SC RI B N ER

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright 2013 by Benjamin Nugent All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner hardcover edition January 2013
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012027692 ISBN 978-1-4391-3659-1 ISBN 978-1-4391-5433-5 (ebook)

1994

1.
Were Not Going to Get Thrown in a Van

he Dads were a man and a woman. They were my father, Linus, and Khadijahs mother, Nancy. Khadijah called them the Dads because, in her family, Nancy played the traditional paternal role. She spent more time at work than Khadijahs father, she made more money, she was harder to talk to. She was a Dad. And my father was a Dad. To explain why we needed a name for the pair of them, Ill start with the Friday that Khadijah and I, with our respective Dads, ran into each other at Gaia Foods. The Day of the Dads. It was early March, Language Day at Wattsbury Regional. As sophomores active in language clubsI, Russian; Khadijah, Frenchwe both manned tables, selling borscht and mousse outside the cafeteria after school. We never spoke during Language Day, although our tables stood five feet apart. All I knew about Khadijah was that she was third-tier popular, all academics, no sports, no theater, no newspaper, an organized girl who recorded homework assignments in apple green pen in high-quality notebooks, and that her deceptively black-sounding name, pronounced Kah-DEE-jah, was a product of Nancys Sufi years. My father picked me up after we collapsed the tables at five, and we stopped at Gaia on the way home, for dinner essentials, wine, and ice cream. After Nancy picked up Khadijah, they stopped at Gaia too. While I was trying to show my father how
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smart I was by making an argument about how many pears he should buy versus how many grapes for a fruit salad, I saw Nancy and Khadijah hovering by bananas. An astute observer probably would have seen there was something weird between Nancy and my father right away. But I was only fifteen. I was stupid when it came to interpreting the behavior of the Dads. Its strange: When youre trying to impress a person, you cant see that person well. And Khadijah and I, we longed to impress the Dads. I noticed nothing unusual in the Dads body language or in their faces. My father reached out and laid his hand on the pears peeking from Nancys wicker basket, looked her in the eye, and said, Theyre fresh today. The gesture did not strike me as remarkable. I found it mysterious, but my father was a sophisticated person. Everything he did was mysterious. Sometimes, he hastened to explain, looking at Khadijah and me, stroking his beard, the fruit at Gaia is slightly rotten. Thats the dark side of organic. Everything isnt spritzed with poisons to make it look neat. I was, myself, as odorous as aging fruit. My parents were hippies. They had not spritzed me with poisons to make me look neat. My blond, shoulder-length hair was triangular, because while I knew there was a hair product called conditioner, I didnt know that conditioner was what people used to make hair lie down. I hadnt acquired the habit of shaving my ghost mustache or wiping the fingerprints off the lenses of my glasses. I wanted to be like my father, who taught political science, who knew how to talk about capitalism in such a way that people either agreed heartily with him or looked personally affronted and concerned for their safety. I wanted his air of rebellion and authority, his shaggy, dark hair and revolutionary beard. But I didnt know how to turn myself into him. I was wearing one of his blousy, longsleeved shirts from the early seventies that Id discovered in our attic, green with wooden buttons, and the consequence was that I smelled as if I were kept in an attic.
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GOOD KIDS

