13
Welcome Day
Since Leonard’s fight with Corey, the two of them had barely spoken. Leonard had been watching the development of Corey’s new persona, in silence.
And Corey had been watching Leonard. During the same period, Leonard’s pattern was as follows. He was working a day shift at MIT. At night, he parked on Sea Street, came in from the winter’s cold, dropped his cop bag on the floor and took off his black nylon parka and other zippered jackets—he dressed in layers for warmth—sometimes revealing a uniform shirt with epaulettes on the shoulders, which was unbuttoned and untucked. Under it, he wore a sleeveless wife-beater undershirt like the neighborhood bookie.
From night to night, the uniform shirt changed its color and cut—gray to blue to white. Once, Corey glimpsed a patch that said MIT Police on the shoulder. But the patch wasn’t always there. The shabby trousers’ pinstripes flickered from red to blue to nothing. Handcuffs dangled from Leonard’s belt some nights, alongside a chrome key chain, and other nights disappeared. He never wore the Sam Browne utility belt that cops carry their guns in. Leonard explained, under MIT police department policy he had to leave his sidearm in the armory at night, but he carried a backup weapon in his cop bag for protection—in case he ran into a crime in progress off the job. He wasn’t allowed to show his personal firearm to civilians.
After getting settled, in his open shirt, hat and tinted glasses, he went to the kitchen and cooked for hours. Late at night, he showered in Gloria’s bathroom and came out in boxer shorts, the undershirt steamed through and clinging to his white chest.
He’d put the fedora back on after showering and wear it for the trip from the bathroom to the futon.
Around the futon, he’d built a little home away from home of Roche Bros. and Walgreens shopping bags containing clothes and socks, prescription medications, garlic, packages of crackers. He kept everything in bags in lieu of a chest of drawers.
The signs of his presence expanded over time. He left his toothbrush out to dry on the corner of the coffee table. In the beginning, he put it away after it had dried but eventually began leaving it there permanently. Soon his soap, shampoo and conditioner had joined it—Vidal Sassoon hair products in black cylindrical squeeze bottles with gold lettering. The expansion of his campsite meant his possessions floated out in their world and some of their belongings floated into his. Sometimes Corey would see a book from his mother’s milk-crate library had been left lying near the futon in among Leonard’s toiletries, and he would rescue it.
At night, to sleep, Leonard unfolded the futon—an operation that demanded moving the coffee table. Leonard had soon begun to forget to refold the futon when he was done with it and put the table back. Corey adopted a standing policy of refolding it whenever he saw it open and returning the coffee table to its proper place. Leonard wanted his bed left alone, as he made plain by the rough way he yanked it open after Corey had closed it. This tug-of-war over furniture caused the first conflict between them since the car incident.
“My mother can’t close that herself if you leave that open,” Corey told his father one night in early March.
“I beg your pardon?” Leonard said. “Excuse me, was I talking to you? Who the fuck told you to open your mouth?”
“Leonard!” Gloria protested.
“No, it’s okay, Mom. I don’t need protection. Let him talk.”
“Get the fuck out of here before you’re sorry.”
Corey began shaking inside but said nothing more. But he made up his mind to show greater strength around his father. The next night, for Leonard’s benefit, he swaggered around the house, deepened his voice and put on a careful show of manhood.
He saw Leonard gazing at him through his amber glasses.
“What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“You look like you want to say something to me.”
“Want to say something to you? What would I want to say to you, Corey?”
“I don’t know. You’re looking at me.”
“Corey, if I wanted to say something to you, you’d know it.”
“I’m sure.”
“Is that a smart remark?”
“Take it however you want.”
“What does that make you, a tough guy?”
“Tough enough. I ain’t a bitch.”
“You must be a real success. I bet your life is going really well for you.”
“My life’s going great. I got a hundred homeboys who’ll tell you that.”
“Sure you do. Corey, I’d be surprised if you had a single friend.”
The day before Corey’s spring recess, it rained. That evening, he took his mother to the grocery store—the Stop & Shop in Quincy instead of the Purple Cactus in Jamaica Plain. They entered through the garden center. He got his mom a shopping cart. She hooked her cane on the rail and they moved slowly down the aisle under the yellow ceiling.
