Jimmy devoured algebra with Mrs. Perry, and then moved into precalculus with a different teacher.
Mrs. Perry was always badgering Jimmy to set up a meeting with his parents, and she reached out to them directly a few times, but they both worked full-time and spoke poor English. His parents could never make the meetings at school or even carve out the time for a proper phone call. By the end of Jimmy’s seventh-grade year, he was doing college-level math coursework.
One afternoon when Jimmy was thirteen, his after-school advanced theory class went long and he was late arriving at The Gunner House. Alice said, “So what are they teaching you in your fancy classes anyway? How to turn water into wine? How to make your shit not stink?”
Jimmy laughed. “We talked about paradoxes today.”
“Para-what?”
“It’s like a statement that’s logical but contradicts itself in some way.”
Sally was combing through her hair with her fingers. She said, “So it’s both right and wrong at the same time?”
“Sort of.”
Alice said, “Say one.”
Jimmy said, “Okay. There’s a crocodile who has taken a mom’s kid. The crocodile tells the mom, I’ll give you back your kid if you correctly predict whether or not I give your kid back. So, what happens if the mom says, I predict you will not give my kid back?”
Sam blinked at him. “Then the crocodile eats the kid, duh.”
Alice said, “But the crocodile just said he’ll give it back if she guesses right, you dummy.”
“Okay,” Sam frowned. “So then the crocodile gives the kid back.”
Jimmy said, “But then he’s violating his own terms, because the mom’s prediction was wrong. See, there’s no logical solution. That’s what a paradox is.”
Sam said, “I hate this.”
Sally said, “Tell us another one.”
Jimmy said, “Okay. The Abilene paradox has to do with group behavior. It’s when everyone tries so hard to accommodate everyone else that no one ends up getting what they want.”
Alice said, “Explain.”
“You have this family sitting around. The dad says, Should we go to Abilene for dinner?”
“What’s Abilene?”
“It’s a city in Texas. But that’s beside the point.”
Alice said, “Why in God’s name would anyone want to go to Texas? Bunch of dog-diddlers.”
Mikey said, “What’s that?”
“Somebody who diddles dogs,” Alice said. “You know . . . like . . .” She screwed one finger into her other closed fist.
Lynn cried, “Gah-ross!”
“Hold up,” Jimmy said. “So, the mom says, Sure, that sounds like a nice idea, doesn’t it? And she looks at the son, who says, Sure, and the sister says, Sure, that sounds nice. So they go to Abilene for dinner. Then they get back home, and somebody says, That wasn’t fun. I would have preferred to stay home. Then they look around and realize that all four of them would have preferred to stay home. So then they can’t figure out why they went on a trip that no one wanted to go on.”
“So why did they?” Sally said.
Sam said miserably, “I don’t get this.”
Lynn snapped, “What’s the point of this?” Lynn’s moods were confounding these days. At any given moment, she could go from grouchy and distracted to giddy and overly emotive to stormy and subdued with no warning and for no apparent reason.
Sally said, “I want to understand.”
Jimmy explained, “The paradox is that because people want to do what the group wants to do, they might act against what they want individually. But if every single person is doing that, no one is getting what they want.”
It was quiet for a bit.
Sally said, “Are we like this?”
Mikey asked her what she meant.
Sally said, “Do we ever do things we don’t really want to do?”
Alice said, “Well, I know I don’t. I make sure at least one of us is getting what she wants.”
Sally laughed. “Tell us one more, Jimmy.”
“The service recovery paradox,” Jimmy said.
“What does it mean?”
“It means a customer is likely to have a higher opinion of a company after the company corrects a bad service than if there was no problem in the first place.”
Lynn said, “You mean people think something’s better if it’s fixed than if there was never anything wrong?”
Jimmy nodded.
Sam whined, “Can we puh-lease play cards now? This isn’t even math.”
Lynn said, “Is there any of that Glen’s left?”
