Rivals

David McConnell

 

 

 

 

 

 

Darius was neat and prompt. He arrived early in homeroom and sat quietly while the other boys played chess or flicked triangular paper “footballs” across their desks. Sometimes he made a flowery gesture to himself before recomposing his hands on the glazed plywood.

In his teacher Jane’s opinion he had an average mind, but every so often he spoke at length in class. On these occasions he was riveting and made no sense at all. He’d twitch. He’d flinch at the loud ticking of the clock as the words poured out. He’d only go still when his eyes rolled up at a patch of the acoustic-tile ceiling and he looked ready to faint. “Sharks are animals! Sharks are animals! You look at them and they have these major senses we don’t have. And they’re animals, so ... Also, the fishermen don’t know about the cancer cure thing!”

Waving for his attention, his teacher put in, “Are you saying they’d be more careful not to overfish sharks? Our speaker made the point that even though sharks are dangerous, they may benefit us.” Jane Brzostovsky knew the sense she tried to make for Darius wouldn’t calm him.

The student who’d just given his “homeroom speech” on sharks and who was still jumpy and flushed in patches squealed, “Yeah, because of what I just said—the cartilage!”

“No, no,” Darius groaned. “Because sharks are animals!” His gaze made an appealing but haughty sweep of his audience before drifting to the ceiling again like oracular smoke. He made a passionate gesture with one arm in a way that caused giggles. He seemed not to hear them. “This, this is not what they see!”

Jane began to wonder, as always, whether he were making sense too sophisticated for his age. Then she heard, “They’re as scared of us as we are of them!” An age-appropriate banality.

And then, again Darius: “I have a tooth from an extinct shark two thousand feet long.” Snorts of disbelief and No way’s went unnoticed. “I threw it in our pool. I won’t say why.” Was it a contentless compulsion to perform? Pure, childish rhetoric, in other words? “I know he loved his tooth.” Much laughter. And Darius laughed, too, as if for a moment allowing this was all a joke. The moment passed. “But he’s an animal—was. So you guys might be useful for cancer. You could be! This!” Thrillingly he seized the homeroom speaker’s hand and tried to hold it up. But the boy shook his arm free with a stormy look and blocked-sinus wheezing. Darius talked on. What could one say?

When the boy finally wound down and the bell rang, Jane reminded him to stay after class to discuss his own speech, next on the schedule. Darius sat, crossed his legs tightly, and put a jaunty hand on his hip. He looked exhilarated, proud, which somehow annoyed Jane. The truth was, she disliked him. Jane disapproved of irony, the vice of the age. And unseriousness bubbled up from Darius—like that moment of laughter today—even when passion had seized him. Most ironical and maddening of all, he adored her. She was his favorite teacher. He took her winces, her reserve, her dutiful encouragement as some kind of hilarious flirtation. She sighed, “Maybe you should think about doing a follow-up, more on sharks, since you feel so strongly ...”

“I’m doing it on the Borgia family,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He’d moved to the desk closest to hers. “They’ve probably never heard of them.” He chucked his head at the empty room.

“Darius, don’t be so arrogant. You come off looking foolish. I’d wager some of them have heard of the Borgias.”

He smiled at her, an oddly prying expression, and repeated, “‘Foolish’?”

“I only mean it takes a lot of hard work to do well and . . . to explain your thoughts clearly. I do get a sense that you have something to say sometimes. But let’s get on with it. What about the Borgias?”

“Well, the Pope had a homosexual incest relationship with his nephew, who was really his son.”

“I think there was a lot of nasty gossip about the Borgias. I mean . . . a very evil family.”

“And the son was in love with his sister.”

“I don’t think you need to be . . . sensationalistic in your speech.”

Again he raised an eyebrow at her.

“Darius, do you know what all that’s about?”

“Of course.”

“What?”

“Sex. The Borgias, you mean?”

“I don’t know if that would be such an appropriate thing to dwell on. Maybe if you talked about the dark side of the Renaissance.”

“You want me to hide the truth?” he asked in the most insinuating tone.

Jane made a face at the window. Outside, healthy-minded boys were playing flag football, plastic streamers, red and blue, dancing from their narrow hips.

“Don’t look out the window on me,” Darius said, outrageously, baselessly intimate.

“Darius!” Jane snapped. “A little respect!”

His face went slack. She closed and rolled her eyes briefly, causing herself an invigorating pain. The boy’s global ignorance didn’t make him endearing. He had no clue about her feelings. Or his own.

The bowdlerized Borgia talk didn’t go over well, but Darius seemed to get the taste of stardom anyway. He talked in almost every class in the days following. When he was on the brink of one of his talking ecstasies near the end of homeroom, Jane Brzostovsky called on others and tried to overlook his waving arm, double-jointed with yearning. At intervals a grainy, silvery thunder of cheering came through the open windows from the middle school playing field. “I know everybody wants to get out, so I’ll try to wrap up,” Jane said.

“I have something to say,” Darius couldn’t contain himself.

“Not sure we have time, Darius.” Jane tried to sound offhand. She snuck a glance. Sure enough, Darius looked betrayed, his brow pinched.

In a snide tone of voice he addressed the class, “She just doesn’t want you to hear the true thing that will go against her small-minded—”

“Hey! Watch it! I don’t like the sound—”

“Of course, she doesn’t. She’s—”

Jane grabbed his upper arm and flung open the classroom door. She dragged Darius into the hall. The other students, vocalizing like monkeys, peered after them.

The door had revolved on its hinges and struck the outer wall. The pewter glare from a glass pane shuddered on the tile floor, and an aqueous clangor re-echoed up and down the hall. Jane’s muscles felt like frothed milk, her eyes actually hurt in their sockets—she was so enraged. Darius’s head rolled with flowerlike indifference. “You’ve been wanting to touch me for a long time, haven’t you, babe?” he said.

She struck him with the flat of her hand. His expression wrinkled up. “And all of you, shut up,” Jane snapped at the murmuring class.

The slap was a serious matter. Jane dutifully reported it to the head of school. Together they settled on a risky course of inaction: not even a phone call to the parents, the exceedingly rich Van Nests. The calculation paid off. Darius never told anyone what had happened. Pleased with their discretion, the head of school bunched his lower lip whenever he saw Jane over the next few days. It looked like he meant, “I do feel for you—these kids sometimes. ...” Other parents who might have heard about the slap would assume a disciplinary word had been spoken. And that was that.