She had pages of claims against her private medical insurance. She hadn’t gotten disability in time to cover herself from a slew of charges. The amounts were bankrupting. And every time she saw the doctor, someone else billed her. The physical therapist had billed her for the dumbbells she no longer used. Her checking yo-yoed up and down between her monthly pay and zero dollars. She had less than two thousand dollars in savings. Corey knew some of this.
She knew her son liked Subway’s, but a prewrapped sub from Stop & Shop was cheaper. She wanted him to have one.
“Mom, I don’t need anything. It’s okay.”
He wanted to buy a jumbo jar of peanut butter, which weighed two pounds.
“You can’t live on that, Corey.”
“Yes, I can. It’s a good investment.”
They bought mac and cheese. She chose a pack of tofu. In the spirit of saving, he said, “Mom, isn’t there a cheaper brand?” and she got upset and said, “Fine, I guess I don’t have to have it. What difference is it anyway, right?”
“No, Mom, I was wrong. I was wrong. Let’s keep the good one.”
They were stalled in the aisle when a guy in a yacht club sweatshirt with a package of ground meat in his basket tried to push past his mother. Corey put up a hand to stop him. The ship’s wheel on the guy’s chest ran into Corey’s hand. The man’s eyes opened.
“What? She’s my mom, you know what I’m sayin’?” Corey said.
Gloria apologized: “He didn’t mean anything. He’s concerned for me, is all. I’m ill.”
The man shook his head at him and went away.
In the night, as it rained, Corey stood hidden in the kitchenette listening to her on the phone with the insurance company, hanging up in frustration, trying to reach a real person at the twenty-four-hour number.
“It’s all a big mess,” she told him when he came out and asked what she had learned. “If this keeps up, we might wind up on charity.”
First thing in the morning, Corey told his boss he had the week off school and could work full-time.
Blecic told him he was letting him go for lying on his time sheet.
“What do you mean?”
“Please. I don’t have time for bullshit.”
As they were arguing, Dunbar strolled up, greeted Blecic and went to work. Corey looked at his boss and said, “I didn’t lie to you.” The Slav would not relent. Corey had to walk away with the other men watching, get in his mother’s car and leave.
Blecic kept Dunbar working.
That night, Corey saw his friend on the street on his way to Point Liquors. He shook Dunbar’s hand, embraced him and said, “I didn’t rat you out.”
“Good looking.”
And for the rest of the recess, Corey hung with Dunbar and his boys when they had time for him. He didn’t tell his mother he’d been fired. He loitered outside the job site, behind the port-a-johns, pretending to be just happening by, trying to catch Dunbar’s attention. When the latter snuck away, Corey would be there to hook up with him and they’d speed down to Weymouth in the Nissan. Dunbar told his friends, “This kid’s a stand-up guy.”
Corey picked up there were two levels of life being lived among Dunbar’s friends. A billboard in Weymouth urged all citizens to call 911 if someone overdosed. Another said: “Save a Life: Carry Narcan.” A lot of people, including Dunbar, had normal jobs but also dealt and used drugs. Steroids were popular. Dunbar took his shirt off and demonstrated radically improved muscles thanks to Decabol. His pectorals had white striation lines where they stretched the skin. He told Corey he ought to take a cycle. Anthony the hairdresser was a real dealer who could get you ’roids, meth, coke, Bizarro, X, smack, and oxy. In the wake of his firing, Corey let it be known he was open to selling drugs for Anthony. As soon as he had said this, he felt oppressed by a sense of gathering doom and loss of control.
One afternoon, he cut class and met the hairdresser at an apartment above the salon where he worked, facing the glass-fronted gym where he trained. It had low ceilings, white stucco walls, a sliding door to a patio deck, which overlooked a mass of trees nestled around a white New England church spire. The surrounding streets were a medley of clean, smooth grays and beiges, some cool, some warm, like the khakis they sold at Work ’N Gear by the CITGO plant in Braintree.
