Читать книгу The Sixth Form - Tom Dolby - Страница 11

That evening, Todd decided to end things with Alex. They met in their usual spot in the Caldwell Memorial Garden, on an oak bench next to a trellis overgrown with wisteria. There had always been something he liked about this garden. It was bordered by tall hedges, so he could sit in it undisturbed; sometimes even, if he were feeling bold, to sneak a cigarette. Broken pieces of statuary were arranged among the foliage; when the school’s land, having previously been the site of a grand nineteenth-century estate, was converted into a seminary, the priests had destroyed all the statues on the grounds, breaking off their heads, arms, legs. Dozens of classical icons—likenesses of Venus, Adonis, swans and goats, gargoyles, a head of Athena, one of Medusa as well—seemingly worthless at the time, had been dismembered and buried across the property. The school had unearthed most of the statues, everything that could be discovered on the formal grounds, and had donated them to a museum in Hartford, where they had been properly restored and preserved. But occasionally in the woods, students would come across a decapitated female torso, or a giant lion’s paw. The broken pieces were totems, markers of where they were in the forest. Here in the garden, there were a few examples that had been saved: a torso of Adonis, nestled next to a bush of yellow roses; a gargoyle’s head, bewitching as it gazed over a plot of pink petunias; a swan next to the trellis, nearly intact save for a broken wing.

As Todd sat with Alex in the chilly night air, he explained to her that with college applications and keeping his grades up, he didn’t have time for a relationship. He knew it was a lie, and he sensed that she did, too. He was no longer interested in sleeping with her; everything that had been so exciting six months ago had vanished. Alex was the coolest girl he had ever known—pretty, smart, a dry sense of humor. But something was missing, some essential ingredient Todd imagined relationships to have. He thought about all the girls he had dated: there had been a string of them, starting when he was thirteen years old, all attractive, some smarter than others, all of whom wanted a piece of him. One by one, he had broken up with them. He would retreat into his boy-world of hanging out with Miles and Izzy, watching sports and playing pinball, until another girl captured his attention. Things would go swimmingly until his interest waned again.

Alex suddenly looked very small, like a wounded bird, all her Greenwich-born prep school bravado having left her. “If you want to take a break, that’s what we should do,” she said quietly.

He didn’t want her to cry. He couldn’t stand it when she cried. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I felt differently.” The words felt like cardboard coming out of his mouth.

He took a deep breath, relieved her reaction had not been tears and hysteria. As they walked back to the snack bar together, a safe distance of several feet between them, Todd felt a weight, an anxiety that held the black shade of depression, leaving him. The future was like an open field, white, snowy, clear.

The following Saturday was Parents Weekend. Todd sat waiting for his mother on one of the leather couches in the entryway of the main building. Jackie was driving up from New York that morning; most parents had arrived the previous night, and most had taken their children out to dinner, but his mother had needed to attend a cocktail party, which had prevented her from coming until now. Todd supposed he should be grateful she would be there at all.

He looked out nervously at the main circle. Todd wanted to intercept her before she did anything embarrassing. He hoped she hadn’t gone too heavy on the fancy jewelry.

He jumped up when he saw her clicking her way across the rotunda of the main entryway. Outfit: conservative, a navy blue suit. Jewelry: understated. Hair: swept up in a French twist, a few blond strands falling around her temples. Todd felt himself relax, ever so slightly. Finally, after all of his and his brother’s years at Berkley, his mother had gotten the message that prep school was not a fashion show, at least not the kind she was accustomed to in New York.

“Hi, Mom,” he said shyly. From five feet away, he could tell she had not gone easy on the perfume.

“Darling,” she said, kissing him on both cheeks. “The roads were incredible this morning! Soaking wet. You’re lucky I made it here alive! Let’s get some coffee. I’m famished.”

They walked down the hallway together toward the dining room. Todd tried to pay attention to her, and not to what he imagined were the stares coming from everyone around him. It was true; he knew he should accept it. Among the Berkley parents—the WASPy, the frumpy, the fat, the simply strange—his mother was the most glamorous.

Jackie charged into the dining hall like an old pro, grabbing a tray for both of them. “Just coffee for me,” she said. “Black.”

“Don’t you want a piece of fruit or something?” Todd asked. “You should eat.”

“Fine, I’ll take an apple,” she said.

