IV - Lost Boys

‘Come on in boys, make yourself at home,’ says the girl. ‘If you want to, you can help us cook dinner and prepare the drinks for tonight. There is a lot of work to be done. Hopefully this party will be epic! The guests will be arriving throughout the evening.’   

            Leonardo is in charge of cutting the onions and Jean-Pierre of helping one of the girls make the sangria. She is blonde and quite cute. Leonardo can see straight away that Jean-Pierre likes her. He can’t help but feeling a bit attracted to her either, that’s just how boys are. Cute girls have a powerful effect on them no matter what. They don’t really need to do anything special, just smile and blink their eyes at them and that’s it, they fall under their spell that easily.

            ‘So, how did you guys meet each other? I didn’t know Jean-Pierre had such lovely friends…’ says Leonardo, feeling slightly awkward as the words leave his mouth. Usually he wouldn’t say something quite like that, but he can’t phrase it in any other way and is feeling quite confused as to why Jean-Pierre has brought him to a house full of cute girls and curious about where he has met them. This is the first time he has seen any of them.      

            ‘We met at Prêt-a-Manger,’ says one of the girls, Olivia, the brunette who had assigned Jean-Pierre and Leonardo to their “posts” in the kitchen. ‘I went there to buy a sandwich and Jean started hitting on me.’

            ‘Come on that is not true. I was just trying to be friendly!’ replies Jean-Pierre straight away, faking his indignation.

‘Yeah, right…’ Leonardo says.  He knows all too well that in Jean-Pierre’s mind, “being friendly” to girls and flirting with them works as synonyms. Besides, this would not be the first time that he has met a girl like that working. He works part-time at a restaurant in Leeds called Prêt-a-Manger, a popular chain of restaurants in England.

‘Really, I wasn’t hitting on her. I was trying to be friendly, that’s all, I swear!’

‘Is that why you asked me if I had a boyfriend?’

‘Oh well… you never know… I was just being curious.’

Everyone laughs. Even Jean-Pierre.

‘I’m glad he did hit on me though, because after I told him I had a boyfriend we continued talking and we became friends. This was only a couple of weeks ago so that’s why we’ve never seen each other before,’ she tells Leonardo. ‘But he talked about you a lot, so I’m glad that I finally got to meet you,’ she tells Leonardo.  ‘And this way you can both get to know my friends. By the way, what do you study, Leonardo?’

‘Politics. Or at least I used to. I had my last exam today. So I think that, for the first time in my life, I’m not a student anymore.’

‘ Oh, congratulations! How do you feel?’

‘ I feel weird… but great. Actually, I think this is probably the happiest day of my life.’

‘I know exactly what that feels like. I finished my exams two days ago and I’m also graduating this year. Well, let us drink and celebrate all night long! Most people here are graduating this year so this is, for most of us, our last house party in Leeds.’

They cook and they eat. They talk and they drink. Guests arrive in increasing numbers. When night comes, there is hardly one sober person in the house, just drunk boys and drunk girls, celebrating the end of an era and the beginning of another. They do what they have done as students for several years. They drink too much, in an attempt to have as much fun as possible. This is the way of the student in the contemporary west.        

             Surrounded by music, laughter and loud voices that celebrate a new-found freedom, Leonardo and Jean-Pierre’s glasses find each other once more, for the umpteenth toast that day.

            ‘To freedom,’ Jean-Pierre says.

            ‘To the future,’ Leonardo replies.

            ‘To our new lives!’ screams Jean-Pierre.

They drink some more, they party some more, their senses increasingly diminished by the power of alcohol.

A dark thought races across Leonardo’s mind, a thought he shares with Jean-Pierre who is sitting right by his side, drinking his beer, his eyes going through the many girls dancing around them in the living room. They all listen to “Die Young” by the “Sweet Serenades.”  

‘Jean?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Can I tell you something?’

‘Yeah. Sure. What is it?’

‘ … I think that our generation is different from every other generation that came before.’

‘How so?’

‘We have no real purpose as individuals. We live in a world that is saturated with people and, as a result, for pretty much everything that you can possibly want to do, there is already someone else doing it, probably better than you could ever do it yourself. And as if it weren’t enough, there are also hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who are waiting in line just like you. It makes me feel sad that none of us is special. That none of us is essential. That if we die, or if for some other reason we fail to become another cog in the immense machine, which is modern society, someone else will. It makes me sad that every single one of us is totally and utterly replaceable, nothing but surplus, our petty existences completely dismissive.’

‘So what do you wanna do about it?’

‘That’s the thing. Where do we go from here? If society doesn’t really need us, how can we have a true purpose? I feel lost you know?’

‘I know… I feel a bit lost as well…’ confesses Jean, the alcohol in his blood taking its toll.

‘We’re lost boys, Jean, two more of a whole generation of lost boys,’ says Leonardo. He says goodbye to his life as a student and he starts preparing himself for the imminent arrival of the sea of doubts that come with the beginning of an adult’s life.

Welcome to the real world boys. Neverland is no more.

The Traveller is listening to:

Die Young (The Sweet Serenades)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ-jzDsl_ic&feature=related