THE NEXT SCHOOL year Jane Brzostovsky noticed that Barry and Darius weren’t so much of an item anymore. She couldn’t celebrate her hero’s liberation, because the change had come about too subtly. Nothing like the I-can’t-see-you shunning she’d observed sometimes.
Freedom may indeed have been the issue for Barry. His love for Darius didn’t lessen, but he liked other people, too. And he preferred practicing skateboarding with a gang of them to sitting in Darius’s bedroom with just Darius.
The friendship may have run its course for now. Or perhaps a budding class consciousness figured into it. For Barry, skateboarding with friends had an egalitarian, comradely feel. Darius’s tyrannical control of their schedule was tiresome. And Barry thought it bizarre and snobbish when Darius claimed to be “like three-hundredth in line to be Shah. The king of Persia, the king of kings. Because my mom’s a Qajar!” When it came to the old dynastic name he pronounced Farsi carefully, unlike French, and with the heaviest possible aspiration.
Barry closed his right eye in displeasure. “The Palahvis are peasants!” Darius whispered fanatically.
Darius was only too aware that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a Qajar himself. Any more than he was a Van Nest. His aristocratic passions probably originated as a secret anxiety about his adoption. A similar deep-seated case of nerves kept him from reacting too much to Oliver’s finicky spasms of cruelty. He could baby step or pout for an hour. But that was it. He preferred dwelling on the mythic, half-remembered period when his father and he were in cahoots in the basement. Cataclysmic changes, like replacement wives or an unrewarding adoptee’s expulsion from the family didn’t seem inconceivable under Oliver’s regime of whims and distorted emotions. Out of caution, Darius forgave.
Barry Paul’s gang of skateboarding friends was slightly older. He got in some trouble with them—a marijuana thing blown out of all proportion in his and Jeanette’s opinion. Even so, he was hauled before a dour juvenile referee who put him on probation. She also ordered him to write a personal statement for a court psychologist and a letter of regret to her. “What’s to keep me from just writing whatever? Whatever you want to hear?” Barry asked.
“‘Whatever you want to hear, ma’am.’ Kiddo, you’re in no position to be snippy.”
Barry frowned, insulted. “Whatever, ma’am. I wasn’t trying to be snippy. Just wondering.”
“‘Just wondering, ma’am.’”
He got Jane to help him write the statement and letter, and thinking of the snippy judge, he told her, “Let’s be extra polite. Her and me, we didn’t jibe. She said she was this close to sending me to juvie.”
Although Jane knew that this was untrue, a sort of twisted boasting—she could hear it in his voice—she fretted indulgently, “Oh, Barry, I really don’t think that’ll happen, do you?”
They were meeting in a small ground floor office in the 1967 wing of the Lawrence middle school building. Any teacher could use the room, ducking into it to scribble quizzes, assemble model molecules, or meet with students, though the space was almost too cozy for two. The desk and woodwork were blond, the door turquoise-painted steel. Jane and Barry had to sit on the same side of the desk. Her fingers were poised over a word processor. A stuck-looking aluminum crank window gave onto a claustrophobic woodland view made up entirely of saplings. Barry, whose chair was leaning against the wall at first, let it land softly on four legs. He slouched luxuriantly. He could just reach the desk with one elbow. When Jane looked down at him, she glimpsed a khaki thickness against his inner thigh.
She looked away, of course. She glanced out at the woods as if hunting for a word. She felt an ardent embarrassment for Barry. You couldn’t be a teacher and not pick up on the humiliation boys feel when that kind of thing happened. Though Barry didn’t seem too embarrassed.
When Jane glanced back, the boy was looking at her candidly. “What if we say I want to be a lawyer? Is that too suck-up? Or—you know—inappropriate?”
“A lie?” Jane looked out the window. “No. No, it’s—whatever—what about—what if we just make it wants to go to college for now?” she murmured. She was thinking she’d been wrong. It was a trompe l’oeil fold of cloth or who knew what? She typed for a moment.
“Darius said he wanted to be an actor.”
“We’re not writing about him,” Jane said. With a peculiar motion of her head, she dragged her gaze from the window, across her lap, across the floor, to Barry’s lap, up the turquoise door to a small square of chicken-wire glass in its middle. Not exactly sly, but she was not mistaken.
Barry shifted wonderingly in his seat as he commented, “But he’s a great guy. You never got him. Shy, you know? Sometimes I wish we were more friends like last year, but he’s a loner.”
“Are you—enemies, then, or...?”
He made a shocked sound. “No. Nothing like that. Come on!” He arched his back. His fists reached for the ceiling briefly. He closed his eyes and deflated. “I didn’t sleep so well last night.”
Jane got a good view when his eyes closed. The bowed thickness shifted unmistakably. Barry even scratched at it with an ultra-quick peck of a forefinger. It was, to say the absolute minimum, man-sized. Jane looked out the window and answered him a little sharply. “Barry, look, this is important. Please, take this seriously.
“Yeah, yeah, I am. Don’t worry. But I really think that ma’am judge might be out to get me. Nothing like this would ever happen to Darius.”
