The Leavers(36)

When Peter and Kay called and asked if he was going to classes, he’d assured them he was. He could win $4,000 in one night of playing tournaments, then lose that much in thirty minutes. At one point, there was $80,000 in his account. It didn’t seem like real money, but it was. He could have withdrawn it and cashed out, but there was always one more game, and one more after that.

All he needed was one good win, but the number that constituted a good win changed whenever he hit it. He shut down the account at zero then put it back up a day later. He went two whole days without playing, drove to Montreal with some friends to see a concert, and afterwards he wanted to buy himself a new guitar, new gear, get back into music. One more game and he’d be set.

He’d taken out a private loan to pay for next semester’s tuition, since his grades had gotten too low to qualify for financial aid, and burned through the loan money in a day. He borrowed what he could from friends, twenty here, fifty there, opened new credit cards and maxed them out. The shakier he got, the more he lost, and the more he lost, the more of an action player he became. He borrowed two thousand from Kyle with a promise to repay him in two weeks, but knew it was over when he kept losing, got frazzled when he heard the warning beep that he was running out of time to bet. So he bet half the pot on a 7–2 off suit. This was a surprise: suicide was also a rush.

He paid Kyle back, two hundred dollars. “Where’s the rest?” Kyle said.

Kyle and his friends, two beefed-up brothers that looked like they lifted cars for fun, began to come by his room several times a day, asking for the money. Daniel stopped leaving his room or opening the door. Now he was $10,000 in the hole.

Angel was going to school in Iowa. She had waitressed all summer and fall, working nights and weekends to save up for her spring semester abroad in Nepal, where she was going to teach at a school for girls, then spend the summer backpacking around Southeast Asia. She’d always loved architecture, geeked out on the layouts of cities, the differences in public transportation. Daniel had been dodging her calls for weeks, but he answered one night and told her about the losing streak, the money he’d borrowed from Kyle. “I need a favor,” he finally said. “I’ll pay it back in a week.” She had been reluctant, but agreed to transfer him ten thousand dollars. He would get Kyle off his back, get his accounts square again, then take out another loan and use that money to pay her.

But after paying Kyle, he hadn’t planned on his credit being so shot that his application for a loan would be denied. He decided to play one last time, so he could make enough to at least pay Angel something, but he hadn’t planned on such a lousy beat—he’d been winning for most of the hand with a pair of aces for his hole cards, only to lose huge to a player named RichDanger who made two pairs on the river. And he hadn’t predicted the extent of Angel’s anger, or that when he didn’t pay her she would call Peter and Kay and tell them about the gambling, though not the money he borrowed. By the time the letter from the dean arrived, he was already in Ridgeborough, attending Gamblers Anonymous in a garage in Littletown. He had told Angel he would make it up to her, that he was going to change.

“You mess everything up,” she’d said. “Don’t call me again.”

Now he wished he could tell her about writing Michael, going to Rutgers Street. It wasn’t just that she was the only person he knew who’d also been adopted (when he had mentioned his adoption to his ex-girlfriend Carla Moody, she had sighed, “That’s so beautiful”), but talking to Angel was unlike interacting with anyone else his age. She had no pretense. When he talked about music she never pretended to know more than she did, and he never got bored listening to her, even when she was going on and on about the differences between the New York City subway system and the London subway system, or texting him pictures of cats she said she was going to get and never did, or telling him about the time she and her roommate had run out of gas on a long drive to nowhere and gotten lost in a cornfield. Maybe because they’d known each other all these years, she was almost like a sister.

One of the last times they had talked, Angel had told him that her parents had wanted her to be pre-med: “But I’d puke if I had to dissect a dead body. So I told Elaine sorry, okay, but you’re going to have to settle for a social worker or something like that in the family. She said I was throwing my talents away. I mean, seriously, get a grip, Elaine.”

He had laughed and said, “I’m a shitty professors’ kid, too.”

“Then we’re both black sheep. Even if that term is racist. Like the white sheep are supposed to be good ones.”

“Let’s flip it and say white sheep as bad, instead. I’m the white sheep.”

“But you’ve always been so good to them,” she said.

“My parents? Nah. I’m not the kind of kid they want.”

Angel had sounded surprised. “If that was true, you wouldn’t even feel bad about it. I bet they’re proud of you, even if they can’t say it.”

She told him that in high school she had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and Elaine and Jim had made her see a therapist who called her hostile. “I’ve never told anyone about that before.”

Daniel hadn’t deleted her phone number from his contacts list. There was still a record of all their text messages, the last one from four months ago. He opened a blank message and typed i miss you. He deleted the first and last words and changed it to: miss talking to you. im working on paying you back. thanks for letting my parents know about the poker, for real. He erased all that and replaced it with you going to your dad’s party saturday? and pressed send. Now that they were no longer friends, he seemed to have lost the ability to be sincere, and in a single swipe he deleted all of his and Angel’s texts, hundreds of them, then deleted her name and number from his phone.