Ten Thousand Saints

Two





The train car was empty. She liked the long, silent chain of seats, the domed ceiling above, dark as a theater’s. She sat listening to her headphones, socked feet resting on the seat ahead while she looked through her reflection to the black screen of snow. She always felt at sea when she was outside New York—giddy but lost, disbelieving how abysmal the world was. Cocooned here on the train, she could be anywhere. She could step outside and find herself in heaven, or Alaska.

But it was better here than in the bright white terrain of the last week, the fake snow on the slopes, the fluorescent lights of the room at the resort, where she did coke and shots with Nadia and Cissy and Cissy’s older sister and rolled her hair in curlers so tight they burned her scalp. It was better than being at home, where she watched videotaped episodes of Santa Barbara with her mother, smoked on the fire escape, taught herself David Bowie songs on the piano, and practiced makeup on Neena, the live-in housekeeper, whom she bribed with coke—the poor woman really had a problem—to cover for her when she snuck out. And it was better than being at school, whatever school she’d find herself in when the semester began. She had been kicked out of two boarding schools in a year and a half—both times for drugs, the second while skinny-dipping in the school’s Olympic-size pool.

She’d thought finally she’d have the chance to go to public school, but her mom had pulled some strings at some desperate place in New Jersey that agreed to consider her application for the spring semester (no doubt for an increased fee). To the first question in the essay section—What are your personal goals for the future?—she had responded with 250 words about her ambition to become a makeup artist, written in eyeliner and beginning with “My personal goals for the future, as opposed to my personal goals for the past . . .”

While Les had applauded her creativity, her mother had tossed the essay in the trash compactor and sat down at the Macintosh computer that looked like an object from a spaceship in the ancient opulence of their apartment, the Oriental rugs and pewter ashtrays and crystal chandeliers, and proceeded to respond to the second prompt: Describe a person who has had a dramatic impact on your life. “The person who has made me what I am today,” she read aloud, her manicured nails typing clickety-clack, “is my mother.”

If Eliza had been forced to respond to the question herself, she would have written about Les. Her dad, an in-house counsel at a downtown brokerage, had died of a cerebral aneurysm when she was three, but by the time she was ten her mom had had the good sense to meet Les and keep him around. Les was the best thing about her mom. He was moody and lazy and seriously stubborn and he went days sometimes without showering, but from time to time he got her mom high, which was what she really needed, and he had this you’re-on-my-team respect for Eliza that continually surprised her. He’d let her paint his toenails. He’d let her crash on his futon in the East Village when she fought with her mom. He knew all the vegetables she didn’t like, and he’d tweeze them out of her stir-fry with a pair of chopsticks.

It was strange, then, wasn’t it, that he paid his own children so little attention. In the only picture Les had of them, they were toddlers in a bathtub, their hair sculpted into soapy Mohawks. These were the babies he had deserted, orphans, really. And one of them a true orphan, adopted at birth, from her own New York. “What are their names again?” she occasionally asked him, even though she knew, just to hear him say them. Now he would say “Dick and Jane” or “Simon and Garfunkel.” She wondered, as the Amtrak sighed to a halt in Lintonburg, what they knew of her.

Out on the cold platform, the world was white, even in the heavy dark. The snow had stopped. On the other side of the tracks, a wilderness of cars, frozen in the lot over the winter holiday, lay buried under it. No one was around except for two boys, lurking a few cars down—that darkly dressed, alley-dwelling species of boy you could depend on for directions if you dared ask. She was about to do so—she was a city girl, not easily afraid—when one of them called her name. She must have nodded, or waved. Here they came, trotting over, cigarette smoke trailing behind. “Hey.” They stopped at a safe distance, nodded their heads. “Are you Eliza?”

Two boys: she had not expected this. There was a black-haired one and a red-haired one, whom she deemed to be Jude. She had composed a picture in her head, an accelerated version of the children in the tub, but now, in front of these real-life faces, it dissolved. She snapped off her Walkman, slipped her headphones from her ears, and let them fall around her neck. “That’s my friend Teddy,” said the redhead. “I’m Jude.”

“Jude,” said Eliza. His eyelids were heavy. Was he high? Then, raising her voice over the roar of the train roaring away, “Hi, but I thought I was meeting a girl, too? Prudence?”

“She had plans,” said Jude, who was smiling painfully. “Plus, she’s sort of young for her age. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“So’s Prudence. I’m sixteen.”

“It’s his birthday.”

“On New Year’s Eve?” Eliza asked doubtfully.

“I didn’t ask to be born then. I just was.”

“Are you getting your license?”

“No. My mom doesn’t have a car.”

“Oh.” Eliza adjusted her backpack. “Well, happy birthday.”

“You don’t have any stuff?” Teddy, the dark-haired one, asked.

“Just this.” The rest of the bags she’d taken to Stowe had gone home on the plane with her friends, who were spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square, she explained. “F*cking last place on earth I’d want to be tonight.”

“You haven’t seen Lintonburg yet,” mumbled Teddy.

“We’re going to a party,” Jude said. “But it doesn’t start for a while.”

“You don’t have another cigarette, do you?” Eliza asked. “I smoked my last one in the bathroom on the train.”

Jude unveiled the pack of American Spirits he’d taken from Harriet’s carton.