To his right Todd noticed that his English teacher, Ms. Davis, was filling up the large mug of tea she carried with her everywhere she went. She turned around just as Todd was about to leave the service area. Please, he thought, please don’t talk to us. It was too early in the morning to deal with his teacher and whatever her agenda was that day.

Ms. Davis and her bright green eyes had already spotted them.

“Todd!” she said, smiling at him and his mother. “Is this your mother?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled.

Jackie extended her hand and introduced herself. “Are you a teacher of Todd’s?”

“English,” she said, firmly returning the handshake. “And I understand you’re a writer yourself?”

“That’s right,” Jackie said, smiling.

“We had a wonderful reading last night. Did Todd tell you about it?”

Todd cringed. He had skipped the reading, even though Ms. Davis had told the class they should attend.

“No!” his mother said. “What type of reading?”

“A nonfiction writer, a recent alumna of the school, actually.”

Oh no, Todd thought, here it comes.

“She read from her new memoir about being a boarding school student and exploring her lesbian identity.”

“How wonderful!” Jackie said brightly. Todd realized that his mother could read his teacher like a book herself. It was common knowledge that Ms. Davis was seeing Ms. Hedge, the art teacher.

Come on, please let it end here, he thought.

Todd’s mother leaned forward with a conspiratorial glint in her eye. “You know, it is so wonderful that the gay community has an outlet these days.”

Todd reddened. It came back to him, something his mother’s agent had lovingly called her at a dinner party after a few glasses of wine: “the World’s Biggest Fag Hag.” He remembered, too, what she had said in return: “I accept the honor completely.”

He touched his mother’s arm to indicate that they should get going.

“Will we get to sit in on one of your classes today?” Jackie said to Ms. Davis.

“Yeah, third period,” Todd said.

“Fabulous! I can’t wait.”

Todd pulled his mother to the farthest corner of the dining hall, where he would be sure not to run into any more of his teachers (or worse, his friends—word had reached him that his friends had informally voted her “the hottest mom alive”).

“I can’t believe I’m here again,” she said, taking a sip of coffee and eyeing her son’s white toast with suspicion. “I remember six years ago, when we moved your brother into his dorm. Brian was so nervous! I was nervous, too. Now it all feels familiar. And this will be the last time I get to do this.” She leaned forward and straightened Todd’s tie.

“I wouldn’t get too broken up over it,” he said.

“Come on, now,” she said. “I’m sure you’re going to miss this place.”

Todd slouched in his seat, yanking on his tie and undoing his mother’s handiwork. Would he be sorry when he left at the end of the year? He would miss the comfort of it, the fact that he knew where everything was; he had his friends, who gave him the well-worn satisfaction of an old pair of shoes, the feeling that, while they were not perfect, they wouldn’t disappear on him one day, or decide they no longer liked him. Before he had arrived at Berkley, his mother helping him pack carefully from the list the school provided, he had been anxious. He was, back then, only three years ago, a bed wetter, a secret about which he had never told anyone. It was an intermittent problem, occurring on and off ever since his father had left them. It wouldn’t happen for months, or even years, at a time, and then it would strike for a few days, or a week. Todd had become used to trudging down the hall of his mother’s apartment in the middle of the night to the washing machine, throwing in the messy bundle of sheets. Jackie would wake quietly, appearing at the threshold to the little laundry room like an angel, silently taking out new sheets from the linen closet, helping him make his bed again. The two of them were complicit in their deception, so that no one—not Brian, not the housekeeper, or the chef—would ever know that Todd (at age seven, at ten, at fourteen) was soiling the bed. Jackie had done everything to prevent it—she had taken him to a psychiatrist, set alarms for him in the middle of the night, encouraged him not to drink water before bedtime. On a family vacation, the problem had struck unexpectedly, and Jackie found herself calling housekeeping at the seaside villa where they were staying in Positano and requesting garbage bags that she cut open into larger panels and placed under Todd’s bedding.

Then the problem would go away. He had always been a deep sleeper, so deep sometimes that nothing could wake him up. He felt as if he weren’t responsible for his own behavior, that his body was acting of its own accord.

The problem never lasted so long as to be a cause for serious concern, just long enough to create discomfort, to give him anxiety at the thought of overnights at friends’ houses; his mother would pack him identical sets of pajamas, just in case. When he left for Berkley, ready to enter the Fourth Form (his school in New York, like many, had gone to the ninth grade), he was worried. Would he, at age fifteen, be caught one morning by his classmates in a puddle of his own urine?

