IN HIS LAWRENCE Academy homeroom, Darius, who’d been unusually quiet for several days, seemed on the verge of talking to the ceiling tiles. Jane Brzostovsky deliberately overlooked his waving arm, nearly 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 blurted out.
“Not sure we have time, Darius.” Jane tried to sound offhand. She snuck a glance.
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 reechoed up and down the hall. Jane’s muscles felt like frothed milk, her eyes actually hurt in their sockets—she was so enraged. Darius’ head rolled with flower-like 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. A light blow, the out-of-control controlled, almost symbolic, but still. His expression wrinkled up.
“And all of you, shut up,” Jane snapped at the murmuring class.
The slap could have been a serious matter. Jane dutifully reported it to the head of school. Without exactly spelling it out in their discussion, the head of school and the Lawrence Board chair settled on a course of inaction, not even a phone call to the Van Nests. This risky calculation paid off, because Darius never did tell his parents that he’d been hit.
Jane felt an irritable sort of remorse. From that moment on, her patience with Darius was fantastic. This withering patience, even more than the slap, cooled his ardor for a while. Yet on a deeper level he didn’t seem to register how much he was saddened by the apparent failure of their relationship. And while she rather enjoyed her own self-control, Jane had no idea how much he was saddened either. There was no sign of it. Perky with nonsense, chatty and outrageous, his personality was more haphazard than ever.
Maybe Jane wouldn’t have been so hard on him, maybe she would have kept the horrendous parents more compassionately in mind, if only Darius weren’t best friends with Barry Paul. Barry was Jane’s favorite student by far. She had a full blown, frankly erotic, crush on him. It was parenthetic and humorous, of course—doll-sized—like Oliver’s gassed millions or her own inward class turmoil about the Van Nest’s housekeeper, Tina. Seeing the two boys together drove her crazy.
And they were almost always together. Inseparable from the start of the year. Jane, who’d kept a close eye on Barry since her first days at Lawrence, had completely missed the moment the friendship suddenly sprang into existence. It happened with kid-like abruptness. It was, she supposed, very pure, very beautiful and very mysterious. At least on Barry’s side. Her flicker of jealousy was quite funny to her.
Next to Barry, who was husky, Darius looked svelte and crafty. With Barry, he was uncharacteristically self-effacing. Chin scratching his clavicle with feline strokes, he’d eye his friend and whatever his friend was eyeing. If he craved attention, a rapid whisper passed his lips. Then, as soon as Barry turned to him, frank and grinning and, for some reason, amazed at what he’d heard, Darius’ fingers squirmed. They formed a white-knuckled spider on the white denim stretched tightly across his thigh. He smiled and seemed to recede again.
Now that Jane knew Barry’s hair was dyed it was obvious. The eyebrows were a few shades too dark. She almost laughed. Self-deprecating amusement bubbled up in her, becoming more abundant affection for Barry, then diffuse happiness, then a barely visible smile.
Barry was considered mature for his age. As far as anyone could tell, he was unharmed by a dreadful mother and a wan, negligible father. He had a strange charisma of utter normality. Jane often tried pinning it down. The universal mistake people made—this was Jane talking to herself—was thinking that the quality didn’t actually belong to him. People 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. And everyone did feel this way. Jane tried to make out it was her absurd crush talking, but she really believed Barry’s appeal was widespread. It wasn’t just her. 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 was slow-acting, even subterranean. Jane invariably laughed it all off but sometimes failed. In subtle stages, she’d given up the notion that this quality Barry had might not be objective. Everybody knew it and it was a secret. Like naïve maps that place the Garden of Eden exactly here, so many miles northwest of Ur, her possible fulfillment seemed to be local, tangible, the fragrance of sour candy on this one boy’s breath.
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 horizontal, grim and almost countrified, but it was always moving. He was an avid, poor skateboarder. He tied a spare wheel truck to the flap of his backpack as 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. The hair at his ankles and a straggly patch above his huge, red-eyed death’s head belt buckle were thickening prematurely, which made him seem secretly manly, despite a beardless baby face.
Even at eleven, a year older than most of the boys in his class, he was lumbering. He was too big to have a mischief-maker’s appeal. And since he was bigger in body, when he got in trouble the trouble seemed a bigger deal than it was. He was caught shoplifting Rock Climber Magazine from a 7-Eleven. There were frequent successful thefts, as well.
Barry and Darius couldn’t answer the question about how their friendship had started any more than Jane could. They didn’t notice they were particularly friends at all, until she smirked at them one time. “You’re as thick as thieves, you two.” Several other adults dropped similar aren’t-you-cute comments. Which made friendship feel unpleasant, but the boys had to admit, 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.” A wag wrote a poem about them: “Very hilarious/Are Barry and Darius.”
The boys even traveled together. When she heard about this trip after the fact, Jane experienced an operatic jealousy. The emotion shocked her. Ah, perfido! 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 at the same time probe for more and more detail.
Barry had a cousin, a freshman at Rutgers. Pressured by his mother, this boy invited Barry to tag along on spring break. The cousin rented a clapboard house in Bel-Mar with ten schoolmates. Because parts of explanations were omitted and because the Jersey Shore was so close and because “cousin” sounded perfectly all right and the cousin’s mother confirmed everything, Darius was allowed to go. Jeanette, who savored the connection to a schoolmate’s rich parents. As for the cousin, he reconciled himself to the company of children for two contradictory reasons. He intended to use the boys the way a lady-killer uses a puppy. And he planned to enjoy a sincere and sentimental pantomime of fatherhood, surprisingly common among teenagers.
