“But how is it?” said Anders. “Are you making friends?”
“It’s all right,” said Jonah. “What’s it called when you have, like, letters standing for words?”
“Acronym,” Anders said, relieved to have remembered.
“Yeah, that. You know what they say Dwight is an acronym for? Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.”
“And your mother’s paying how much money to send you there?”
“A shit-ton.” Jonah shrugged. “They’ve got a good soccer team.”
Anders surreptitiously checked his phone. Nothing. He took a long pull of his beer in the silence that descended.
“So … high school is good,” he attempted again. “Very different from middle school?”
“It’s pretty druggy there,” said Jonah, playing with his napkin. “A junior got caught doing coke in the library last week. You ever tried it?”
Tried it? He loved it. But he wasn’t about to tell Jonah that. The memory of snorting powdery lines off Cleo’s smooth breasts came to him like an electric jolt. He took another gulp of beer.
“No, buddy,” he said. “That stuff rots your brains.” Then, fearing that he was giving the kind of rote answer he would have ignored as a teenager himself, he added, “Stick with beer and weed. It’s a safer bet.”
“Good to know.” Jonah smirked. “Hey, cool bracelet.”
He reached across the table and touched Anders’s wrist. It was the first time he had willingly made contact with him that day.
“You like it?” Anders said. “You can have it.”
He unwound it and watched as Jonah haltingly wrapped it around his own slim wrist. It was made of blue maritime rope held by a silver fishing hook. Jonah looked at it, then back at Anders.
“Nah,” he said. “It’s mad gay.”
Anders regarded the bracelet as Jonah removed it again. Eighty-five dollars at Barney’s for something his father could have made from his tackle box. He slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.
“I can’t believe you kids are still calling things gay,” he said.
“It just means not dope, you know, lame. It’s not about sexuality or anything.”
“What do you know about sexuality?” exclaimed Anders. “You only have ten pubes!”
“Well,” said Jonah, shooting up in his chair. “I already have a girlfriend. So fuck you.”
Anders was thrilled to be given this confidence, however aggressively. Jonah had never talked to him about girls before.
“That’s fantastic! Who is she?”
“She’s only kinda my girlfriend, I don’t know,” said Jonah. He scrunched the napkin into his palm. “This girl Raquel.”
“Raquel,” repeated Anders. “Fantastic. What’s she like?”
“She’s in my grade,” he said. “She’s cool. She’s not the hottest girl in the year, that’s this girl Natalia, but she’s like top four. And”—he smiled to himself at the memory—“she let me stick a finger in her.”
“Whoa,” said Anders, genuinely taken aback.
Jonah leaned back in his chair and picked up his steak knife, twirling the point against the tip of his finger. Likely the same finger, Anders observed, that had recently been inside a Dwight freshman named Raquel.
“I tried to get her to give me a BJ,” Jonah said. “But she was all whiney about it, so I gave up.”
This tone was entirely new to him. His Jonah was sensitive, kind. He’d cried at half the movies Anders had taken him to. Anders remembered something Cleo had told him about empathy, how it should be exercised like a muscle, particularly in boys, starting from a young age. She said it was the most important skill a person could have, the ability to feel as another feels.
“And, um, how do you think that made her feel?” he ventured.
“What do you mean?”
The waiter arrived to unload the porterhouses onto the table. Blood ran across the plates. Anders sliced open his baked potato and looked tentatively at Jonah through the cloud of escaping steam.
“When you, um, touched her,” he said as the waiter retreated.
Jonah took a bite of his steak.
“Oh, I know how it made her feel,” he said. “Wet!”
Anders’s phone buzzed. He slid it from his pocket and felt everything inside him contract. Frank was calling him. She’d told him. He mumbled something to Jonah about a work call and stumbled from the table. He stepped out of the restaurant into sunlight, the phone still buzzing in his hand. It was an unusually warm day for February; even without his jacket, he was sweating. A group of girls walked past, singing along to a pop song playing tinnily from their phone. His thumb hovered over the answer button. He could not move. He willed his thumb to press down, but he was paralyzed. He stared at the name. Frank. Frank. Frank. Then the screen darkened. He’d missed it. The girls crossed the street, their music fading with them. He exhaled, patting his pocket for the cigarettes he already knew he’d left with Cleo. His phone vibrated again and declared a voicemail. He lifted it to his ear, his heart racing.
“My brother!” Frank’s voice said. “I’m back. Best seafood I’ve ever had. Octopus legs as big as my arm. You would have loved it. Anyway, I’m about to get food with Cley. She wants to eat during the Arsenal game, of course. Come meet us! Or if you want a drink later …”
He heard a murmur in the background, a low female voice. Cleo.
“Anyway, call me back,” Frank said. “I’ve missed your handsome Danish face.”
Anders returned to the table. He felt relief and disappointment wash over him in waves, one sensation gaining force as the other retreated. She had not left him. She would not. He had been spared one sadness, only to be given another. He sat down, looked at his bloody steak without appetite, then stood back up.