“The vodka from the other night?” Alice said, “No, we finished that over the weekend. Don’t you remember?”
Sam said, “My uncle Randy’s coming tomorrow. He usually brings over like three cases of beer and a ham and these cleaning supplies he tries to sell to my mom, and he sticks around for about a week. I can probably snag a few of his beers.”
Alice said, “My brother’s dating some girl who’s in college. She has those mutant kind of thumbs, and I don’t like her. But I’ll be real nice and ask her if she’ll buy us something. We’ll have to give her money, though.”
Sally said, “What if the mom predicts that the crocodile will give her kid back?”
They all looked at her. “What?”
“If the mom predicts that he’ll give the kid back, then the crocodile has to give the kid back, right?”
“No,” Alice said, her face lighting up as she understood. “Remember? He only has to give it back if the mom guesses right. So if she says he’s going to give it back, he can still eat the kid without breaking his promise. It works either way.”
Jimmy nodded. He turned to Sally. “Do you get it?”
Sally nodded. “Okay.”
As the deck of cards was retrieved and conversation strayed to other topics, Jimmy noticed that Sally seemed to linger on her thoughts. Jimmy knew Sally, and Sally’s secrets, well enough to imagine what she was thinking about. He wanted to take Sally’s hand, but he didn’t dare offer this gesture in front of the group. What the two of them shared could not be made known to the others. Still, he was pleased that she liked his paradoxes. He would tell her more later that night, when it was just the two of them.
Since Sam struggled the most in school out of all of them, Jimmy was puzzled when, in early spring of their junior year of high school, Sam suddenly refused Jimmy’s help. Sam stopped bringing his homework over to The Gunner House. He laughed less at Jimmy’s jokes and wouldn’t meet his eyes. There seemed to be a quiet anger, something just below the skin.
Jimmy felt rejected and confused. Sam was his first friend within the group, and for ten years, they had watched Buffalo Bills games together at Jimmy’s house, in the wood-paneled den with green shag carpeting, a massive white ceramic cross on the wall, and a shelving unit full of Bibles and photo albums and tiny religious trinkets and figurines. During commercial breaks, Sam liked to look through the old photo albums from Jimmy’s parents’ childhoods in the old country. After a win, they would re-create plays in the backyard, diving around with Jimmy’s Nerf football. Sam loved the sandwiches Jimmy’s mother made, with oily meats and crusty bread, and he had learned to say please and thank you in Italian.
But now, in March of their junior year of high school, Sam wouldn’t even look at Jimmy when Jimmy tried to discuss the recent trade of the Bills’ second-string quarterback for a hotshot wide receiver from Dallas with well-documented legal troubles. Everyone in the city of Buffalo had their opinion on the trade, yet when Jimmy asked Sam about his, Sam murmured, “Don’t know, don’t care.”
Jimmy didn’t understand what had gone wrong. He speculated about the possibilities. Sam always liked to be at the center of things—making the loudest jokes, challenging Alice’s au
thority, setting up competitions in areas where he knew he could
win. Jimmy wondered if Sam suddenly felt ashamed that he required Jimmy’s help with schoolwork. But what had caused the change? Jimmy tried to ask him indirectly, then directly, and Sam scoffed at him as though he had requested an unreasonable favor. Even though Jimmy did not sense a change in anyone’s feelings toward him outside of Sam, he was still afraid to talk about it with any of the others, even Sally, with whom he shared almost everything. He worried that if whatever was bothering Sam were to be aired publicly, the others might come down on Sam’s side of things.
Jimmy tried to console himself with the idea that the overall group dynamic was becoming more complicated as they grew older, that change was unavoidable. Now there were pimples and breasts and untimely boners. There were Lynn’s erratic moods. There were secrets. There was a new intensity to all of them. Life felt shifty. But this was all just part of growing up, Jimmy reasoned with himself; perhaps he was reading too much into Sam’s behavior toward him.