“Thanks,” Eliza said, taking out a lighter. They all stood in a circle on the platform, staring at the red eyes of their cigarettes, trying to keep warm, no obvious place to go. It was not hard to fend off the disappointment that she wouldn’t be meeting Prudence. She had been curious to know what Prudence looked like, to observe her from afar, but it was Jude, she realized now, that she had wanted to meet. Girls irritated her, intimidated her, and finally bored her; around girls she became territorial, sniffing their asses, showing her teeth. It was not a part of herself she liked. Around boys she was herself, she could relax; she had nothing to win but them.

Still, she’d expected . . . something different. The novelty of a foreign exchange student. Provincial fashions. Elaborately laced snow boots. These boys looked like they’d just stood up from Les’s stoop on St. Mark’s Place.

“You guys get into a fight or something? You look sort of bloody.”

Under the streetlight, she could see that Teddy’s mouth was ringed with red bumps. At first she thought it was acne, but Jude had it, too, a raw, rosy stubble, like a beard of hives.

“No, it’s huffer’s rash,” said Jude. “It happens sometimes.”

“From turpentine,” said Teddy.

“Turpentine,” she mused. Maybe they did have their tricks in the country. Maybe they wouldn’t be impressed by the cocaine in her makeup bag. “Are you f*cked up right now?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Jude said.

“It wears off pretty quick,” said Teddy.

“I thought it was part of the Dracula punk thing.” She tipped her cigarette toward Jude’s devil lock. “You into the Misfits?”

Jude and Teddy exchanged glances.

“They’re not bad,” said Jude.

“I saw them at Irving Plaza when I was ten. It was my first show. With the Necros and the Beastie Boys.”

“No shit?”

“It was some show,” she said, looking up at the Vermont sky, remembering. So this is where Les used to live, in this snowcapped village, with his other family.

Jude said, “Your mom let you go to a show when you were ten?”

“Not by myself.”

“Who took you, then?”

She watched her smoke rise white in the air, and then her breath, fainter. “Your dad,” she said. “I sat on his shoulders.”

Jude’s desire for girls was indiscriminate, feverish, and complete; he wanted them all equally, and he wanted them not at all. Blondes or brunettes, big ones or small ones—they were cold, fragile, impenetrable creatures, all desirable as they were undesirable, all perfumed and pretty. To get one, he would have to get near one. He’d attempted this at a barn party in Hinesburg, kissing the girl unkindly and without asking, kind of pressing her up against a wall, and the whole drunk drive home in the backseat of the Kramaro, he’d felt so bad that he hadn’t said a word about it to anyone, not even Teddy.

Eliza was different and not different. She was a girl, a painted doll. Her hair, bobbed to her elfin ears, was thick and black, her heavy bangs straight as a blade. Her eyes, too, were black, Egyptian, or was it an effect of the makeup shadowing her lids, the stiletto lashes, the feline inflection of the black, what was it called, eyeliner? Her lips were red, her skin translucent as wax paper. Her coat was white and puffy and slick, with cinched cuffs and a hood that looked like it was made of feathers, and she wore tights and a kilt. She could not have been much more than five feet; he could have opened up his own coat and smuggled her inside.

The fact that she possessed knowledge about his father, for instance that he still sold pot and that he still owned his 1968 Dodge camper van, was what was disconcerting. It was as thrilling and as freakish as if she had revealed to him that she was his flesh-and-blood sister, come all the way from Manhattan to find him.

“Here’s the thing,” she said, getting down to business. In an effort to offer her the Vermont experience, they’d taken her to Ben & Jerry’s, the only place on Ash Street that was open on New Year’s Eve. Her treat—Jude and Teddy were still broke. It occurred to Jude to be embarrassed, but she insisted on paying, peeled a starched twenty out of a wallet that looked like lizard skin. They sat in a booth, Eliza on one side, Jude and Teddy on the other. She said, “I think your dad wants to be part of your lives.”

Jude licked his cone. New York Super Fudge Chunk.

“Lives?” Teddy said.

“Jude’s and Prudence’s. Sorry.”

“He said that?” Teddy asked.

“Not like, those exact words. But I sense it.”

“My dad’s a prick,” said Jude. “He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”

“How do you know, though?” Eliza asked. There was a gap between her two front teeth, just wide enough to slide his napkin through.

“Because I haven’t seen him in seven years?”

But that was the thing, Eliza said. Les felt that Jude and Prudence wouldn’t want anything to do with him. He’d been gone so long that he felt he was better off leaving them alone. “I think he feels bad about everything. I can tell he does.”

“What’s ‘everything’?”

“You know, deserting you. Not being there for you.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

“Jude, okay, listen.” Eliza stabbed her spoon into her cup of Cherry Garcia. Jude did not want to listen. Whatever she had to say wouldn’t be true, not because he knew his father better than she did but because his father no longer existed. He was a voice on the phone, that was all.

“You should have seen him at Christmas. He got drunk—which I’ve never seen him that drunk—and he was crying, Jude. It was after he talked to you on the phone. He was standing out on the balcony, and he was alone, just crying.”

“You were there? When I talked to my dad?”

“Isn’t it sad?”

Jude said it was sad that he’d sent her to be his messenger.