Jane felt an irritable sort of remorse. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so hard on him, maybe he could have aroused her compassion—by all accounts his parents were horrendous—if only he hadn’t been so close to Barry Paul. Barry was Jane’s favorite student by far. She often laughed to herself about her more or less full-blown crush on him. Or “crush”—when it came to Barry her stream of consciousness bubbled with giddy scare quotes and, she had to admit, sputtered with irony. Seeing the two boys together drove her crazy. Annoyed her, she told herself, on Barry’s behalf, because even he might be affected by exposure to such a “twisted” companion.

The two boys were always together. Inseparable from the first day of class at Lawrence Academy. Jane had no clue how their friendship suddenly sprang into existence. It was one of those kid things. It had to be very pure, very beautiful, and very mysterious. At least on Barry’s side.

Next to Barry, who was husky, Darius looked svelte and crafty. He effaced himself. Chin scratching his clavicle with feline strokes, he’d eye his friend. If he needed attention, there weren’t any outsize ecstasies. A rapid whisper passed his lips. Then, as soon as Barry turned, frank and grinning and, for some reason, amazed at what he’d heard, Darius’s fingers squirmed. They formed a white-knuckled spider on the white denim stretched tightly across his thigh. He smiled at the floor. Jane didn’t care for the too-tight pants or the flowered shirts the boy, or his mother, went in for.

Since Jane’s thoughts about Barry were over the top as well as energetically secret, her love was also funny. To her anyway. The scare quotes tickled. Self-deprecating amusement creamed inside her, becoming more abundant affection for the loved one, then diffuse happiness, then a barely visible smile.

Barry had a special quality, didn’t he? Who knew what it was? Jane tried pinning it down. Too simplistic to say he lacked irony. The universal mistake people made—this was Jane talking to herself, for she really believed Barry’s appeal was widespread and that was no joke—the universal mistake people made was thinking that the quality didn’t belong to him. They thought they were content, they were having a good day, they were interesting, their personality was bearable, even admirable, whenever they had some little dealing with Barry. Since he wasn’t memorably beautiful and never said anything a suburban New Jersey boy wouldn’t say, he was able to go about his business in the healthful anonymity that suited him. His star power—that’s what Jane called it—was slow-acting, subterranean. A tribute to her, in a way, that she’d picked up on the—uh, “star power,” no? She tried laughing but failed. In subtle stages, she’d given up the notion that sometimes she was content or interesting or to be admired or that she could ever become that way through an effort of her own. It was objective, this quality Barry had. Like those naïve maps that placed the Garden of Eden exactly here, so many miles northwest of Ur, fulfillment seemed to be local, tangible, the fragrance of sour candy on this one boy’s breath. She was like any of us when we’re starstruck. We squirrel away tiny facts about our idols, whether to take them down a peg or draw them closer is unclear. But sometimes all the detail in the world is insufficient. They have one more thing. An invisible thing. And we swear it’s real.

Barry’s eyes were set wide. He squeezed the right one closed when he didn’t understand something—often enough. In repose his mouth looked straight, grim, and countrified, but it was always moving. He was an avid, poor skateboarder. He sometimes tied a spare wheel truck to the flap of his backpack, a sort of tradesman’s token. He had no particular passion for any of his classes, though he liked the biology unit of science best.

Even at eleven, a year older than most of the boys in his class, he seemed lumbering. He wasn’t above trouble. Somehow, bigger in body, the trouble seemed a bigger deal than it was, too. He was caught shoplifting Rock Climber Magazine from a 7-Eleven. There were plenty of successful thefts, as well.

No matter how amiable, he liked popping out a cruel remark from time to time and thought them pretty funny. Jane and Darius were both—independently—shocked. Like the time he mimicked his grandmother’s Alzheimer’s a week before she died. He wasn’t not good-hearted, just not mincingly good—a distinction neither Darius nor Jane happened to be strong on. Plus, the down at his ankles and another patch of down that often showed over his huge red-eyed death’s-head belt buckle were going coarse prematurely, a little too sexy for a kid. When you glimpsed it, you imagined he was secretly manly, despite the beardless baby face.

He had one quirk. He claimed to be a communist. He insisted on it. Though he knew a few Maoist aphorisms and pretended to celebrate May Day, his communism wasn’t a thought-through political position. Sometimes the most normal boys in the world develop a healthy consternation about being so normal. With a simplicity that’s really anything but eccentric, they seize on a single eccentricity and make a hobby of it. Being a communist, especially at the time, 1989, made Barry feel more like a particular person. And of course, it suited Jane, a brazen leftist till reality dumped her in the hallowed halls of Lawrence, perfectly.

All the humor—the irony, ironically—mostly shielded Jane’s “crush,” her love, from her own eyes. But Jane wasn’t stupid. She knew there was something out of hand about so unwieldy an emotion for a student. She once tried to finesse it. Too smart for her own good. As all the world knows, secrets want to come out.

There happened to be a scandal that got a lot of play in the Star-Ledger around this time. Thuggish football team. Slip of a boy raped with an Eskimo soapstone carving of a seal. Then, comfort in an assistant coach’s arms! A two-year chronicle of forty-eight “incidents” between man and boy. Jane wasn’t the only one to follow this story. But she stayed up late one night typing a memo to fellow faculty members. “Thoughts before We Formulate a Policy on Inappropriate Behavior” was the long title, and “Glasnost! Openness!” was the short first paragraph.

The memo went on about a friend of Jane’s, a first-time mother who discovered that her nurturing feelings toward her infant actually had an erotic component. “Perhaps new parents often give up having sex for a time, because they’re experiencing a perfectly normal displacement of erotic feeling onto their children. Nor should any of us feel alarm if we acknowledge that this might be part of our ‘job description’ as teachers. Not that anybody’s talking about reviving the Greek example! Ha ha!” Jane got through six revisions and had made thirty copies of her memo without ever realizing that to stuff the thing into the banks of cubbyholes in the teacher’s lounge would be insane.

A prudent sixth sense took control of her body, and she handed the sheet to elderly Emmett Drinkwater (New Jersey history, lacrosse). “You have a minute, Emmett, to take a look at this for me?” Why was she clearing her throat so much?

After skimming it, then reading it through again while he tickled a wrinkled earlobe, Drinkwater hemmed, “I’m not so sure, Ms. Brzostovsky.” He grimaced as if a strong wind were coming from the memo. “Do we want to get into this? Seems a bit of a personal statement.”

“Personal?” Jane said, with a note of miffed laughter.

“I’m just not sure it’s something you ought to embark on. Though you . . . you make some points.”

