21

CROSS

CAT DID HOLD JAY to his promise to reformat her laptop. Doug barely found out about it in time.

He and Jay were IM’ing while Doug web crawled his way through Labor Day afternoon. He didn’t care for chatting or texting much, but he liked talking on the phone even less.

Doug: Still there?

Jay: sorry had to answer the phone.

Doug: I think we should play this new MMORPG called Darkness. It’s about vampires.

Jay: don’t u get enough of that irl?

Doug: You chat like a 12-year-old girl.

Jay: lol! irl = in real life

Doug responded that he knew what it meant, though he had in fact been searching for the abbreviation in an online glossary.

Doug: Anyway, Darkness—you can play a vampire or a vampire hunter. Or a werewolf or demon or a lot of other things I don’t care about.

Jay: i know, i’ve heard of it.

Doug: But get this: one of the goals you can work toward as a vampire is hunting down the vampire that made you. If you kill it, you become a superpowered human.

Doug watched the minutes tick by on his computer. He might get distracted from time to time while Jay was waiting for a response, but Jay was usually pretty attentive. He killed time watching clips on YouTube, but nothing moved him. Where he’d once considered it his duty to tell people who posted stupid videos that their videos were stupid, it felt less important now in the grand scheme of things.

Doug: Am I boring you?

Jay: sorry, getting some stuff together. i gotta go soon.

Doug: Where are you going?

Another long pause. Doug thought, screw this and flopped down on his bed with a comic book. The computer pinged.

Jay: ok i might as well tell u i’m going 2 Cat’s 2 help her w/ her os. i wasn’t going 2 tell u cause remember when u said Adam’s nicer 2 us when no one’s around? sometimes u make fun of me more when there r people around. well not more i guess but it bugs me more. but i feel weird going over there alone so u can come if you want.

Doug felt a twist in his stomach then, a vinegary taste in his mouth. He couldn’t be the bad guy here. In a world of ass-holes, how could Jay think this of him?

Doug: I don’t make fun of you. I just joke around. That’s what friends do. If it bothered you so much, you should have told me.

Jay: my fault then.

Doug: That’s not what I’m saying. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be more careful. I’m sorry.

Jay: it’s nothing. so ur coming?

A quick bike ride and poncho refolding later, and Doug was at Jay’s front door. He thought he’d better make it a front door sort of day. He rang the bell and listened as Chewbacca came barking, listened to his tiny terrier nails claw for traction on the hardwood floors, listened as he threw himself again and again against the inside of the door. Usually someone was right on his heels shouting, “Chewbacca! Shut up! Sit! Sit! Stay,” and then the door would open. Chewbacca continued to bark and scratch at the door, but even his actions began to sound confused, a little lost, like a man in a bar fight who’s expected his friends to hold him back before he embarrassed himself.

Doug was considering ringing the bell again when the door opened to Pamela’s wary face.

“You can get your own drinks today,” she said.

Chewbacca leaped toward Doug, licking and jumping and just hoping to catch a little bare flesh or get a good sniff of groin. After becoming a vampire Doug had braced himself for a lot of growling and biting from previously friendly pets, but if anything dogs seemed to find him mind-blowingly awesome now.

“Jesus,” said Pam. Chewbacca had stopped leaping but was teetering like a trick dog on his hind legs, nose aquiver at Doug’s crotch. “You hiding a hot dog in there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Probably one of those little cocktail wieners.”

He wasn’t going to let her get to him today. Today he would stay cool, cool as a tall glass of lemonade.

“What are you wearing?” she asked him.

It was the same shirt he’d worn at that party in San Diego. Long sleeved, lots of tiny pockets. It was a little snug, but the salesgirl had said it was supposed to fit snug.

“Oh, and you’re qualified to give me fashion advice,” he said, “because your swim team T-shirt is so incredibly awesome. Look! It has autographs all over it! Autographs of the other members of the swim team! Are you gonna let me in?”

Pamela took a languid half-step to the right. “Jay gave me three dollars to get the door for him. You two have a spat?”

“How much would he have had to pay you not to tell me he paid you?”

“I don’t know. Seven? But he probably didn’t think he had to. He’s so morally upright.”

Doug followed her into the house, feeling carbonated and shivery. He would see Sejal soon. He and Jay would go to her house, Cat’s house, and they would sit and stay awhile. Gentlemen callers.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Pamela said suddenly. Doug had absentmindedly followed her all the way to the door of her bedroom.

