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  “I have something,” I said after a while, reaching into my pocket, figuring he’d like this. “I have a note from Danny. Well, from a friend of Danny’s, originally written by Danny. She gave it to me today.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Haven’t read it yet.”

  Chuck looked surprised—only for a second, but I saw it, his face flexing, then relaxing back to neutral. He leaned slightly forward. “Maybe you want to talk about why you haven’t read it yet.”

  I sighed. “Can I just read it?” I said. “I thought you’d be excited.”

  “Are you excited?”

  I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “No,” I said, the word drawn out and plaintive. Chuck’s questions brought out an achy weariness that, once elicited, felt ever-present, as if it’d been trailing me all along.

  “Okay, why don’t you just read it?” he said, sounding a little resigned. I was, I knew, a source of ongoing or at least regular disappointment to Chuck.

  I unfolded the paper, already regretting this, trying to tamp down a nervous feeling that rose in me. “ ‘Min,’ ” I began, and then stopped to clear my throat. “ ‘This is so boring. Madame Guignan looks like a penguin. What are you doing this weekend? We’re going to Haber’s after the game. You should come with us. Bring Penny. Chemanski thinks she’s hot. Write me back. I’m bored as shit.’ ”

  That was it.

  Chuck watched me, waiting for a reaction. I watched him, doing the same.

  “There you go,” I said, “my deep and introspective brother.” But that wasn’t what I was really thinking. I didn’t tell Chuck that Mme. was abbreviated incorrectly to Mdm. and penguin was spelled pain.g‘-wim and that Danny had dropped the apostrophes from Haber’s and I’m, and that he’d used a homonym for write me back so it came out right me back. And that there was barely a period in the whole thing, most of the words running one right into the next. I didn’t tell Chuck that all of that gave me a bad feeling, the way Danny came across as little and stupid.

  Chuck didn’t know anything about Abernathy, about how before we moved to Fairfield, Danny had been scrawnier than David Nelson. He used to get teased all the time, and not just because of his size, but because he was dumb. All through middle school he’d been terrible at reading out loud, his words coming in a slow, unintelligible sputter. He brought home papers scrawled in red, with notes from teachers about needing to talk to my parents. He had to go get a bunch of tests and was given a constellation of diagnoses from dyslexia to dysgraphia to ADD. By ninth grade he spent parts of his days in what they called a resource room, which was basically special ed. He came home one time with a crusty shine at the back of his head, leftovers from an egg someone had thrown at him.

  Throughout, he had a joking sort of vulnerability, a self-deprecating humor that made him the magnet of our household. At the dinner table he would go on long riffs about how they made kids do math with colored felt squares in the resource room (like they’re going to hurt themselves with a regular multiplication table), or about how Jerry who sat next to him had a hole in the back of his skull that he would let people stick a finger into for a quarter, or how it wasn’t Danny’s fault that he got confused about prepositions when he was writing (If those words are so important, why are they so little and annoying?). “Mississippi,” he’d say, “that’s an important word.” He’d sing: “M-I-S-S, I-S-S, I-P-P-I.” My parents were quick to laugh at his silliness, even when it wasn’t particularly witty or clever, which it often wasn’t.

  He shared an easy rapport with them that I could never quite muster. My parents, I knew, were mostly befuddled by my studied seriousness. How, I wanted to know, did anyone ever come up with the big bang theory to begin with? Where exactly was East Timor, and why were people there so angry? “Was the milkman a Nobel laureate?” my father often joked to my mother. My mother tried to turn every conversation back to things like why didn’t I grow my hair out or get my ears pierced. “Madame Librarian,” Danny often said when I tried to start dinner table conversation, making my parents chuckle. And I would chuckle too. There was something soft in such jibes, as if he were poking me only as hard as he poked himself.

