Dustin decided to end the matter quickly by going to the highest authority first, the rabbi at their temple. Much to Dustin’s surprise, Rabbi Kennison agreed with his mother, citing the example that she herself had worked at McDonald’s in high school. “I asked every customer if they wanted to supersize their meal; does that mean I’m responsible for the obesity problem in America?” she asked. Before Dustin could answer, she added that Dustin would be performing a mitzvah by using his God-given intellectual gifts to help another. “What if Steven grows up and becomes a senator because you helped him with his studies?”
Dustin would have scoffed at the idea that the kid who once ate a June bug on a dare when they were four years old could ever become a senator, but the fact that the current president was once a reality star who cheated on his pregnant wife with a porn star gave him pause. Instead Dustin thanked her for her counsel and immediately called Dr. N. and requested an emergency therapy session. After fifty minutes of therapy, Dustin was no closer to a decision. He eventually reasoned that all teenagers, rich and poor alike, probably had the same capacity for good or evil, and the best way to combat evil was through education—that is, if no lightsaber was available. (Dr. N. casually mentioned at the end of the session that if Dustin turned down the job, perhaps he might recommend his nephew for the position, as he was a poor law school student at Fordham. Dustin found this suggestion ethically questionable.) After a week of intense hand-wringing, Dustin accepted the tutoring job, warning his mother that if he felt even a twinge of inner turmoil, he’d quit.
What Dustin found after his first month was that the nine hours a week he spent tutoring Steven was not in fact an Aristotelean battle between good and evil like he had feared (nor a biblical, Shakespearean, philosophical, or even George Lucasian one), but was instead fun. His childhood friend wasn’t as entitled and insufferable as Dustin had assumed he would be. Steven had grown up to be very much the same as he was when he was a toddler, a charismatic boy with a good sense of humor who enjoyed expensive toys and was happy to share them with his friends (and who would probably still eat a bug if he was dared to do so).
By the second month, Dustin had begun to find his time spent with Steven amusing, even though he would never admit it to his mother. On more than one weekend, Dustin found himself looking forward to their Monday study session, when Steven would no doubt regale him with some outlandish story from his “lit AF” weekend. The two boys had polar opposite high school student experiences: Steven’s were all drugs, nightclubs, and hot girls while Dustin’s were mostly coffee shops, study groups, and smart girls who always, always “friend-zoned” him.
By the end of the fall semester Dustin had whipped Steven into fighting academic shape, witnessed Steven ace his finals (without cheating), and found himself prouder of Steven’s 3.3 GPA than his own 4.0 (though with APs his GPA was actually higher). The two boys celebrated their shared victory over a massive steak dinner at Peter Luger in Brooklyn, and when Steven toasted Dustin for achieving the impossible—Steven’s father told him he was proud of him for the first time ever—it dawned on Dustin that he was going to miss Steven during the monthlong winter break. The fact that he had been proven so wrong about his old friend didn’t annoy Dustin, but instead filled him with joy. Feeling superior to his peers often made him lonely, and that night over a feast fit for a king, he felt a profound sense of connection to someone his own age, and he liked it very much.
This was when Steven invited him to his annual New Year’s Eve party, which, though he didn’t know it at the time, would forever change the course of Dustin’s life. It was never Dustin’s soul that was at stake upon reuniting with Steven, it was his heart. The reason for this was that Steven’s girlfriend, Lolly, had a little sister, Kimmie, who was to become Dustin’s newest infatuation and perhaps his greatest love.
III
Unlike Steven, Dustin had always been an intense, bookish kid, which meant he didn’t have many friends, but this never bothered him because he had no time to be social. He put all his time and effort into his schoolwork, the debate team, and worrying about global warming and the rising sea levels. However, he did have one source of real joy: movies. Sitting in a dark theater, he could momentarily stop worrying about his extensive AP course load and just breathe. Because of this escapism, he had seen an impressive number of films, with his favorite guilty pleasures being the high school comedies of the eighties and nineties. It was these very movies that ignited the flame of his one super-secret, shameful fantasy that he had never admitted to anyone in his entire life, not even his therapist.
This fantasy was that Dustin wanted to end his high school career by going to his senior prom not with a pack of guy friends, or even a smart Ivy League–bound girl whose GPA he admired, but with a gorgeous, completely out-of-his-league hot girl (he didn’t even care if she was smart). And he didn’t want just any pretty high school girl, he wanted a girl who was on the not-so-secret “secret” Manhattan private school Hot List that came out every year during the Christmas holidays, ranking the top ten private school girls in every grade. (He knew, of course, that the very existence of such a list was shallow, misogynistic, and demeaning to girls, but it’s not like he actively participated in the making of the list; he just viewed it. And then promptly hated himself for doing so.)
Dustin was wise enough to know this reverie of his was fueled by the fantasy-filled teen movies he loved, where the “nice guy” always ended up with the “hot girl,” but he didn’t care. He wanted what he wanted, and even though he felt guilty for having such a frivolous hankering, especially when the entire political landscape was a shit show these days, he let himself off the hook by viewing the matter scientifically. What he was experiencing was a biological imperative, or to put it more crudely, it was because he had just as much testosterone as every other teenage boy in America.
This prom fantasy of Dustin’s had morphed into an entirely different beast six weeks ago, on the night of Steven’s annual New Year’s Eve party. This infamous party came into existence four years prior when Steven had no choice but to attend Baruch, a New York City public school, for the first semester of his freshman year after he managed to get kicked out on his first day of Riverdale Country School. Steven, worried he was going to lose his social standing while he waited for his mother to get him into a new private school, asked his father to let him throw a New Year’s Eve party, while his parents spent the holiday as always at their beach house in Maui.
His Korean father, who was constantly worrying about his half-Korean son fitting in with the best of New York society, agreed and gave his son the sage advice that for a party to be memorable, it needed not only to be lavish but exclusive as well. It was his father’s idea that Steven should restrict his party to only upperclassmen (private school juniors and seniors) even though he was himself only a freshman. And to attract these cool upperclassmen his father paid handsomely for A$AP Rocky to perform. It was his mother’s idea to “paper the party” with twenty young Wilhelmina models paid to be pretend guests, something she had heard about from a friend who made his fortune investing in nightclubs. The original party was an enormous success, and Steven’s reputation as the host-with-the-most (models and booze) was now legendary.