Weights.

I

I'm tempted to begin with Brooks, the kid who turned out to be our next door neighbor, but I'd rather start with our new house, which had a fancy screened-in back porch, a laundry room on the second floor, and a finished room over the garage (which my parents' real estate lady kept calling a "frog"). No basement, though--few homes in all of North Carolina, and none of them along the coast, where we were going to live, had basements--and this quickly proved to be a problem for me. Not long ago I'd been given an elaborate set of weights and a weight bench for my fifteenth birthday, and had been working out with them every day in the basement of our old house in Sharon, Pennsylvania. I was scrawny then, and bitter about it, and my intention was to bulk up behind the world's back.

My dad was a contractor. He supervised the construction of our new house himself, shuttling back and forth from Sharon to Wilmington and establishing his own contacts in the process. A few years earlier Sharon Steel and the Westinghouse plant had packed up and left town, and a large part of the population quickly followed. No one was buying houses, much less building them in Sharon; new construction was limited to nursing homes and assisted living communities, which seemed to be popping up all over the place and in which my father had no interest. He needed a town that was growing, one where the median age--his words now--was somewhere below retirement. He'd miss seeing his Steelers on TV, true, and his hunting trips out to Clearfield County (he took me along once, the previous year; I spotted a deer but before I could sight my rifle my dad shot it himself), but he'd adjust. And so would my mother. And so would I. How could we not? The house was so ... new. Brand-new faucets and cabinets and carpeting. New hinges on the doors, a new dishwasher, a new electric range with smooth, flush-to-the-surface disks that glowed a furious red when they were hot. New towel rods and bathtubs and showers--the one in my parents' room had a little porcelain seat built into it. New windows and drywall and drainpipes. The house itself was located in a brand-new subdivision; trees had been cleared away to build new lots and new roads and to put up new power lines. There was a gleaming, blemish-free blacktopped driveway in front, and that new screened-in porch in the back, which is where I decided to set up my weights.

Even then I understood that it was this newness that most excited my parents--that clean, untouched quality had given our life the sudden feel of a do-over--but, truth be told, a part of me was looking forward to the move, too. All I really wanted out of life was to be on the school's football team, but sometime between eighth and ninth grade my male classmates shot past me in size, making the chances of my ever reaching this objective more and more unlikely. I was convinced I could be a good player--a wide receiver or defensive back. I had good speed and good hands and good instincts. I was just too small. And back home the competition was stiff: every kid in western Pennsylvania wanted to play football. I figured--or at least hoped--that in North Carolina, which was primarily basketball country, the talent level for football might be a little diluted.

So in July we moved in and spent a week unpacking. Then there was nothing much to do. The beach was only a few miles away but I couldn't drive and didn't know anyone; my father was working all the time (Wilmington was booming, after all, and there were lots of houses to be built) and the prospect of going to the beach with my mother, just the two of us, made my stomach do a hollow collapsing thing. It was hot--in the nineties every day--and I took to walking around the house and yard without a shirt on. I'd been working mostly on my chest, lots of flies and bench-presses, with some push-ups mixed in for variety. Results were mixed. When I looked at myself in the mirror I could still see the little ridge of my breastbone outlined beneath the skin, but I could also make each pectoral muscle bounce up and down slightly when I flexed it, which was encouraging.

One day during our second week in Wilmington I was ready to move up ten pounds on my bench presses. It was late morning, pushing noon; the air was already thick with humidity. Only the upper half of the porch was screened; the bottom was solid, so very little breeze passed through. In addition to my bench and weights the porch also contained a glass-top coffee table, an old boom-box, and a dozen or so random boxes that had been stashed there to make the inner rooms of the house appear more orderly. I moved one of them aside and found two five-pound plates and slid one onto each side of the bar. I tuned the radio to a station I'd settled on over the past few days, then lay back and began my set, which came much easier than I'd anticipated. I knocked out ten reps and sat back up. Sweat sprang from my forehead and back; I twisted my arm around and examined the firmness of my triceps. I pressed it with my fingers.

"So how much was that?"