Two months later felt like a thousand years when she found the thirty pages at home, read the first couple of sentences, and started hyperventilating. She threw the sheets away as if they were thirty pieces of silver. What on earth could she have been thinking? The alarm passed eventually, but to this day it could come over her like malarial fever.

There was another time that her crush struck her as not such an amusing thing. Maybe this was when love began to elbow “crush” out of the way. Jane was renting a small house in a so-so section of Monmouth County. Her neighbors were all old, mostly working-class retirees who reminded her of her parents. So it seemed a dream when she was sipping coffee at her kitchen window one Saturday morning and saw Barry Paul, wearing only white jockey shorts, mowing the lawn of the backyard next door. She felt a flood of . . . loving concern. He could easily be injured. His big feet were bare and he was handling the flimsy mower carelessly, snapping the orange cord over the grass like a bullwhip. She watched him until concern for his toes spiraled off like steam and her coffee got cold. She moved from window to window watching him. A secret seventh sense had taken control of her body as she studied him, a little thick and well made for so young a boy. She eventually woke from that dream. Even though it wasn’t a dream.

It turned out Barry was a friend of Hi and Betty Malcolm, the elderly couple who lived in the house next door. He’d gone with them that morning to inspect some dreary square footage their son-in-law had rented for a card shop. Because Barry wore dress clothes to meet the son-in-law (and his mother always made a stink about taking care of dress clothes), he sloughed them later to do a chore for the infirm couple. Hi had a sore arm, Betty an enlarged heart. Thus yard work in underpants.

Jane didn’t make herself known that day. But Barry visited the Malcolms from time to time, and months later Jane flagged him down, “Look who’s here!” He gave her his squinty, one-eyed look. She put her hands on her hips and heard a flutter in her long sigh. They were both clothed. They were bemused seeing one another in the civilian world. Barry seemed to find it funny. Not Jane. She was horribly depressed all that afternoon.

 

What was that very pure and very mysterious connection kids can form? That just uncurls like a leaf? Jane felt, frankly, excluded, and it almost made her angry—anger she turned on Darius, no matter how unfair. She just didn’t like him. It happens.

The two boys didn’t even notice they were particularly friends, until Jane smirked one time, “You’re as thick as thieves.” Several other adults dropped similar aren’t-you-cute comments. Which made friendship feel disgusting, but the boys had to admit, now that they thought about it, they were always together. Other kids were matter-of-fact. If they wanted to know what Darius thought about something, they asked Barry. And vice versa. They addressed the two, even when one of them wasn’t around, as “you guys.” Poetry was written about them: “Very hilarious / Are Barry and Darius.”

The boys even traveled together. When she heard about their trip, Jane got perfectly jealous. The emotion shocked her. It was torture how each boy came to her to report happily about spring break. And even worse torture hearing herself needle them about it over several days like some—well, some Claggart. Needle them and also probe for more and more detail. She wanted to know everything.

Barry was unusual in getting along with people of all ages. Not just the elderly Malcolms. Another pal was a cousin, a freshman at Rutgers, who invited Barry to tag along on spring break that year. The cousin rented a clapboard house in Belmar with ten schoolmates. Because parts of explanations were omitted and because the Jersey shore was so close and because “cousin” sounded all right, Darius was allowed to go. Then Barry, who hadn’t been given permission himself, was allowed to go, because his mother savored the fancy Van Nest family connection. The boys handled the circular permissions nicely. As for the cousin, he had two contradictory reasons for wanting them along. Partly he meant to use the boys the way a lady-killer uses a puppy. Partly it was a sincere and sentimental pantomime of fatherhood.

Like most New Jersey shore towns, Belmar is built along a narrow beach in strips, boardwalk, traffic-congested street, jostling bars and shops facing the Atlantic, then a quieter swath of modest summer houses. The town is overrun with black teenagers during Greek Week, white during spring break.

Neither boy had the words to get the idea across to Jane, but the world is marvelous when a bunch of doting teenagers are the grown-ups. Adulthood looks unbearably beautiful and energetic and free. Belmar wasn’t anything like the madhouse locals grumbled about. Barry and Darius were so happy they panted when they talked. The first day they spoke as loudly as possible.

“SHAKE IT, DARE!”

“I AM, BARE.” Darius turned to a voluptuous girl in a green bikini and purple kimono. She was the only one who was up at that hour. She’d fixed cereal for them and was now fumbling with a cigarette. “Should I help clean up?” Darius asked her.

“Uh, no,” she answered, unsure about letting them run off to the beach on their own. But Barry was so determined.

“I GOT YOUR TOWEL, DARE!”

“COMING! WEAPONS?”

“GOT ’EM.”

The girl made an expression like, “Yikes!” She blushed when she noticed Darius staring at a couple of black curls peeking from the bikini-strangled apex of her thighs. Tugging at her kimono, she turned abruptly and blew an uninhaled mouthful of smoke through the screen door. From the humid dimness of the house a mucous-y, male voice said, not unkindly, “Get out or shut the fuck up.”

On the beach Barry shouted, “SEE THAT OUT THERE?”

“NO. WHERE? WHAT?”

“THE BOAT UNDER THE BANNER-TOWER. HURRY! UNDER THE TAIL OF THE BANNER—‘QRL EASY-PISSING MUSIC’ I THOUGHT IT SAID!”

Darius laughed, gripped his belly. His too-large mirrored sunglasses, already askew, slipped off when he bent forward. “OK, YEAH. I SEE IT. SO?”

“ILLEGAL DUMPING. THAT’S WHAT HE’S DOING.” Barry shrugged and pretended to inject his forearm with a hypodermic. Darius squinted at the horizon. He couldn’t see that the ship was dumping anything, illegal or not. “CAPITALIST SCUM!” Barry screamed.

“Hey!” a stranger in headphones barked. “Pipe down, f’Chris’! S’with you, you two?”

Barry and Darius gave one another a long look. Barry arched his back, thrummed his belly like a duffer but deftly lifted his towel to his hand with a foot. “THINK WE CAN PIPE DOWN, DARE?”

“DON’T THINK SO. THIS IS JUST THE WAY WE TALK.”

“WE JUST TALK THIS WAY?”

“YU-U-U-U-UP!” Darius screamed.

The stranger pulled off his earphones and feinted getting up. The boys ran down the beach. Half an hour later they were still escaping him in fantasy. Darius pretended the reverse of the “Belmar Daily” beach tag safety-pinned to the hip of his Speedos was a video screen. He sat on the gritty boardwalk and pulled his towel over his head. One of the stranger’s earphones was a camera (planted earlier), and Darius could observe the man’s thoughts on the screen. “SHIT! HE’S COMING!” He scrambled to his feet and shoved Barry in the small of his back. The boards made cooing thuds as they trotted off toward the bridge that led to Avon-by-the-Sea and Bradley Beach.