There were two easy chairs. Dunbar sat in one, Corey in the other. Anthony came in wearing a Cerucci jacket—a short, black iridescent high-collared garment with the collar turned up and a gold chain around his sweaty purple neck. He took the couch, which seemed like a single chair just big enough for his huge legs.
“So this kid’s got a hairy dick now.”
“He’s a good shit,” Dave said.
“You got a driver’s license? Put it on the table.”
Corey took out his driving license, bearing his full name and address next to the seal of the state of Massachusetts. Anthony photographed it with his cell phone.
“This is like your first day at McDonald’s. Everything you do either speaks for you or against you. If this goes right, we can build things up. If you put money in my hand, I’ll put money in your hand. But if I catch any heat, Quincy’s a short drive. You heard? If I get hurt, you get hurt.”
He pulled a ziplock bag of yellow capsules out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on the table.
“What the fuck is that?” Dave asked.
“Don’t touch. This is candy, motherfucker. He’s gonna sell it in his school. People want this. This product here will sell for a rack and a half, fifteen hundred dollars. Twenty pills, eighty bucks a pill. Here’s what you do. You let your friends know you can hook them up with this candy. Everybody gets one piece for free. You give away a couple. Don’t double up on anybody. Wait for them to come back for the next one, and then you sell them.”
The next day, Corey cut school again. “I’m a hustler,” he said, standing under the bus shelter in Quincy Center while it rained.
Yeah, we get it, the others said—a mixture of kids and young adults who weren’t going anywhere either, except maybe on the buses, which came and went while they stood around and smoked. Most had dropped out of high school, some were working on it. There was an older guy among them, a twenty-five-year-old, who had stopped when he saw their skateboards, to tell them about his glory days, the risks he’d taken and fears he’d faced doing tricks and jumps and taking painful falls at the Swingle Quarry. He had a piercing in his lower lip, a girlfriend and a baby, which he could be seen pushing in a stroller through the station in the middle of the workday—he was unemployed—on his way to Dorchester to leave the child with its mama’s family, while he went to a community center very similar to the one Gloria worked at and asked for counseling and drug treatment and help getting a job.
“I learned to deal with that fear,” he told the dropouts. “You will too.”
Corey was holding a cigarette while it burned. He squirted saliva through his teeth at the wet pavement, and nodded at the older guy as he left them and went through the drizzle and into the station, passing the cop who was always posted there to watch the truants and street people.
The parking lot faced the backs of stores—a line of connected buildings with dumpsters by their rear exits—a minimart, an always nearly empty Indian restaurant where white people went to drink, a coffee shop–hangout called Gunther Tooties, a law firm in the underutilized office suites upstairs. A short girl opened the back door of the café and ran through the rain to the bus shelter in her sweater and leggings and Uggs, her hair messy, her lighter in her hand. “Yo,” she said. “This rain sucks my dick.”
She advanced on the cluster of young people, hitching her hip at them, skipping sideways, saying, “Gimme a cigarette! Gimme a cigarette! Gimme a cigarette!” One boy said, “I’ll think about it,” and gave her one, and she jumped up and kissed his cheek. Another was holding a dark brown pit bull on a chain, and she patted the dog’s wrinkled forehead.
Another bus came and went while she talked about her art class. The cop watched them without watching them. He was a tan-skinned colossus in a sharp navy uniform and black boots who had mastered the Deadpan. Corey glanced at him and looked away.
Corey never sold any drugs. He gave away one pill to a black kid named Brian and took one himself and gave the rest back to Anthony. They were opioids. They put a wall between Corey and the world.
But they didn’t put a wall between him and Anthony. Through a third party, he heard that Anthony expected five hundred dollars for his two missing pills. Corey tried to get a job, but Dunkin’ Donuts wasn’t hiring. Someone called his mother’s cell phone and told Gloria that her son didn’t pay his debts. He went to Dunbar and asked him what to do. Dunbar was broke and couldn’t help him out but promised to speak to the hairdresser on his behalf. In the end, Corey borrowed two hundred fifty dollars from his mother and gave it to Dave to give to Anthony. But after that, he heard from others that he could have simply blown the drug dealer off, and he was left wondering if Dave had taken advantage of him. He heard rumors about himself.
