Elise trusts Robbie on a gut level. She gets being bisexual, and thinks everyone is attracted to anyone, but gay boys have it rough, they learn fast and cruel. This one kid who worked at a check-cashing place in her old neighborhood was famous for being queer. He was all buttoned up, saving money, determined to get out of that town, always wearing neckties and cardigans, polite in the Plexiglas booth, but he wouldn’t hide his wrists or pursed mouth. She walked in there once with her Burger King check, and he was swollen, one eye bandaged, one ear burned. Necktie in place—green polyester with diagonal maroon stripes. She was fascinated by him—nearly destroyed for love, over and over, and refusing to lie.
She survived years of school fights herself, fights that came from real and imagined sexual and social conflicts. She knew what it was like to be forced to take the squatting posture against another girl in the parking lot, hair in her face and mouth, a tribe watching, a random extra girl coming into the fight once in a while to kick or punch, the creepy silence broken with huffing and a whimper. No matter how bad Elise got hurt, she never regretted standing up for herself. She was glad when that stage—fighting every week—was over. Although you have to be on guard forever.
Dove shit steams then freezes on the road. Icy light radiates into the house.
In the kitchen, Matt unpacks sushi lunch from takeout boxes.
“Let’s see—what have we got here,” he says.
“Yum, I’m starving,” Abigail says self-consciously.
Abigail’s Christmas-in-Bermuda tan is amplified by a white turtleneck. She’s scared, in a titillating sense, which is how most girls feel near Jamey. He’s not charming—it’s something weirder, more potent, dangerous. He’s so convincingly disconnected from his beauty that people look away, not wanting to be the one who tips him off with their gawking.
Jamey bends over the Aeneid in Latin, the only thing he studies anymore.
He’s always taken classes off the beaten path: Japanese Swordsmanship, Thermodynamics, the Culture of Belief from Saints to Atheists, a course on Prison Ethics, one on Botanical Drawing, and one on Jainism. The barbs and thistles of these fields caught him. He had a double course load and immaculate grades—until now.
His classes…had committed mutiny. The simplest, most innocent concepts turned overnight into enemies, capable of triggering full-system shutdown. Light is not light but energy. A person will never see his own face, just its reflection, or a photograph of it. Brain waves are more active during dreams than waking life. Roses don’t smell beautiful; they smell like ripe fruit, which is good for survival, and so they’re defined as beautiful in our aesthetic beliefs. These are obvious riddles, in the league of conundrums that blow a thirteen-year-old’s mind after his first bong hit.
Jamey wonders, vaguely ashamed, why they’re getting to him now.
He carved ballpoint x’s into B. F. Skinner’s eyes. He had to throw out his Kierkegaard.
And now, his last refuge—amo, amas, amat—disintegrates: the paragraphs don’t hold, words fall apart. Letters degrade into tiny sticks and circles, and Jamey closes the book.
He dispiritedly gets up for water, and Abigail watches like a hawk.
Matt snaps his fingers. “Over here,” he says, indicating himself, being funny. “Show’s over here.”
“Oh, shut up,” Abigail plays it off.
“Jamey gets plenty of attention,” Matt says.
“Do I?” Jamey asks drily.
“That one over there like spies on you,” Matt says, looking to Elise’s building.
“What?” Jamey’s surprised he’s angry.
Matt shrugs, psyched he got a reaction. “I’ve seen her, looking out the window.”
“She’s not looking at me,” Jamey says, opening the fridge for something to do.
“And you defend her all the time. Fascinating,” Matt says, tapping his chin with his finger.
“Oh, whatever,” Jamey says.
Jamey ends up parking at the Chapel Square Mall, crossing the lot with hands in camel-hair pockets. He wanders the domed hall, following mauve diamonds on the rugs, passing potted plants that don’t need sun. He likes the mall because he is somewhere, but he doesn’t go into the stores so he’s also nowhere.
He sits on a bench to observe the population. He’s always relied on odd activities to soothe himself, like reading true-crime books in hot baths. As a kid, the encyclopedia was his security blanket. He sucked his thumb until he was eleven and a nanny started dipping his thumb in nail-polish remover.
Now watching strangers is his salvation.
Today it’s backfiring, making Jamey feel particularly left out of the world’s doings. He looks away from girls in tight jeans, from women in acrylic sweaters. He observes two losers by the food court throw out a nasty hello like a fish hook until they reel in a girl, play with her till she’s not so disdainful, and then her friend joins them, and the guys clumsily sneak the girls a look at their freshly rolled joint. They all saunter off, the guys’ arms over the girls’ shoulders, newly minted couples, for a quick blow job on the loading dock then a grape soda at the arcade, or a car ride and a fuck at one of the girls’ homes, with the second couple taking her little brother’s room, his turquoise globe falling off the bed stand, cum on his Spider-Man sheets.
Jamey watches them leave the mall, his eyes golden with misery.
Elise rides a rusting Huffy BMX bike (whose handle grips are gone) to work, her body vibrating with energy. Passing the Harkness Tower and the translucent-marble library of the university, she then navigates a couple bad blocks where boys in black beanies and shearlings stand on corners.
The shop is downtown, past the movie theater and next to a hamburger spot. She unlocks the frozen door to a room humid with fish tanks.
Marianne, the shop owner, comes in later, barely ever able to get there at all, dragging a cape of Mylanta and Epsom salts and cat litter vapors.
Marianne feeds the fish and watches soaps on a tiny TV.
“You seem awful happy,” Marianne says.
“I’m in a good mood today!”
Elise wishes she could talk to Marianne about Jamey, but there’s no point. Marianne has frizzy white hair and is obese, and is impartial to life, to living, without being bitter or blaming anyone. I get along better with critters is what she tells people.
Elise sings to Lionel Richie on the stock-room radio; hours pass.
At the pizzeria, she eats a slice while looking at a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet someone handed her. She sips Diet Coke from a wax cup, staring out the window at sun sliming the ice on the sidewalk.
At the Goodwill on Linden Street, she finds mirrored glasses for twenty-five cents.
Loopy Lex waves from the church steps. Homeless, his long hair matted and lip scabbed, he’s still a raw-boned, handsome American.
“How’s it going, Lex?”
“Going going going.”
Back at the shop, she makes a paperclip chain.
Everything is about Jamey now. She’ll wear the sunglasses for him. She could introduce him to Lex, tell him about the daughter in Vietnam that Lex never met, how Lex comes in the store to look at the fish. She wants to show Jamey the python Marianne keeps in the big tank, whose markings are like puzzle pieces.
She talks to Jamey out loud. As she bikes home in the dark, she’s lost in a complicated conversation with him. Standing on the pedals to stall for a light, she suddenly worries she forgot to lock the door to the store, and has to go back.
It’s locked.