It had never happened. Not once. He was proud of this, that something at Berkley had solved the problem, that while other more masculine fluids might stain his sheets, never again would he have to do a load of laundry as the sun was rising.

He looked at his mother, considering her question. “I don’t think I’ll miss it. I want to get the fuck out of here.”

Jackie sighed. “That English teacher seemed nice.”

“She’s cool. A little too political, but basically okay.”

His mother started rifling through her handbag. “I do wish you would appreciate the fact that you’re here. I never got to have an education like this.”

Todd groaned. He could feel one of her speeches coming on. Several times a year, his mother would remind him how hard she had worked to ensure that he and his brother got the best schooling, how the tuitions she paid now were more than she had made in her first job working as a secretary. Sure, Todd thought, but they’re about one-fiftieth of one of your book advances. He supposed he shouldn’t be ungrateful about it. Those books had made everything possible.

But his mother didn’t offer a lecture. Instead, she asked him the question he was dreading even more. “What about Alex? Is she around?”

“Yeah, she’s around.”

“Will I get to see her? She’s such a sweet girl.”

“Mom, we broke up.”

“Oh, darling!” His mother leaned over in an attempt to hug him. He winced as he noticed that her voice had just gone up by several decibels.

“Don’t make a big deal about it,” he hissed, pulling away. “It’s nothing.”

“Has it been hard?” she asked. “I never would have known.”

“Mom, just forget it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, you look great, I have to say. There’s color in your cheeks, your complexion is clear, you look healthy.” She leaned forward and whispered, “How’s the smoking? Are you still smoking cigarettes?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Well, you shouldn’t. They’re so bad for your skin. But whatever you’re doing, keep at it. It’s working.” She extracted a small pocket mirror from her purse, surreptitiously examined her teeth for remnants of apple, and then began reapplying a shiny tube of lipstick to her mouth.

Todd winced as he realized, from his mother’s pose, from her demeanor, from her tone of voice, that she was addressing him in exactly the same way she spoke to Nick.

Later that day, Todd was sitting with Jackie at the tearoom. The small restaurant was bustling with students and their parents; the crowd overflowed into the entryway, and Laura couldn’t seat people fast enough.

In her usual inquisitive fashion, Jackie had grabbed a booklet describing Wilton’s offerings, though Todd was hesitant to remind her that this might be her last chance to shop for hand-dipped candles or overpriced antiques. He noticed she was perusing a section on the history of the town. It had been founded in the late seventeenth century after the Salem Witch Trials as a refuge for those who might be suspected of practicing the craft. For a hundred years, Wilton was a home for misfits, those shunned by society. Because of its remote location and spectacular landscapes, however, it was eventually discovered by the wealthy from Boston and New York as a bucolic respite from city life. As Wilton’s past as a haven for eccentrics was long forgotten, it continued to be populated by adventurous city dwellers who visited the town with a sense of stoic reserve, as if they had been coming here for centuries, as if they were not simply enjoying their leisure time, but rather enacting an ancient filial duty, that edict that stated Thou Shalt Not Spend One’s Weekend in the City.

Ethan was supposed to join Todd and Jackie for lunch before the three of them pushed off for New York. Todd felt nervous, he realized, because his mother would be meeting Ethan for the first time.

As Todd and Jackie glanced over their menus, Ethan arrived in a burst of cold air and commotion, his tie crooked and his hair mussed.

“Mom, this is Ethan,” Todd said.

“Hello,” his mother said, in a tone that Todd knew she reserved for maladjusted teenagers and the elderly.

Someone had taken the third chair from their table. After mumbling an awkward hello, Ethan went to find another one.

“Is that a friend of yours?” Jackie asked, once Ethan was out of earshot.

“Mom, it’s Ethan. Ethan who’s coming to stay with us for the weekend? He’s in my English class?” In Ms. Davis’s class earlier that day, Ethan had arrived late, and had raced off as soon as the bell rang. Since Jackie had wanted to quiz Ms. Davis on feminist interpretations of Pride and Prejudice (even Todd, who was behind on the reading, could tell that his mother was out of her depth), he had not been able to introduce his friend to her until now.

“Of course! I’m sorry, I totally forgot.”