I turned quickly and saw a face on the other side of the screen. A boy's face: it was dark, copper-colored, framed by wavy ringlets of bleach-blond hair. With the screen between us, and the sun behind him, the boy's image was fuzzy, shrouded in cottony gold light. Then I smelled something funny and noticed he was smoking; the tiny nub of a lumpy cigarette hung from his whitish lips. I was still touching my triceps.

"Huh?"

He nodded vaguely, removed the cigarette and seemed to swallow a mouthful of air. "I asked how much you benchin' there."

"Oh." The reality of my shirtlessness occurred to me suddenly and I folded my arms across my chest. "About," I began, and shrugged. I didn't want to admit to the weight. "Not sure. I don't usually keep track."

He thought for a moment then took two quick puffs on the cigarette, as if sucking something solid through a straw. "That's cool." He held up the cigarette. "Hey, you wanna come out and have a few tokes? Got more where this came from."

I had no idea what he was talking about. "I kinda have to finish this," I said.

"Yeah, no sweat." He took a couple of steps back; the sunlight shifted behind him and for a moment all I saw was his silhouette. "I just live next door. Come check me out whenever you want. Name's Brooks."

"Okay," I said. Then I said, "Nick."

"Well, Nick, this neighborhood blows, I'll tell you that. Buncha yuppies and little kids. Count the number of bikes and Big Wheels laying around the street at suppertime and you'll see what I mean." He put the cigarette to his lips then snubbed it out with his fingers and lowered it to where I couldn't see--in his pocket, I figured. "But the beach is close. And at least we go to Hoggard and not New Hanover High. That school's a friggin' pit, man. Stabbings weekly."

I understood then that, without consciously realizing it or even addressing the question in my mind, I had believed Brooks to be at least a little older than I was. And now it appeared that this was not the case: we were in fact very close in age. I reached for my shirt, my exposed skin now seeming incredibly pale, my muscles flimsy and childlike. I'd forgotten what he'd just said, had no idea if a response was required on my part. All I could think to say was, "So what year are you?"

"Gonna be a junior. You?"

"Sophomore." At least he was one year older.

"Cool," he said. "So, yeah. All right then, I'll get going--let you finish up. I got the munchies anyway. Wanna hit that goodies cabinet before my mom gets home from work."

It wasn't until later that I realized that Brooks was a pretty big guy. I pumped out a couple more sets of bench presses, a few flies, keeping my shirt on the whole time, until my arms got jittery and I couldn't straighten my elbows. When I walked over to the screen where he'd stood I saw that my line of sight was several inches lower than where I remembered Brooks' face looking in at me. I turned my attention to his house next door. It was a recently constructed faux Colonial, much like ours, with its own "frog" (I'd learned to recognize the windows and slant of the roof above the garage). A row of simple, nondescript hedges separated our lots--the only things even close to trees for many square acres. I saw a gas grill on the back deck and several potted plants and I understood that Brooks' involvement in my life from here on out was unavoidable.

Inside, my mother was painting the trim in the downstairs bathroom. It was a bone of contention with her: the contractors were supposed to do it, but they just didn't. There seemed to be no reason as to why they didn't do it, and they didn't seem to ever be coming back. My father, adhering to some sort of ambiguous contractors' code, refused to take up my mother's cause in the matter. "Just paint the damn thing," he'd said to her. "It'll take you ten minutes."

Everything, according to my father, took ten minutes: cutting the lawn, cleaning my bedroom, shoveling the driveway. Especially demanding tasks, like cleaning out the garage, took twenty.

I should say here that my father, too, was a big guy. The first thing people noticed about him were his gigantic hands: beer cans disappeared behind his sausage-like fingers. Then they noticed his feet. Size thirteen shoes. There are pictures of me as a baby, sitting in them. When he wore baseball caps he had to set the little plastic prong-and-hole adjuster to its outermost setting, and even then the hat wavered tenuously atop his enormous head. He was a carpenter, a brick mason, an electrician, and eventually a contractor. He was his own boss. He was a leader of men. Men with tattoos, men who laid concrete and dug foundations with backhoes, did what he told them to do.

But I'd received none of his genes in this regard. Instead, I'd picked up every physical attribute of my mother's father: five-eight, 135, wiry but strong, metabolism of a jackrabbit. The writing was on the wall. Yet I fought the inevitable with protein powders and carbo-crunch bars and of course my weights. I tried to eat a roast beef sandwich every night before bed, but it gave me nightmares and I had to stop and switch to a bowl of corn flakes.

