Chapter Forty-Three

CHRIS IS HAVING a boxing lesson in the morning sunlight that falls through the windows of the library in his town house. It is an odd place for a boxing lesson, but the coach wants to have it in that room so he can look at the books while the kid works out.

For Chris’s seventeenth birthday, his father called a gym on Thirteenth Street and hired a coach to teach his son how to box. They went down to the gym together. Chris had been scared in the gym, of the dirt and the grime and all the strong dudes beating the shit out of the bags and each other. In the car on the way back uptown, he convinced his father to let him have the lessons at home. So the boxing coach comes to the Upper East Side every Sunday. Chris’s father had a heavy bag and a speed bag installed in the basement, next to the unused stationary bicycle and treadmill. Still, Chris is not a particularly quick study. The big black gloves look like anvils sprouting from his skinny arms.

“Stay on your toes,” Coach tells him.

Chris is tired and getting sloppy with his footwork, as he is shadowboxing, and his footwork is suspect to begin with. He is shining with sweat, and it has soaked semicircles into his designer tank top. Coach rolls his eyes every time he sees the skinny kid wearing the stupid-ass thing.

“All right, that’s enough. Here.” Coach hands him a leather jump rope. “This for ten minutes, and then you’re done.” Ten minutes is a long time. Coach settles himself in an overstuffed leather chair to wait for the kid to finish and go get the cash for the lesson.

Chris takes the rope and starts jumping, but trips when he hears the door buzzer, then stops jumping and goes to the intercom. “Who is it?”

“Sara.”

“Oh . . . yeah, come in.” Chris wonders if he looks good, with the boxing and everything.

Coach watches the girl walk in the room and notes what she looks like. Pretty, though Coach is not that impressed. The girl looks a little off. But he also suspects she might be a fighter in her own way.

Sara starts talking immediately. “Chris, guess what? Jessica says she can get some Twelve for the party.”

“Hey! C’mon.” Chris beckons her up the stairs with him as he drops the jump rope on the floor. “I’ll be right back, Coach.”

Out of earshot, on the second floor “Are you nuts?”

“What?”

“You were just talking about that stuff in front of my coach.”

“So what? Chill out, he just works for your dad or whatever, right? What’s he gonna do? He probably doesn’t even know what it is.”

“I didn’t even know you were into drugs.”

“For the party, stupid.”

Chris grabs four twenties for the hour of boxing out of his father’s bureau. “I guess. But you shouldn’t talk about it in front of him, okay?”

Sara says nothing, vaguely perturbed by Chris’s lecture. Back downstairs, Chris hands over the money. Coach gets up and looks at the rope on the floor and then at Chris, who shrugs; Sara arches her eyebrows at the exchange. Coach cracks his knuckles, says, “See you next week.”

Chris falls into the armchair Coach was sitting in. He is flexing his pecs, as if to make it seem they are always that big. Sara does not notice.

“Who do you think will come?” he asks.

“Maybe you.” Sara exercises a grin onto her face for him. Chris practically giggles as he rises to try to catch her and kiss her. She fends him off.

“But seriously,” he says, “I don’t want to have too many people.”

“Oh, why not?”

“You know how it gets. They might wreck the house or break something. Remember Paul’s party?”

“Yeah. You told me you broke a coffee table.”

“No, but something like that could happen if we have a lot of people.”

Sara draws her chin back into her neck, like Eew.

“It could still just be you and me, alone, you know?” says Chris. “We’re alone right now, actually . . .”

“No!” She barely holds in another eew. “I mean we have to have everybody cool so it will be the best party ever. A famous party, and we’ll be, like, famous.”

“I just don’t want too many people.”

“You want me, don’t you?”

He nods his head. She moves closer and starts pushing into him, just walking into him as if he isn’t there, pushing him back toward the chair. The backs of his legs hit it, and he sits down. He looks up at her face as she stands over him.

“Just leave the people to me, okay?” she says.

Chris is turning red.

Sara kisses his temple. “Great. Now just give me some cash to pay for your part of the stuff. Jessica said she had to take a lot of money out of her father’s account, and I can’t cover all of it.”

Chris is not planning on doing any of the drug, but what the fuck, it’s an investment. “Come upstairs, I’ll grab the money. How much?”

“Two hundred. I’ll stay here, though.”