Fantasy was heady stuff for Barry. He enjoyed Darius’s knack for it like he enjoyed watching movies. Left to his own devices, he was curious about everything that wasn’t fantastic. He almost preferred talking with the teenagers. When they’d exchange looks and teasingly make as if there was really too much he didn’t understand yet, he took it good-naturedly.

He was fascinated by work. He pestered a pizza boy with questions about hours and wages. The pizza boy was standoffish at first, but he let himself be drawn out, scratching flour from the messy scar of, perhaps, a patched harelip. He said he’d gotten his GED. This job was a stopgap, of course. He was vague about his recent discharge from the navy. Somehow Barry had really started him thinking about his life. Barry wore an expression so adult that his smoothie’s straw in the corner of his mouth looked like a gangster’s cigarette. The pizza boy noticed the brown gaze sizing him up and was suddenly self-conscious.

Like an uncle slightly out of true, he asked, “So what do you kids think you want to do, be, whatever?”

Barry and Darius answered at the same time. Darius said, “Actor, I guess.” Barry’s response was a question: “You ever, like, put stuff on the pizza if the guy that ordered it’s a real jerk?”

Darius had an inkling that his friend was a few steps ahead of him. He wasn’t too young to pooh-pooh Barry as boringly normal (privately and only if he got in a funk), but the being normal was, in fact, what he most loved. It exerted a powerful fascination. Barry—maybe all normal boys—seemed hurtling and unprotected in a way that caused Darius a kind of . . . loving concern. This tenderness was almost painful. It could make him cross with Barry. Or it could make him neurasthenic. As if Barry and he and the teenagers and a kid he’d known who’d drowned in a golf course water trap years earlier—as if they were all on a spree, splashing and ducking in the ocean, and Darius suddenly needed everything to stop. He needed to be up on the beach away from it all. Because death was going to get one of them, no matter what.

He couldn’t explain this part to Jane and didn’t even try. He started feeling homesick, and by the fifth day the anxiety was pretty strong. The two boys and six half-naked teenagers piled into a car and sped off, jamming the clutch and bucking, speeding, swerving—Darius had no idea where they were going. Everybody talked at once. Darius was queasy.

Toward the Atlantic the lights of freighters and Jupiter pricked the lavender evening. The car was full of scent. The crammed bodies touched with secret alertness. Cowardly, exhilarated, saliva pouring down the back corners of his mouth, Darius sat dumb among these extraordinary strangers. Even laughing Barry was a stranger. Where were they going? Anything might happen. A crash.

They pulled up alongside the big park in Spring Lake, safe and sound. A band was playing under a panoply of Irish flags. An upstanding crowd of picnickers was scattered across the lawn. Pulling on T-shirts, the teenagers formed a sheepish group and pointed at the clarinetist, their friend.

Barry and Darius ambled down to the pond. Their approach seemed to bump two swans onto the black water. The boys sat brushing the last feather-shaped patches of sand from their skin. Barry made Darius hold his hand an inch from the skin of his thigh, not touching it. “My soul,” he explained. “It got so hot today it’s leaving my body. Feel it? Let’s . . . yup. You’re losing yours, too.”

“Bullshit . . . Shit, I am!” He tried to sound amused, play along. But the rich boy who could take Borgia evil in stride was upset by Barry’s teasing hint of irreligion. This evening he was. Barry’s fantasies weren’t like his own. “What’ll we do without a soul?” His tone wasn’t so broad.

Barry smiled. “I guess we’ll go to hell.” He threw a dried pea of excrement at the swans. A gluttonous carp made rings in the water, slow and slowing.

“But you have to have a soul to go to hell,” Darius said. He was recalling a childish nightmare about nothingness. “I just remembered something ...” he trailed off.

“Oh, right. Well, I guess, maybe, we’ll be like wandering souls. And our bodies’ll be like zombies. Maybe like that.”

“Whoa, Bare! Your foot!” Darius pointed.

Barry examined a black crust between his toes and along the edge of his scuffed left foot—dried blood. The sole was wet with it. He recalled wincing on a broken cockleshell at some point that afternoon. Strangely, he’d felt no pain whatsoever. Then or now. A moment ago he’d thought vaguely he was stepping in mud. But he said, “Oh, yeah.” As if he hadn’t deigned to mention his suffering. The wound was too horrible and painful looking to waste. “No big deal.” He shrugged in contentment.

“You want to wash it?”

“Not in there! I just threw a swan turd in there.”

“These things?” Darius stirred the pellets with a stick. “These aren’t from swans, they’re from fish.”

“What? The fish come onto the shore to take a crap? Bull.”

“No, they just come in this far.” He splashed the shallows with his stick. “I had a bunch of them in my fish tank at home. But they all died. But this special kind of fish, it sticks its tail out of the water and farts, and that kind of shoots the turd on shore. ’Cause they don’t want to swim around in their own . . . obviously.”

Barry grinned appreciatively.

“Seriously, Bare, you have to tell me for real. Do you think your soul is leaving you?”

“Wait a second! You had these fish in your tank? In your bedroom? With all that shit flying out of there?”

“Yeah, it was gross. Tamala cleaned it up, though.”

“Oh, right. The ruling class. With a housekeeper! I forgot for a second you were the enemy of the people.”

That evening Barry made a big deal about his injured foot. He was mewled over by four teenage girls. They bandaged the wound, and the elaborate bandage caused him such pride that he started limping and kept it up till he went to bed. Darius had gone to bed a little before. Darius—no one knew this—cried to himself. For two seconds he cried. He was imagining that no one knew him or knew where he was, and that if he died during the night, the teenagers would just say, “Who is this kid? Or was?” and roll him aside with their bare feet.

 

At Lawrence Academy one or two teachers may have wondered. Especially after Barry and Darius came back from spring break and seemed closer than ever. Innocents are never as innocent as we think, or are they? Jane was irritable if anyone turned to her for the lowdown on the two boys—home situation, sports, homework load. Why did people think she knew specially?

Even if they wondered, the teachers virtuously insisted you could never predict how a kid would turn out. So they said. In their bones most of them felt adulthood was going to be an isometric mapping of the shoulder-high personalities of middle school, or all but. With fair confidence they picked out the lawyers and the screwups.

