The Nix(44)

His first sleepover. Samuel’s dad drove him and was plainly stunned when they pulled up to Venetian Village’s large front copper gates.

“Your friend lives here?” he said. Samuel nodded.

The security guard at the gate asked to see Henry’s license, asked him to fill out a form, sign a waiver, and explain the nature of his visit.

“We’re not going to the White House,” he told the guard. It was not a joke. There was venom in his voice.

“Do you have any collateral?” the guard asked.

“What?”

“You have not been preapproved, so I’ll need some collateral. To insure against damages or violations.”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“It’s policy. Do you have a credit card?”

“I’m not going to give you my credit card.”

“It’s only temporary. Like I said, for collateral purposes.”

“I’m just dropping off my son.”

“You’re leaving your son? Okay, that will do.”

“For what?”

“For collateral.”

The guard actually followed them in a golf cart, and Henry delivered Samuel to the Fall house with a brief hug, said “Be good” and “Call me if you need me,” and then glared pure hatred at the security guard as he got back into his car. Samuel watched as both his father and the golf cart disappeared up Via Veneto. He held his backpack, which contained some overnight clothes and, at the bottom, the cassette tape he’d bought at the mall for Bethany.

Tonight he would give her the present.

They were all there—Bishop, Bethany, their parents—they were all waiting, in the same room, which Samuel had never seen before, all of them inhabiting the same space at the same time. And another person too, at the piano, Samuel recognized him: the headmaster. The same headmaster who had expelled Bishop from Blessed Heart Academy now sat taking up all the space on the bench in front of the family’s B?sendorfer baby grand.

“Hi there,” Samuel said, to nobody in particular, to the aggregate mass of them.

“So you’re the friend from the new school?” the headmaster said.

Samuel nodded.

“It’s good to see he’s fitting in,” the headmaster said. This remark was made about Bishop, but it was made to Bishop’s father. Bishop sat in an upholstered antique wooden chair and looked small. It was as if the headmaster’s large presence had colonized the room. He was one of those men whose body exactly matched his disposition. His voice was big. His body was big. He sat bigly, his legs far apart and his chest puffed out.

Bishop inhabited the farthest seat from the headmaster, arms crossed, feet under him, a tight little angry ball. He leaned so far back in his chair it seemed he wanted to physically dissolve into it. Bethany sat nearer the piano, perfectly upright, as she always did, on the edge of her chair, ankles crossed, hands in her lap.

“Back to it!” the headmaster said. He swiveled to face the piano and placed a hand on the keys. “Now don’t cheat.”

Bethany turned her head away from the piano and looked directly at Samuel. His chest seized, her stare carried such voltage. He fought the urge to look away.

The headmaster pounded a single note on the piano, a strong, dark, low note that Samuel could feel in his body.

“That’s an A,” Bethany said.

“Correct!” the headmaster said. “Again.”

Another note, this time near the top of the keyboard, a delicate plink.

“That’s C,” Bethany said. She still stared at Samuel, expressionless.

“Right again!” the headmaster said. “Let’s make it more challenging.”

He hit three keys at once, and what came out was dissonant and ugly. It sounded like what an infant might do bashing the piano incoherently. Bethany’s stare seemed to disengage for a moment—it was as if her consciousness receded, the way her eyes went glassy and remote. But then she came back and said, “B flat, C, C sharp.”

“That’s amazing!” the headmaster said, clapping.

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“I’m sorry?” his father said. “What was that?”

“Can I go?” Bishop said.

“Maybe if you learn to ask correctly.”

And here Bishop finally raised his head and met his father’s eyes. They held each other’s gaze like that for an uncomfortable few seconds. “May I please be excused?” Bishop said.

“Yes you may.”

In the game room it was clear Bishop did not want to talk. He jammed Missile Command into the Atari. He sat stone-faced and quiet while he shot rockets out of the air. Then Bishop grew agitated and said “Fuck this, let’s watch a movie,” and he started a film they’d seen several times before, about a group of teenagers who defend their town from a surprise Russian invasion. They were about twenty minutes into the movie when Bethany opened the door and slipped in.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Good.”

Samuel could not believe how much his stomach flopped whenever he saw her up close. Even now, when he felt seriously conflicted about his presence here, when Bishop transparently wanted to be alone and Samuel didn’t know what to do with himself and had been wondering if he should call his father and go back home, even through all this Samuel felt elated when Bethany entered the room. It was as if she erased every lesser thing. Samuel had to bat away his impulses to touch her, to muss up her hair or punch her in the arm or flick her earlobe or any of the other juvenile maneuvers boys do to terrorize the girls they love, maneuvers that were really meant to bring them into physical contact the only way they knew how: brutally, like little barbarians. But Samuel knew enough to know this was not a good long-term strategy, so he sat there heavy and still on his usual beanbag chair and hoped Bethany would sit next to him.