  But then the summer after his ninth grade we moved to Fairfield and he grew three inches and his voice dropped and he spent every day in his room lifting weights and panting through a series of ever-increasing sets of sit-ups and push-ups. The boxes weren’t even unpacked, and an unending stench of warm sweat wafted from his room. He drank powdery energy shakes for breakfast. He had three servings of whatever we ate for dinner. Dad was proud, talking to him about what to bench safely, when to use the help of a spotter. Mom was nervous but relieved; you could see it in her face, the searching way she would stare at him across the table, trying to figure out who this man-boy was. I would catch her smiling at him when he wasn’t looking. Danny started running a mile, then two, then three a day. He swam laps at the community pool.

  Mom and Dad set him up with a tutor, who came over three nights a week and Saturdays too, sitting at our kitchen table and trying to make Danny’s tongue wrap around words like intriguing and thoroughfare and physiology. Danny would press his fist to his temples and stomp his feet against the floor. Afterward he would stand in the doorway of my bedroom and tell me how lucky I was not to need a tutor. “The dude’s mouth smells like dog crap,” he’d say, “and he sits like one inch from me.” He would come up to me then, imitating his tutor, sticking his face right in my face and breathing heavily onto my nose, and I would laugh. “You so smaht,” he’d say in a fake Chinese accent, pulling the corners of his eyes back. “You so rucky cuz you so smaht, Rydia.” I would laugh and laugh, more than the comments merited. Those were long, lonely months. I was twelve and scared, in a new town, friendless. My parents were even further away and fuzzier than usual, preoccupied by the wallpaper that had to come down from the bathroom and the ivy to be pulled from the yard. Danny was what I had.

  By the end of summer, he’d made a deal with my parents: he’d do ninth grade over if they’d take him out of special ed. My parents agreed. So by the time he started Franklin, he was big and new and full of the pent-up, vengeful charisma of someone who’d had to fight his way to it. The football coach took him as a late walk-on even though he’d missed summer practices, and his first girlfriend, the catlike and breathy Hindy Newman, followed shortly after. His dumbness hardly mattered anymore; it was muted by his repetition of ninth grade and, more important, almost expected of a standout athlete, which he quickly became, attacking opponents with praise-worthy viciousness.

  My entrance into the seventh grade made barely a blip, save for the girl in science who complained to the teacher that she wanted to be lab partners with one of her friends instead of “that new girl” and the three boys in PE who took to imitating the way I ran, their legs splaying out at their sides as if in need of stabilizing braces. Each night Danny would come home late after practice, sweeping past me up into his sweaty, dank room as if I were a museum piece, a relic of a forgotten era. One night after a particularly bruising day—no one would sit with me at lunch, my haggish new English teacher said I had “misapprehended” the themes of The Old Man and the Sea in my first assignment—I went into his room as I had many nights before, slumped against the wall, and waited to begin one of our lazy, aimless conversations. I wanted to be distracted. Danny was good for distraction, but this night he lay on his bed, perched on his elbows, flipping through a notebook. I couldn’t see what he was looking at. I knew he knew I was standing there.

  “What are you studying?” I finally asked.

  “None of your business,” he said.

  “No, seriously,” I said, and flopped on the end of his bed.

  “Go the fuck away, Lydia,” he said, scowling at me. His face was so wide and squarish now, barely even his face anymore. I stared at the strange blue veins of his biceps. It was a stunning moment, one that lingered in my mind for years, not because it was particularly dramatic
. Likely it was a moment he soon forgot. But it marked for me the first stinging rebuke, the first appearance of the casual cruelty that had come from apparently nowhere but would stick, would become simply who Danny was, or at least who he was to me.

  My parents, as they cleaned his uniforms and bandaged his injuries and listened raptly to stories of scrimmages, win/loss records, and tackles, fell easily into the role of devoted fans. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to do with myself. Now when he made fun of me at the kitchen table with a screeching imitation of my voice, a pointed Enough already in the middle of one of my stories, it did not strike me as jocular, it did not seem like I was in on the joke. The shift felt seismic to me, the pitch of sudden anger directed my way, as though I were somehow responsible for all those years of teasing, as if retaliation upon me were the thing that would right those past wrongs.