Sexuality was a more interesting guessing game; no longer too charged even to think about. But bets were taken only in short-odds cases like Tom Gelertner. No one wanted to consult openly the handful of teachers everyone knew had an eye for these things. After all, who’s asking? Ostentatious shrugs stood for tolerance. They may have wondered about Barry and Darius, but the obviousness of their crush made it seem less diagnostic. Tom Gelertner tossed his head in tragic isolation. Barry and Darius got only friendly, pro forma attacks as “You two faggots.”

Sometimes the obvious thing is true. Or maybe half true. Barry and Darius got into an argument about chicken skin. Whose scrotum looked more like supermarket chicken skin? It had to be settled. In a couple of dreamlike steps their pants came off, and they kneaded their balls, pulling the skin over their knuckles like saran wrap. Barry’s scrotum was bumpier, more chickenlike, they decided, holding them side by side to compare. The stiff penises got in the way, dumb-seeming as puppies on Christmas morning. Wryly, Barry strangled his with one hand and knocked Darius’s in a meditative rhythm, gradually losing his smile and just watching.

At least that was a step in the right direction. Usually Barry found Darius’s bashfulness aggravating. It was the only thing Barry got angry about that whole vacation at the shore. Salty and dusty and scraped after a long day at the Belmar beach, they were about to wash up. Barry sat on the toilet examining his foot. He tugged the shredded, filthy plastic bandage away. He picked curiously at the ring-straked gauze, red, brown, and yellow. “Hey!” he said crossly, spotting his friend. Darius had turned shyly to the corner to peel off his Speedos. “Don’t do that,” Barry said. He really seemed angry. “We should just strip down and jump in the shower. I think that’s more normal, if you’re buddies.” For some reason Barry was put out by Darius’s shyness. Maybe it made them seem less close. Or he was concerned for his friend. Maybe he hated seeing Darius give in to unhealthy habits of mind.

Knowing whose scrotum was more like chicken skin was a step in the right direction for Darius, too. After that issue had been decided, they spent a long afternoon together, getting well bored halfway through a game of Stratego. They were sitting on Darius’s bed. Barry was losing through sheer indifference. Darius tried to keep interest alive by talking. A loud, old window fan filled the bedroom with noise. Somewhere in the complex sound the thing made was a regular heartbeat. The doomlike rhythm distracted Darius. The strands of a bamboo curtain he’d hung in his doorway swayed and pecked their own time.

Seeing it through Barry’s eyes, Darius was aware of something dreary, even prisonlike about his bedroom. Listening to the ticking bamboo and the beating fan, he stopped talking, just like that, in the middle of a sentence. He realized that, try as he might, none of his relationships was quite real. That old “love” he’d felt for Jane Brzostovsky wasn’t real, was it? He was experiencing one of those unnameable key changes of consciousness, which children may be more subject to than we are. He went from nothing to grief to near dizziness in an instant. He heard himself asking, “Do you ever like getting stuff stuck up your butt? ‘Cause I actually do sometimes.” It felt odd to be sitting there after saying this. He listened to the fan and gently pressed the fanged token “General” against his knee.

Barry seemed to stop what he was doing, though he’d been perfectly still. His stopped expression, a smile, looked a little like pleasure, a little like mockery withheld. He shrugged finally, and started moving his bendable mouth. “Hadn’t really thought about it,” he said, clearly thinking now.

“Oh,” Darius jerked his shoulders, which made his loose-jointed old spool bed creak for a long time, and the creaking was an additional marking of time—like the fan’s heartbeat and the ticking of the bamboo strands. “It’s weird, I guess.”

A weekend morning a little after this the two boys had been on the phone for what felt like hours. It got to the point where they were just breathing to each other and going about their business. Barry was particularly bored again, which made him cranky, so in a speculative, nasty tone of voice he threw out, “You know, I think Ms. B. is losing her mind.”

“Yeah?” Darius had taken the phone into an attic room to rummage through a broken Empire sideboard. The sideboard was full of old silver, tarnished black and blue, and bundles of ancient family letters containing creepy, beribboned curls of hair.

“Yeah, she asked me if I ever woke up sticky.”

“What? Sticky?”

“Right, and then she laughs like an insane person.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. And she said not to worry about it ’cause it was like protein or something and if I didn’t want to get in trouble with my mom, I should wash my underwear in cold water ’cause if my mom washed it in hot it would, like, cook the protein and turn it brown.”

“What the fuck? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She was talking about it. Not only that, she’s . . . I don’t know. I think she’s turning into a bitch.”

“Barry! Shh!” Darius sounded wounded. He still felt loyal, even if love was dead. “Don’t say that.” He opened a manila envelope full of old travel guides and spilled them onto his lap. Dresden decked out with swastikas! “Oh man! Oh man! You won’t believe what I just found. I’ve got all this Hitler stuff here.”

 

At the end of the year Barry got in some trouble—drugs—a little bit blown out of proportion because of his size and the way he acted. With dour super-seriousness a juvenile referee ordered him to call her ma’am and to write a personal statement for a court psychologist. “What’s to keep me from just writing whatever to make you happy?” Barry asked.

“‘Whatever, ma’am,’ and you’re in no position to be snippy.”

Barry frowned, insulted. He got Jane to help him write the statement, and thinking of the snippy judge, he told her, “You should put down something like—maybe—being a kid doesn’t jibe with me.”

Jane swallowed. With healing insistence, as if the remark made her worry for him, though, curiously, she liked it, Jane said, “Oh, Barry, you don’t think that’s true, do you?”

“Sure,” he smiled. “The only outstanding thing about being a kid so far is being friends with Darius. That’s awesome. Maybe we should write about him some.”

Strangely, Jane’s heart froze. “I don’t think . . . well, maybe.” Her hands had stopped on the word processor keyboard. She looked down.

They were in a small ground floor office in the “new”—1967—wing of the Lawrence middle school building. Several teachers shared the room, using it to scribble class plans, grade homework, or meet with students, though the space was cozy for two. The glazed brick and blond woodwork, the turquoise-painted door, and the crank windows (oxidized shut) made modernity feel painfully outdated. Barry had twisted in his seat and rested his elbows on the desk. He wore a monster truck T-shirt and khaki pants. When Jane looked down, just as compassion for her hooligan was welling up in her, she glimpsed—it was almost unmistakable—a khaki tumescence lounging along the crease of one of the boy’s thighs.

She turned away, of course. She tried to look like she was hunting for a word. Unfortunately, being shared space, the room had almost nothing in the way of decoration to occupy her eyes. She felt an ardent ... embarrassment for Barry.