“Oh, he didn’t. He wouldn’t do that. He just thinks I’m here to, you know, meet you guys.”

“Why are you here?”

Eliza deposited a lump of ice cream on her tongue and swallowed. “I was in the neighborhood.”

“Stowe’s not really in the neighborhood,” Teddy pointed out.

She shrugged. “I feel bad, I guess. I’m hogging Les all to myself.”

Jude laughed. “Really, that’s okay. You can keep him.” Then, having lost his appetite, he turned his ice cream cone over onto the table. “No offense, but it’s not really your business.” The cone settled, and then began to melt.

Teddy was working on his own cone. Jude looked at him and Teddy looked back. Teddy’s rash looked like a birthmark, a twin scar that bound them together. They were parentless; they were orphans, fiercely so. Eliza, Misfits or no, could not get to them. Her red mouth was pouting. Jude wanted to lean over the table and glide his tongue against the groove between her teeth: that would shut her up.

“Maybe you should go see him,” Teddy said to Jude.

“What?”

“Maybe you should give him a chance.”

Jude looked at him. “Don’t mind Teddy. His mom left this morning. He’s feeling homesick.”

Teddy fired a look at Jude. It was the same look he’d given Jude in front of Harriet earlier, drained of all its pleading warmth. Their silent pact had been broken.

“She left?” Eliza asked. “Where’d she go?”

“We don’t know,” Jude said. “We just woke up and she was gone.”

“Just—gone?”

“Just gone.”

Eliza put her small white hand on top of Teddy’s brown one. “Oh, shit. What should we do?” Her nails were painted with red polish, now chipped. Jude wanted to put his hand on top of theirs, as if they were making a promise or cheering before a game, but he didn’t know what they would be cheering for.

On Christmas, Les had asked her, “Do you know what your problem is?”

“I don’t appreciate my mother.”

“That’s true.”

“Or my trust fund.”

“That, too.”

They were sharing a bottle of wine on his fire escape overlooking St. Mark’s Place.

“You’re young,” Les said. He got like this when he was tipsy—enigmatic, flirtatious—but now he was full-on drunk. “You’re naive, girl. You’re a drama queen. You’re a sad-story addict. You’re drawn to them like a moth to a flame. You believe you can save the world by saying so.”

“Whatever,” Eliza said.

“Fine,” said Les. “Go up there. Scatter your pixie dust.”

Salvatore “Tory” Ventura lived on Lake Champlain in a colossal stone house, bearded with ivy, that Jude and Teddy had passed a thousand times. Up and down the street, cars were double-parked, jammed in snowbanked driveways and scattered across the white lawn. A guy who was not Tory was manning the door, and with an indifference that Jude took as a sure sign of their triumphs to come, he waved the three of them in, through the foyer, past the piles of coats and shoes, through the marble kitchen smelling of microwaved food. In the cavernous, wood-paneled living room, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” was drowning out Dick Clark. People were crowded around the coffee table, playing poker in the low light, and Jude recognized them as he recognized semifamous people on television. Wasn’t she from that one show? Wasn’t she in his homeroom? It was nine o’clock, but he didn’t see Delph or Kram.

Twenty-odd years ago, when Les and Harriet had been in college here, they’d met at a party. Les once told Jude it had really been an orgy, that he had found Jude’s mother’s body in a pile of other bodies (a mass like a writhing octopus), and that she’d been wearing nothing but a string of love beads, purple and pink. He’d taken her hand and pulled her out, Les to the rescue.

Since then, the health of Lintonburg’s hippie movement had followed a series of dips and inclines, the same undulating route of the Dow Jones, for which most of the New England Boomers, by the end of Vietnam, had abandoned their peace pipes. By the time Les was fired from his lab position at Vermont State in 1980, the town’s marijuana market had dried up. His customers got promoted, got pregnant, got older.

But then there were their kids. By the end of 1987, at Ira Allen High School, the hippie thrived again, enjoying with the jock a marriage of tolerance, if only for their sheer numbers. Metalheads and punks, though, were few and far between, and they knew how to watch their backs. At Tory Ventura’s house, no orgy greeted Jude with outstretched hands. He and Teddy and Eliza entered the room just as someone was snapping a picture: they would be forever captured in a photo they didn’t belong in, blinking against the flash. Escaping from the room, they took cover on the landing of the staircase, in the shadows of the wide window seat. Eliza went in search of beer while Teddy and Jude stayed put, keeping an eye out for Kram and Delph.

“She knows her way around a party,” Teddy observed.

“She’s not shy,” Jude agreed.

“You like her?”

Jude looked out the window. “She’s awful damn nosy.”

“She’s just trying to be nice.”

In the backyard below, a bonfire was blazing. The light caught a flash of glass—a beer bottle soaring into the lake.

Teddy said, “She’s pretty, though, right?”

“She’s pretty,” said Jude.

Here came another girl now, slithering down the stairs, and up her denim skirt went Jude’s eyes. Whether Tory Ventura, escorting her, caught Jude’s glance, Jude didn’t have time to decide. Tory grabbed Jude’s devil lock and gave it a jerk, as if milking a cow. “I like your pigtail, Maybelline.”

