sand, the sound of the wind, the ocean itself, a big thing full of unseen life. By the time Dana put her hand on his shoulder, he had lost his erection. She turned him around, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him, asking if he could be nice. He touched her breasts, but his erection was still gone. She led him underneath the back steps, where the grass was cool and matted with aromatic pine needles, and slipped out of her dress. They rolled together, but his cock remained on coffee break. When she touched him, sliding her hand inside his underpants, the muscles down there jerked not in pleasure or revulsion but in a kind of terror; her hand felt like rubber, cold and impersonal and antiseptic. He tried to think of something sexy—looking up a girl's skirt in study hall, dirty French playing cards, Sandra Cross in sexy black underwear—but then, of all things, he saw his father with his hunting knife, talking about the Cherokee Nose Job. That did it; everything collapsed into noodledom. He reached down and took hold of his penis and shook it as if to ask what was wrong, but Mr. Penis wasn't talking. He slid an exploratory finger into her, thinking, "This is the place men like my father joke about on hunting trips and in barber shops. Men kill for this." But when he tried, it was like the old joke about trying to jam a marshmallow into a piggy bank. He rolled off and apologized. Dana sighed an irritated sound and said, "All right. It happens." Charlie insisted it had never happened to him before, though it was his first time. The cold certainty that he was queer crept over him like rising water. Dana told him to wait before coming back up, then zipped into her dress and was gone. Charlie sat under the steps, the moon watching him closely, perhaps to see if he might cry. He didn't. After a while he got his clothes straightened and went back upstairs, where Pete and Dana were gone and Joe was making out with a stunning girl. Charlie sat down and waited for the party to be over.

Aftermath and Dream

By the time the three of them got back to Bangor, dawn had already pulled most of her tricks out of her bag, and a red edge of sun peered down from between the smokestacks of Brewer. None of them had much to say. Charlie felt tired and grainy, unable to tell how much damage had been done to him, but with a leaden feeling that it was more than he really needed. He fell into the tiny daybed in the living room, the last thing he saw before sleep being bars of sunlight falling through the venetian blinds onto a small throw rug. He dreamed about the Creaking Thing, the same nightmare from his childhood: he was in his bed, the moving shadows of the tree outside on the ceiling, the steady, sinister sound. But this time the sound kept getting closer until the bedroom door burst open with an awful crack. It was his father, holding his mother in his arms. Her nose had been slit wide open, and blood streamed down her cheeks like war paint. "You want her?" his father said. "Here, take her, you worthless good-for-nothing." He threw her on the bed beside Charlie, and Charlie saw that she was dead. He woke up screaming—with an erection. In Room 16, after he finished telling this story, nobody had anything to say, not even Susan Brooks. Charlie felt tired, and there didn't seem to be a great deal left to say. Most of the students were looking outside again, and Charlie decided Sandra Cross's sex story had been better; there had been an orgasm in hers.