'You're in trouble, huh?' she said sympathetically.
He couldn't help himself-he nodded.
'Shit. So am I.'
'Huh? You?'
'Oh sure,' she said with venomous disgust, each word the swing and crack of a bull whip. 'It happens all the time, I'm getting used to it. They say get to know the kids, go to the parties, join the clubs. You're gonna need it, Christine, on your college applications. You're gonna need all that stuff.' She snorted and managed a patently false smile as the station wagon pulled slowly into the drive. 'Y'know, Don, no offense but there's a lot of scuz in your school.'
'No offense. There is.'
The smile, when she turned it on him, was genuine just long enough for him to notice; then it faded as Norman and Joyce opened their doors and got out, Norman pointing stiffarmed to Don, then to the grocery bags in back.
'A girl,' she said quietly, 'can't even get a decent lay around here.'
He wanted to laugh, to grab her, to find someplace dark and deep where he could hide and start this conversation over. He wanted to tell her he knew exactly how she felt. What he did was stand meekly and murmur a good-bye when his father gestured again for help with the bags. Chris touched his arm in farewell, smiled again and introduced herself to the Boyds as she headed for home. Norman watched her; Don grabbed the two heaviest bags and grunted back to the house where his mother had the door open and waiting.
In the kitchen he lowered them onto the counter and backed into a corner while he waited for the storm.
Norman dropped his load solidly on the table, Joyce did the same, and they proceeded to move awkwardly about the room, putting things in their places and not looking at him save for a flat glance or two.
'I thought you were to stay in the house,' his father said.
'Chris seems like a very nice girl,' his mother said with an anxious smile.
'She is,' Don told her. Guess what, Ma, she wants to get laid and I'm still a goddamn virgin.
'You're grounded,' Norman reminded him.
'Well, maybe you should get to know her a little better, what do you think?'
Back and forth. Figurines on a clock.
'I guess, Mom. I don't know.'
'Her father is a surgeon, you know. He works in New York. A fairly important man from all I hear.'
'How come he lives here then?' he said, flinching when Norman opened a cupboard next to his head and gave him a look that demanded a response.
'I don't know,' Joyce said, frowning over a box of cake mix, weighing it in her hand before putting it aside. 'From what I'm told, he isn't lacking for the old green. And it certainly isn't because this is the perfect suburb. There is, I gather, something about the mother that-''
Norman slammed a can of soup on the table and faced his son. 'I want to know what you were doing outside, Donald, when you were specifically told not to leave the house.'
He lowered his gaze to his shoetops and swallowed the burrs that climbed into his throat. His left hand began thumping lightly against the wall.
There was heat in his chest, and heat on his neck, and he could feel the seconds skip by like rocks dropped into a puddle. Without seeing her he could sense his mother shifting toward the doorway, fussing meaninglessly with something, staying because she had to, wanting to leave because she knew what was coming.
That was the Rule: the family never ran out on a discussion.
'I'm grounded,' he said. 'That doesn't mean I can't sit on the dumb porch, does it?'
'You know damned well what it means,' Norman said.
'No,' Donald said, 'I don't know damned well what it means because you never told me before because I was never damned well grounded before.'
Joyce put a hand to her mouth; Norman took hold of the table's edge and for a moment Don thought he was going to tip it over and come for his throat.
Don looked past him to his mother. 'Mom, why are my things in the attic?'
'Things?'
'From my shelves. The animals. You took them away, remember? I'd like to know why they're in the attic. Am I ever going to get them back?'
'Go to your room,' Norman said before she could answer. 'Go to your room and don't come down until you have a civil tongue in your head.'
'Sam,' Joyce said.
There was no time then; no sound; no air.
Don raised a fist, and Norman looked at his wife in shock and disgust.
'Oh,' she whispered, and ran out of the room.
There was red, briefly, before Don became aware of what he was thinking.
He lowered the fist, forced the fingers to open, and headed for the staircase, his father behind him. At the landing he looked down.
'What if I'm not sorry?' he said flatly.
Norman swallowed and came up a step.
He knew it then-he knew as surely as he could see the red gathering in the corners that if his father lifted his foot one more time, one more step, there was going to be a fight. He was going to hit his father, or his father was going to throw the first punch. He had seen it in the movies and thought it stupid, that it never happened in real life. But he hadn't been able to feel it until now, until he saw this stranger looking up at him, not even the courtesy of hatred in his eyes, this stranger fighting with himself because all the rules said you can't hit your son when he's almost eighteen.
'Do as I tell you,' Norman said tightly.
'I'll go,' he answered, not conceding a thing.
He sat cross-legged on the bed, his back against the wall, his hands in his lap.
He deliberately avoided looking at the shelves, the neat desktop, the window, the floor.
He looked at the stallion, forever charging through the forest, and he thought.
First he thought about what it would be like to be an orphan and how he might accomplish the fact without leaving school to take a job; He thought about Tracey and why she hadn't said anything to him about going out again, or seeing him at school, or even seeing him around; He thought about Brian and Tar and the not-always- rotten Fleet, and why he had to be known as Donny Duck when he wasn't the only Don in the school, when there were others who had worse and funnier names, when there were others who were clearly meant to be the butt of stupid jokes; He thought about Chris, thought about what she was like under that sweater, and wondered how many there were who knew exactly what was there and why did she have to talk to him and ruin everything about her; He thought about the Rules.
He thought about how he could get all these people off his back before it broke in half and he was left lying in bed, crippled and dying.
Finally he thought about nothing.
At midnight he stirred.
There was nothing left in his mind he could cling to for more than a few seconds, but he smiled when he felt a curious settling inside. He looked down at his chest and was amazed to see how wet his clothes were; he touched his hair and it was matted to his scalp; he touched the bed and it was unpleasantly damp. But he didn't move because he still felt himself settling. It was the only way he could describe it to himself-a mass of something light piled high on a plain that had nothing but horizon, something that shifted and settled and eventually became a small something else, a nugget, compact and incredibly hard.
He reached without moving his arms, and he touched it, and it was hot, and it was red, and it was perfectly fitted to the palm of his hand when he picked it up and stared, and knew what it was.
There was a moment as he watched it-all the rage, all the frustration-when fear hovered over him, a storm cloud rumbling before the first clap of thunder. Yet despite the heat, the red, the hardness it had, it was more than anything something comforting, something familiar.
