When the dealer stops, Terrance taps the card on the left. With a little smile, the dealer turns it over. Jack of clubs.
Another twenty comes out of Terrance’s pocket, but this time the dealer tells him double or nothing. So out comes forty, and a round later, eighty.
“How’d you know?” he asks when we finally walk away.
“YouTube, a deck of cards, and lots of time. Ten thousand rounds later, I was as good as those guys.”
“Then we should set up a game ourselves,” he says. “You and me.”
*
We wander deeper into Tompkins, past the crowded basketball court and a homemade sign taped to a post about a missing guinea pig named Otto. We find a bench that’s clean, or cleanish, beneath some skeletal trees, and sit.
“So is it your dad who’s at the State Department, or your mom?” Terrance asks.
“Dad,” I say.
“What does your mom do?” he asks.
I consider lying. Usually it only gets awkward after I tell the truth. But this time, for some reason, I don’t. “She’s dead,” I say. “Ten years.”
“Mine, too,” Terrance says. “Eight years. Sailing accident.”
I open my mouth to fill in the how part, but he stops me with a hand on top of mine.
“It’s okay. If you don’t want to,” he says.
“Thanks,” I say.
Then the fact of both our moms being dead just sits there for a second, okay with itself. No fuss. No drama.
“So where do you want to go?” he asks.
“I’m fine just hanging out here,” I say.
“No. For college.”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” I say. “University of Someplace Warm. How about you?”
“Harvard. My dad, he endowed a chair there, so…”
“A chair?”
“Not a literal chair. It’s, like, a faculty position. The Mutai Chair for the Study of Economic Something Something. I can’t remember the whole name.”
From somewhere deep in my pocket, my phone rings. I steal a look and see it’s my dad. But instead of answering it, I turn off the ringer. I’ll call him back later; no need to interrupt the moment and break the spell. The clock on the phone reads 2:42 p.m. Where did the time go? The wind whips through the slats on the wooden bench. I turn the collar of my army jacket up and cross my arms tightly.
“What’s wrong?” Terrance says.
“Cold,” I say.
“Want to get going?”
“No.”
Then his arm is around me and he pulls himself close. My muscles go stiff. I feel the warmth from his body traveling all the way through his jacket and mine. Is there something I’m supposed to say? No, I tell myself, just shut up and let things be. I tilt my head to the side so it’s resting on the shoulder of his suede jacket. He smells like fancy soap, the kind they have in expensive hotels.
“And after college?” I ask. “What then?”
“My dad says anything I want as long as I don’t go into hedge funds like he did,” Terrance says, running his hand along my arm. “But I’ll probably, I don’t know. I love writing code, the mental precision. There’s beauty there. Math as art. Is that weird—math as art?”
I let out a little laugh. “Math music.”
“What?”
“Math music. It’s stupid, but that’s what I call, like, Dizzy and Charlie Parker together, or Coltrane and anyone. It sounds like chaos, but it isn’t. It’s calculus.”
“Math music,” he repeats. “I like that.”
Then his arm tightens around me, and I slide an inch closer, then another inch.
A fat drop of rain lands on my knee; a second lands on my hand. They start to explode and pop all around me, darkening the sidewalk like drops of brown paint. We both know we should get up and head for shelter—it’s going to start coming down hard in a minute—but neither of us moves. A low rumble of thunder turns into a sharp crack. A purple cloud over the buildings in the distance flashes brightly, as if lit from within.
“The gods are conspiring against us,” I say.
“Better go,” Terrance says.
*
We dash through the park, the sky opening up above us, letting down sheets of rain in contoured waves that look like furious ghosts. If I believed in God, it would almost seem like a punishment for stealing a few hours of fun with a strange, interesting boy. We make it across Avenue A to the shelter of a tenement entrance. There’s only a few square feet of space here, and we lean against the black steel door to get away from the ricocheting raindrops.
“You’re shivering,” he says. “Come here.”
I hadn’t noticed and I don’t feel cold anymore, but I do it anyway. He presses his chest to me and wraps his arms around my back.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “It’s the Mutai Chair for Something Something Economic…”
He laughs, and I feel his chest move against the side of my face. “Technically, it’s the Terrance Mutai the Third Chair.”
“The third chair?”
“No, my dad’s name is Terrance Mutai the Third. That makes me Terrance the Fourth.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. I hope he doesn’t think I’m an asshole. “There’s a number in your name? Are you royalty or something?”
“No,” he says. “Just a pretentious snob.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “Me too.”
Then, tragically, and against all the statistical odds that apply to New York in a rainstorm, a taxi pulls to the curb and a woman climbs out. I could have stayed where we were, as we were, all day, maybe all week, but before I can protest, Terrance is pulling me by the hand into the back of the cab.
*
He directs the driver north along First Avenue toward my address. “Then a second stop,” Terrance says. “Seventy-Second and Fifth, the Madisonian.” I haven’t been in the city that long, but I know enough to recognize one of the most prestigious blocks on the whole island of Manhattan. Here, even the very rich live on blocks like mine, in apartments that are too small, looking down on streets that are too busy. Terrance’s neighborhood is reserved for the astronomically wealthy. Even most of the snobs at Danton would look at his address with envy.
The cab scurries along and the streets gleam black in the rain. Terrance and I are crouched down low in the backseat, the heat vents blasting. I notice my fingers are red and numb. He takes my hands in his and rubs them.
We turn down my street, and I tell the driver where to pull over. As we roll to a stop, I reach into my pocket for money, but Terrance says to forget it, the cab ride’s on him. I turn to say thank you but find him right there, mere inches from my face. It’s over before I know it, a quick, chaste kiss on the lips. I wonder what my expression must look like because he laughs. “Later,” he says.
*
My mind races to break down and analyze every second of the past few hours as I enter the front door of my building and start climbing the stairs, second floor, third floor, fourth floor, Terrance the Fourth.