“Uh, sorry. I just spaced out.”

“Were you looking at my ass?”

“No,” said Doug, who at the mere mention of the word “ass” had almost looked at her ass again. “I wouldn’t look at your ass if it had a Playboy stapled to it.”

“Nice.”

Doug spun around and walked, pink cheeked, back to Jay’s room.

“Okay,” he said as he crossed the threshold. “I’m ready to go.” Chewbacca stretched up Doug’s leg, paws on his knee.

Jay didn’t look up from his computer. “Cat’s bringing her laptop over here now. Cat and Sejal. She said something like, ‘No way with my mom on the rag’ and said she didn’t want anyone at her house.”

Doug could tell he was trying to be standoffish, but Jay still couldn’t keep a straight face while saying “on the rag.” “They’re coming here? Shouldn’t you clean up a little?”

Jay looked around his room, which was spotless as always.

“Clean up what?”

“I dunno. At least take down the Darth Maul poster, right?”

Jay shook his head. “You’re just like Adam.”

“Okay,” said Doug, “I’m sorry you’re upset. I thought, you know, we’ve been friends a long time, and friends kid each other. I didn’t know I’d been hurting your feelings.”

It sounded reasonable to Doug as he said it, as if it could even be the truth. There was a flimsy nobility to it, like a paper crown. Just then the doorbell rang.

Doug nearly collided with Pamela in the hallway. Chewbacca rushed past to bark at the door.

“No!” Doug said. “This time we want to answer it.”

Pamela held out her hand. “Three bucks,” she said.

Doug stared at her, hard. “You will let me answer the door,” he told her.

“Yeah. For three bucks. Stop looking at me like that.”

“I thought,” Doug said, fishing his Velcro wallet from his back pocket, “that trolls…were supposed to ask you a riddle”—the wallet was free now, and he paid Pamela—“not demand cash.”

“You’re thinking of sphinxes.”

Doug ran to the entryway, then skidded to a halt and took a couple of leisurely steps to the door.

The door wouldn’t open, so he turned the deadbolt, found that he’d just locked it rather than unlocked it, turned the small handle lock instead, and soon he was looking out onto the stoop, and yard, and Sejal.

Jay’s house faced the south, and that dazzling midday light made the neighborhood incandescent and traced a hot red edge around Sejal’s small body. Cat was there, too.

“Cat, Sejal, come in,” he told the girls. Chewbacca seized with happiness at having so many visitors.

Cat had her computer under one arm and a backpack over her shoulder. Sejal was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt that you could see through to a black tank top beneath.

“Hey, Meatball.”

“Hi, Doug,” said Sejal.

Doug led them down the hall and said, “Jay mentioned you might be coming by, but I thought I’d have to miss you. I have an appointment later.”

“He paid me three dollars to let him open the door!” Pamela shouted from her room. “Which one of you does he have the crush on?”

“Sejal!” Cat shouted back, and entered Jay’s room.

Doug winced at Sejal. “You look nice,” he said.

She looked beautiful. Each time he saw her now, she was more lovely. It hurt a little to look at her, hurt in a part of Doug’s body that he couldn’t immediately define.

“Thank you, Doug. I didn’t know you were going to be here,” she said, as though explaining something, though Doug couldn’t imagine what. “This dog is very taken with your pants.”

“Yeah…well,” Doug said. There didn’t seem to be a great way to spin a comment like that.

In the bedroom, Cat and Jay were talking like they were friends.

“Well, I hope you don’t mind that I brought a bunch of music over,” Cat was saying as she dumped a pile of CDs onto the floor. “I don’t know what you’re into. Where are your CDs?”

“I don’t really buy them anymore,” said Jay. “I have everything on a networked hard drive. I like They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, MC Frontalot…”

“Awesome! Nerdcore!”

“What?”

“That last guy was nerdcore. Are you nerdcore? I think that stuff’s hilarious. Oh, my effing God! Is that a theremin?”

Cat jumped up from the floor and over to a long black box on a microphone stand in the corner. Dials and knobs studded one side of the box, and fat antennas trimmed the ends.

“He’s really good at it,” said Doug. “He can play anything. Play something, Jay.”

“Maybe later,” said Jay, his ears blushing as red as brake lights.

“Oh, you have to! That is so rad,” said Cat. “A theremin’s this electronic instrument you play without touching, Sejal. You just wave your hands around. You should totally start your own nerdcore band, Jay!”

“So what kind of music is all this?” asked Doug as he sifted through the CDs on the floor. “Goth?”