When she opened her eyes, he was looking at her candidly. “We don’t have to write about him, if you don’t think it’s—you know—appropriate.”

Jane looked out the window. “No. No, it’s—whatever . . . what about him?” she said randomly.

He shifted wonderingly in his seat as he answered, “He’s a great guy. Sometimes I feel bad about that whole Richie Rich thing he’s got going on there. Not that I usually get worked up about the oppressor. You just got to string them up at some point, even if they never meant to do anything.”

“Are you—starting to be enemies, then, or ...?”

“Nothing like that. Come on! No, I’m just messing around. I’m getting bored with this thing.” He reached out and gave the paper in the word processor a fillip. He arched his back. His hands made fists and reached for the ceiling. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

Jane got a good view. The bowed thing shifted unmistakably. He even scratched at it with an ultraquick peck of a forefinger. Jane looked out the window and answered him a little sharply, “Barry, look, this is important. Please, take this seriously. Because if you don’t, I have an awful feeling . . . with the way this year went—with this, that, and the other thing . . . Well, your mother’s a bit fed up. I offered to tutor you next year. If she—if she thought it might help.”

Barry looked at her quizzically a long moment. “My grades are really bad, huh?”

“No, it’s just ...”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So should we say Darius is, like, a good example? Like, I want to be a good kid like him?”

“Barry. You are a good kid!”

“I mean more like smart. You just said I need to get tutored.”

“Barry, wake up! You’ve got so much more going for you than . . . Darius Van Whoever-he-thinks-he-is.” She dared to lay her fingers encouragingly on his knee, though she didn’t look at him when she did and lifted them at once. She brought her hands together in bony prayer and kicked her wheeled chair as far from Barry as she could get. Not more than a foot. The back of the chair butted the aluminum windowsill.

The boy appeared to notice something odd and looked at her. Really looked at her. Even before he spoke, she snorted self-consciously. He said, “You don’t look like you used to.”

“Same me,” she said in quiet hysteria. “Let’s get back to it.”

“I think you dress different. Like, this whole year you dress different than you did at first.”

“‘Differently,’ but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” She did know. Coral nails. How had that started? She was all but certain Barry couldn’t figure it out. He was a kid, for God’s sake.

“Well, like those,” he said uncannily. He meant her black stockings.

“This is just a French style. Tights.”

“And that stuff,” he said unerringly.

She wiggled her fingertips. She softly clapped several times. “OK, OK, OK, Barry. Let’s get back to it, please.” She looked at her watch for effect. But she had the fluttery idea that he didn’t care in the least about his tumescence. That he knew she’d seen and didn’t care about that, either. Or he did, just not in an embarrassed way.

 

Apart from glimpses and waves when Barry visited the Malcolms, Jane and he saw each other only once over the summer. Barry had been thrown out or ran out of his house after calling his mother “Marie Antoinette” one time too many. Although he’d never had bratty, childish thoughts of running away from home, now that it had happened, he liked it. Solely out of pity for his parents, he decided, he wouldn’t stay out the whole night.

At a strip mall Barry let himself be picked up by a police cruiser—two mustachioed, friendly cops. Reluctant to go back home so soon, 9:00 P.M., he gave them Hi Malcolm’s address. He made up a story, not too elaborate, about Mother leaving him at a store—she’d had to rush home, sort of an emergency. For some reason he faked a limp. The cops, as is their way, appeared to believe nothing. Turning onto Meadowlark Lane, their eyebrows rose. They saw an ambulance flinging its drunken, unfestive lights across the somnolent housefronts. So the kid hadn’t been lying.

“Shit oh shit oh shit. See!” Barry couldn’t resist acting a little, even now. But he was also trembling with nerves. He was more or less certain Betty’s enlarged heart had burst (as it almost had). When the cruiser pulled up he saw Hi Malcolm, fluttery as a snared heron. Barry didn’t run over and shout “Dad!” or anything grotesque. He hung back with the officers. A very bewildered Hi climbed into the ambulance without ever seeing him. “Barry! Oh, Barry . . . isn’t it . . . scary!” came a familiar alto from the tree lawn. Seeing a responsible-looking woman, short hair and a terry robe, the two officers melted away with mumbled condolences. And Barry was left in mother Jane Brzostovsky’s hands, still faking the limp. In fact, the story became much more elaborate. He’d spotted some kids trying to break into a Sam Goody’s through a mall loading bay. He’d been chased. He’d taken a spill down a ravine. To Jane, his clothes did look, at least, messy.

This is how it happened. Eat? No? Bed? Her rapid-fire ideas caused her to jerk. It was a little disturbing. She put him to bed. She washed his clothes. She sat in the kitchen in wordless argument with the telephone, looking at it reproachfully, as if it were at fault for not being used. Her heart was pounding. She had a glass or two of Chardonnay. Silent as a mouse she crept upstairs. She fore-fingered ajar the door to the darkened bedroom. She sidled in and stood there a long time.

“I’m not asleep, you know. It’s really kinda early.” Confusion about Jane’s twitchiness and worry about Betty and Hi had made Barry tractable about going to bed so early. Though how this had gone from striking out on his own to a weird sleepover escaped him. “What are you doing? You get my mom?” he asked.

Jane sighed a tragic, an operatic sigh. She posed a hip on the bed, then tipped over softly onto the pillow. Her trembling made the whole bed shudder. She lay facing him, parallel, a foot and a couple decades between them. Her hunched shoulders were in awful pain, but the trembling got worse if she tried releasing them. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness. She saw that he couldn’t bring himself to look at her. His dark eyes hovered at her throat. He frowned slightly. He was bashful beyond belief. More bashful than Darius, even he realized it.

In the slowest of slow motion Jane plucked a corner of the duvet at Barry’s shoulder. Just as slowly, she folded it off him and tipped it to the floor. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. His tone, meant to sound like humorous skepticism, sounded oddly like a whimper.

He was holding his body awkwardly, rigid. Any more tense and he’d start trembling like her. But the luster of his skin, flawless as a new baseball, seemed to illuminate the room. It was shining, however dusky. The angelic freshness of his scent was like nothing Jane had ever smelled. He lay so the front of his Jockey shorts was partially hidden, shyly turning his buttocks to the ceiling. The white cloth twisted and rode up between his legs. Still, what he was hiding wasn’t so hidden. In the confusion of gray tones, Jane could see an untimely swelling stretch at the cotton fabric, causing the elastic to yawn in a shadowy gap at his hip. His wisecracking whisper came again, “I don’t know.” His mouth worked. He shut his eyes, crumpled them tightly in the way of children. Jane slipped her hand between the mattress and his unbreathing chest. The nipples seemed as hard as jujubes, the skin as soft as—ha ha!—kid. She pried. He seemed unable to move himself. As her hand went lower, his hip obediently rose until he was facing her. Her trembling hand rode over the swollen cotton, and, though he didn’t recoil this time, he started trembling, too. Which made them both laugh a little. Barry’s eyes were still tightly closed.

