“Goddamn, I wonder if she knows. I wonder how miserable they’ll-”

            Ruth Balliol came to the door, knocking lightly on the lentil.

            “Mom?”

            “Lincoln, you’ve got company.”

            “Well, the more the merrier,” Balliol spreading his hands out, and Matt Mercurio entered the room.

            “Mom, Matt. I want to know.: if you are gay, then you decide you’re going to get a girlfriend anyway… what does that make you?”

            Matt cocked his head and said, “I’m the last person to answer that question.”

            Balliol’s mother said, “It makes you British in the nineteen-twenties. Or American in the twenty-first century.”

            She smiled, and then she was gone.

            “Goodbye, Widow Balliol,” Matt purred and Balliol rapped him on the head.

            “Hey, no gawking at my mother.”

            “Your mother’s beautiful..”

            “Yes, so am I. Gawk at me.”

            Matt sat on the bed, vacantly gawking at Balliol, and then he said, “Is that enough.”

            “More than enough.”

            “Now,” Matt was wearing his book bag, which Balliol and Sully both thought was strange, and he pulled it off to reach for something.

            “What’s this?” Balliol began, but Sully took it from him and said, “Genoa College.”

            Matt shrugged,  looking pleased at himself, though Balliol couldn’t tell why.

            In front of a brick building happy young people with back packs were walking back and forth, sharing secrets, telling jokes. A girl sat on the lip of a water found eating a sandwich and  Sully read, “Genoa College, a convenient commute between Columbus and Cartimandua…. Blah blah blah,” he opened it up and read quietly while Matt explained.

            “I think I’m going to go. I sort of want to stay home,” he was telling them. “I think this will be a great place. I feel like I lost a part of myself last year. And I haven’t felt good. I mean, I didn’t feel good until I came back here. I don’t want to leave and I don’t want to go to Cartimandua College—”

            At this, Sully looked up and made a gagging noise.

            “Exactly,” Matt said. “This place seems like a perfect compromise. I think we could go down and look at it.”

            “We?” Balliol said.

            “Well, yeah,” Matt sounded mildly offended.  “What would be so wrong with all of us going?”

            “Like kids on a TV show?””

            “Oh, Bailey, you gotta admit that’s kind of cool,” Sully told him.

            Balliol opened his mouth to say something… something both of his friends assumed would be contrary, and then they saw the switch in his expression, and he said, “All right. Okay. You may have a point. Let’s go down and see this place.”

            “Should we call the others?” Sully said.

            “The others?” Balliol said. “Have all six off us going to this school?”

            “Yeah.”

            Balliol looked at both of them, and then shrugged.

            “Why not?”   

“Are you fucking me?” Mason said nearly dropping his cigarette on the bed.

            “Mason, the last thing we need is a fire in this house,” Tommy warned him.

            “No,” Addison said. “No one is fucking you. Well, maybe Swain is, but that’s not my business.”

            “You’re funny,” Mason made a face at him. “When you’re not gross.”

            “But no,” Addison replied. “I’m not fucking you. I got a scholarship to Penn Sate. It came through. I’m going. Mom and Dad are proud as shit and  we’re going down to look at it.” He took a hand through his dark hair. “I’m even going to cut off my lovely locks and be all presentable and shit. Finally, I’ve done something to make my parents proud.”

            And then Addison said, “Actually, my parents never knew half the shit I did. But finally I’ve done something that… I guess I can tell them about.”

            “Addison, that’s not true,” Tommy went on in a tender voice. “I’m sure your parents are proud of you for lots of reasons. Mine aren’t of me,” he added reflexively. “But that’s not exactly my fault.  And I’m sure yours are of you.”

            Addison exchanged glances with Mason for only a second and then said, “Well, maybe. But I think they were worried about me. And now they don’t have to be.”

“DOES ANYONE HAVE TO BE?”

            “Have to be what?” Addison said after Tommy had gone back to his room.

            “Worried about you?”

            “What’s that mean?”

            Mason shrugged. “I don’t know. Penn State. I never even knew you applied.”

            “It was a long shot,” Addison said. “It was a just in case, wouldn’t that be nice school. I didn’t think I’d really get in.”

            “But now you’re going?”

            “Yeah,” Addison said. “And then. It’s only a few hours away. And you know what? You could go too!”

            “No, I couldn’t. No, I don’t want to,” Mason decided very quickly. “And you’re right. It is only a few hours away. It’s a new life for you.”

            Addison stuck out his bottom lip and said, “Well, I guess.”

            “But, I mean, that’s the real reason. It’s a new life.”

            Addison waited for him to go on.

            “Tommy had a point. Your parents are proud no matter what. They don’t…really know about your life, any of our lives. But you know about yours, and I think maybe you want to be proud of yourself and this is something you’ve done that makes your proud. Even though you downplay it. And it’s a chance to get away from… All the stuff.”

            “You mean like Becky?”

            “Yeah,” Mason nodded. “And even Bonnie.”

            “Bonnie,” Addison said with something like sadness.

            “You love her?”

            “I like her.”

            “You think she’ll last?”

            “She’s really good friends with Swain, isn’t she?”

            “Yeah,” Mason was surprised by that.

            There was a ring at the doorbell.          

“I don’t know if she can survive the long distance thing,” Addison said. And then he admitted:

“I don’t know if we would survive anyway… Considering how we met.”

How Bonnie and Addison had met was a circumstance Mason knew only vaguely, but never inquired on. It was something Addison never felt entirely good about, and they stayed away from the subject.

The door burst open, and very much unlike a shady subject, Lincoln Balliol, Matt Mercurio and Sullivan Reardon entered on the surprised Mason and Addison while Balliol announced:

“OH, DO I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU!”