Tory had given Jude the name in Spanish II on the day Jude had made the mistake of borrowing his sister’s acne concealer, a tube of what looked like flesh-colored lipstick. He gave Jude and Teddy a hard time in the halls, for Teddy’s glasses, Jude’s retainers, their band T-shirts. It didn’t help that the members of the Christian Fellowship Club had started wearing T-shirts that reconceived the logos of these bands—Prayer instead of Slayer, Megalife instead of Megadeth—implicating Teddy and Jude in the same substratum of hallway prey.

“You and your boyfriend been making out?” Tory asked Jude. He was staring with disgust at the rash around their mouths. “Looks like you got a giant hickey.”

“It’s from huffing,” Jude said. “Turpentine? To get high?”

Tory was wearing a hot pink T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of pleated khakis with a braided leather belt, and boat shoes with no socks. From his pocket, he withdrew a tube of ChapStick and circled it lazily over his lips, concealing the whole tube in his hand like a kid would hold a crayon. “Hell you doing here, anyway?” he asked Jude, his lips shining.

“Hell you doing?” Jude asked, feeling bold.

Tory laughed. The girl, still standing at his side, combed her fingers through the dark hair at the nape of his neck. “It’s my house, dipshit. Who invited you? Fitzhugh?”

Jude hopped down from the window seat, and Teddy followed. The fact that Tory Ventura suspected Jude might have been invited to his party, by a person named Fitzhugh, whom Jude didn’t know; that a girl who had taken a train to see him was fetching him a beer; that Lintonburg might in fact be bigger, more generous than he’d believed, gave him courage. He ran a slow finger around the bruised contour of his lips.

“Fitzhugh?” he said. “You mean the guy who gave me this?”

Jude grabbed Teddy’s elbow, and they took off running. A group of people had gathered on the steps below, trying to move past, and they dove through them, taking the stairs two at a time.

Outside, the night was so cold it hurt to move through it. It was 9:35, and Delph and his pot weren’t anywhere. They found an unlocked LeBaron and slipped inside, Jude in the driver’s seat, Teddy in the passenger’s. They scrunched down low, even though they didn’t seem to have been followed. “Why do you always have to piss people off?” Teddy said.

He was breathing heavily from the sprint out the door. He could feel the snow in his shoes and the sweat cooling in his armpits. The car reeked of beer.

“He pissed me off.”

“You always want to get in a fight.”

“So?”

“So you’ll never win.”

Teddy opened up the glove box. Inside were a manual, a flashlight, and a box of condoms.

“Let me see those.” Jude grabbed the box, opened it, and let the package unfurl. The condoms they’d stolen from Shop Fart when they were thirteen were hidden, still unopened, in an empty Mötley Crüe cassette case in Teddy’s dresser drawer. Now Jude tore one off the pack, tossed the rest back into the glove box, and turned on the overhead light, which Teddy snapped off.

“You want everyone to see us in here?”

Jude pocketed the condom. “I was reading it.”

“You think Eliza’s going to do you just because it’s your birthday?”

“Shut up, Ted.”

“You’re so sad.”

“Shut up, Ted!” Jude jumped at him, mashing Teddy’s face in his hands. Teddy found Jude’s mouth and sank his frozen thumbs in deep, and Jude bit down. They’d done the blood brothers thing when they were twelve, cut open their fingertips with a paring knife and made them kiss, the hands of God and Adam, E.T. phone home, almost as faggy as last night, in Teddy’s still-bright bedroom at Queen Bea’s house, when they’d shared a mouthful of pot smoke—a shotgun was what it was called, a word Jude had taught him—one breathing it into the other’s mouth like a secret. Now their fluids slipped under each other’s hands again, spit, snot, sweat, the tears from Teddy’s eyeballs as Jude bored his knuckles into his sockets, Teddy trying to blink with his eyes closed, Jude snorting and gagging and elbowing the steering wheel, hitting the horn, which turned his gag into a cackle, which made Teddy laugh, too. Teddy pried Jude’s fingers off his face. Jude bent Teddy’s fingers back. Teddy screamed, “Uncle! Uncle, my contact!” Jude let go, and a cool wind flew into Teddy’s right eye.

“Don’t move,” Teddy said. “I lost my contact.” He scanned his lap, the seats, the floor, but the car was thick with darkness, and he could see out of only one eye. He took the flashlight out of the glove box. “Help me,” he said. Panting, he passed the light over the dashboard, the gearshift, their bodies. Maybe it was still in his eye. His glasses were at home, tucked safely in the drawer with the condoms, and the thought of them there, useless to him, just out of reach, made him start to cry, so that both eyes, the seeing and the unseeing, now spilled hot tears.

“It’s all right, man,” Jude said. “We’ll find it.”

And he did, plucked it off of Teddy’s own cheek, where it had affixed itself to his moist skin. Teddy took it from him, fragile as a jewel, and looked at the soggy dome on his fingertip, too tired to put it back on. He would wait until his eyes dried out. He would sit here and wait. Maybe Johnny knew where their mother was. Maybe they could find her and bring her home. Or maybe Johnny could help him find his father. He’d asked him as much in his last letter, a question he wouldn’t admit to Jude. It was as if, by asking about his father, he’d made his mother disappear.

“Jude, I got to get to New York,” he said.