Like most New Jersey shore towns Bel-Mar was built along the narrow beach in ribbons, boardwalk, traffic-congested street, bars and surf shops facing the Atlantic, then a quieter strip of modest summer houses.
The world is marvelous when a mob of doting teenagers seems grown-up. Adulthood looks unbearably beautiful and energetic and free. To Barry and Darius Bel-Mar didn’t seem anything like the drunken madhouse locals grumbled about. They were often so happy they panted when they talked. The first day they decided to speak 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 fumbled with a cigarette now. “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! With a discreet finger she tucked away a few black pubic hairs showing at the top of a bikini-strangled thigh. Pulling her kimono over her lap, she blew an uninhaled mouthful of smoke away from Darius and through the screen door. From the humid dimness deeper in 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!” A bleating biplane with a trailing yellow radio-station ad indeed appeared to overfly a distant ship.
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, by which he meant the ship was probably dumping infected needles along with its illegal trash. 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.
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?”
“I DON’T THINK SO. THIS IS JUST THE WAY WE TALK.” Darius cringed a little at his own outrageousness.
“WE JUST TALK THIS WAY?”
“YU-U-U-U-UP!” Darius screamed. He covered his mouth with both hands.
The stranger pulled off his earphones and feinted to get up. The boys ran down the beach. Half an hour later they were still escaping the man in fantasy. Darius pretended that the reverse of the Bel-Mar 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 boardwalk boards made cooing thuds as they trotted off toward the bridge that led to Avon-by-the-Sea and Bradley Beach.
Fantasy was only tolerable to Barry. He enjoyed Darius’s knack for it like he enjoyed watching movies. But left to his own devices he preferred talking with the teenagers. When the older boys exchanged meaningful glances about something 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. Though the pizza boy was standoffish at first, he let himself be drawn out. He scratched flour from the messy scar of a patched cleft lip. He was vague about his recent discharge from the navy, said he’d passed his GED. Barry listened with an expression so adult that the drink straw in the corner of his mouth looked like a gangster’s cigarette. Somehow he’d gotten the navy boy thinking about his life.
Like an uncle slightly out of true, the boy fumbled in return, “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 put stuff on the pizza if the guy that ordered it’s a real jerk?”
Darius had long had an inkling that his friend was a few levels more mature than he was himself. In an occasional funk he would narrow his eyes and dismiss Barry as painfully normal—boring, even. But the normality exerted a powerful fascination. Barry—maybe all normal boys—seemed hurtling and unprotected in a way that caused a familiar tenderness to well up in Darius. As if he and Barry and the dead boy Todd McCormick, for that matter, were all on a pool party spree, splashing and ducking, and Darius suddenly needed everything to stop. To be up in his attic window again. His grandiose tenderness, not unlike his secret and illustrious eternity, made Darius feel as if he had lived as fully as a grizzled warrior king already. The condescending emotion bore no similarity to his hilarious beach tag/video screen or earphone/thought camera, but they were basically both play-acting.
He must have been feeling homesick, because on the last day exactly that flying pool party anxiety came over him. The two boys and six half-naked teenagers piled into a car and sped off. Racing and bucking in traffic, they were driving who knew where. Everybody talked at once. Darius was queasy.
Toward the Atlantic, freighters and Jupiter pricked the lavender evening as white glimmers. The car was full of scent. The crammed bodies touched with secret alertness. Frightened, exhilarated, saliva sluicing along his inner cheeks and past his molars, Darius sat dumb among these extraordinary strangers. Even Barry was a stranger. Where were they going? Anything might happen.
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 ogled 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 day’s feather-shaped patches of sand from their skin. Darius made Barry 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!” Barry tried to sound amused, to play along.
“What’ll you do without a soul?” Darius sighed. His tone wasn’t so broad now.
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.
“But you have to have a soul to go to Hell,” Darius countered.
“Oh, right. Well, I guess, maybe, we’ll be like wandering souls. And our bodies will be like zombies. Maybe something 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. His sole was still wet with it. He recalled wincing on a broken cockle shell at some point that afternoon. Strangely, he’d felt no pain whatsoever, then or now, though at times he’d vaguely noticed something slick like mud underfoot. The wound was too horrible and painful looking to waste. “Oh, yeah. No big deal.” Barry raised his chin and shrugged in contentment.
He garnered a satisfying expression of awe from Darius, who wondered, “You want to wash it?”
“Not in there! I just threw a swan turd in there.”
“Really? These things are—?” Darius stirred the pellets with a stick. “I think I know a big secret of yours,” he said. “You dye your hair.”
Barry paused only a second. “I don’t. My mom does. That’s not my secret. You and me are blood brothers, so I tell you everything. But the reason you don’t know that is cause it’s not mine to tell.” He tipped his head in consideration. “You shouldn’t tell anybody else, though. My mom would probably fucking kill me if she thought everybody knew. She’s such a bitch.”
“Barry! Don’t say that!” Darius whispered back in shock.
That evening Barry made a big deal about his injured foot. He was mewled over by two teenaged 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.