4

“It’s all right. You did very well. For a beginner.”

We were back in Jared’s house, in Jared’s room, and the wonderful power in my legs was gone. There was a taste in my mouth like ash.

I thought: there’ll be a knock at the door downstairs, interrupting the party of sophisticated people, some of them speaking French and Russian.

The faraway laughter was a little too loud. It was very late and the party was getting a little drunk and shabby.

“No, really,” Jared consoled me, even though he laughed as he said it. “It wasn’t your game, after all. It’s mine. You shouldn’t have tried to do it all by yourself. I was wrong to encourage you.” He gestured at me like a magician: presto, now you’re happy. He was thin and dark-haired, and knew how to speak with his eyes, and with his hands.

He laughed silently and shook his head. “I was nervous the first time, too,” he said. He smiled at me through the smoke. He waved a hand, in his grand way. “They won’t hurt you,” said Jared.

“I know it,” I said, but I knew that what I meant was: they won’t hurt you, but they’ll hurt me. And I hated the little rasp in my voice, the dry croak I made.

I was so ashamed—and so shaken—that my lower lip was trembling. I have my moments of minor courage. I played shortstop, and if I couldn’t get the ball in my glove, I stopped it with my face. I heard things like, “Way to go with the face, Stan.” “Great face, Stanley.”

There was a flare of adult laughter downstairs. Jared’s parents were sitting around sucking drinks with other smart people, people in tweed and cufflinks, gin drinkers.

I glanced around his bedroom. A carton of Marlboros was open on the dresser, and the room was a tumble of books and clothes, some of them shirts still wrapped in plastic from the department store. On the wall Jared had a map of the night sky at midwinter, a delicate tracing of Orion and Taurus, and several pinups of the sort my parents would never have allowed, tousled women with blossoming labia and hard gazes. There was a dark spill of marijuana on the nightstand. “Nobody cares,” Jared had told me once, “what I do.”

And he had his trophies, a tangle of them there in his bedroom, on the dresser: a lighter, a gold pen, a box of oversized plastic paper clips—all of the curios, knickknacks he had stolen not for their value, although some of the objects did look expensive. They were proof that he had crept into the innermost room of a house, and snatched a token, any random object, as proof.

It was a secret game Jared had played all by himself, until at last he had begun to hint around about it, saying, “I know a game that most people would be too scared to even contemplate.”

Jared used words like contemplate easily. His father was the author of books about astronomy, and was always flying off to Arizona or Hawaii to visit observatories where men and women like him studied the stars. His mother did technical drawings at the university, precise representations of the jaws of extinct rodents and the fangs of long-lost birds, and she, too, was always flying off to conferences in far-off cities.

Jared knew things. He didn’t just have facts straight, numbers ready, dates and famous writers. He knew things like that. But what was remarkable was that he made no mistakes. None. If Jared decided to walk along the top of the chain-link fence beside the DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE signs—and he did this often—he would never slip. Never falter. Never hesitate for an instant, unless he wanted to pretend to be about to fall in the way that made me scream inside myself and put my hand out to the fence and draw myself into one tight thought: don’t die, Jared.

Don’t die.

Once he walked across the 580 Freeway, on the pedestrian walkway over eight lanes of traffic. He goat-footed his way along the top of the suicide cage, the fence that arches over the walkway to keep people from doing just what Jared had decided he would do. It was exactly his style: watch what I can do.

But gradually, very slowly, our new friendship became more than a shared midnight laugh, more than me watching Jared teeter along one fence, more than a matter of watching Jared bound across traffic while cars squealed.

“It’s better than any drug,” he would say with a smile, and he had tried them all. “It’s better than sex,” he would say, and he knew all about that, being muscular and bored-looking enough to have a girl on each arm sometimes after school.

At first I didn’t believe him. “You don’t really,” I said. “Not really.”

He made one of his gestures. Jared could say as much with a shrug, a wave, as most people could with whole conversations, complete with charts and pointers. So don’t believe me, his shrug said. I care nothing what you believe or don’t believe. Be a little, dull person. What do I care?

Of course, that was only a joke. Jared wouldn’t really hurt anyone, or even take anything especially important. His game was, in a way, an act of mercy. He would slip into a house, hold the lives within his power—and spare them.

I sat in his bedroom, a friend who had failed, and Jared was kind, tossing me the pack of cigarettes and the gold-plated—stolen—Zippo. It was an old-fashioned kind of lighter, and I tossed it in my hand for a moment, thinking: the person who lost this misses it.

“Maybe next time I’ll go with you, back to the same house. It sounds like an interesting challenge. A creaking staircase.” He widened his eyes, as though to mock me. “A gun in the nightstand.”

“They’ll be ready for you,” I said.

“For us,” he said.

I’m never going back there, I told myself. Never.

“All it takes is the right touch.” Jared leaned back in his chair, watching the smoke from his cigarette drift toward the ceiling. “It’ll be all the more fun. Burglar alarms, brand-new rented guard dogs.”

Never, I wanted to say. Not as long as I live. It would be a disaster. I would slow him down, and my doubt, my clumsy lack of faith, would ruin everything.

But Jared read my thoughts.

He wasn’t smiling. “I’ve decided. Next time,” he said. “We’ll do it together.”