At that moment, Hannah appeared in the doorway, alone.

“Well, look who’s here!” she said, looking down at Jackie and Todd. She stuck out her hand. “I’m Hannah McClellan.”

“Jackie Eldon.” Todd’s mother greeted Hannah.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you! Todd has told me so much about you.”

Todd couldn’t remember if he had told Hannah anything about his mother, if she knew more about Jackie than anyone else did at Berkley.

“Thank you,” Jackie said. “That’s so sweet.” Todd could see there was no recognition in her face.

“Hannah is an English teacher here. She makes the desserts for the tearoom,” Todd said.

“Todd and Ethan have been great,” Hannah said. “I’ve even got Ethan working for me.”

Jackie gave Hannah a confused look.

“He’s organizing her library,” Todd explained. He sensed Hannah would be annoyed that she was a virtual stranger to his mother.

“Don’t let me keep you from your meal,” Hannah said.

“Of course not,” Jackie said. “It’s always lovely to meet Todd’s teachers.”

The three of them zipped along the roads of Massachusetts and New York in Jackie Eldon’s emerald-green Jaguar, alternating Vivaldi and classic Bowie on the CD player. Ethan savored the scent of fresh leather, admired the wood paneling on the doors. Even if they decided they could afford it, he couldn’t imagine his parents owning a car like this one.

Todd didn’t seem to be fazed by the luxury of his mother’s ride; she had to tell him twice not to put his feet on the dashboard. He spent half the trip turned around and chattering at Ethan until, at Jackie’s insistence, they finally switched places at a rest stop off the Taconic.

Ethan sat next to Jackie (she had said he should call her that) and tried to relax. He imagined New York was full of women like her. He had the strange urge to read one of her novels.

“So tell me,” Jackie asked Ethan, as they cruised along the woodsy parkway, “do you have your eye on anyone at school?”

“Mom!” Todd barked from the backseat. “Leave him alone.”

“Darling, we’ll be spending the whole weekend together. I think we should get to know each other.”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want,” Todd said to Ethan. “Besides, we’re not spending the weekend together. Ethan and I will be doing our own thing.”

“No, it’s fine,” Ethan stammered. “I, uh, well, there’s this one girl…” It was Alex Roth, but he couldn’t say that. There was no way he could talk about having a crush on Todd’s ex so recently after they had broken up.

“Who is she?” Jackie asked, teasing.

“Yeah,” Todd said, “you’ve never told me about this.”

He decided to name someone else, someone from his art class. He would say it was Julie Moore. She was from Boston, was applying early to Harvard. She wasn’t going out with anyone, and would serve as a plausible decoy.

“It’s Julie. You know, Julie Moore?”

“Ethan, Julie Moore is way out of your league. She dates jocks.”

“Todd, stop being such a pain in the ass!” Jackie said. “Okay, so, Ethan, what are we going to do to get Julie’s attention?”

“Mom, you’re crazy.”

“Oh, come on,” Jackie said. “I’m just having fun.” She put her hand on Ethan’s knee as she spoke to him. “My son can be such a spoilsport sometimes!”

Ethan squirmed in his seat. Thank God for seat belts, or else Jackie Eldon would see him sporting wood in her Jag. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s this Halloween dance. I thought maybe I’d try to, you know, dance with her or something.”

“She’s out of your league…” Todd continued in an annoying singsong voice.

“Dancing is good,” Jackie said. “I prefer champagne and jewelry, but then again, I suppose you are in high school.”

“Mom, it’s totally different for us,” Todd said. “You don’t know how it works.”

“Explain it to me then,” she said.

“Please,” Todd said. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“I am not being ridiculous!” Jackie waved one of her manicured hands at her son in the backseat, and the car swerved onto the shoulder of the road. She started laughing hysterically as she righted the car.

“Mom! You’re going to get us killed.”

“Don’t worry, I just renewed my insurance.” Was the woman crazy? Ethan wasn’t used to adults who didn’t take things seriously. “Come on,” she said. “How do you get a girl to like you?”

“Mom, just drop it. Why do you care so much anyway?”

“Well, of course I’m interested in your life. But there’s another reason. My publisher has asked me to write a young adult novel. And, if I’m not mistaken, you two are young adults.”

“You’re going to write about teenagers?” Todd laughed.