Jude gripped the steering wheel. “All right,” he said to the dashboard. “If you’re going, I’m going, too. I’ll go see my dad. You know how to hotwire a car?”

“Now? What about Eliza? You don’t even know how to drive.” Delph kept saying he was going to teach them. Delph was always saying shit.

“We’ll take her with us, man. We’ll steal some keys.”

Teddy turned off the flashlight and put it back in the glove box. He looked at Jude, who had his seat belt buckled. Jude believed they were in their getaway car, their Batmobile, the DeLorean that would transport them, with a rocket-fart of fire, back to the future.

“You ready?”

Teddy’s eyes were closed now. He said he was.

“All right,” Jude said. “Let’s haul ass.”

“Let’s go.”

“All right. Let’s do it.”

But neither of them moved.

She’d told him her name was Annabel Lee. She didn’t remember his. That was many minutes ago, and still she stood in the bathroom doorway, trapped by his large arm, bumming cigarette after cigarette, letting him refill her plastic cup from the keg in the tub. She supposed she could have walked away. Why didn’t she walk away? He lifted the silver necklace out of the collar of her coat, bounced the charms dumbly in his hand. It was hot in here—did she want to take off her backpack? Her coat? She did not.

It was her punishment for making this trip. Instead of spending her New Year’s Eve talking to some drunk prick in New York, she would spend it talking to some drunk prick in Vermont. He could have been any of the guys from home she’d let lift her necklace out of her coat. The weekend after her bat mitzvah she’d lost her virginity to a lacrosse player named Bridge Fowler, her friend Nadia’s stepbrother, at his dad’s place in the Catskills. She’d met him there when she went over with Nadia to ride a horse named Athens, and when Eliza went back with Bridge they snorted coke—another first—off of a silver serving platter, then did it in the barn. Afterward Bridge put on his loafers, lit up a cigar, and set off on a walk to visit the horses. He never touched her again. He passed her along to his friends, one weekend after another, weekends singed with the chemical smell of cocaine and latex and new cars, the smell of having achieved something she’d had little doubt of achieving.

Now Teddy and Jude had left her to fend for herself, and she was fending. She was a girl who knew how to fend.

Well, she came, she saw. Sipping beer from her cup, the remains of her red lipstick staining the rim, she felt lost and tired, but serene. She had wanted to lay eyes on Les’s children, to be known to them, and one out of two wasn’t bad. Strange, how she felt that she knew Jude already, how she already missed him, wished it were he standing in front of her, breathing into her ear. She had known him and Teddy only a few hours longer than this guy, but they were her companions for the evening, her guardians. She imagined Jude appearing and whisking her efficiently into one of the quaint, New England bedrooms—there would be exposed beams, a quilt. There would be kissing. He’d make stupid jokes. He was eager, young. He was sort of dangerously adorable, like one of those wide-eyed donkeys that would either kick you or eat out of your hand.

Then what if he came back with her to New York. What if he moved in with his dad. Would Les laugh at her then?

And then there was Teddy—not Jude, but Teddy—saying, “There you are!”

His rash had faded a little, but his eyes were swollen, and his cheeks were flushed.

“I’ve been here the whole time.” She slipped her hand around Teddy’s back and kissed his cheek. “Missed you, baby.”

Teddy looked petrified only for a moment, then hooked an arm over her shoulder. He nodded. “Me, too. You, too.”

“This your boyfriend or something?”

“His name’s Teddy,” said Eliza.

The guy laughed bitterly and emptied the rest of his beer. “You kids have fun,” he said and made his way past them to the keg.

“Thanks, baby,” she whispered. “That guy was ready to maul me.” The line for the keg nudged them farther into the brightly lit bathroom. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Let’s just go.”

“You look sort of ruffled. What happened to you?”

A girl, drunk and laughing, sat on the toilet with her underwear around her knees. Behind her, three or four people bent purposefully over the bathtub, trying to extract the last frothy drops from the keg. The guy who’d been talking to Eliza announced that it was dry. The crowd, disappointed, muscled back out into the hall, pushing Eliza up against the sink. She slipped off her backpack and hopped onto the counter, Teddy jammed against her knees, until everyone slowly filed out of the room, leaving the two of them alone. On the way out, the guy turned off the light and pulled the door shut.

“We should go,” Teddy said, but he didn’t move to turn the light back on.

She said, “My train doesn’t leave till midnight,” although she wasn’t sure what time it was now. She took a swig from her cup. She was drunk, she knew, but not beyond reason. Someone tried the handle, but the door didn’t budge.

“I guess it’s locked?” she whispered.

“I can’t see, anyway,” Teddy said. “My contact fell out and I can’t get it back in.”

“Where is it?”

“Right here, in my hand.”

Eliza put down her cup. “You’re going to lose it. Let me see it.” She was still sitting on the rim of the sink, her knees grazing his hips. She felt him find her elbow through her coat and then her hand. He placed the lens in the middle of her palm. It felt like a wet breath. She popped it in her mouth as though she were swallowing a pill, and let it soak on her tongue.

“What are you doing?”

“I put it in my mouth.” Her voice slurred around the lens. “It keeps it moist.”

“Oh. I just got them. I’m still getting used to them.”

“Come here. Which eye is it?”

