“I FEEL LIKE YOU’RE KEEPING something from me,” Balliol said flatly. Sully turned to him. “If you are that’s your affair,” Balliol said. “Maybe you need to keep it to yourself. Maybe it’s someplace deep inside of you, and you can’t talk about it yet. I don’t have to know everything.” They were at Sully’s house, a rarity. Tina was still at work and Sully had actually scheduled out this whole day for he and his friend. Justin had called in the morning. It hadn’t even hurt the littlest bit...

“I was actually thinking about not telling you because I thought ‘It’s not really his business,’” Swain said as she barged into Balliol’s bedroom. “And then I thought, ‘Lincoln will find out sooner or later,’ and also I thought, ‘Well, it kind of is his business’. Besides, I do tell you everything.” Balliol, whose door had been open and was now beginning to regret this, gave Swain a look that said, “Get on with it.” “Oh, yes,” Swain said. “I’m seeing Mason. Not in a serious sense. But ...

MASON AND SULLY WERE BOTH at the house when the MacDonalds arrived. They all stood in the foyer which, Mason noted, was not like the foyers in Addison’s neighborhood, but a great hall with parquet wood floors, portraits of dead family members looking down and the light of mid June shining through a long skylight. “Aunt Ruth, Uncle John, glad to see you. Balliol,” his cousin Herse pronounced his name in an entirely uncongenial voice. “Herse,” Balliol returned in the same voice. He...

They sat on the porch steps side by side saying nothing and then suddenly, they could hear, “ “Oh, God! Oh, shit! Shit! Shit! Philip!” Sully turned around for just a brief second. He wished that Tommy wasn’t his friend so that he could just sit here and watch. Sure in the shit, Philip was fucking this chick on his sofa and, presumably, Tommy’s mother was getting fucked by the big fat buy in the back of the house. Instead of looking, Sully pretended he wasn’t concerned and said, “Why ...

The problem with Savannah was she didn’t deceive herself. She never said she was going to do a thing unless she did, or unless there was a good chance that she might do it. As wonderful as the idea of “going back to school” was, and she could afford it, she remembered what most of her friends did not. That they had been in no way academic and for them school had been nothing but a chore. So Savannah chose to read a lot instead. She had quit her job and was working at her aunt’s boutiqu...

AUNT CHLOE HAD BEEN TASTELESS. She was what people now called ghetto fabulous. Everyone was using that word now and no one knew what it meant. Once, Mason Darrow had been watching an award show and, affront of all fronts, a Black woman had misused ghetto fabulous. She had a voice like a valley girl and Mason didn’t think she was really Black anyway, but she had shown off a bedazzled, expensive cell phone and said, “Isn’t it ghetto fabulous!” No, to have something ghetto fabulous, you coul...