Besides, Jimmy had other concerns outside of his friendship with Sam. Namely, his own penis. He had a love-hate relationship with the thing. He loved its appearance when hard: the pleasing, uniform pinkness of it, the handsome little ring of curled black hair that surrounded its base, the stately stiff ridge, its overall symmetry and its size. It was the right size, a great size quite frankly. He loved the victory of ejaculation, that staggering, psychedelic moment. Ohhhh, but he hated its appearance when soft. A shriveled white acorn. He hated when it betrayed him, stiffening at the wrong times, disobeying strict orders to cease and desist. And for the ultimate betrayal, Jimmy’s worst and darkest secret, his penis was entirely to blame.
Chapter 14
Sam had been in love with Sally all along. When they were little, and before they really even knew each other, he loved and admired her silver hair and her sweet smells. When they grew a bit older, he loved her teeth, the tiny, even spaces between them, her pale eyes, a little pink top she wore. By the time they were twelve, he had come to love her legs, as flawless as cream, the earliest suggestion of breasts that rose beneath her shirt, and he loved to make her laugh.
Sam had a large rotation of jokes and tricks and funny faces that he employed to entertain Sally. He could make her laugh and laugh, until she had to clap a hand over her mouth and wave for air. He loved to make her laugh because as soon as she stopped laughing, her eyes became grave. Sam was convinced that he was the only one who could save Sally from the mysterious sadness that seemed to so easily overtake her. He loved her. He would have traded all the rest of them for her, even Jimmy, his best friend since they were five years old. He would have traded his own siblings for her. His own mother.
Sam felt certain that Sally loved him, too, but he worried that she would reject him if she thought a romantic union might isolate the two of them from the other Gunners. Sally had a mild and agreeable personality—she always wanted everyone to get along, everything to be fair.
So, for Sally’s sake, Sam waited.
He watched her go from a little girl to a young woman, and his desire for her intensified.
Sam started saving money to buy Sally a ring to give to her for her sixteenth birthday. He knew she wouldn’t marry him at this young age, but he was ready to express his love to her. They were hurtling through adolescence, juniors in high school now, and he had watched serious and lasting romances form between classmates at school. He knew that if he waited too long, he would lose Sally to someone else. He had convinced himself that the rest of The Gunners would understand, maybe they would even be happy for the two of them.
Sam pruned his grandmother’s shrubs and collected recyclables from street trash, which were worth five cents apiece if he took them to the center. He had his eye on a little gold ring with an emerald heart that he had seen at JCPenney’s—green was Sally’s favorite color. Sam worked and saved and worked and saved, and finally earned the fifty-eight dollars needed to purchase the ring. It came in a beautiful red velvet box that was as soft and warm as a baby animal.
During the days leading up to Sally’s birthday, Sam made plans to meet up with her on the evening of her birthday, after dinnertime. He’d had almost no contact with Sally’s mother over the years; it seemed almost like an unspoken rule, but approaching Sally at her home was the only way he could avoid encountering any of the other Gunners who might interfere with the plan. The plan was this: He would go to Sally’s home and ask if he could take her on a walk. He would say he’d gotten something for her birthday. They would go to the park on James Street. The park wasn’t much to see—splintered fencing covered in graffiti, a tilted merry-go-round, sun-faded swings on a squealing iron frame—but it was the nicest outdoor location he could think of. He would tell her of his great love. She would be stunned, but overjoyed. She would put the ring on. The two of them would make a plan to tell the rest of The Gunners so that they wouldn’t have to hide their relationship. He would maybe and probably even kiss her.
The evening of Sally’s birthday finally arrived.
Sam combed his hair and stuffed himself into his slimmest pants.
He admired the ring, put the box in his pocket, and at eight o’clock, he left his home and walked up Ingram, his pulse beating against his skull.
At Sally’s home, Sam rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. He rang it a second time, then a third.
He knocked on the door, thinking that perhaps the bell was broken.