The story of the episode came back to him in exaggerated form, with him an even bigger fool, a mark, getting played for even more of his mother’s money. His friendship with Dave Dunbar ended.
On the fifth of April, MIT held a welcome day for next year’s freshmen. Workers put up canvas tents on the lawn outside the student union. Administrators sat with upturned faces to speak to parents and their children. A sign asked “Want to Spend the Summer in Kazakhstan?” A caterer delivered brisket from Redbone’s in Davis Square. Initially, it was sunny. The sun passed overhead, making the tent glow like a lampshade. In the afternoon, however, the weather clouded over and the lampshade went dark. The brisket cooled. Mrs. Reinhardt pushed through the tent flap in her wig, followed by her hulking son, Adrian.
She approached a long-necked woman with a pious face and medieval bowl cut who sat with her hands primly clasped and her fingers interlaced, waiting to be called on to help someone.
“My son’s coming here next year!” Mrs. Reinhardt indicated Adrian—the figure in the black leather jacket. He was standing with his feet braced out like a man about to meet a charging herd of horses, holding open a heavy textbook, studying the contents with a look of dramatic fascination on his face. “That’s him.” And she laughed at the sight of her son. The administrator, either due to innate humorlessness or because there was something that troubled her in the sight of the figure in the mouth of the tent, didn’t laugh.
While his mother talked to the administrator, Adrian drifted out on the lawn, repeating formulas, whispering to himself, working out a problem, touching his lip in thought, writing in the air on an invisible chalkboard, looking up at the clouds.
His mother emerged and reclaimed him. She wanted to inspect the student union. It was a public space open twenty-four hours a day: slightly trashed, smelling like old pizza. Anyone could sit for as long as they wanted in the chairs, leaving the stink of their sweat in the fabric of the cushions. She toddled past the young engineers-in-training sprawled out doing homework. At the far end, there was a Dunkin’ Donuts–Baskin Robbins, giving off its characteristic confectionary smell—a sugary, creamy, coffee-flavored, vanilla-chocolate goopiness.
“Oh, Adrian, I’m going to have an ice-cream cone!” she cried. Then she noticed she was alone. Adrian had let her go on without him.
She bought an ice-cream cone and went back and got him and made him follow her around the campus for another ninety minutes.
When she was satisfied, she took him to his dorm. It was a redbrick-limestone building with white colonial trim. There was a glass rotunda with a white roof and white vertical elements separating the windows. She took her son inside. There was a guard desk in the lobby but there was no one there.
“Let’s go upstairs!” she said. “I want to see where you’ll be living!”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Oh, come on, Adrian! Don’t you want to take me? ‘Where the boys all go, the girls go too!’ ” She sang to him in a show-tune falsetto.
“No, that’s okay. I’m not interested.”
“If you won’t come with me, I’ll have to get a college man to show me his room.”
“Go ahead. I’m sure that will be very satisfying.”
“Adrian…”
“Yes?”
“You better not wander off.”
“We’ll see.”
“Adrian.”
“What?”
“You better be here when I come back.”
“You can’t tell me what to do. You’re the one leaving.”
“I’m only going for one minute.”
“Okay, one minute.” He set his G-Shock watch. “That’s sixty seconds. You’re going to have to hurry, otherwise I have no obligation to wait for you.”
“I know somebody who wants to go to physics camp this summer. Maybe you better think about that, unless you want to get that yanked.”
“You’re just countering a reasonable condition with a threat. We went over this with my doctor. For an agreement to be valid, both parties have to have a stake in it. You’re acting in bad faith. To be in good faith, you would have to say how long you’re going to be upstairs and then you would have to make a faithful commitment to be back here by that time.”
The elevator arrived.
“If you’re not here when I get back, I’ll take away something you want,” Mrs. Reinhardt said.
When she was gone, Adrian stood in the lobby, staring at his watch. “That’s thirty seconds,” he announced to the empty room.