Khadijah, by contrast, had the grooming and bearing of a girl with a hands-on mother. She stood straight and still. The burgundy scrunchie that held her brown ponytail matched the trim of her Esprit socks. But for all the inorganic, detail-oriented parenting lavished on her, she was almost as awkward as I was, no surer of how to start a conversation. When the Dads asked for some time to chat by themselves, she tensed at the prospect of being left alone with me. We both doubted, I think, that we could find something to talk about. You hooligans wont cudgel each other, if we wander a little? My father thumped a box of Finnish crackers against his palm. You can keep yourselves entertained? Five minutes? Nancy asked us, edging toward my father. Maybe ten? You see, my chickens, a mutual friend of ours is in the hospital. Nancy had managed to tame her hair, I noticed, the way I longed to tame mineit formed a neat, soft bell behind her face, like Tom Pettys. She batted aside one strand with impatient, bony fingers. Go, Mom, its Gaia, said Khadijah, picking at her cuticles. Were not going to get thrown in a van and sold into sex slavery. The Dads shot around a corner and vanished. At first there was only silence. But eventually, Khadijah turned to face me with a solution to our not knowing what to do with each other, using semipopular girl instincts I lacked: Should we spy on them? I said yes. Im so bored, we both said. But I think the reason we spied on them, aside from the need to kill awkwardness with action, was that we suspected something. We were in tenth grade; it was strange theyd felt the need to ask us if wed be okay while they spoke in private. We just didnt suspect that we suspected something. Trolling the aisles, we sighted the grown-ups in Candy. Nancy was slouching in order to better inspect an item on a chest-high shelf. My father was scratching his beard as if he was looking at art. What we need is a hiding place, said Khadijah. She snapped her fingers. The African-American History Month thing.
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The African-American History Month display sat at the aisles mouth, fifteen feet from where my father stood speaking with Nancy. It consisted of two tables pushed together and covered with kente cloths. February was over; like the produce, the display had been kept out too long. The tables were poorly aligned, and the cloths sagged in the gap between them. A traditional African-American cookbook and an Ethiopian cookbook remained upright, but a third volume had toppled over. There was something foreboding about this structure. Something told me that, if Khadijah and I hid inside it, like children in a fairy tale, we would have a hard time getting back out, would require a trail of crumbs. Before we could discuss the pros and cons, Khadijah crept. She slipped between the kente cloths and vanished beneath the tables, and I had no honorable choice but to follow. We were on our hands and knees in the dark, cheek to cheek, almost touching. I smelled Khadijahs vanilla shampoo, and my own stale shirt. I made a promise to myself: I will never emit this scent again. We peered through the gap between the maroon kente cloth and the green kente cloth, drawing them aside like stage curtains. My father and Nancy faced each other in the candy aisle, oblivious. We watched the show. My father did something astonishing. He took a candy bar and slipped it in the pocket of his quilted corduroy barn jacket. He was going to steal it. Nancy whacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand, and he put the candy bar back on the shelf. Next he took a large, glistening gift bag of chocolate and shoved it halfway into the same pocket. Nancy whacked him harder; he put it back. Then he took a paper bag of cookies down from the shelf as Nancy dealt little blows to his shoulder. He made a show of trying to stuff the bag into the pocket, until it ripped open at the corner, and bled cookies on the floor. Nancy crossed her arms. My father tried to gather the cookies and hold the broken bag at the same time. Linus, said Nancy, you clumsy outlaw. My father arranged the fallen cookies in a little pile on the shelf
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GOOD KIDS