“Barry, wake up! You’ve got so much more going for you than—Darius Van Whoever-he-thinks-he-is.” She dared to lay three fingers encouragingly on his knee, though she didn’t look at him when she did and lifted them at once.
“I only meant cause he’s rich,” Barry whispered.
Jane 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 her chair butted the powdery aluminum window crank.
This was a terrible problem. Jane crossed her legs. She turned back to the keyboard but only scrabbled her painted nails on the desk to either side of it. The immediate problem was that Barry’s lap wasn’t part of a private fantasy suddenly. Unless this was a dream.
He appeared to notice something odd and looked at her. Really looked at her. Even before he said what he said, 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 last year.”
“Differently, but I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” She did know. She’d started to use a flashy, child-friendly coral nail polish. She was certain Barry would never be able to figure it out. He was a kid, for God’s sake. She had to be creating everything on her side. This was some erotic Turing-test confusion.
“Well, like those,” he said uncannily. He nodded at 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. She had the fluttery idea that he didn’t care in the least about the thing in his pants. That he was aware she’d noticed and didn’t care about that, either. Or that he did care, but not in an embarrassed way.
He continued to behave as matter-of-factly as ever. He crossed his arms and pushed out his lower lip. He scratched the inner corner of an eye. The two of them did some work. They composed sentences about Barry’s earnest desire to learn, to get into a good college, to find gainful employment that would also benefit society. Jane continued stealing glances as Barry rattled on or yawned or stretched. The thing never changed. She knew what everyone knows about the vigor of youth, but she began to wonder if it was just the way he was permanently. In other words, maybe the lump was soft instead of hard. She thought she’d have noticed before now, but things change. Especially at his age. Barry could have suddenly grown up to be all shower and no grower. Honestly, if that was the case, he had, almost, a deformity. She began to wonder whether she could contrive to touch it. No matter how minuscule the office was, that was going to be hard—difficult.
She dwelt on the challenge for a moment. Though the situation was serious, she turned it over with much of her former broad humor about the crush. She never imagined she might actually follow through and touch him. She never guessed her fugitive hilarity was precisely the lead-in to trying.
She barely listened as Barry somehow talked his way back to the Van Nest family, Sohaila this time. “I always really liked her. A lot. I was sort of jealous of Dare. His mom’s got this thing—like kind of a serene thing, you know what I mean?”
Jane wasn’t typing this, of course. They’d more or less finished the personal statement. The letter of regret would be easier. Jane’s fingers crooked on the desk in typing position. She stared right through the word processor. Rays of afternoon sun and the blond wood made for dreamlike fumes of honeyed light in the room.
Barry went on in bland innocence. “You want to know something really weird? I mean completely weird. Dare’s mom has a boyfriend and his dad doesn’t care about it. The guy comes over for dinner with them all the time. He’s called Stan. So it’s like all three of them together at the table every night. Four with the French teacher guy. At first they thought he—Dare’s dad—was going to marry a bunch of wives like a Mormon but then they realized he wasn’t into sex, like he’s a neuter.”
“See if I can get this open,” Jane turned to the window. Barry’s obvious tall tale about the Van Nests sluiced over her without effect. She gripped the chalky old aluminum crank. She threw the weight of her shoulders back and forth. Staring at the oxidized frame with a trace of wildness, she hit the window with the heel of her hand. “Won’t work, I guess,” she breathed mildly.
She formed a comical plan. She’d pull the completed statement from the word processor. With a casual flourish—There-you-go!—she’d press the sheet to Barry’s lap. Her fingertips would feel him ever so slightly through paper and khaki. Then she’d know for sure. Turning back from the window, she took the paper from the word processor. It needed three yanks, and the sheet was a little crumpled.
The plan failed in every particular. There was no ever-so-slightly when she pressed the damaged sheet into Barry’s lap. He jerked in his seat at the firm pressure of her hand. Impulsively her fingers pursued as his lap recoiled. They pressed, almost a grip, almost a squeeze. She pulled her hand back, crossed her arms and dropped her chin in thought. “There you go! Personal statement.” Barry wore an expression of amused shock.
It was hard. It was hard for Jane to look at him now. She’d seen an expression cross his face, a knowing expression. And even now, the way his brown eyes glowed, the way the corners of his mouth squinched tightly and the down-dusted-doughy pallor of his beardless cheeks pinkened. There’d been neither embarrassment nor unawareness all along.
Not knowing what to say, he stretched a bit, shifted in his seat, more luxuriantly this time, making everything even more obvious. It was now clear to Jane that a portion of his restlessness had been deliberate display. She could see it in his face, and she felt angry, scammed, anything but the instigator. Very sharply she addressed the edge of the desk, “I think we can get to the rest another time. Your regret statement. That should be pretty simple. You could do it on your own.” She motioned for him to clear the way to the turquoise door. He didn’t move. She frowned in irritation.
“Uh—a minute?” His gaze fell to his lap briefly, brows rising. His knees yawned farther apart by an inch. “Could be a challenge for me to walk around.” He snickered. “If you know what I mean.”