Wilde Lake(57)

“Little . . . Lu,” Davey said with a distracted, almost sleepy tone, as if he had just awakened from a nap. I frowned at the “Little”—and the pause. Did he not know me? He and AJ had been friends for more than two years at this point. “Who’s your buddy?”

“Randy Nairn,” I said. Davey shook hands with him, very solemn, as if greeting an important dignitary. “Nice to know you, dude.” It was like Zeus leaning out of the heavens and introducing himself to a mere mortal. Yet Randy did not seem particularly awed.

“What are you doing around here?” I asked. “Are you coming to our house?”

“Your house? No, I just—I just sometimes like to . . . perambulate,” Davey said. “Nice day like this. I like to wander. No practice today, tomorrow is a bye week, so I decided to kill some time before taking the bus home. You think my parents might give me a car, they have the dough, but no, no, no. That might be a distraction. You’ll get a car when you graduate, young man.” The last said in a prissy voice, only deep, so I guess he was quoting his father. “But what am I going to do with a car when I go to college, especially if I get into Stanford? I need wheels now.”

It was hard enough to talk to Davey when he was just hanging with my brother. One-on-one, him in this odd state, it was almost impossible. But I kept trying.

“Yeah, AJ wants a car, too.”

“We all want so much,” Davey said. “Everybody, whatever they have, it’s never enough. You know what? Not only can you not get what you want, you can’t always get what you need. No matter how hard you try.”

“Uh-huh.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Yeah, well—I thought I might hit the McDonald’s at the mall. See ya, Little Lu.”

That name again. I winced. Davey went weaving down the path.

“I see that guy all the time,” Randy said.

“Where?”

“Near where I live. Like, at least once a week.”

“What would he be doing—over there?” I did not want to say: You live in those town houses where poor people live. Davey lives in Hobbit’s Glen, miles away, near the golf course, in a really nice house.

“Buying pot, I guess.”

“Davey doesn’t buy pot,” I said.

“Then I guess someone gives it to him because he was H-I-G-H high just then. My sisters get high all the time. I know what it looks like.”

“Davey’s an athlete,” I said. “And a good student. You can’t do those things if you get high.”

“Ah, who cares? Let’s play something new. You know I have to go home by dark and that’s getting earlier and earlier. Next week is Thanksgiving already.”

“I know. Four whole days without school.”

“Yeah.”

“You sound like you don’t like days off.” Even this year, when I finally had a friend and a teacher who seemed to like me, I was happy to have two extra days off. I would watch the parades on Thursday morning, then watch my father and brother watch football in the afternoon. Our dinner wouldn’t be anything much—Teensy made most of the sides a day ahead, and they weren’t very good reheated. My dad roasted the smallest turkey that Butterball sold. But he couldn’t make gravy, and he never remembered to put the Parker House rolls in the oven. There was a part of me that felt as if I should take over in the kitchen, learn how to do some things. Certainly, Teensy was pushing me in that direction. But there was also a part of me that never wanted to be that person, someone I thought of, dismissively, as the girl. No cooking, no sewing, especially not after the crocheted vest debacle. Once, when I was particularly unhappy at school, my father asked if I wanted to go to a private one. It turned out he had in mind some all-female place up near Baltimore, which horrified me. I’d have rather gone to an all-boy school. And not because I disliked females. I’m not one of those women. But if you weren’t competing with boys, it seemed to me, the bar had been lowered. I ran against boys, played their games on their terms, ceded no ground to them in schoolwork. I don’t think it’s an accident that I married the smartest person I’ve ever known, the only person who was unequivocally smarter than I am. Except for my father, of course. My father and AJ.

“We don’t really do Thanksgiving at my house,” Randy said. “My dad almost always has to work, and my sisters just want to eat Chef Boyardee out of the can.”

“Maybe you could come to our house,” I said. “I can ask.”

I think he had been hinting for just this invitation, but he kept his reaction simple: “Okay, you ask, and if your dad says okay, I’ll ask my dad. It would be better if your dad called my dad, though. I don’t think my dad can say no to your dad.”

The sun was down, the light fading rapidly. It was time for us to part, but it was hard to say good-bye for some reason. The days were growing shorter, and our time outside would be coming to an end soon. Where would we go, as the days grew dark and cold? It doesn’t seem a stretch to say that we felt a little like Adam and Eve, about to be thrust out of Eden.

Maybe Randy felt this, too, judging by what he said next.

“Should we kiss?” Randy asked me.

The question threw me.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”