and slid the mutilated bag back into place. After hed brushed the crumbs from his fingers, he reached down and tipped up Nancys chin. I could only assume that he would restore the chin to its original position, as he had everything else he had taken in his hands. He would put Nancy back, just as he had put back the chocolate and the cookies. Nancy stared up at him and dropped her hands to her sides like a child. That was when he kissed her, full on the lips. She kissed back, hungry. It was probably because of the sweets all around them, but one of my first thoughts was that they were eating each other. Khadijah and I said nothing. Our faces were almost touching in the dark. We jerked away from the gap in the kente cloths, and my head struck the underside of the metal table. Why would your dad do that? she demanded, finally. She was breathing hard. My mom is married to my dad. My dad is married too, to my mom, I pointed out. Your mom kissed him back. Im going to go out there and ask them whats going on. I predict that question will prove unacceptable to them. Even in this moment of father-related crisis, I tried to speak with my fathers gravitas. My poor dad, Khadijah said. There were tears in her round brown eyes. Just because your mom kissed my dad doesnt mean, necessarily, that theyre screwing. This was my idea, at the time, of being comforting. I sent a thought out to my father: If you are screwing, I will cut off your dick and give it to Mom on a sword. Then, immediately afterward: Im sure there is a good reason for this. Its only a kiss, I thought. Nothing else. I hate your dad, Khadijah said. This isnt necessarily anything. In truth I felt it was beyond doubt that my father, who had held me on his shoulders on marches hed organized for divestment from South Africa, had a more nuanced moral understanding of the situation than we did, and was doing the right thing, even if it looked wrong. I repeat, all theyre doing is kissing. Why should we make an assumption?
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The kente cloths lifted slightly when a brisk walker passed by. I knew from the acknowledgment of Kwanzaa at school that the cloths were used for sacred rites, by the Akan people. I wouldnt want to kiss that beard, Khadijah said, her face pressed against her legs. Your mom dresses Republican, I responded. Thats one of those lady blazers. Your dad dresses like a homeless person. She was actually sobbing now. Hes in public but hes wearing sweatpants. Dont cry, I said. Its going to be okay. It was something I had learned to say from movies, but I meant it. Khadijah was always pretty, but crying, she was so beautiful my face was going to burn off. I found the discovery that tears enhanced beauty nearly as disorienting as everything else that was going on. At any rate, I realized it might be acceptable to reach out and touch Khadijah, now that I had told her not to cry. I laid my hand on her head. When she didnt object I stroked her hair slowly. I liked the feeling of doing this too much to stop. She jerked her head back. I think that maybe I should tell my dad and you should tell your mom. Thats out of line. Its kissing. True. She thought for a moment, calmer now. Whatever theyre doing, if we told on them, it would make it bigger. With nothing to do, my hand, the one that had been stroking her hair, was shaking. I sat on it. We cant leap to conclusions, I said. I dont want my fathers reputation to suffer. My parents have an excellent marriage. A kiss, I thought, hearing a new voice in my head that I hoped was the voice of adulthood, means nothing at all. We sat and watched through the gap in the cloth as the Dads walked away and turned a corner. We found them where theyd left us, in Produce. Did you survive our absence, darlings? Nancy asked. She and my father were peering at us, I realized, to make sure we hadnt seen them. Did anything bad happen? There was a soldierly expression on Khadijahs face, an expres8

GOOD KIDS

sion you already saw on Hillary Clinton sometimes, in 1994. Her eyes were pink, but her face was dry. She shrugged. Smiles dawned on the faces of the grown-ups. They were concluding they hadnt been caught. Mom, please dont be paranoid, said Khadijah. Were fine.

2.
Thank You for Saying That

hen my father and I came home from Gaia Foods, he kissed my mother on the mouth and sliced the pears. I watched him to see if he looked guilty, but I couldnt see his face as he stood at the kitchen counter chopping. My mother slid a pizza from the oven, spun the greens, and asked about his day in her low, steady therapists voice, the way she always did. If she knew anything, it didnt show on her face. Did the anthro guy try to get his new courses in the major? She dialed down the volume on All Things Considered to give her full attention to his answer. He tried, and then he asked us to articulate our needs. Hes a whore. My father plucked the grapes from their stems and dropped them on the pears. A grape fell to the linoleum, and he stepped on it without noticing. Does he make you angry? Do I seem angry? Not particularly. Hes a nice whore. So nothings wrong? Id like to banish him to a comfortable island before he kidnaps more of my students and conscripts them, thats all. My mother nodded as she fanned the steaming pizza with a mitt. Shed sensed something was off about himdid she know? Was there more to know than what Id seen? She called my little sister, Rachel, who shuffled in with her library book about an Arab girl forced into marriage, her hair wild with static from reading in the corduroy beanbag. I didnt want it to be dinner10

