Now, where this thing I told her starts is with Carol. But of course I didn’t have to, like, explain much about him to her, because her school was like his school’s sister school or something, and they’d gone to the same parties and, like, school-related events a lot, so she already knew him pretty well.
I won’t say she exactly liked him. We’d talked about him once or twice; she told me she had no patience for that sort of snoopy attitude of his, and all those sorts of irritating questions he always asked people to sort of figure things out about them.
Anyways, what I told her about first were Carol’s “private satisfactions.”
I had to explain all that.
I mean, I had to explain how he sometimes lied about who he was to strangers, just to sort of impress them and see how they’d react, which she thought was idiotic and just another reason to think Carol was sort of a nut.
But what I told her was that I’d actually talked to Carol about this habit of his, because it really interested me.
At first I worried that bringing it up might embarrass him. But Carol wasn’t shy or embarrassed about it at all. Actually, I never once saw him get shy or embarrassed about anything. He was really what you might call a sort of pluperfect confident guy, which of course was maybe just an act—because he was, like I said, an actual actor in those dopey TV spots—but if it was an act, it was the best one I ever saw in my life, because he never let up on it, not even for a second.
But to tell the truth, I didn’t just talk to him about this habit of his.
What I really did was try to sort of call him to account for it; I mean ask him to explain why he did it and what was so wrong with his life that he was sort of addicted to doing it, but all he did was laugh, and not a regular happy laugh, but one of those dark laughs that basically told me he thought I just didn’t have the brains to figure it out. I told him I understood the respect thing, and how maybe it helped him fight back against potentially bratty kids who bragged about what they have, and he kind of agreed with that stuff, but he said that really wasn’t why he did it.
“It’s a rush, dude, that’s all!” is what he told me. “A total rush! I mean, I really can’t explain it. You just won’t get it unless you try it yourself.”
So one day I tried it.
I really did.
I actually did it myself, on a day when I cut school a couple years ago.
Now, I don’t cut school too often, and I told Laura that, because I knew she wouldn’t like hearing that I ever cut school, and I hardly ever did. But once in a while there would come a perfect opportunity, like if I had a note from my mom saying I had to leave early to go to the dentist or something, and after I was out of the dentist I could just skip the rest of the day if I wanted, and nobody would wonder why I was gone.
Usually I just hung out alone in garages in alleys when I cut school, so as not to get spotted by anybody who might report me to school or to my parents. And that’s just how it started on this day I was telling her about. But after a while I got bored with garages, so I figured I’d risk wandering around the streets up there across Roland Avenue, which is this big two-lane street that cuts right through my neighborhood, with all these plants and flowers growing on the median.
When I got across Roland Avenue I went all around, under the trees and past all these big houses built up on these raised yards, so when you walk past them there’s, like, a flagstone wall next to you and the yard is level with your face. I didn’t worry too much about getting spotted. Nobody knew me up there, and if anybody did see me and wondered why I was out of school, I could just slip away and hide pretty easily.
Now, this whole area across Roland Avenue was what people call the dollar side of my neighborhood, where all the doctors and lawyers and big property owners live—the really rich ones. Laura knew it was called that; anybody in my neighborhood or any of the nearby neighborhoods would, because that’s something you learn no matter where you live around here.
My side of Roland Avenue, where just regular people live, we always call the fifty-cent side. Laura knew that, too. Everybody calls it that. But up there across Roland Avenue, everybody calls it the dollar side. And even though I already told you about The Oaks, where Laura lives, and how everybody over there is rich, you have to remember how I said those are people who sort of come and go and haven’t lived there long, whereas these people on the dollar side were even richer, and their houses were the oldest of any around, and the families had lived there the longest.
I walked awhile, just sort of admiring all these huge houses—or really maybe just trying to admire them, because I couldn’t always see over those flagstone walls as high as my head and felt like I was lost in a huge, hilly maze. I remember the sky was dark with clouds and the air felt pretty heavy and sort of cold, too. Finally I came up to this country club over there, which had these big brown shingle buildings not much different from houses, only bigger, and a big inner courtyard with fenced-in tennis courts, and this golf course out back, down at