The day I met Brooks we had ravioli for dinner. I disliked ravioli night because they could be counted. A pile of spaghetti is a pile of spaghetti but put seven ravioli on your plate and suddenly there's a countdown. The meal's progression can be quantified, and my father's constant scorekeeping--"You only started with seven, for christsake. Eat like a man!"--didn't help matters. About halfway through, after my dad finished telling us about the complications of building a house next to a salt marsh, complete with water table considerations, I leaned back in my chair and said, "The boy next door--he smokes," and as the words passed my lips I was hit by the knowledge of what he'd been smoking.

"Boy?" my mother said. "About your age?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, about, I guess."

"Well, how nice. You should invite him over."

"Maybe," I said.

"All right, come on now," said my father. "Finish those up and have a few more." He scooped up another pile of ravioli with the big plastic spoon and held it above my plate, as if I were expected to inhale what was still on it right then and there.

"Oh, Tony, please," my mother said. "Would you please leave him alone? He's old enough to decide for himself how much he wants to eat."

"I agree. So why do I have to do this?"

"You don't have to."

"Fine." My father let the spoon drop noisily back into the big bowl. "The kid's--" he paused and moved his mouth around as if chewing on his words, looking for the ones that tasted just right--"the kid's brimming with potential. He just won't give himself a fighting chance. We'll see how you feel about it when he ends up in the hospital in the fall."

"Tony!"

"Well, it's true. Kid says he wants to play football. What do you think's gonna happen, if he doesn't put on some weight?" He looked at me. "What do you think's gonna happen?"

"I'll be all right." I cut a ravioli in half and put it in my mouth, but the act seemed so trivial and pointless it embarrassed me and I tried to chew without moving my jaw.

"Yeah. You'll be all right," my father said. "Uh-huh. Well, I hope so, mister." He tapped his fork against his empty plate. Afterwards, he went into the living room to hook up the stereo and TV to the new surround-sound he'd finagled free from the buddy of a coaxial cable supplier, and I sat and ate as my mother cleared the table around me.

II

Brooks had a basketball hoop in his driveway. It was set, he explained as he stood on our front steps, ball cupped against his hip, at nine and a half feet, for easier dunking. He had on mesh game shorts with the number 24 on one lower thigh and a Junior Olympics tee shirt with the sleeves cut off. His blond hair was pulled back and tied haphazardly with a rubber band. It looked pretty cool.

We shot around for a while, occasionally complimenting each other's successful shots and self-deprecatingly condemning our own poor ones (Whoa, would you look at that! Where did that come from? Heh-heh-heh). Brooks liked to bank from the wings and was fond of a quick, two-dribble figure eight through the legs prior to shooting. He was consistent from ten to twelve feet but didn't have much from the outside. His shots were flat, with almost no spin, but somehow found the bottom of the net much more often than I would have expected. As for the rim being six inches lower than regulation, I hadn't really noticed until, following one of my misses, Brooks jumped up, snagged the rebound with both hands, and, in one smooth motion, dunked it, hard. The ball slammed off the driveway and into the side yard.

"Boom!" Brooks roared.

"Whoa," I said, "Nice," and went to retrieve the ball.

"Wanna run a game or two?" he asked then.

I shrugged, flipped the ball to him. "Yeah, okay. Sure."

"To eleven?" He tossed the ball back.

"Fine."

Playing each other didn't make much sense to me. Brooks was bigger and stronger, obviously a better player, but I surprised myself by hanging in there. I was a half step quicker and Brooks had a difficult time working his way in on me to his comfortable ten-foot range. Still, he played hard; he did not sit back and give me uncontested shots or stand around while I went after loose balls. Yet he did not try to smother me either; he didn't take cheap shots or elbow his way in for easy lay-ups or foul unnecessarily or swat my shots across the street just because he could, as I imagined those who knew themselves to be superior players might do. The result was competitive games: he won them both, 11-8 and 11-9, but he had to work for them, and I felt as though I had proved something.