A moment later—or so it seemed—Jane was downstairs, arms folded, staring at the duvet she’d left trailing on the carpeted steps. Her shoulders were killing her, and there was something familiar about the hunched way she held them. Wildly, for some reason, she analyzed this. She stood in front of the window, in front of a desk, now over the stove in the kitchen, now bending slightly into the open refrigerator. All the time she was holding her shoulders more and more tightly. Then she pretended to remember what had caused her shoulders to hurt like this before. (She believed, hysterically, this was a real memory.) She dropped her shoulders and laughed in horror. She’d only hunched her shoulders exactly this way when she used to play with the miniature people in her dollhouse as a little girl!

Back upstairs, the duvet wrapped around her like a wedding gown, she found Barry sitting cross-legged on the stripped bed. He stared at her with his cheery, know-nothing, raised eyebrows. This expression kept morphing, like a candle flickering, into a stagey version of his old cockiness. He shrugged a few times. His penis was centered now, sticking straight up past the waistband as if he’d arranged it there with simple-minded artistry, as he had. Jane let her eyes fall closed tragically. She let the duvet fall. She fell to the bed, curled on her side, abased her head at the boy’s crossed ankles. She was crying.

“I’m sorry about two seconds ago,” he said. “Really, I’m sorry.” She turned her head to look up at him. Her eyes were streaming. He crossed his pale arms and shrugged, making the mattress bounce. “I wish you didn’t feel bad. I hate that. I’m really, really sorry.”

“I love the way your ankles smell, Barry. I love you,” she whispered.

 

After this Jane would have been wise to cancel. It almost came as a surprise to her when tutoring began on schedule at the start of the school year. Barry and Jane met at her house.

Three times a week for weeks and weeks, everything passed with Jekyll-like civility. Jane’s schedule was light, so she was able to drive back from Lawrence to meet with Barry in the afternoons. Barry was dropped off after school by his mother or biked over himself. On warm September days Jane and Barry went out in the backyard and were full of innocent waves for Hi Malcolm staking his delphiniums in hopes of a second bloom. When they met indoors, Jane was inhumanly patient with Barry’s flirting: his obstreperous and/or continuous erection, the tickling of his sneaker toe under the table, sudden bouts of exhaustion when his head and arms fell to the kitchen table and his overgrown child’s fingers accidentally brushed her shoulder or trapped her hand. He was pushy, except when Jane occasionally fell into a sort of trance and they got to real sex. Then he was immobile, awed by her.

He tolerated the suspense. Maybe the game of being held off wasn’t that different from what it always feels like to be a child, and Barry assumed this affair was the natural sequel to childhood. Besides, what he was after, or what he played at being after, though he was getting a taste for it, was still a bit much for him. Jane realized this early on. The odious mother stopped in for chats at first when picking up her son and once let slip, “He didn’t want to do it! As usual he fought me and fought me. I told him, ‘Barry, don’t be an idiot like you always are. This is your favorite teacher! Or was. And she’s nicely offered. ...’” Barry shrugged hugely and gave Jane, who blushed with shame, a raffish smile. “Furthermore,” Jeanette waved an envelope in Barry’s face. All demure sweetness, she turned to give it to Jane, “I’m more than aware fifty an hour is about as low as any sliding scale can slide. We’re enormously grateful. Even this idiot.”

Jane later whispered to Barry, “If you don’t want to come ...?” He was able to convince her he did. Still, coming was a problem—his coming but not coming, that is. Jane became scientifically obsessed, though quite emotional, about this hydrologic detail. (Moralists make the best sinners. So twisted!)

The first time they had sex, Jane had no greater inspiration—no thoughts in her head at all—than to mannequin Barry into missionary position with her hands. Her hands were busier and more aware than she was. Propped on his arms for a lazy push-up, he did it, swaybacked, arrhythmic, eyes closed. After a short while he stopped. He rolled off her. With a pleased grin, he wiped his brow and lithely sat cross-legged. He flipped at the fat penis rising past his ankles, stiff as ever, gleaming and insistent, and made an uncertain stab at humor, “Boing, boing.” He seemed to feel the same friendly companionship for it as he did for Jane. He lowered his voice, quoting some movie, “That was . . . amazing.” Though she had no idea why he’d stopped, Jane didn’t dare suggest they go on. The boy didn’t seem to realize there could be any going on. Was he too embarrassed to leave a puddle on her or in the bed? Over the months, the next three times they had sex ended just as inconclusively, with the same childish and abrupt change of subject. Since he never made the first move (beyond general and constant flirtiness), Jane was confused by the decided way he kept breaking it off.

Then Jane grasped something awful. She’d been premature a year or so ago with her zany, nerve-wracked question about nocturnal emissions. However knowingly he’d pretended to answer at the time. He was—the problem was moral, not hydrologic, after all, and Jane almost fainted—too young for the sap to be flowing yet! Or else he was so painfully innocent that he knew of no connection between blurting at midnight in his own bed and what it was he and Jane had started to do in hers. He knew nothing!

Barry could have lived with sex or without it. But now that it was happening to him and Jane was making him happy on the whole and he was getting all the adoring attention he could want, he tried to reconceive this as something he’d decided on. He tried on outsize words like, “my love affair.” Though he didn’t have much gift for fantasy, he came up with an enjoyable way to imagine the relationship. He adopted a cool, James Bond-like persona. In bed he made odd facial expressions, cold seeming or supercilious, which mystified Jane but were supposed to “drive her wild.” When given an opening, he stroked Jane’s chin with avuncular tolerance. He either didn’t guess or ignored her power.

When he started opening his eyes, there was too much for him to admire. The breasts with their forbidden, V-shaped pallor lurched in drunken, separable ways. Their sponginess needed so much restraint that it worked on his nerves. Even the slightest touch sometimes made her cringe. And the miraculous tubular muscle her hand led him to (because he didn’t have the confidence to look and wasn’t even sure how the link was supposed to be made)—when he knelt over her and did look at it for the first time, leaf upon leaf upon leaf parting, until she had him just graze the jack-in-the-pulpit with his ink-stained finger, he wore no expression at all, his heart in his throat. The thing was like some minute dungeon-master secreted behind pink curtains that were half animal, half fluid like honey. He tried raising his chin to give her a taste of Bond-like arrogance, but he couldn’t stop staring. He was under her power. After pulling his hand back, he reached out again, measured her, or concealed her, with his palm. For a moment he seemed to rest his eyes, really rest them, on a blue haunted house rubber-stamped on the back of his hand. His mind couldn’t take so much detail all at once. Or he was so young he didn’t know the words for the details he did see, which may be the same thing.