He inspected a science exhibit in a Lucite case: a geode, an egg of stone that had cracked open, revealing fang-shaped crystals of purple and white, like frozen milk. The outer surface glittered with shiny dollops of chrome and nickel. Geodes, the exhibit said, form in bubbles of molten stone within the earth.
The leather of his jacket creaked. His bicep compressed it when he flexed his arm to look at his G-Shock watch, strapped to the joint of his powerful hand.
“A minute’s up.”
He found a fire exit, which led to a stairwell, and went down into the basement.
Thirty minutes passed, and the security guard who tended the lobby of the dorm returned to his post to find a woman talking excitedly on her cell phone. Her tone of voice suggested delight. But there was something paradoxical about her voice. It didn’t match what she was saying. She was saying, “There’s a maturity issue! He’s not ready to be away from home!” The guard realized she was seething.
The woman got off the phone. “My son’s disappeared,” she told the guard. “You haven’t seen him, have you?”
“What does he look like?”
“You’d know him if you saw him,” she said.
The guard offered to put out a call on the radio.
“Don’t bother. I’m going home. I’ve got cancer, you know. He’s going to regret this. This is a very nice dorm. I was just upstairs. It’s a lovely dorm and I met some lovely people, but he’s never going to know them.”
She left the building.
The guard strolled through the hallways on the upper floors. Finding no one out of place, he entered the stairwell, tapping his trouser leg with the antenna of his radio, and after looking up and looking down, descended to the basement.
There was a red exit light at the far end of the basement, which was otherwise dark, and it glowed on the overhead pipes—water, sewer, gas, electric—turning them red. The air was humming from a high-voltage generator running in the power room. The guard began to stroll into the throbbing darkness. As he moved, white lights keyed to motion detectors came on and went off, so that a square of white light traveled with him down the tunnel, illuminating the cinderblock walls. The last bank of lights to blink on revealed a human figure standing like a robot absorbing the sound waves coming out of the generator.
“Hello, Adrian.”
Adrian turned around and looked at the guard. The guard was Corey’s father.
“Mr. Goltz, is that you?”
“Almost. Goltz is my baby mama’s name.”
“Oh dear, I’ve committed a faux pas. What should I call you?”
“You can call me Leonard.”
“Leonard, what are you doing here?”
“I work here. What brings you down here?”
“I like feeling the energy radiating from the walls…I feel like no one knows I’m here…I feel violent and powerful…I feel like I’m in this big red humming pussy.”
Adrian looked inside himself while he talked, following his ideas from one to the next, until he came to this conclusion. Once he said it, he looked up with the air of a sleeper coming awake and registered Leonard and a smile spread over his face at the hilarious strangeness of what he had said. He laughed.
“Don’t worry,” Leonard said. “That’s perfectly normal.”
And Adrian laughed even louder.
“You’re getting away from it all. I get it. This is my favorite part of my rounds.”
“Are you a policeman? Corey told me you were a policeman for MIT.”
“I’m a guard. I was with the cops. But the hours are better for me as a guard.”
“I don’t blame you. I think you’re so lucky. I’ve always wanted to be a night watchman! I’d have time to read and study…I wouldn’t want to be a cop either, telling people what to do. What kind of person needs to control other people like that? It’s like something’s missing in them, like they have some kind of penis envy, so they have to wear a gun.”
“They’re small-minded. They’re blinded by status markers.”
“Exactly! I hate that! They want to wear an MIT T-shirt and brag about having their kid go here.”
“You see it with academics getting letters after their names. I call it alphabet soup: PhD, MS—multiple stupidity, more like; bachelor of science—BS, BS, BS. I’ve gotten letters after my name too. You think I introduce myself as Leonard Agoglia, PhD?”
“You have a PhD?”
“Yeah, you bet your ass. Got it in 1998. Wrote my dissertation. Did original work. Big fucking deal. Life goes on. I don’t need the status.”
“Wow! Corey never told me that!”
“That’s because I never told him. It doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change the universe.”
“Gosh, that’s such a noble attitude!”