GOOD KIDS

time. I was usually ravenous all hours of the day, but now I was too jumpy to eat. I drummed my fingers against the fridge, the radiator, the bowl of greens. As we sat at the table, my mother, my father, Rachel, and I, I stood my mother next to Nancy. Nancy, like my father, taught at Wattsbury College, a small liberal arts school whose campus sprawled a square half-mile between the Wattsbury town common and the lumberyard. From the common you could see its glassy library, from the yard its columned gymnasium. It had redbrick dormitories jacketed in ivy, but it was smaller than any school in the Ivy League, and sported a color scheme Id never seen elsewhere: The stucco business school and the observatory were lemon, the administrative buildings sherbet orange. It was as if a more whimsical civilization had ruled Massachusetts in days beyond remembering, and fallen, stranding a colony in our midst. Whereas my mother taught psych at a college twenty minutes west, in the shadow of the Berkshire Hills. It was my high school duplicated five times over, beige blocks, concrete. You look glum, Joshua, my mother said. Whats wrong? She flashed me clown faces: a cartoon frown, a madman smile, the gape-mouthed stare of a person struck with a pie. Was it that my father thought Nancy was hotter? Your outfits strange, Mom, I said. My mothers clown face disappeared. She looked at me probingly, twisted a lock of her long brown hair. She wore a denim button-down over a pleated denim dress. Its not really an outfit, she noted. In this family, my father said, we permit women freedom of dress. He reached into my mothers hair and rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. Your mom looks nice. Notice he didnt actually defend what I was wearing, said my mother. But she was smiling. There was something about this, her smiling at my father, after hed kissed Nancy, that was intolerable to me. We ran into Nancy Dunn and Khadijah at Gaia today, I said. My father glanced at me and resumed chewing.
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Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, said Rachel. She had memorized the names of all the girls and most of the boys in my class, knew our social hierarchies better than those of her own grade. Shes pretty, unconventionally. My father waggled his eyebrows. I bet Josh liked her outfit. Rachel made the sound like the crescendo of a police siren that to seventh graders signifies the detection of lust. I blushed and dropped the subject. When we were done eating, my father cleared the table while my mother headed for the stairs. Every evening, immediately after dinner, she performed her rituals: a hundred prostrations, a seated meditation, the pouring of water into twin orange cups. Why do you do that stuff? I called to her. It was the first time Id raised the subject in years; she never spoke of it. I looked to see if my question had provoked a telling reaction from my father, but he had his head in the cabinet over the sink, where we kept the wine. Does it ever bother you that the rest of us dont believe in it? No, she said, turning on a step, crossing her arms. It would be worse for you to become a Buddhist because Im a Buddhist than for you to not be a Buddhist. It was the same answer shed given when I was in junior high. I do it because if I didnt do it Id beshe lifted her hands and wailed like a ghostcrazy. I knew what she meant. Nine years ago, there had been a period of experimentation with violence. When Rachel was in toilet training, my mother had made her potty fly. The kick was more fluid, more natural, than the ones Id seen her execute when she picked me up at soccer practice. It was a surge of strength from her heart to her leg. The potty leapt across the living room with its lid open and landed upright at my fathers feet, splashed pee on his sandals. She apologized to me, because Id seen it, and I pretended to be upset because I felt it was expected. But I liked my parents fighting, even when it frightened me. When I saw it I could feel that they needed each other, sharpened each other. I felt some of what they felt, the fear of getting hit mixed with joy that somebody might give enough of a shit about what you were saying to hit you.
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GOOD KIDS