  And even though his neck grew thick as a stump and he was trailed by a dusty cloud of new friends, I was onto him. Even then, I was onto him. I had some sense of the particular combination of chance, timing, and circumstance that had rescued Danny from himself. Had we not moved from Abernathy exactly when we had, had he not grown exactly when he did, had he not been given long summer months to prepare, he never would have completed his transformation so fully and dramatically. It wasn’t the diet or the exercise or even the determination that had changed Danny. It was the precise alignment of events falling exactly in his lap at exactly the right time that had turned his life into a fairy tale.

  Dumb luck, I used to sing to myself, over and over again, as he breezed past me or as he said smirkingly, “New hairdo?” Dumb luck. Dumb luck. Dumb luck. It soothed me.

  But now here was this note, full of paingwim and Im. He was still that stupid little kid, and as I sat in Chuck’s stifling office, it brought me no solace. Danny had spelled Chemanski wrong, one of his best friends, who’d played football alongside him for three years. She-manskee, Danny had written. And it made me wonder where he was now. Not in the daydreamy way I usually wondered, picturing him stretched out on some nice lady’s lawn chair in a warm-weather state or on a surfboard along a coastline. I wondered now if his luck had changed back, if midnight had come and gone, if someone or something had come to prey on this dumb, pretty jock and set terrible things loose upon him.

  When I got home, Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, his face clenched and red, his fist balled around a dirty envelope and an equally dirty scrap of paper. It looked like a page torn from a phonebook. Melissa Anne. Melissa Anne wrote us every few weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less, always on random pages—a corner torn from a newspaper, the back of an advertising circular—though the block-print penmanship was so neat, so precise and perfectly proportioned, it may as well have been sent on the triple-lined paper of grade school. There was never a return address, aside from the two words of her name. The postmark sometimes read Fairfield, sometimes a neighboring suburb.

  Dad was still in his suit, his tie tightened around his neck. He had his coat on. His briefcase sat at his feet. When he saw me, he just shook his head. His eyes glittered. Melissa Anne’s letters were always the same, her words printed neatly in the margins of the page or on top of existing text, spaced like a couplet:

  I had a vision of your son.

  He is buried in the ground.

  The first line never varied. The second did: His mouth is filled with dirt. He is encircled by worms. He is smothered by silt.

  That was it. Every letter, only two lines long.

  My father’s eyes searched the table now, his chest rising and falling. Melissa Anne had become a flashpoint for my parents, getting under their skin in a particularly powerful way. Other letters, inappropriately evangelical ones about what Jesus could do for us in times of crisis if only we’d accept him into our hearts or long, rambling ones about the importance of strict discipline in the home to prevent this sort of tragedy, left them unmoved. But Melissa Anne got to them. Maybe it was the childlike writing or the simplicity of the message or my parents’ impotence in the face of it or the way it pointed clearly to a larger, systemic impotence. The police had been unable to identify the sender and eventually told my parents her letters were meaningless—if they were a legit lead, they’d contain more information, and if they were threats, they’d contain a demand of some sort, ransom or otherwise. There are a lot of kooks out there, the police reminded my parents, which was supposed to be reassuring.

  “Can’t you dust for prints or something?” my father had yelled at one squinty-eyed officer who’d stood in our kitchen the day we’d received Melissa Anne’s seventh or eighth letter. The officer just looked at my father with a pitying smile, my dad another poor schmuck who’d watched too many cop shows. “You can’t,” he said with the stern sympathy police seemed so well trained in, “get worked up about every nut job out there. Ignore it. Throw them out as soon as they arrive. Don’t even open them.”

  But my parents were incapable. My father seemed to tear into Melissa Anne’s grimy but meticulously addressed envelopes with a vigor rarely seen otherwise. He shook the torn page now. “What are we paying Howard for?”

  Our private investigator hadn’t been able to find the sender either, or do much of anything else. Aside from coming over and rapping his knuckles on our countertop while wearing a suit a size too small, and reciting obvious facts everyone already knew, Howard seemed largely to specialize in sending my parents expensive invoices for amorphous things like “casework” and “background analysis.”

