the chair next to me. His chinos rode up to display glossy muscular calves, pale in front, sunburned in back, and completely hairless. Later he told me that he shaved his legs, something to do with the aerodynamics of cycling. But at that moment all I could think of was those eerie sexless angels gazing blindly from their ramparts at Rossetti Hall. He smelled of sweat and sun and 3-IN-ONE oil.
“Well then.”
He had a sweet voice, boyish, with that clipped prep school delivery that produces the faintest echo of an upper-crust British accent. Unexpectedly my heart was pounding. I closed my book and started to shove it back into my bag, when he leaned across his desk and peered up at me. His eyes were a piercing sea blue, startlingly bright against his sunburned cheeks. He had a sharp chin, a narrow, slightly upturned nose. The sort of handsome yet delicate face that you find in doomed matinee idols, James Dean or Rudolph Valentino. But his glasses were cheap and very dirty and seemed out of place. They might have been part of a bad disguise, Cary Grant as bumbling professor, or some ridiculous bit of stage business—
He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and looked away.
It was the Mad Hatter’s question to Alice, of course. I knew it because I had directed a children’s production of the play at home that summer. And now this boy was sitting there like it was the secret password, waiting for me to come up with the right retort. I remembered the feather in my knapsack. I remembered the figures in my room the night before, the rows of angels flanking my window. I shivered.
Something truly weird was happening. Some kind of test, some bizarre initiation that I hadn’t been warned of. My fingers tightened on the edge of my desk as I raised my head.
He was still staring at me. And suddenly, inexplicably, more than anything I had ever wanted before, I wanted him to like me. Wanted him to keep on looking at me like this: eyebrows raised, almost smiling—not snidely but gently, encouragingly, as though to say
And the crazy thing was, I did.
The almost-smile disappeared. He removed his glasses and peered at me more closely. He looked dismayed, but also confused. All the glory faded from his beautiful face, the way the blue drains from a cornflower after it’s been picked.
My heart sank. Something had gone wrong, his face showed it. He hadn’t expected me to know the answer—and why should he? Still…
“That’s right,” he said. He folded his hands on his desk, frowning. I felt idiotic and about fifteen years old, as if I were waiting to hear I hadn’t made the cut for the cheerleading squad. But I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was just my homesickness, the terror that I would never make another friend in my life. That I would never wear the right clothes or say the right thing again. But somehow, it seemed that everything hung on whether he liked me or not.
There was a long moment when I could hear the soft conversation of the others at the front of the room, the sound of a pen scratching on paper. Then, abruptly, he stretched a hand toward me and grinned.
“Oliver Wilde Crawford.”
I looked into those sea blue eyes and nodded slowly. As suddenly as it had appeared, his doubt was gone. We might have grown up together, played Ringolevio in the summer twilight, been betrothed as children. For a moment I could only stare, until he nudged me.
“Sweeney,” I said. I took his outstretched hand. On his shirt cuff a watch had been drawn in blue ballpoint ink, the hands pointing to four o’clock. Always time for tea. “Sweeney Cassidy.”
“Ah hah.” Oliver slumped back into his chair. His eyes narrowed. “Sweeney. You’re from someplace very cold. Maine?”
I shook my head. “New York. Why?”
He drew an imaginary line from my velvet-clad knees down to my boots. “It was cold in my room,” I said defensively.
“Of course it was.” He nodded, tugging at the collar of his oxford cloth shirt. “I rode my bike down from Newport,” he went on. He spoke so quickly that I had to lean forward to make sure I didn’t miss a word. “A 103 Vega, I traded my twelve-string for it—1964 Gibson, with that kind of marbled bakelite detailing around the frets? That guy from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators had one just like it. Everything else’s coming in a trunk. Greyhound. I didn’t get here till yesterday night, took me three days, no change of clothes, I washed these this morning.”
He held out his arm and I touched the cuff above the ballpoint wristwatch. It was damp, but I barely had time to register that before his hand shot back, swooping the hair from his eyes, and he continued.
“So New York. Manhattan? Detour from the High School for Performing Arts? Or no, NYU film school but then you saw that Truffaut movie and—”
He cuffed my boot. “—here you are, Iphigenia in Northeast, our own Voila! And you’re taking Warnick’s class,” he added approvingly, adjusting his glasses. “Have you seen the pre-Columbians yet?”
I blinked. I was sweating so heavily I was surprised there wasn’t a pool at my feet. “Pre-Columbians?”
“At Dumbarton Oaks. We can go this afternoon. They open at two.” He glanced down at his wrist. “Can you borrow a bike? Or the 63 bus goes there.”
I felt a faint buzz at my temples, a thrumming sound that spread across my skull and down my spine. I felt stoned; at least, I couldn’t make any sense out of what Oliver was saying, although he seemed to think he was carrying on a normal conversation.
“The bus,” I said.
Oliver nodded. “Okay,” he said, pleased. “Sweeney, huh? Mockingbirds outside your window last night, near the Convent of the Sacred Heart? O sacred head surrounded?” He tilted his head sideways, gazing at me with glittering eyes.
I stared back, nodding like I had some idea what he was talking about. If he wasn’t so unabashedly beautiful, you’d think he was nuts. But this was Oliver’s peculiar gift—one of them, at least—that if you didn’t understand him, or were confused (and I usually was), or even just bored, you always felt like it was
“Tom O’Bedlam,” he said, and gave my chair a little kick by way of urging me to join the fun.
I swallowed and riffled the pages of
“Dumbarton Oaks,” I said. “‘Let us go and make our visit.’” It was the only line of Eliot I could remember.
Oliver nodded excitedly. “Right!” He removed his glasses, spun them by an earpiece. “Now, we’ll have to eat first—”
He rattled on, more unfamiliar names. Blue mirrors and Georgetown and numbers, 330 and six-oh-five, but was that a time or a bus or an address? It was my first exposure to one of Oliver’s odd monologues, composed equally of literary and private allusions and delivered at breakneck speed in his prep school voice, punctuated by dramatic tugs at his long hair and glasses. I nervously twirled a lock of my own hair and just kept nodding.
But Oliver didn’t care. Oliver just kept on talking, smiling that loopy grin that let you know he’d spent a lifetime being loved by everyone he’d ever met.
“…so we’ll hit the Blue Mirror, hardly worth the transfer anyway, save your quarters for the Rockola at Gunchers and some Pall Malls, excellent sort of sub-Deco architecture and—”
Behind us footsteps echoed down the hall and then stopped. I glanced away from Oliver to see a figure standing in the doorway. A somewhat hesitant figure, the carnival light from our classroom’s windows broidering it
