Kevin, I mean. Pretty well, actually.” This didn’t fly with Noel, who brapped out a laugh.
“You don’t know anyone like him . Do you expect me to believe that? You hardly ever even come to my house, Addison.” His accent abated here, for some reason, but he recovered himself. “Knew him. Shit. A’ight den, I’ll tell you. White people be crazy, though, son.” So he explained to me what he knew. That he’d heard from someone that this dude Short Mike had shot Kevin for insulting him at a party, and that he’d shot the others to dispose of witnesses and to make the cops think it was a random killing. “Thass all I heard, man. All of it.”
I didn’t believe him, on principle. How can you believe a guy who spends fifteen minutes lying to you about fucking? He’d used the shelf simile about some other notional girl’s ass before. I remembered the little-boy’s gesture he used to indicate it: stroking a new football or something. But I couldn’t call him out for lying about Kevin, any more than I could for his other lies. What would have been the point? I mean, I was the one toting around some dead kid’s permanent record. I was the weirdo . Also I had my commercial interests to think of. So smiles and sage nods all around! I shook Noel’s hand again, in the complicated, flowing way he demanded: lock, reconfigure, unlock, touch fists. His mother’s house loomed huge and cream-colored behind the gate barring the drive from public access. A tall, thin woman (presumably his mother, the former Mrs. Eliot Bradley) was crunching across the gravel in pinpoint black heels, calling out, “Noel? Noel?” She was wearing a smoke-gray suit, and her face had that leathery tan. You know: the color of a boat shoe, maybe a little lighter. Looked about as durable. “Shit, that’s my moms. Peace, son.” Noel initiated the process of hefting himself out of my car, his cherry-red shirt billowing beautifully. I took off as their gate creaked inward, terrified—for some inexplicable reason—that his tanned and oblivious mother would see me. They were embracing as I drove away, Noel twice as wide as Mrs. Bradley, and their awkward double figure dwindled in my rearview mirror. For all the harshness he’s been subjected to by his parents, Noel does not hold them accountable. He speaks of his mother and even his father with genuine—if shy—love and respect. He knows all the particulars of his father’s business dealings and his mother’s fund-raising efforts. I never once heard him make a single ironic remark about either. Which is kind of astonishing.
V .
T HE FIRST NOTABLE THING that happened when I got to school: a fight with Alex Faustner about the correct meaning of the phrase begs the question . Which she had misused seven times in a single English class. Mr. Vanderleun backed her up, and we had to go to the dictionary, and then because I was right Mr. Vanderleun got all purple and hush-voiced, and his stump waggled in fury, and by the time the whole thing was over the period had ended. For which I got an invisible wave of gratitude from everybody. Then came the assembly, which we were all looking forward to, because it would eat up another hour of class time. We were seniors, after all. And this was precisely why the admonitions from our teachers started coming. They had noticed a restlessness , a lack of initiative , a certain aloofness on our parts, and they wanted to remind us that, despite being seniors, WE WERE STILL PART OF THE KENNEDY COMMUNITY. It wasn’t phrased so explicitly. It never is, at Kennedy. We just got a general sense that our teachers were pissed, but also that they were too … what … spineless, I guess, to crack down on us. These admonitions against our laziness came compressed into the form of another college-preparedness assembly, which my entire class was forced to attend, a throng of unfamiliar black and brown faces. The G&T kids sat in their own row. It was in the back. No one paid
“You don’t know anyone like him . Do you expect me to believe that? You hardly ever even come to my house, Addison.” His accent abated here, for some reason, but he recovered himself. “Knew him. Shit. A’ight den, I’ll tell you. White people be crazy, though, son.” So he explained to me what he knew. That he’d heard from someone that this dude Short Mike had shot Kevin for insulting him at a party, and that he’d shot the others to dispose of witnesses and to make the cops think it was a random killing. “Thass all I heard, man. All of it.”
I didn’t believe him, on principle. How can you believe a guy who spends fifteen minutes lying to you about fucking? He’d used the shelf simile about some other notional girl’s ass before. I remembered the little-boy’s gesture he used to indicate it: stroking a new football or something. But I couldn’t call him out for lying about Kevin, any more than I could for his other lies. What would have been the point? I mean, I was the one toting around some dead kid’s permanent record. I was the weirdo . Also I had my commercial interests to think of. So smiles and sage nods all around! I shook Noel’s hand again, in the complicated, flowing way he demanded: lock, reconfigure, unlock, touch fists. His mother’s house loomed huge and cream-colored behind the gate barring the drive from public access. A tall, thin woman (presumably his mother, the former Mrs. Eliot Bradley) was crunching across the gravel in pinpoint black heels, calling out, “Noel? Noel?” She was wearing a smoke-gray suit, and her face had that leathery tan. You know: the color of a boat shoe, maybe a little lighter. Looked about as durable. “Shit, that’s my moms. Peace, son.” Noel initiated the process of hefting himself out of my car, his cherry-red shirt billowing beautifully. I took off as their gate creaked inward, terrified—for some inexplicable reason—that his tanned and oblivious mother would see me. They were embracing as I drove away, Noel twice as wide as Mrs. Bradley, and their awkward double figure dwindled in my rearview mirror. For all the harshness he’s been subjected to by his parents, Noel does not hold them accountable. He speaks of his mother and even his father with genuine—if shy—love and respect. He knows all the particulars of his father’s business dealings and his mother’s fund-raising efforts. I never once heard him make a single ironic remark about either. Which is kind of astonishing.
V .
T HE FIRST NOTABLE THING that happened when I got to school: a fight with Alex Faustner about the correct meaning of the phrase begs the question . Which she had misused seven times in a single English class. Mr. Vanderleun backed her up, and we had to go to the dictionary, and then because I was right Mr. Vanderleun got all purple and hush-voiced, and his stump waggled in fury, and by the time the whole thing was over the period had ended. For which I got an invisible wave of gratitude from everybody. Then came the assembly, which we were all looking forward to, because it would eat up another hour of class time. We were seniors, after all. And this was precisely why the admonitions from our teachers started coming. They had noticed a restlessness , a lack of initiative , a certain aloofness on our parts, and they wanted to remind us that, despite being seniors, WE WERE STILL PART OF THE KENNEDY COMMUNITY. It wasn’t phrased so explicitly. It never is, at Kennedy. We just got a general sense that our teachers were pissed, but also that they were too … what … spineless, I guess, to crack down on us. These admonitions against our laziness came compressed into the form of another college-preparedness assembly, which my entire class was forced to attend, a throng of unfamiliar black and brown faces. The G&T kids sat in their own row. It was in the back. No one paid
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