  My dad was staring past me with a steely, tight-jawed look, as if he could punch something. I’d never seen my dad punch anything, never even really seen him yell before all of this started. He’d once been the sort of guy who just flopped easily into his chair at the end of the day, amusing himself with corny jokes. What do you get when you cross a parrot and a shark? A bird that talks your ear off. A hula dancer and a boxer? Hawaiian Punch. He grasped the phonebook page so hard now his arm was shaking, as if by will alone he could discern or destroy it.

  David Nelson came over later and sat at my desk while I sat propped against my headboard with a bunch of pillows. We were trying to finish Richard III for Mrs. Bardazian’s English class. David loved crazy Queen Margaret and he kept reading her lines out loud: “Hie thee to hell for shame, and leave this world, thou cacodemon!”

  “Cacodemon’s a good one,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. Oliver sat at the foot of my bed, licking his front paws incessantly, the sound wet and distracting. I told him to knock it off, but the dog eyeballed me sideways and kept going.

  “Is it better than … hang on,” David said, paging through the play. “Better than elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog?”

  “Cacodemon ’s better.”

  “Even though it’s redundant? Caco means bad. Cacophony.” He said the last word slowly, as if I were being an idiot. “So she’s calling him a bad demon. What other kind is there?” He looked smirky and very proud of himself. Twisting himself around in my desk chair, he cracked his back.

  “Well, what’s an abortive hog?” I said. “A premature pig? It’s a more powerful insult to call someone a terrible demon than a piglet.”

  “Abortive also means deformed,” David Nelson said. “And elvish-marked means possessed by elves. Who are supposed to be spiteful little creatures. That’s far more creative than just calling someone demonic.” He had a zit the size of a mosquito bite on the side of his nose.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Margaret’s insane anyway.”

  “Not as insane as Richard,” he said.

  “Richard’s not insane,” I said, just to fight. At times things went off-kilter between David Nelson and me, our normal interactions becoming suddenly grating. It could be exhausting, always trying to prove who was smarter. “He’s just a megalomaniac.”

  “He kills his brother and his nephews and tries to marry his niece. That’s not insane?”

  “Knock it off,” I yelled at Oliver, who quit the licking for
a second. I patted his head with my foot to make up for yelling. “It’s too simple to just call him insane,” I said, not even believing what I was saying. “He’s got a clear political agenda. All his actions are in ser vice to that.”

  “His madness is inextricably linked to his megalomania. He used his madness to become king and then being king only turned him into more of a lunatic. You’re being intentionally obtuse if you’re just reading this as the story of a political schemer.”

  “Jesus. Stop lecturing me.” It came out more harshly than I’d intended.

  David Nelson’s face went slack, his mouth pulling down at the corners. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” I said, but not convincingly. Oliver had already gone back to the licking.

  We read for a while, David hunched over his book at my desk. I could see the gray-striped elastic of his underpants coming out the back of his pants. “Hell-hound,” he said, but tentatively now. “That’s a pretty good one.”

  I ignored him.

  There was a knock at my door, and my mom came in holding a mug in each hand. Oliver stood on the bed, wagging his tail like crazy.

  “I made you floats,” she said, practically shouting, though her voice was frayed, as if she were at the tail end of a bout of laryngitis. There was something both familiar and creepy in this, the sort of oddly placed and invasive gesture she used to be more temperamentally prone to but that had disappeared entirely of late. She was smiling now, though she looked like she’d been crying recently, her eyes red-rimmed and mongoloidal, the tiny veins around her nose bluer and more spidery than usual. Her hair was unbrushed, the back matted down and clumpy.

  “Thank you very much, Mrs. Pasternak,” David said in the kiss-ass voice he always used with my parents. “Delightful,” he said as we both took our mugs. I wondered where she’d gotten the ice cream and the pop. These were not items we kept around these days. Had she made a trip to the store? Unlikely. The whole thing made me uneasy.