This was another way in which the families were different. The Kadetskys were atheists—“lowercase a,” her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.
Cory’s very small, busy mother, Benedita, came into the kitchen, where they were working that day on their project, and she proceeded to serve them small blue bowls of aletria, a warm Portuguese dessert that weirdly had noodles in it. The image of a mother at the stove, fussing over food that she would make for her child and his classmate—staying there long enough to cook it, and even to watch them both eat it—was painful. Sometimes from across the street Greer had noticed the Pinto family getting ready for dinner. Then, when they sat at the table, she could see the tops of their heads going in and out of frame as they bent to eat, and it all upset her. The discrepancy. The difference. The normalcy of this family across the street, compared with the uneasy oddness of her own family. Beyond that, now, the taste of the aletria was shocking in its deliciousness, showing her that when a mother cooked, she could make magic. Mrs. Pinto approvingly watched them eat the dessert, proud of her own skill and enjoying the fact that they were enjoying it. Or at least that Cory was.
It was easy to tell how much she loved her son. At nine, seeing a mother’s unhidden love, Greer was naked in her own lack of love. Naked and, she was sure, pathetic. Mrs. Pinto probably looked at her with sadness and sympathy: the carelessly raised little girl who lived across the street. Maybe that was why she was giving her this dish of ambrosia; it was the least she could do. As soon as Greer thought this, she pushed the dish away. There were still a few spoonfuls left, but she didn’t want to eat them. The Navajo project was quickly finished, and then Greer went home, pretending indifference to this boy and his family. But something new had happened. She had seen how loved he was; she had seen that being loved that way in real life, not just in a novel, was possible.
It was eight years before she would return to the Pintos’, and then, when she did, there was no aletria; she no longer desired it, or even consciously longed to be “parented,” as people said these days. Because finally she was a full-strength teenager, and feeling separate from one’s parents was, as she would say to Cory, part of the job description. It didn’t often matter to her that she had been ignored and left to come of age mostly alone in the house. She had long since gotten used to it and had come to accept it as her life. But now at the Pinto house there was Cory himself—different Cory, teenage, emotionally and sexually attractive Cory, who was not only as bright as she was, but was interesting as well, with a serious face and long hands and a hair-free chest, and a way of being with her that soon seemed unrelated to the way anyone else was with her.
By then, at age seventeen, both of them were deeply involved in the furthering of their own individual brands. He was a basketball player, having been drafted onto the Macopee Magpies, where the coach didn’t pressure him to be particularly good, just tall. When he wasn’t on the basketball court or laboring over the grindstone of his studies, Greer had seen him standing over the ancient Ms. Pac-Man machine at Pie Land Pizza. Quarter after quarter was slipped into the slot, and as the grimy, curving display fluttered to life, Cory became the master of this world too, his name appearing at the top of the players list that the management of Pie Land had posted on the wall. People wrote in their own scores, and at the end of the week a champion was declared. PINTO had been written in green Sharpie.
It seemed unfair that he should dominate in this realm too, Ms. Pac-Man being, after all, female. Though really, Ms. Pac-Man with her sunlike orb of a head, and legs in red bootlets, lacked the parts that would separate her from her male counterpart. She was breastless, and there was no lower body to hold the sexual mysteries that would excite Pac-Man himself, he who required no “Mr.” before his name.
In high school Greer had sometimes sat at Pie Land on weekends with two or three friends, all of them on the obedient, good-girl track but with a slight offbeat aesthetic, as if to compensate. The blue streak that Greer put in her hair was like a neon sign lighting up the set of delicate facial features below. Maybe Cory Pinto noticed her; maybe he didn’t. But Greer and the others noticed him, and more than that they watched him from the side or back as he played the game. His wing bones shifted, his jaw went tight; he was in a state of absolute concentration.
“What’s so fascinating to him about that game?” Marisa Claypool asked.
“Maybe it helps him focus,” said Greer, though the question really should have been: what’s so fascinating about Cory Pinto?
She watched intently as the globular Ms. Pac-Man kept eating everything in sight. Did it matter that that character was female? Greer tried not to pay too much attention to her own femaleness; the world would do that for her. But her breasts did exist now—she was no longer boobless, as she’d been called outside the KwikStop—along with a tapering waist, and a vagina that menstruated in its secret, brilliant way each month, observed only by her. No one else knew what went on inside you; no one else cared.
One day, early in the winter of their senior year of high school, Greer Kadetsky and Cory Pinto and Kristin Vells thudded off the bus onto Woburn Road, one after the other as usual, but this time after Kristin walked away Cory hitched up his huge backpack and turned around to look Greer in the face, saying, “You think that test in Vandenburg’s class was fair?” Up close, she saw the pastel mustache making a soft inroad over his lip, and the small, crescent-shaped remnant of an injury scabbing on his cheekbone. She recalled his having had a small Band-Aid stuck there not too long ago, from some kind of boys-horsing-around accident.
“Fair how?” she asked, confused that he was talking to her suddenly, and with such force.
“All that material about electric potential, et cetera. None of it turned out to be on the test.”
“So you learned extra,” she said.
“I don’t want extra,” Cory said, and she realized that the unnecessary information weighed him down. It was like the way swimmers shaved their bodies, wanting nothing to get in the way of their proximity to the water.
Without any negotiation, he followed her up the path to her house. “You want to come in,” she said flatly, not a question, even though she didn’t know exactly why she was inviting him, or what they would find inside now. But as soon as she opened the door she could smell a far-off scent rising up from the basement to meet them.
“Whoa,” Cory said, then laughed.
“What,” she said flatly.
“Superweed, parental variety,” he said, and she just shrugged as if she didn’t care.
Her parents’ cannabis was stronger than what the stoners at Macopee High smoked. Rob and Laurel Kadetsky procured their mellow marijuana from a farmer friend and his wife up in Vermont. Sometimes in Greer’s childhood she would accompany her parents on a road trip there. She’d once sat on the couch while Farmer John painstakingly plinked out “Stairway to Heaven” on the banjo, quietly singing along, “Ooh, it makes me wonder . . .” Beside him his wife, Claudette, showed Greer and her mother the patchwork baby dolls, made of pantyhose pulled over balled socks and bits of fabric and called Noobies, that she was trying to sell. The Noobies’ faces had the vague, mashed expressions of people stoned on Farmer John’s superior product.
The day that Cory came to the house, marijuana was the opening theme. It had been a while since Greer had caught a tinge of it during the day, and it upset her that on the one afternoon of her life that she had brought her longtime secret nemesis Cory Pinto home with her, this was what she’d found.
“I’m sorry, it’s just funny,” Cory said as he sniffed the air. “I’m going to get a contact high just being here. I’ll need Cheetos and M&M’s pretty soon, so get them ready.”