Sully was leaving the house when he tapped Balliol on the shoulder and said, “Wait a moment?”

“What?”

“Stay back,” Sully told him, and went toward the garage. Balliol followed him for a moment, but Sully repeated: “Stay back.”

Sully had gotten really big on the whole I’m the oldest business in the last year. It was all he said now, like eight months made a different. Balliol watched the gangly boy with the off blond hair head toward the Darrow’s garage which was surrounded by weeds and between their house and the McGovern’s.

Sully stepped through the dry grasses and then looked into the window. A blond man with a beautiful face looked back at him. He was unshaven and a little dirty, but still good to look at, Sully though. Like an angel who had fallen on hard times. A scar ran across his lower lip to his chin and his face disappeared nearly as soon as Sully looked at it.

“Hello,” the voice came from behind him.

“Hello,” Sully repeated. “I was just…”

But now Balliol had joined them, and the young man turned to him and said, “Hello!”

“Hi, yourself,” said Balliol.

“Can I help you?” the young man was in brown trousers and an open shirt over a tee shirt. He was pounding a wrench against the palm of his hand.

“I was just…” Sully began. “I saw you on the Darrow’s property and I just…”

“He wanted to know who the hell you were?” Balliol concluded.

“Well,” The young man smiled at them sort of stupidly. He was smaller than Sully, a little shorter than Balliol. He looked like someone from someplace else and he was very pale with shaven reddish brown hair and a reddish blond goatee. If not for the goatee he would have looked about twelve.

“I’m Dan,” he smiled broadly and held out his hand.

“I’m Sully,” Sully began, but Balliol brushed this away with a hand and said, “And who the hell is Dan?”

“Bailey,” Sully said gently.

Balliol was just about to say that if Sully wasn’t gay and this man didn’t have a pretty face then he might be a little suspicious too, but he didn’t. He was getting better about not saying everything that came to mind.

“Are you all friends of Mason?” Dan said.

“Yeah,” Sully said.

“You must be Balliol,” Dan said. “You couldn’t be anybody else.”

“I certainly couldn’t be.”

“And Tommy and Addison are… where?”

“Which brings us back to: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?”

“Oh,” Dan remembered himself. “I’m Dan Mitchum. Mason’s uncle.”

“You never told me you had a white uncle!”

“You never told me you had a white father,” Mason said. “Until I saw him. Besides,” Mason was sliding the closet door closed and preparing to leave his room, “He’s not white. Or at least, his mother—my grandmother—isn’t.”

“He’s not like a half uncle,” said Addison who had just gone out there. “I mean, shit, that guy’s whiter than me.”

“He plays in a grunge metal band so you bet your ass he’s whiter than you,” Mason said. “He just… My mother turned out darker. Not dark. I mean, you’ve seen her. But Dan just turned out—”

“Dude, your uncle turned out white!” Addison shook his head. “That’s fucked up! How do you get through life like that?”

“I’ll have to ask him, Add,” Mason said, heading out of the room.

“I would suspect,” Balliol murmured, “fairly uneventfully. Would that we were all that lucky.”

“Oh, shush, you get to be a millionaire.”

“I think,” Balliol reflected, “being invisible or being highly visible are the best ways to survive. Everything else is just… trouble.”

“Dan, when did you get here!” Mason shouted as he caught his uncle by the hands and they swung around for a second. Dan was just crazy. Dan was where Mason had gotten his craziness from. He was just like Savannah in some ways. In fact Mason thought that Dan had once had a crush on his aunt. He was a year younger than her.

“I got here this morning. Just been mucking around in the garage.”

“Shed,” Sidney corrected, offhandedly. “Are you about to explain why you’ve been mucking around there?” Sidney said.

“Cause I need a place to stay?”

Sidney raised an eyebrow. “Is this where I play twenty questions?”

“Look, Sid. I fucked around and got evicted. So I climbed in the Topaz and drove here.”

“You could stay in the house,” Mason offered.

“I need my own space.”

“That’s just stupid,” Sidney muttered.

“No it isn’t,” Mason and Dan said at once. Then they looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“Things have been so shitty lately,” he said. “Kim gone… all of that business. I can’t believe I’m divorced. I’m divorced and twenty-seven and living in a shed with a broken down Topaz. I’m officially white trash.”

“You’re playing it white these days?”

Dan shrugged, “Only when I’m trash,” he told Sidney.

“Now, look,” Sidney told him, “this just foolish. You can stay in the house and not out in that battered old shed like some… like white trash.”

“Yeah, we’ve got Tommy living here,” Mason volunteered. “And he really is white trash.”

“No, it’s like I said,” Dan told them, “I need space. Is it alright if I stay there, Sid?”

“Well…” Sidney let out a long breath and shook his head while he said: “Of course it’s all right. Should I call Keisha?”

“Fuck no!” Dan cried.

Sidney thought about this and said, “Well, yes. You might want a break from her for a moment.”

Mason murmured, “Who wouldn’t?”

“So, Mason,” Dan was saying as they were sweeping up the garage, “How is Savannah doing?”

“She’s good.”

“She’s not still with that Bobby guy, is she?”

“No.”

“Good, he was an asshole.”

Dan stopped and struck a pose, rubbing his chin.

“So... if I gave her a call?”

“Uh…”

“Uh… what?”

Mason looked for a way to phrase this.

“You could call her,” he said, at last. “You could totally, completely call her and she would be glad to see you.”

“But she’s with someone?” Dan realized.

Mason nodded painfully:

“For about a year and a half now.”