“What’s wrong with that?” Jackie said. “I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’ve had two of them. Tell me. How does it work these days?”

“I don’t know,” Todd said. “It just happens. You start off as friends with a girl and then, you know, one thing leads to another, and then you’re a couple.”

“‘One thing leads to another.’ God, is there no romance anymore? What about dating?”

“Mom, we go to boarding school. We can’t go on dates. We have to be in our dorms by ten.”

“What about that tea place? Can’t you take a girl there?”

“That’s not really dating. That’s just hanging out.”

Relationships, dating, being a couple: it had all seemed so complicated back at home. Just when he thought he had figured out how it worked at a day school, Ethan had been hit with an entirely new set of rules at Berkley. But it seemed not so much about rules as it was about summoning an essential range of emotions. Ethan feared that even if he did follow the guidelines to the letter, it wouldn’t be right, the girl he had chosen would feel something lacking, would turn away, and he would never know what he had done wrong.

The walls of the Eldon apartment’s private vestibule at 1040 Fifth Avenue were upholstered in tan suede panels, a Picasso drawing of a female nude greeting visitors as they got off the elevator. The floors were ebonized to a deep black shine and covered in Persian rugs. To the right were the dining room, living room, kitchen, and servants’ areas; to the left were the private rooms, a quiet cream-carpeted hallway that led to Todd’s, Brian’s, and their mother’s bedrooms, Jackie’s study, and the library. The art adorning the walls was not the type of local artists’ work that Ethan’s parents had decorated their house with, but statues and paintings and antiques of the quality he would see in books and museums (was that really a Miró, he wondered, in the living room?). Family photographs (Todd, age four, with his parents, Todd and Brian together, Todd grinning after losing a tooth) were carefully arranged on the glossy black piano in silver frames. Flowers everywhere, enormous multicolored arrangements in the public rooms, and then simpler arrangements, perhaps put together by the housekeeper, in little nooks, on bedside tables, in the powder room: small vases of fresh roses, a single lily. As his friend glided around the apartment like a museum director rushing through a priceless collection on his way to an appointment, Ethan marveled at the abundance of brass and gold and silver; everything stopped short of being overdone, but was decadent, still: chandeliers and candlesticks and picture frames and door-knobs and switch plates. Hand-painted fabric murals in the dining room, a scene from the French Riviera. Ivory craquelure’d walls in Jackie’s study, like fragmented eggshells, a giant ebony Chinese desk its centerpiece. Framed covers of her numerous best sellers were the only nod to her professional persona as Jacqueline Sterling, a writer hard-bitten by glamour, someone who maintained a steely outer facade, a mask of foundation and Chanel. Those novels, hoarded by women all over the world, their foil-stamped covers tucked secretly into handbags, were what had made this life possible.

After they had gotten settled into Todd’s bedroom (hunter-green walls, collection of vintage toy soldiers, flat-screen television set), there was a meal waiting for them, wild salmon filets cooked by Jackie’s chef. During dinner, she let them drink wine, a California chardonnay; the evening went by in a blur as Ethan accepted glass after glass from two different servers who had been employed for the evening. Jackie and Todd’s lives swirled around him while Ethan quietly observed: phone calls were accepted, Todd and his mother argued about where they would spend Thanksgiving, Jackie rushed to the kitchen to get a new knife for herself, as hers had a spot on it. Ethan found himself taking small and deliberate bites of his food—never before had he been so worried about talking with his mouth full—as he watched this thrilling world unfold, full of discussions of travel and real estate and parties in exotic locales. Unlike their time in the car, when Jackie had attempted to talk to them as teenagers, here in her own dining room she seemed perfectly content to treat Todd as an adult. Ethan was surprised to hear his friend opining, albeit gruffly, on everything from the quality of Jackie’s latest driver to the relative merits of Aspen versus Vail.

After a dessert of low-calorie raspberry sorbet (Todd told Ethan that Jackie had banned all full-fat products from the household), the boys stumbled back to Todd’s room. Ethan was feeling buzzed—more than buzzed, drunk, really—and he flopped down on the foldout couch that had been prepared for him.

“Don’t crash yet,” Todd said. “Let’s smoke.” The thought of doing anything after this many glasses of wine seemed inconceivable.

“Smoke cigarettes?”

“No, I got some weed.”

Ethan blanched at first, though the idea actually excited him. “Where?”