What I wanted right now was for them to scream at each other. Dad, I said, as my mother disappeared upstairs, dont you get sick of Mom doing insane groveling in the bedroom? Doesnt it annoy you? My mother paused on the landing and listened. My father spun a bottle of wine against his palm. No, Joshy, he said. My mother continued her ascent. Its restorative. The equivalent is when I watch baseball, or read popular history. The thump of my mothers prostrations sounded rhythmically from the master bedroom. My father uncorked his bottle of red and took it to his study. Rachel went to the phone to call one of her friendsit was Friday night. I stood and sat down, stood and sat down again. Why are you being weird? Rachel asked. This is what I do when Im thinking about a Russian paper. I went out to the yard and lay on my back in cold grass and stale snow. The gray branch of a sapling shivered. What Id seen in Gaia might have been a dream, to judge from the way the world marched on. Had my senses tricked me? Was I one of those adolescent males my mother talked about who had manic breaks, who lost their minds forever in episodes of grand hallucination? I yanked grass out of the ground, my arms stretched to either side, and filled my hands with snow. I pounded the earth. I saw it, I said. I rose and walked inside, through the kitchen to the closet in the hall. My fathers barn jacket hung from a chipped white hook. I stepped into the closet and closed the door. It was dark. I pulled on the quilted jacket, warm and capacious, like a bed. I ran my hand over the corduroy on the right side until I found what I was looking for, stuck in the grooved cloth, and tasted them for sweetness, to make sure they derived from cookies: crumbs. The next day, when the phone rang, I was taking close-ups of the kitchen radiator for photography class. I was pouring small amounts of water on the radiator, trying to make it look like one of the ominous steaming props Id seen in a Nine Inch Nails video.
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My mother answered. I knew from her face that a person of significance was on the line; in moments of drama she assumed a meditative reticence. As a general rule, the events that caused my father to go bombastic caused my mother to go still. Its for you, she said. I took the receiver and said hello. This is Khadijah, came a small, effortful voice. How are you doing? So that was what my mothers portentous blankness had meant: Its a girl. This was unprecedented. My mother made a face I had never seen her make, a mix of triumph and amusement, and jogged upstairs. Its really good to hear from you, I said. I punched myself in the back of the neck, three times, as the words came out. Khadijah asked how the Russian Club had fared on Language Day. I gave a nuanced account. She provided an overview of the French Clubs fiscal woes. When she fell silent, I looked outside, trying to think of a way to say, Why did you call me? The snow appears to be melting. I slurred the words, to sound casual. What? she said. Snow is melting, I enunciated, enraged at myself. True. She drew a breath. Maybe youd like to meet. Maybe youd like to meet up, downtown, and discuss that thing that we saw happen. Yes. I took the cordless into the bathroom and shut the door. Yes. I feel insane. I am becoming an insane person. That, she said, is exactly what I hoped you would say. I sloshed uphill, past the common, the Bank of Boston, the head shop, Al Bums Records, the fire station, the townie bar. In half an hour I was kicking the muck off my Doc Martens, on my way to the back table at Class Caf, where she was already seated, homework spread before her. I have proof its not just kissing, she said, after wed ordered carrot cake and herbal tea, and shed put away her binder. Theyre in love. She said this in a perfunctory manner, looking out the
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GOOD KIDS