But sex was rare between them. Jane made sure. To a surprising degree she was still his teacher. Except in the darkest recesses of her heart—where who knew what wounded and virginal drama was playing out?—Jane refused to “play” at anything for Barry. He got no Miss Moneypenny, at least none he ever observed. She calmly stared at him across the kitchen table’s piles of dog-eared worksheets until she was sure he really didn’t know whether a comma was needed before a prepositional phrase. “It’s not. Generally the fewer commas the better,” she smiled. With an identical expression and calm, she’d pull away his inky finger, “Don’t be a brute with a girl’s clit, Barry.” The uniform matter-of-factness went over well with her student and lover.

This sort of thing has to blow up, doesn’t it? As long as it was tutoring, as long as they only met in the parallel world of her house, Jane could go on. Not that the situation didn’t take a toll. She had the occasional panic attack. She had a trailing and ominous bout of hilarity when she and Barry once conferred with the mother about progress and the truth seemed right there on the surface, obvious to anybody. Apparently it wasn’t. But when she and Barry relaxed, left the house, close calls became closer. A Schwarzenegger movie at the mall after wrestling with the Pythagorean theorem: “Mr. Drinkwater! Hello!”

At Lawrence Academy, Jane was in a constant agony of indigestion, waspishness, and gloom. She’d arranged to have no classes with Barry and never drove him to their sessions after school. Still she mistrusted herself. She assumed she was trying to get caught. Other teachers commiserated that she was obviously having a tough year.

Barry was insufferable. She walked past him in the hall. “Yo, B, you bringin’ that Coke for me?” His insolent wink caused some surprise, only kids, thank heaven. The Coke can made a metal ribbet as Jane swept past. Her sandwich had deep finger marks when unwrapped. She told herself Barry was stupid. Not even attractive compared to the obvious standouts, who left her cold.

Then again, she and Barry might cross paths, and it would be just them. Alone together in the hall after school let out, reduced to black flickers in the consuming glare from the overwaxed floor, like shadowy wisps of soot rising in a candle flame. Jane reminded him severely, “Barry, I have total confidence in you.” The way he nodded looked so manly. His smile, just too faint to be cruel, struck her as an impossible combination of love and wisdom. Washed out in the glare, his blue T-shirt, collar deformed and blond hair and his glinting brown eyes—he looked more apparition than real, and it was easy for Jane to think her way into her dreamworld. “I don’t know if you feel like biking over later, we could watch something on TV.” Appalled, rapturous, she assumed he could see her heart kettle-drumming through her blouse, and she didn’t care.

That spring Jane took a cruise of the Chilean fjords by herself. Life-vested, she was shuttled by Zodiac to a briny crag colonized by seals. She ignored the Iowa retirees in the boat with her, even the handsome guide. She ignored them and studied the seals. What animals animals were! This wasn’t a virtuous nature show. The seals stank. They bleated. They farted. They fought. They bled. Long yellow “fingernails” twisted over their flippers. But all around, the crushing sublimity of the fjord remained somehow unaffected by their uncleanness and their crimes against each other. Since this lonely trip was mostly a trip away from Barry, Jane couldn’t help holding up her own crime in comparison. Strange to say, seeing how it, too, had no impact at all on the sublime inattention of nature and time made her crime seem less pardonable to her than ever before.

When she got back, Jane moved a pot of basil to the left side of her front door. That was her and Barry’s signal. Jane never had to phone the Paul home, leaving pesky records. A day later she heard Barry rustling in the lilacs outside. Hiding his bike from the Malcolms. She sat him down, and his knees fell apart in the cocky way he had. Though he could tell it wasn’t going to be that kind of a visit. And if it had been, oddly, a breath of shyness would have come over him.

Jane brought up something they’d never mentioned before. “Our ... friendship, Barry. You know, people don’t think it’s OK. They really don’t.”

He asked how dumb did she think he was. Of course he knew that.

“No, Barry, just let me . . . if this happened in . . . I don’t know—in China—and someone found out . . . they might . . . whatever they do—execute us, cut off our heads. I don’t mean to be terrifying, but

... On the other hand, of course, if we were in a different time and place, like Rome, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal at all. But we are where we are, right?”

He gave her a shrug. He looked off. She had a horrible reminiscence of justifying an F to some kid.

“We know we have to stop. Absolutely stop. Don’t we?” Jane collapsed in a chair with a sigh of regret and unpleasant clarity. Barry crossed the room. She sat up. He stood over her, chin bunched up. For a second she thought he was going to hit her. Then she smiled at such a ridiculous fear. She’d relaxed completely and expected a caress when his arm floated toward her slowly, involuntarily almost. He pinched her biceps. His nails felt like needle-nose pliers. She shrank into the cushion, so shocked she couldn’t not laugh and frown. She rubbed the sore spot. She looked at him, “Barry! What’s gotten into you?”

“Oh.” He gave her a twitchy version of Bond’s raised chin. His eyes—Jane stared with incomprehension—had watered up. “You’re done with your toys, so you just throw ’em away.”

Jane couldn’t speak. The idea that he had feelings, strong feelings, anyway, had never occurred to her. He was a kid. A pang of guilt made her heartbeat stumble and start kettle-drumming painfully. Would he tell? But this grief of his was sure to blow off in an afternoon. He was a kid. Besides, he was the one who cheerfully teased her, got under her skin, in the Lawrence halls. She was the one with a full set of adult emotions.

His eyes narrowed. Tears bulged like glass matchsticks. He was a child. Wildly, Jane imagined him laughing in a week. She even felt an iota of anger about it. She was so confused she could barely read his expression or hear what he was saying. What was he saying? “—but him at least—and I know you think he’s a spoiled brat and a faggot—him at least I could take seriously something he said. If he said—you know ...” The tears flickered to his cheeks. “With him, it was never like you and me being ‘friends,’” he spat the word out bitterly. Jane almost didn’t grasp that when he shook his fists in the air, he was also trying to make meaty, violent quotation marks with his fingers. So she’d know he thought that word was a complete joke, not a funny one. The gesture wasn’t like him at all.