“People look at the surface and think they know you. They have no idea what you’re thinking.”
“That’s exactly how I feel!”
“They look at me and see Joe Shit the Rag Man. I just laugh at them.”
“I think of myself as a proud, lonely boy.”
“We’re all heirs to the capitalist system.”
“In what way?”
“It’s the system of competition: the zero-sum game of I-win-you-lose instead of the understanding that knowledge is not property. You can’t buy and sell knowledge—even though that’s what places like this try and do. Knowledge lives outside the economic realm. And if you look at history, mistakes have happened when people have tried to bring these realms together.” He held his hands apart and moved them towards each other until they overlapped. “This is a problem. Things that are separate should stay separate. This is the problem right here—” and he gripped his hands together, clutching his own flesh.
“Hmm, that’s very interesting. I have to think about what you said. I wouldn’t have thought of it as capitalism. I guess I was thinking more of it in terms of psychology, like somebody has this expensive house or car, and they want to fight over it, but deep down, the reason they’re fighting over it is because it’s this part of themselves that they see being taken away, like a penis.”
“Capitalism is based on false value—the value of a bar of gold. You can’t eat gold. In material terms, it doesn’t do anything for human survival. What good is it?”
“You’re right! People love to talk about how beautiful gold is: It’s shiny; they practically masturbate over it; they fetishize it; they make statues out of it. But it’s just a bunch of atoms. You could melt it down to nothing in a kiln. If we can worship gold, why not silver? Or why not shit? I’d like to grind up a gold statue into powder and make a gorilla eat it; then I’d collect the gorilla’s shit and make a new statue, and worship that. People would say, why are you worshipping a shit statue instead of a gold one? And I’d say it does have gold in it! Here—smell!”
Leonard laughed ha-ha. “Unfortunately, most people worship gold.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s why I’m doomed to my lonely quest. Nobody wants to smell my shit.”
“You never know. Stay hopeful.”
“I thought Corey would be a great person to share ideas with.”
“I think he’s very taken with you. He looks up to your academic success.”
“I looked up to him too. He was so hyped-up about ideas in the beginning. I’d never met somebody who was so into the same things as me before. It was incredible. It was like looking in a mirror! But he’s changed.”
“Yes, he has.”
“You’ve noticed it too! It’s like he’s lost his intellectual side, and he’s doing this tough-guy thing, like what matters is being this big man instead of being a friend.”
“Yes, it’s ridiculous.”
“What’s been causing it?”
“His mother.”
“I thought it had something to do with her! Hasn’t she got some health problems?”
“Yeah, she’s sick. But everyone’s got health problems.”
“You must be really bummed.”
“I’m not surprised. His mother’s destroyed everything she’s ever touched.”
“Gloria—that’s his mother?”
“Yeah. The thing is, he tells her everything, so if you talk to him, she’ll hear everything I’m telling you.”
“I won’t tell Corey anything we talk about.”
“I thought I had you pegged as a solid guy.”
“That’s a sacred trust to me. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to understand what we’re talking about.”
“They probably wouldn’t. They probably wouldn’t get the whole thing about the big red pussy, would they?”
Adrian laughed. “No!”
“It might be a good idea not to tell anyone we know each other.”
“I have no problem with secrecy. It’s how I’ve survived knowing my mother.”
“I think I met your mother upstairs. Is she short?”
“She’s pushy.”
“I was going to say loud, but that fits.”
“She’s loud. Her voice is so whiny…She’s awful.”
“I know the type: has to get what she wants when she wants it. She wants to know where you are.”
“She’s stalking me. That’s why I’m down here. I’m going to stay until she leaves. I know she’s got to get to bed at a set time, so all I have to do is stay out till ten thirty and I can still get eight hours’ sleep and be up by, like, seven. I can study the way I want, I can work out, I can lift, I can get stronger; everything’s still improving; I’m learning everything for my courses; she isn’t defeating me.”
“A difficult woman. Is she Italian?”
“Does it show?”