window at an incense salesman on the sidewalk who moved as if hed had three strokes. I asked her how she knew. She reached into her backpack and unrolled a charcoal still life: a pineapple. Grotesque, right? I draw like an ape. All the pineapples are like that, I said. It was true. Ms. Chumly had made everyone do a charcoal drawing of a pineapple, and no pineapple had been an unqualified success. The halls were blackened with grenade-like fruit. The effect was austere. It made you think about how every student who drew a pineapple was someday going to die. Even so, my pineapple particularly sucks, Khadijah said. So last night, after we put away the groceries, I show it to my mom so she can see I got an Ashe has a rule that she has to see all my grades on everythingand my dad walks in and laughs at my pineapple and then he leaves. I sipped from my cup of Lemon Zinger. I looked directly at her with my eyebrows raised, something Id seen male love interests do in romantic comedies. My mom looks at him like shes going to throw a knife at his back. She picks up my pineapple and goes, Theres a friend of mine whos seen your work, who told me youd be a great artist if you had the proper training. Khadijah paused for effect. She was talking about your dad. Isnt it obvious, when you think about it? I stared at her, trying to figure out if she was right. Do you think Im overdramatic? My parents say Im overdramatic. No way. Oh my god, thank you for saying that. She threw her arms across the table and laid her head beside her plate, to signal a lifting of a great burden from her shoulders. The bad news: It was possible that Nancy and my father were committing a crime against our families. The silver lining: There was a conspiratorial feeling growing between Khadijah and me. We were being drawn together in a game. That night, I walked through the last snowstorm of the year to
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CVS and bought a Gillette Sensor Excel razor. I studied the pictures of hair on bottles until I began to comprehend conditioner and pomade, how each might amplify the benefits of the other. I bought a Neutrogena antiacne scrub, a witch hazel toner. The next afternoon, I asked my mother to take me to the JCPenney in the all but gutted Mountain Farms Mall, known locally as the Dead Mall, where I picked three rugby shirts, and to Payless, at the nameless, less thoroughly eviscerated mall farther down Route 9, known as the Live Mall, where she bought me a pair of running shoes. As the fresh snow melted on the springy new track at the college, I went for the first run of my life. When I came back, my lungs full of silver air, my skin red and warm, I looked at my father with wonder, reading in his chair. How could he look the way he always had, even though he had kissed a person not his wife? I wanted to scoop up a snowball and throw it at his head, if only to catch him off guard, dent his shell. I needed to know: Were he and Nancy Dunn screwing? No matter what he had done, he had a talent for secrecy. He sat with a bowl of ice cream, his first glass of wine for the evening, his eighth or ninth military history of the yearhe never tired of wars, though he hadnt been in one and professed hatred of them. He saw me staring. If I keep eating like this, and you keep working out, I wont be able to murder you, once I start to feel threatened by you, he said. He smiled, warmly. Youll just outrun me. He returned to Scourge of Dunkirk. I climbed the two stories to my renovated room in the attic, showered with conditioner, cranked out four push-ups, and took my clothes off in front of the mirror. I felt I could see myself become less revolting as I became more and more interested in being devoted to someone. And now that there was something unrevolting to give, I wanted to give it. I stretched my arms out in either direction and lolled my head to one side, imagining myself on a cross. I wanted to give what I had to Khadijah, of course. Part of it was the way she looked and the way she carried herself. But it was also that a small piece of me was close to a small piece of her
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GOOD KIDS