Cat made a face. “That word doesn’t even mean anything anymore. There’s a bunch of different styles in there: darkwave, batcave, deathrock, death metal, queercore, slowcore, nocore, shoegaze, postindustrial—”

“Jesus. How many different kinds of music are there?”

“I don’t know. Four hundred and twenty-seven. Lots.”

“At Booktopia there’s only, like, five,” said Doug.

“Booktopia doesn’t know dick,” said Cat, and she turned to Jay. “So what do we do to get me using Linux?”

“Well,” said Jay, “do you have all your files backed up?”

“Hell, no.”

“We should back them up first.”

“I don’t know anything about computers,” offered Sejal to no one in particular. Doug nonetheless treated it as an opening.

“I don’t know anything about music, apparently,” he said to her. “It’s like…it’s like how many different kinds of musical labels do you need? There’s almost as many as there are bands. Like in the future we’ll reach some singularity and the ratio will be exactly one to one. ‘Hey, you like the Rolling Stones?’ ‘What kind of music do they play?’ ‘Oh, you know—mid to late Rolling Stones.’”

Sejal smiled. Barely. If there had been a smile-o-meter on her face, the needle would have stopped at “Polite.” Doug retreated and sat next to Cat on the bed.

“You’re in good hands—Jay really knows computers,” he said. Jay gave him kind of a weird look but he pressed on. “Way more than I do. He grew up learning a lot of stuff we didn’t ’cause he was homeschooled.”

“No way,” said Cat.

“Up until sixth grade,” Jay admitted.

His father had sent away for curricula and textbooks and Cricket magazine and acted as Jay’s one and only teacher until he was ten. He had play dates with other homeschooled kids, and of course with Doug. Then Jay’s mother came home one day with a child development study that concluded that homeschooled kids did worse in college interviews than their traditionally schooled peers. His parents panicked and rushed him into Doug’s junior high. It didn’t matter that another study refuted the first one just six months later—the damage was done.

It was as if he’d been raised in captivity, at Sea World maybe, and was used to popping his head above water every hour and showing off what he knew. But now out of a misguided concern for his welfare, he was being released into the worst kind of ocean. Middle school was shark-infested water, and even the other dolphins couldn’t understand why Jay was so eager to jump through hoops.

This had been an uncomfortable time for Doug. Jay had never met School Doug before, and School Doug didn’t want to be thought of as the sort of person who’d be friends with a boy like Jay. He hadn’t been so complimentary then.

“Seriously. Jay’s, like, a computer genius.”

Jay glanced at Doug and connected a hard drive to Cat’s laptop.

“What’s that for?” asked Cat.

“I’m going to drag all your files over here,” Jay answered. “I won’t keep them or anything. I’ll delete them after we’re done.”

“You better. I got tons of lesbian porn on there.”

Jay flinched. Cat laughed.

“Kidding.”

“So. Speaking of lesbians,” said Doug.

It was a spectacular segue. It exploded and then lay there like a pile of dead clowns.

“Wow,” said Cat.

“I mean…I just…I was thinking about what you said about Ophelia.”

“I only said it because you asked,” Cat insisted. “I probably shouldn’t have. Don’t spread it around, okay? She should get to decide who knows and who doesn’t. If she even is gay.”

“I think she is brave,” said Sejal. “If she is a homosexual. It is not always easy, no? Even in America?”

“Are there gay people in India?” asked Doug.

Sejal shrugged. “There are a billion people there, so…”

So maybe Sejal hadn’t been offended the other night after all. Or if she had been, she’d gotten over it pretty quick. Doug, for his part, didn’t think he really had much of an opinion about gay people. He didn’t know any. Except maybe Ophelia, now. If anything, he was possibly a little sick of them. They were always popping up in shows and movies and in the books he read. They used to be comic relief, but at some point it was like you weren’t allowed to laugh anymore, and the gay characters were Very Serious. Their whole character would be about them being gay, and how serious and unfunny and also completely normal it was. In each new book, especially, there seemed to be one or two. Like the author wanted to prove what an open-minded, big-tent guy he was.

And, because he was thinking about books, and because the room had been filling with a cold silence and someone had to jump in, he said, “What do you guys like to read?”

“Kelly Link kicks ass,” said Cat. “I read a lot of comics.”

“Mmm…” said Sejal. “I am trying to think of someone I’ve read of whom you would have heard. Do you know Feluda? No? Jhumpa Lahiri?” she ventured, to dead stares. “Zadie Smith? Nick Hornby?”

