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the slippery rubber rim curiously, trying to figure out how thé thing worked. Then the bathroom door opened, and Joey walked out, naked from the shower. Danny couldn’t keep from looking at his penis, which was hanging down out of what seemed to him an astounding quantity of pubic hair.
    â€œSo you found that stuff, hey, kid?” Joey said as he pulled on his underwear. He smiled. “How old are you?”
    â€œAlmost twelve,” Danny said.
    â€œYou know what it’s for?” He came close, put his hand on Danny’s thin back. “Yeah, you’ll know,” he said. “You’ll know all about that soon enough.”
    He turned from Danny and pulled a red T-shirt over his head. “Your sister,” he said. “Your sister—has one fucking fantastic voice.”
    â€œI like to hear her sing too,” Danny admitted.
    â€œYeah, well, she is good at a lot of things,” Joey said, picking up thediaphragm. He smiled. “I’ll bet you already can’t wait to get laid,” he said, “can you?”
    Danny turned around, and Joey laughed.
    After that Danny didn’t like Joey, though he longed to see him naked again. This was an essential contradiction he was bound to come up against again and again throughout his life.
    ___________
    It was Joey, not April, who concocted the interest scale. He complained that Danny talked too much, and it was true: Danny was given to repeating the plots of movies he’d seen, or books he’d read for school, or National Geographic specials about termite colonies.
    April sat him down one day to discuss it. “All adults,” she said, “before they say anything, think about the interest scale. They think to themselves, ‘This thing I’m about to say, where does it rank on the interest scale? Is it a one? Is it a ten?’ The rule is, Don’t say anything under eight.”
    Danny took the interest scale seriously. He thought it was an essential fact of adulthood that one should have to measure oneself against some common rule. And yet he had questions: Were shy or silent people shy or silent because they had nothing worthwhile to say? Danny could think of plenty of adults (Joey Conway among them) who, in his opinion, neglected to consult the interest scale, as well as others who were quiet, but who he suspected would have had plenty to say if they’d wanted to.
    He asked his sister about this. She said, “These questions rate about a three-point-four.” It was a mean period in her life in which it seemed Danny couldn’t win, couldn’t say anything without her or Joey laughing and shaking their fingers at him like old-fashioned schoolteachers. “Now, Danny, remember the interest scale!” But the interest scale worked. In a matter of weeks Danny moved from excessive talkativeness into a state of almost painful shyness, in which he barely said anything at all. April didn’t seem to notice. She still liked to have himaround, sitting on the big beanbag chair in her room, like a kind of mascot. Her friends offered him pot and alcohol, both of which he steadfastly refused.
    As for Joey, he remained in the picture, sleeping with April every night on the big mattress she had spread on the floor of her room, plucking his guitar while she practiced his songs. Sometimes he came by the house for dinner with Nat and Louise. While Louise cooked, he and Danny played long games of Spit, the cards slapping and flying in a frenzy of motion, all the while Danny imagining situations in which Joey once again took off his clothes.
    ___________
    The first songs Joey and April performed were written by Joey. They were by and large bad—angry anthems decrying the wrongs being perpetrated by the university’s administration. At the coffeehouse debut, Danny sat in the front row with April’s housemates, Paula and Phyllis, nice girls with vaguely leftist sympathies, while on the stage