in a way I had never been close to someone, because of what we had seen. Satisfied my father was stationary for the evening, I slunk to his study, in my pajamas, and rifled through his desk. It was the nicest piece of furniture we had. We didnt have a lot of money; wed been to Europe once, to Paris, and my father had cursed every time the bill came for lunch. The desk was a gift from an entertainment lawyer he knew from the Harvard Lampoon. Made of black wood, it worked like a drawbridge; you turned a little brass key and eased the work surface down on brass hinges, revealing six black drawers, each brass-knobbed and coated on the inside with mauve felt. There was nothing of significance in any of them. A magnifying glass, an unopened letter from the Democratic Socialists of America, a roll of tape with no tape left on it, little mauve strands clinging to the translucent circle. In one drawer that was otherwise empty, there was an unused postcard. I flipped it over; the picture side was a photograph of Emily Dickinsons house, in nearby Amherst, taken from the street. I thought about this a little while, and slipped the postcard in my pocket. On Monday, during study hall, I wrote Khadijah SilverglateDunn a note on the postcard. My dad HATES the Emily Dickinson house. He says its an ahistorical tourist fetish. Does your MOM like it? The capitalization of hates might have been hyperbole, but he had called it a tourist fetish once, and though he hadnt really called it ahistorical, ahistorical was a word he applied with derision to many things other people liked, like Schindlers List and Mel Gibsons version of Hamlet. I slipped the postcard through the gills of Khadijahs locker. It materialized in my own locker the next day. A message was written on it in a large, loopy script that must have been Khadijahs: Found in my moms office @ work. A twice-folded sheet of graph paper was attached with an apple green paper clip. Id deduced that Nancy Dunn was an art historian of some talent from the fact that my father deigned to kiss her, but I was still awed by what I saw. On the graph paper was a time line,
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untitled, drawn with a fine, black pen, ferociously graceful, the cursive youd think would flow from one of Nancys dark hands, with their skeletal fingers. It might as well have traced the development of pottery in Mesopotamia, or perspective in European painting. But its subject was a series of local outings. At the beginning, on the left edge of the black horizontal line, there was a perfect miniature architectural drawing of a greenhouse. Beneath it, a caption: Botanic Garden of Smith College. The next item, two inches to the right, was a little millstone, filled in with black and perfectly round. Beneath the millstone, in the same indestructible, filament-thin block letters of the caption previous: Book Mill Used Books, Montague, MA. Next was the Sunderland Pet Shelter, illustrated with a litter of lithe kittens, who bared claws at each other in Darwinian conflict as they tumbled across the bottom of the page; then, a movie screen that emitted thick, black rays of light and displayed a title I didnt understand: La rgle du jeu. It was at the terminus of the line that Nancy had drawn a picture of the Emily Dickinson Homestead, its balcony framed by identical trees. Outside the social studies classroom, I caught Khadijahs shoulder. For a moment, our eyes met and we passed something back and forth, a mix of elation and panic. Then we remembered we were surrounded by our peers and assumed postures of ironic detachment and bemusement. For what its worth, I said, Im still not persuaded. But thank you. Neither am I, said Khadijah. So. We turned in opposite directions and walked away, backpacks bouncing, stupidly fast. The time line became the keystone of our investigation. It turned otherwise innocuous objects into proof; it was what allowed us to settle the matter in our minds. Dad, Rachel called from the kitchen that evening, are we getting a sweet-natured, mixed-breed sheepdog whose behavior shows very mild signs of puppyhood trauma, but who will blossom under the care of a firm but gentle master? Who wouldnt blossom under one of those, honey? My
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father swiped the Sunderland Pet Shelter flyer from her hands. Daddy was using that as a bookmark. Why did you take it from Daddys book? You should try to keep a respectful distance from your daddys things. My own daddy, good Irishman, would have gone somewhat apoplectic if you had appropriated a bookmark like that. I just wanted to see if the book had Holocaust pictures. She was at the peak of a one-sided carnage phase. Your old dad went to Sunderland for a bike ride and stopped to look at the dogs. You know how much Id love to get you one, but we have to consider your mothers allergies. At school the next morning, I ran to Khadijah as she hopped off the bus. My dad took home a picture of a dog from the shelter, I said. You were right. Its a definite thing. What wed been doing had come to resemble a game so closely that I was surprised when Khadijahs face collapsed and she covered her eyes with her hands. When she withdrew them, she was twitching. Her brow wrinkled. Her mouth puckered. Her cheeks assumed an alien roundness. She was trying to hold it together, like she had a broken wrist. Sorry, I said. I didnt mean to say it like it was good news. But it was too late. She signaled forgiveness with a wave and spun into the crowd marching through the green double doors. We were in almost the same location that afternoon, just after the final bell, when she appeared at my side. Her eyes were red, her face was calm. Come with me, she said. Were going to the Thing in the Woods. The Thing in the Woods was a rusted wheel that must have once belonged to a landscaping vehicle. It sat in a fairy ring of mashed cigarettes and glittering bottle glass. Residual snow lay in patches on the brown grass, like mold on bread. Khadijah drew two sheets of paper, the same graph paper her mother had used for the illustrated time line, from a pocket of her three-ring binder. I considered for a second whether the chart could have been a forgery of Khadijahs, but I knew that
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BENJAMIN NUGENT

her draftsmanship was not as delicate as Nancys; the person who could make those inky kittens dart and swipe would not have drawn as geologic a pineapple as Khadijahs. Khadijahs handwriting, too, was different from the handwriting on her mothers time line, larger, loopier, more arabesque. Shed written: I, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn, will never cheat on anyone. If Im in a relationship and I want to be with someone else, I will either wait and see if it changes or I will break up with the person Im with before I do anything. I will not be an asshole and just cheat on them. If I think about doing it, I will remember this moment, now. The other sheet of graph paper had the same vow written on it, only with my name at the beginning instead of hers. She took the sheet with her name, knelt in the grass, and held it to the side of the rusted wheel. She took a blue ballpoint pen from her pocket and signed. Watching me closely, she offered the pen. I knelt beside her in the grass. I pressed the paper against the rough surface of the wheel and put down my name in stilted, overly slanted cursive, the first time I signed my name rather than wrote it. Facing each other on our knees, we shook hands. Heres my question, I said, dusting off my shins as we walked away. If theyre into each other, if they make each other so happy, why dont they get divorced and be with each other? People dont hold it against you if you get divorced in Wattsbury. She folded the sheets of graph paper, creased the fold, and handed me mine. Because we exist.

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