He led her hand to his right eyelid. His lashes were stiff with cold. Holding him by the ears, she eased his head back, then spit the salty lens onto her fingertip. She had saline solution in her backpack, but she didn’t want to turn on the light. She liked the idea of her saliva lubricating this kid’s eyeball. Gingerly she drew back his lid and fit it over his eye.

“Quit squirming.”

“Sorry.”

“Is it in?”

After a moment, Teddy said, “I think so.”

On the other side of the door, someone else jiggled the knob, then gave up. The floor was vibrating with music and a few feet away people were laughing. She was afraid Teddy was about to turn on the light. Instead he said, “You live in New York, right?”

He told her the story. He was moving there. He had a half brother named Johnny in Alphabet City. Teddy had no money; Johnny had no phone. Could she take a message to him?

Eliza was the one to turn on the light. For several seconds they blinked at each other, as though surprised that the other was made of pigment and flesh. From her backpack she withdrew a pen and a sheet of the stationery she’d taken from the inn, and he wrote down his brother’s address and Jude’s number. He told her to tell Johnny to call him there. She liked the idea of carrying a message, riding through the snowy night to deliver urgent news to a stranger. She wrote down her own phone number and tore it off, and Teddy put it in his pocket. “You’re not going to lose that, are you?” It was suddenly something that was important to her, not being lost to him. If she held on to Teddy, she could hold on to Jude. “Why don’t you just come back with me tonight? I’ll cover your ticket.”

“What about Jude?”

“We’ll bring him with us. He can live with his dad. It would be perfect!”

Teddy turned his eyes toward the empty red cups littering the bathtub. Here it was—a free ticket, dropped into his lap. He allowed himself to imagine the prospect of a solution, an adventure.

“I don’t know if Jude can come tonight,” he said. Eliza could hear him swallow. “And I don’t know if I could just take off with you. I feel bad enough we’re doing this.”

She gave his shin a gentle kick. “What are we doing?”

He laughed nervously. “Standing around like retards.”

Eliza reached for her backpack again and began rummaging around in it.

“What are you doing?”

She fished out her makeup bag and unzipped it. “I have a little something in here.” After fumbling for a moment, she produced a razor and a small plastic bag. She was glad she’d saved some.

“Jeezum Crow,” Teddy said.

Eliza laughed. “You’re so country. Haven’t you done this before?”

“Uh-uh. Only thing I ever snorted was ground-up chalk.”

She tipped the powder onto the counter and gathered it neatly with the razor’s edge. Then she took a bill out of her wallet and rolled it up. She did the first line, and then Teddy copied, expertly. After a few seconds, he staggered back and leaned against the wall. He nodded rapidly, eyes closed. Then he looked at her and grinned. He had very, very white teeth. They each did one more line, then finished Eliza’s beer.

“Let me see this,” Teddy said. She felt his cold fingers on her clavicle, the weight of the chain snaking against her skin. He cupped the charms in his palm, jiggled them like a pair of dice. He inspected the locket, the Star of David, the keys, then tucked them back inside her coat. “Neat.”

“I like yours, too,” she said. She tapped a finger on the cool disk around his neck.

“It’s for the subway. My brother sent it to me, for when I go to New York.” He looked down at it, holding it just under his nose. “It’s missing the silver circle in the middle, so my brother says it’s lucky.”

“It must be,” Eliza said. “I’ve never seen one like that.” Teddy let the token hang. “How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Now? Wicked. How come you didn’t tell us you had this before?”

“I was saving it.” She crammed the plastic bag into her makeup bag and the makeup bag into her backpack. “We should turn the lights off again.”

“We should do that.”

They were little kids, playing a game. She turned the light off, found Teddy’s cold face in the dark, aimed her mouth at his, and kissed him. It was so dark she was asleep, dreaming. It was a dreamy kiss.

“So are you Indian?” It seemed safe to ask, now that they were in the dark. He was shaking a little. It was probably, she realized, his first time. This made her want to pull him close and pat him on the back, which she did.

“Yeah. Gandhi, not Geronimo. But my mom’s white.”

They kissed again, leaning forcefully into each other. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her.” They kissed until a knock sounded at the door. Eliza and Teddy held their breaths, trying not to laugh. The doorknob rattled, and the visitor disappeared.

Teddy whispered, “He’s looking for us.”

“Who?”

Teddy didn’t answer.

“I don’t think he’d mind,” Eliza said, but maybe she wanted him to. Maybe she wanted Teddy to tell Jude. Maybe she wanted Teddy to pass her on like Bridge Fowler had, like an expensive new drug. Try it, you’ll like it.

She peeled off her coat, and the coat, electrified with static, zapped the air. A shock of blue sparks sputtered between them. “Whoa,” they said together. She found her way up onto the sink again. His cold hand found her knee, and then her hip, and then the long, goose-bumped length of her arm, and then the sleeve of her T-shirt, and then darting through this opening, the hand swallowed a breast whole.

Les was wrong. She wasn’t young. She didn’t want to save anyone; she wasn’t in love with other people’s suffering. She wanted to be consumed by it, eaten alive.