Todd motioned for him to come down the hall. “Out on the terrace.”

Ethan followed him toward the living room. As he passed the door to Jackie’s bedroom, the light coming from under it made him sad for a moment, as he thought what it must be like to be a single woman of her age; Todd said that though she had received several proposals, in the twelve years she had been divorced, she hadn’t yet met a man whom she wanted to marry.

Todd opened the French doors leading outside. Ethan had taken a brief look at the wraparound terrace earlier in the evening, but now he could really get a sense of the view: from up here, they could see across Central Park to the West Side and all the way to New Jersey.

Todd fired up the pipe and inhaled quickly. He handed it over and Ethan took a sharp, choking hit. He started coughing.

“Go easy, don’t burn your lungs,” Todd said, taking another hit himself. “That’s probably enough for now. Just see how it works for you.”

Todd clearly knew what he was doing, and Ethan realized that he trusted him. As the pot seeped into his consciousness, he had a sudden desire to spill out a litany of secrets, secrets that lay far below the history of his middle-class existence, secrets he had never told anyone: the fact that in his entire seventeen years, he had only kissed a girl once, just a warm, wet peck on the lips during a game of truth or dare at summer camp in the San Juan Islands when he was thirteen—there had been a horrible smooching sound that had made the others giggle, thereby sealing his fear of locking lips with anyone over the next four years. The fact that he had once stolen a pornographic magazine from a bookstore in Palo Alto, a giant megachain that he was later horrified to realize was equipped with surveillance cameras, and that the entire thing was on tape and therefore indelibly seared into the collective memory of the community at large (for six months, he avoided even walking in front of that store). The fact that, during an argument with his mother about something stupid (now he couldn’t even remember what it was), he had told her he wished she were dead, a statement to which Judith Whitley had said nothing, only shaking her head and leaving the room.

He stayed silent as these vignettes went racing through his brain. A cool breeze came from across the park, and Ethan looked out again at the expanse of foliage, the squares of light in the distance, the flickering reflections on the Hudson between the buildings.

“This is amazing,” Ethan said.

“Yeah, it’s good shit.”

“I don’t mean the weed, I mean your whole life. Everything. This apartment. Your mom. It’s out of a dream or something.”

“I don’t know, you get used to it.”

The two gazed out at the view. A paranoia briefly struck Ethan—he was smoking, he was breaking the law, he might become a drug addict!—and then he relaxed. He remembered himself a year ago, where he had been (nowhere, really), living at home, and thought of all he had experienced since then. He was at a school, part of a group of people who were considered in the top one-tenth of one percent of the population (if even that much) in terms of education, opportunities, possibilities. He was invincible; anything could happen this year. And here he was, in actuality, on top of the world.

He started babbling, the words coming out of his mouth without control. “It’s so weird, it’s like you take it all for granted. I can’t even imagine what it would be like. I…well, I guess I would give anything to live like this. Not forever. Just for a little bit. Just to see what it was like. I guess.” He realized he sounded stupid. “I don’t know.”

Todd laughed wryly. “Be careful what you wish for.”

Ethan frowned for a moment, then decided to push from his mind the idea that Todd’s life could be anything less than remarkable. As a set looks far from spectacular when one is actually onstage, Ethan wanted to sit, if only for a little bit longer, in the audience.

After they finished smoking, Todd led Ethan through the dark hallway. His mom had gone to bed and the chef had left for the evening. The two of them brushed their teeth, mint toothpaste masking marijuana, Todd turned off the lights, and they climbed into their respective beds. He couldn’t remember the last time he had hosted an overnight guest; for a moment, his familiar anxieties returned. He felt his heart pounding from the lingering high. There was a glow surrounding Ethan, a light emanating from him. He heard Ethan rustling his sheets, repositioning himself for sleep.

“Ethan?” he said. Todd turned on his side toward the foldout couch, brushing his cheek against the plaid flannel of his pillow-case.

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad we became friends.”

“Me, too,” Ethan said. “G’night.”

“Night.”

If there had been any doubt before, Todd was now sure he was stoned, because as he drifted off to sleep, he imagined himself walking over to Ethan’s bed and climbing in next to him, their bodies intertwined, skin touching skin, electric, thin cotton T-shirts, soft underwear. His eyes opened with a jolt: he was still in his bed, Ethan was on the couch, and nothing had changed.