Was no one home? Earlier in the day when he had casually asked Sally if she had plans for her birthday, she had said that she did not and would probably just be “around.”
Sam turned back toward the street, and noticed now that Sally’s mother’s Cutlass Supreme was not parked out front. Perhaps she had taken Sally out for dinner. But the lights were on . . . Corinne was probably working late or with a boyfriend, Sam thought, and Sally was probably in there alone, wishing she had someone to spend her birthday evening with.
Although he’d never once set foot inside the home, Sam knew which side of the home Sally’s bedroom was on. He decided to make his way around to that side, to see if perhaps she was listening to music or watching TV, which had prevented her from hearing the doorbell. Sam felt a little squirrelly about sneaking around their property and snooping on her bedroom this way, but if Sally was in there by herself . . . Well, it could be perfect, and romantic, couldn’t it? Like a movie, the one with the guy holding the handwritten sign professing his love outside the girl’s house, although now Sam couldn’t remember how things had turned out for that guy and his handwritten sign.
Sam made his way around the home, and the light in Sally’s room was off. He was about to head back to his own home and formulate a new plan for tomorrow when a bit of movement from inside the bedroom caught his eye. Sam returned to the window. And it was dark in there, but he could see now that there was someone inside. There was . . . There were . . . He could see the back of Sally’s head, and the rest of her was beneath the covers. And what? There were two bodies. Sally was on top. There were hands on Sally’s head, behind her neck, and beneath the covers. There were rhythms. No. Sam felt like his knees were bending the wrong way. He felt like time did not exist.
Sam’s impulse to continue watching, to find out who, and to break into the house and strangle whoever had taken this from him, was overtaken by a swell of nausea and the impulse to get as far from this scene as he could. He ran back to the street and made his way up Ingram unevenly, loping up the street like an injured animal, face wet with tears and twisted with rage. Not back to his home, where he might encounter his mother and have to explain himself, but instead to The Gunner House.
It was dark and empty, and when Sam entered, he didn’t turn on the light but pulled the door shut behind him. He drew the ring from his pocket and threw the little red velvet box across the room and let out a painful scream. The room smelled exactly the same
way it always smelled, and Sam wept.
Who? He lay back on the mattress and closed his eyes.
It had to be one of them. Sam had been watching Sally long enough to know that she didn’t have friends outside of The Gunners. She didn’t talk to any other boys. She didn’t even give them looks.
It had to be one of them. But which one? Sam’s stomach lurched and soured at either possibility.
Sally and Mikey had been best friends before the group came together. The two of them sat together on the bus and shared an early bond, both trapped in a home with a sad-sack single parent. But Mikey was so small, so shy. He was a year younger—still just a sophomore, he was so . . . innocent. Under the covers with Sally that way? Holding her head and her neck that way?
But Jimmy was Sam’s best friend. Jimmy! How could he? Sam had never spoken of his feelings for Sally, not even to Jimmy, but how could Jimmy not know? How could Jimmy sneak in and . . . Oh, it made so much sense, of course. Those turquoise eyes. Sam knew how girls looked at Jimmy. The whiz kid. That stupid tapping code Jimmy had developed that only Sally understood . . . Jimmy could have been saying anything to her, and no one else would have ever known.
Sam’s thoughts turned to the morning several months earlier when he had gotten up at 6:00 a.m. to take the family dog out. The sun wasn’t even fully up yet, and Sam wore boots and a winter coat over his pajamas. He was groggy as he opened the door and trudged up the block with the dog, who always required a brief expedition to locate the perfect pee spot. As Sam passed Jimmy’s house, where all the lights were still off, something down by the basement storm window caught his eye. Something had appeared for a split second, as though it were about to emerge from the storm window, but then it had disappeared just as quickly back inside. Sam stared at the storm window. It was a flash of white, something that had been scared off by Sam’s presence. And now it was gone, whatever, or whoever, it was. Sam yawned and continued up the street with the dog. It could have been nothing just as easily as it could have been something.
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