“That last one sounds familiar,” said Doug. “I think I’ve heard of Feluda, but I can’t remember what she writes.”

“She is a he. And he’s a fictional character, not the author.”

“What kind of comics do you read?” Jay asked Cat.

“Um…I like Meat Cake and this one graphic novel called Ghost World. And a lot of Vertigo stuff. Especially Sandman, but of course that’s not a series anymore.”

“Yeah, I liked Sandman,” said Jay. “I have a few collections of it. Now that guy writes movies and books and things.”

“Cat is having me read it right now,” said Sejal. “I like it okay so far.”

“It gets better, I swear,” said Cat.

“It’s gets better for a while, but…” said Doug, “Neil Gaiman doesn’t know how to end things, you know? He builds everything up to this huge battle in Dreamland and then, poof, it doesn’t happen.”

“Um, spoiler alert,” said Jay.

“It doesn’t happen because a big battle would have been juvenile,” said Cat. “It—Sejal, cover your ears and hum for a bit unless you want the ending ruined.”

Sejal covered her ears and sang something Indian with lots of syllables.

“Okay,” said Cat, but she couldn’t continue without laughing. Sejal laughed back but didn’t stop singing. “Okay. The Sandman doesn’t fight because he’s ready to die. The mess he gets himself into is actually this huge plan he’s been setting up for centuries without even realizing it.”

“I know,” said Doug. “I know. Because he’s depressed, and he doesn’t want to be the Dream King anymore, but he doesn’t have the guts to just off himself.”

“He feels too responsible for his kingdom,” said Cat, her voice getting sharp. “So he has this…secret plan to remove himself and be replaced with someone better, but the only way he can do it is to…not even let himself know he’s doing it and…I’m not explaining it well.”

“Because it’s dumb,” said Doug.

“It’s about him realizing he’s not a good person,” Jay mumbled. “He knows deep down he should change, but he’s too proud to admit he was ever wrong.”

“Yeah,” said Cat, and she smiled at Jay.

After a moment she threw a pillow at Sejal, and Sejal stopped singing.

“What was that?”

“Jana Gana Mana,” said Sejal. “It’s the Indian National Anthem.”

“You guys are probably right,” said Doug. He got down on the floor with Sejal. “Jay’s always right about this kind of thing.”

Cat put some music on. “I promised pizza,” she said. “Is Agostino’s okay?”

“You don’t have to do that,” said Jay.

“Whatever, I’m doing it.” She checked her phone. “I’ll be right back, I’m not getting any bars in here. Sejal, come with me.”

Sejal and Cat walked back down the hall, followed by the dog. After the front door opened and shut, Jay rounded on Doug.

“Don’t you think you’re…I appreciate it and all, but don’t you think you’re laying it on a bit thick?”

“What are you talking about?”

“All your flattery. It sounds fake.”

“God, there’s no pleasing you,” said Doug. He’d actually been enjoying it, being so complimentary. He’d noticed there was a way you could do it that made you look even better than the person you were complimenting. But it kind of ruined things if the subject of your praise was going to be all ungrateful about it.

“Just act normal,” said Jay. “Except don’t make fun of me as much. That’s all.”

“Well…you act normal. Except not so retarded. Then there won’t be anything to make fun of. And you’re acting totally weird, too.”

Jay frowned. “No, I’m not.”

“You are. You’re all, ‘I like Sandman, too, Cat. We have so much in common. Watch me code on your computer with my dick.’”

“Shut up.”

“Screw this,” said Doug, and he shuffled out to the front door. Cat and Sejal were coming back in as he reached for the knob.

“Oh! Hey,” said Cat. “They’re really backed up because of Labor Day. So the pizza won’t be here for an hour.”

Doug looked at his watch. “I have to leave in an hour. To see this…mentor guy by Clark Park I’ve been seeing.”

“Mentor?” said Sejal.

“Uh, yeah, he’s like a career counselor. You know. Helping me figure out what to do with my future.”

Cat announced that she was going to see how her computer was coming along, and left the two of them alone in the hall. Now the stale house air seemed to crackle and bloom. He wanted to seize Sejal and hold her close. He wanted to shrink her down and carry her around in his tiny pockets.

“Maybe I should blow off my appointment,” he said. He couldn’t remember how to stand. What did he usually do with his hands? “The company is better here.”

Sejal was looking at a potpourri arrangement on the side table. “Your future is important,” she said.