“It shows. Italian women are hysterical.” Leonard made devil horns and pointed them at the earth. “See this? This is what my father did when he saw my mother, to ward off the evil eye. You ought to try it.”
“I’m not going to be able to keep her away with that.”
“Is she in good health?”
“She’s got brain cancer.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I hope she dies!” They laughed.
“When did you figure out your mother was difficult? How many days, how many minutes, after being born did it take?”
“It was early. I was like four or five.”
“Did she do something?”
“Yeah.”
“Something you don’t want to talk about?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“My mother was a freak of nature also. I can barely talk about her. She fed me worms.”
“That’s awful. That makes me feel really violent.”
“I have to get back to the lobby,” Leonard said. “Keep the faith.”
Still oppressed by the Dunbar affair, Corey cut school and took the Red Line up to Cambridge, planning to surprise Adrian at Rindge, a campus of green lawns and gray stone buildings that harkened back to churches. Class was in session; the grounds were quiet. Corey could see a teacher lecturing behind a distant window. Then the doors opened and kids with backpacks came out of all the buildings. He looked for a leather jacket. Coming down a path beneath a high stone archway, Adrian appeared, carrying a book under his arm. Corey put himself in his way.
“What are you doing here!” Adrian exclaimed, looking with wonderment at Corey, who stood before him, draped in baggy clothes and hood.
“I cut school!”
“Your rebelliousness gives me such a sense of power.”
“Come on! Let’s go to Harvard Square! Let’s go meet some ladies!”
Adrian thought that was a great idea! He checked his watch and said he’d be free to do that in four hours and seventeen minutes.
“What do you mean, four hours? Let’s go now. Come on!”
But Adrian refused—he had to maintain his grades.
“What am I supposed to do, stand here and wait for you all day?”
“I told you my terms. I can see you in—four hours and thirteen minutes, now. All you have to do is occupy yourself for that length of time. Anybody should be able to do that if they have basic inner resources and aren’t hyper-needy.”
Corey said, “Forget it,” and went off to Harvard Square alone. At no point did Adrian mention that he had talked to Corey’s father at MIT.
Mr. Gregorio had Corey summoned to his office. An assistant showed Corey in and closed the door, closing him in with the principal and two other male teachers. Corey stood in front of the principal’s desk, wearing his newsboy hat, NFL jacket and loose-fit jeans. He had forgotten where his feet were and so he was standing slightly pigeon-toed. All three men were staring at him. He put his eyes down.
“Hello, I guess,” he said, and took his hat off.
“Hello, you guess,” a teacher said. “What are you supposed to be, a tough guy? Look at him. He gets in fights now.”
“Okay,” Gregorio said. “We’re not here to make you feel misunderstood. If there’s a problem, you can tell us. Is there something going on?”
“No.”
“I let you take your course. Now Mrs. Clark is telling me you’re a disruption.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve heard worse than that,” one of the other men said. He had a face that went white-to-red in half a second when he was angry, a sharp nose, close-cropped orange hair, a strong voice, and a wedding ring. He was looking at Corey steadily as if he were a nail sticking out of the seat of a chair, which needed to be hammered down. “We ought to have security check his bag.”
“I’d be up for checking his bag right now.”
“How about it, Corey? You have any contraband on you?”
“No.” He took his backpack off and the red-faced teacher unzipped it and went through it.
“My daughter goes here. If I heard that somebody was selling drugs to her, do you know how upset I’d be?”
“Here’s your bag back. Don’t forget your bio book. Wait a sec. Is there anything in here?” He flipped the textbook over and shook it. A piece of paper fell out: Corey’s notes on adenosine triphosphate, the energy currency of the cell.
The red-faced teacher’s name was Edgars. He coached.
Gregorio said, “We’ve got a proposition for you, Corey. You go with Mr. Edgars. You work with him, do what he says, go to the games, assist during practice. If he’s happy, we take you off probation. That’s if he takes you. It’s up to him. He’s no softy. But we want to see a change of heart here. What do you say?”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“You stay on probation the rest of the year.”
“I’ll stay on probation.”
“That’s what I thought,” Edgars said. “I don’t want him anyway.”