Jude roamed. They had split up—Teddy upstairs, Jude downstairs—but Jude searched upstairs, too, wandering the hall, trying doorknobs, looking not only for Eliza but now for Teddy, Delph, Kram, anyone but Tory, for beer, for the bathrooms, all of which seemed to be locked. He drank a watery centimeter of beer from an abandoned cup, but it only made him thirstier. He found the kitchen phone and called Delph, not caring how late it was, and left a message after his father’s nerdy voice: “This is Jude. Where are you?”

Days seemed to have passed, whole, eventless weeks, since the girl had knocked on the driver’s-side window. She had a wall of blond hair and a low-cut top that Jude stared down as she leaned over, cleavage that went and went. Could they move their car, please? They were blocking her way. And hey, actually, was this their car? Um, not really. It was their friend’s. They’d go get him.

On a wicker love seat on the back porch, Hippie was passed out in a Santa hat, his glasses knocked askance. He’d graduated the year before, but he still hung out with the high school set, cruised his bike around the school parking lot each afternoon. The story was that in exchange for pot, Hippie was under Tory’s protection, which meant that instead of being robbed by Tory, Hippie chose to supply him. Leaning over, Jude nudged his shoulder, and Hippie sat straight up, palming the leather fanny pack at his waist.

Jude said, “Hey, you got anything left?”

Hippie squinted at him. An icy wind blew through the porch screen. “Who are you again?”

“Jude. Jude Keffy-Horn.”

Hippie adjusted his glasses. “Your mom’s the Glass Lady?”

“How do you know my mom?” It wasn’t until Jude had asked the question that the answer became obvious. He’d never wondered where his mom got her pot since his dad left town.

Hippie said, “We’ve traded services a few times.”

Jude did not like the sound of that. He tried to banish the image of his mother engaged in a business exchange with Hippie. “How about a dime for some of my mom’s glass? That’s a good deal.”

“Hippie’s not doing any trading tonight,” said Hippie.

“Or how about this?” Jude reached into the inside pocket of his coat and revealed two round, white pills, fuzzy with lint. “A little vitamin R. I’ll toss them in.”

“Hippie takes cash.”

“Come on, man. Be a friend.”

“Sorry, brother. Can’t help you out.” Hippie leaned his head back against the love seat. From the pool table behind him, Jude took a pool stick and thrust it like a javelin through the porch screen, startling himself and Hippie, who leapt up from the couch. The wind whistled through the hole in the screen.

“Screw you,” Jude said. “You’re lucky I don’t steal that fag bag off you.”

He kicked open the screen door, trundled through the snow, and pissed into a dark corner of the backyard, leaning a hand on the cold, slickly painted fence, drilling a steaming hole in the snow. As a kid he had done this with his father many times, stood beside him in the outdoors and pissed with pleasure into snow or gravel or grass, the sun or the moon on their faces.

It was just after his ninth birthday that his dad had left. This day was always the same. The false jubilation, the snow.

“You making pee pee, Maybelline?”

Jude zipped up. When he turned around, Tory Ventura was a black silhouette against the distant floodlight on the porch. Behind him were five or six more silhouettes. What remained of Jude’s earlier bravado quickly sank.

“That’s him,” said Hippie’s voice.

“That’s him,” said a girl, the girl who had discovered Jude and Teddy in the car.

Tory stepped closer. Jude could see only his outline, his moon-limned shoulders and knuckles. “You been vandalizing my house, Maybelline? You been messing with my car?”

The bonfire shivered at the far end of the yard, crackling with the smoky voices of the figures standing around it.

“It was unlocked,” Jude said, ignoring the first question. “We were just trying to stay warm.” How the f*ck hadn’t he known that Tory Ventura drove a LeBaron?

Tory stepped to Jude’s left, and Jude stepped to the right, doing a little do-si-do. The light now fell flat on Tory, revealing his face to Jude, all but his deep-set eyes, darkened with circles below, as though with permanent paint, and Jude whiffed a swift air-gun shot of the beer on Tory’s breath. “You come to my party without an invitation,” Tory said, “and then you destroy my property?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Jude said. “I was supposed to meet someone.”

“You’re going to have to pay for that,” Tory said, and for a moment Jude thought he meant money.

Then Tory took a step forward and shoved Jude back into the snow. It wasn’t a particularly brutal shove, but he didn’t try to get up. The snow had stopped falling and the sky was clearing, a gauzy cloud traveling over a spray of 3-D stars. Down the waist of his jeans, the packed snow numbed his back.

“You think you and your little friend can just walk in here, you little freak?”

“We didn’t—”

Tory kicked at the snow, his boot stopping just short of Jude’s face. Snow pelted the molars in Jude’s open mouth, the inside corners of his blinking eyes. He had never been jumped before, and he braced himself for the boots. More than any other moment in that endless and disappointing day, he wanted to be blacked out, knocked out, out cold, gone. But when the boots came, they kicked him over, flipping him onto his belly like a fish in a pan. Coming down on his chin, he bit his tongue. Warm blood filled his mouth. He heard the zip of a belt through belt loops and then he felt the belt, not on his back but around it. The others held him down while Tory threaded the belt around Jude’s trunk, clamping his hands behind his back and cinching it over his crossed wrists. They grunted wordlessly, as though lassoing a calf. Jude closed his eyes. Then, through the ear pressed to the ground, the ear listening for his tribe to come stampeding to his rescue, he heard the gentle trickle of liquid, a tributary making its slow way through the crystals of snow, and he opened his eyes to see the golden pool forming before him. Beer. He opened his jaw for it as Tory shoveled in the handful of soaked snow—he struggled to bite down on his knuckles, but already his mouth was too full—and just as he heard the woodpecker reel of laughter above, and the halfhearted protest of one of the girls, he discerned the true contents on his throbbing tongue, and tasting the ammonia through the aluminum of his own blood, his mouth stuffed open with snow as with a pair of balled socks, he gagged, and then vomited, his mouth now filling with vomit as well.

When Teddy and Eliza found him alone in the snow, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour later, they were standing elbow to elbow, as though hiding something between their bodies. They unbuckled the belt and helped him to his feet. “Oh, shit,” Eliza kept saying, her hand over her mouth, but Teddy was dusting the snow off Jude’s jeans, saying, “You’re fine! You’re fine, right? You’re fine, man, right?”

Jude tried to spit into the snow. He couldn’t feel his tongue or his face.

Teddy was sort of panting. Teddy was messed up. Jude did his best to cock his head. Are you messed up? he asked with his eyes, and Teddy’s black eyes blinked back, with painstaking slowness, with remorse, Yes.

They practically had to force Eliza onto the train. She wanted to stay until they were home safely, but Jude wouldn’t let her, and Teddy pressed his hand to the small of her back as she climbed the stairs of the car. She didn’t have to ask Teddy if he was coming with her. She knew he couldn’t leave Jude now. Teddy watched the train disappear without him.

Now he let the force of the snow, falling again, carry his body down the hill, past his own street and his empty house, toward Jude’s. The antiseptic flakes burned his skin. His heart was skidding on ice.

“You okay?” he asked Jude for the fourth time.

Jude nodded, hobbling stiffly beside him. He was holding something. Out of the pocket of his jacket snaked the end of the braided belt, wet with snow. “Where were you guys?”

Teddy had hoped to find something heroic about Jude’s defeat, something that could be salvaged and spun into a story for Johnny or Delph or Kram. But now it felt unusable, a black stain, and entirely tangled with the bright memory of what he’d done in the dark while Jude lay outside in the snow. That was a story for another time, too. “Looking for you,” Teddy said.

Up ahead, the frozen lake was lit like the ocean, like there was nothing on the other side. Now that Teddy was leaving this place, he had a biting fondness for it, a feeling that was unfamiliar to him; he’d left the other cities of his childhood without regret. He kicked the snow as he walked, spraying arcs of white mixed with the pebbly dirt beneath. She’d tried to kiss him again as they dressed in the dark—he could feel her raising up on tiptoe—but he’d swooped out of the way to feel for his jacket on the floor. He’d meant to punish himself, withhold one last indulgence, but he knew by her stunned silence that he’d punished her instead. “He’s probably worried,” he’d explained, zipping up the jacket. The cold teeth of the zipper bit his hand.

“Dude,” he said now as they entered the alley behind Jude’s house, “when we go to New York, we’ll get away from that a*shole. Everything will be different.”

The streetlight shone on the patch of dirt where, in the spring, Harriet planted her garden. “Yeah, for sure.” Jude stepped into the light and then through it, past the greenhouse, toward the office building next door. Teddy followed.

In front of the building’s air conditioner, Jude knelt in the snow. He put his hands on the pipes that curled at the side of the machine. Fumbling, he pinched and pulled in the dark until he found the right valve.

The last thing Teddy wanted was another experiment. His heart was still shuffling frantically, and he wanted to still it, to burrow under the warm covers on Jude’s top bunk and fall asleep. But Jude was on a mission, and he needed a partner, and after what had happened, Teddy could not refuse him. He had expected a glowing green light, something that might simmer wickedly in a test tube, but in the end the freon was a lot like the turpentine—invisible fumes, cheap and fickle, that turned you into your own ghost. They knelt, knees frozen, and sucked the valve like a straw, Jude blowing Teddy a mouthful, Teddy tonguing the night air until they were sky high, kite-light, whites-of-your-eyes f*cked-up. There was a fire in the sky. There were fireworks. It was a new year. Bursts of red and gold flowered above them, petals of color fading and falling with the snow, and Teddy went up there. He felt himself float up into the alley, up over the lake, evaporating.

In the morning, it was Harriet who found them. Jude heard her before he saw her—the crunch of her boots over the snow. When he opened his eyes, the sky was twilight gray, and she was standing above him with a snow shovel hanging from her hand like a claw. He couldn’t feel his body. The world had tipped sideways.

“What on earth are you boys doing?”

Teddy was curled up on the ground beside him with his hands between his knees. His face was a mask of ice. Jude tried to answer, but he couldn’t speak.

The shovel fell. She threw down her gloves. His mother’s hand was like a hot iron on his face. She had a hand on Jude’s face and a hand on Teddy’s; she was the warm current between them. “Jude, be still,” he heard her say. “Teddy, wake up.” When Teddy didn’t open his eyes, she lifted his elbow, then dropped it. “Teddy, honey, wake up!” She clapped her hands, as though to scare a flock of crows from her garden, and the three beats echoed in Jude’s waiting ears, taking flight through the valley and up into the morning.