By that time the sun was pounding down on us full bore. There was no shade to speak of (since there were no trees) so Brooks opened his garage door. Inside, half was taken up by a Toyota SUV and on the other side there were a couple of folding chairs and a card table. He told me to have a seat then went to the back of the garage where he opened a refrigerator and took out two cans of Mountain Dew.

We sat for a while. He told me how he'd moved from Ohio to Wilmington last year with his parents and two brothers--one older, in college; the other younger and away at summer camp. (Brooks and I, incidentally, were both fifteen: I'd turned in the spring, he would turn sixteen in August.) His dad worked for Chessie Systems, the railroad company, and got transferred around every now and then, though this was the first move Brooks really remembered. His last name was Johnston. He said that, yeah, the football teams down here were less competitive. He played (starting tailback on JV last year but figured he should start varsity in the fall), but it wasn't all that much fun because people didn't take it as seriously as they did up north. The girls, though: they were better down here. They were generally looser and blonder and loved to party and wore almost no clothes--except for the Jesus freaks, which you could spot a mile away. Then, as if on cue, two girls drove up in a Cabrio convertible and stopped in front of the house. The girl in the passenger seat called out Brooks' name. He finished what he had been saying to me (something about a beach party somebody'd thrown back in May), slugged down the rest of his soda, and stood. "All right," he said. "Let's go see what they want."

We moseyed (and that's really the only way to say it; we took our sweet time) down the driveway. At one point Brooks put his hand on my shoulder and said to me confidentially, "The one driving? Not a Jesus freak."

They were both blond, both in shorts and floral-print bathing suit tops, both wearing sunglasses, both chewing gum. The driver was a tad heavier, but not much. Her bleach-white hair was colored pink at the tips.

"Hi, y'all," said the one in the passenger seat, though she was looking straight at Brooks. Her forehead and shoulders were heavily freckled from sun. The driver was leaning forward to see past her. "What'cha up to?"

"Just hanging out," Brooks said. "This is Nick. Just moved in." He motioned with his head toward my house. "Nick, this is Kasey and Jessica."

"Come to Wrightsville with us," said the driver, whom I for some reason took to be Jessica, without acknowledging the introduction.

"We made vodka slushies," said Kasey. "They're not that good, but ..." She leaned back and put her bare feet up on the dash. "Come on. It's too hot not to be at the beach today."

Brooks turned to me, hid his mouth from them with his shoulder. In a low voice he said, "What do you think?"

I had no idea what he was looking for from me. A validation of the girls' attractiveness? My approval for him to go along with them? I still couldn't get past the fact that they were driving. I felt about five.

"Let's bag it," he offered, and waited.

"Yeah, okay," I said. "Sure. Whatever."

"I think we're just gonna stick around here," he said to the girls. "Maybe we'll catch up with you later."

Kasey and Jessica were visibly disappointed. They told him where on the beach they planned to be and Jessica put the car in gear. She flicked the knob on the stereo and the latest Pearl Jam song--where over and over again Eddie Vedder lists the things he wishes he could do or become--erupted from the little dashboard speakers. "Y'all are gonna miss a fun day!" she shouted over the noise.

"Bye-bye, Brooksie honey," Kasey said. "See ya, Nick," and they pulled out into the street and disappeared at the intersection.

"One more game?" Brooks said. "Then I need me a smoke break. You in?"

III

And so, just like that, I became Brooks Johnston's sidekick. And I kind of liked it. Despite the fact that I'd lived my life on the fringes of true popularity back in Sharon and was committed to reinventing myself down here, it was not difficult to see that living next door to Brooks provided access to a friend I otherwise would never have, and that by virtue of this friendship I was projected to the world at large in an entirely different light than I otherwise would have been. And besides, Brooks didn't treat me as a sidekick. Over the next couple of weeks kids swung by his house incessantly and Brooks introduced me with a nonchalance that seemed to imply that there was no need to accept me into the inner circle: I was already in. It was tough to tell which were his better friends and which were passing acquaintances--until afterward, when he would confide to me what he really thought of the kids who'd just driven off. From what I could gather, what he most disliked in people was any manner of bragging or self-promotion. Whenever someone got going about some sports- or girl-related conquest, Brooks tuned him out. The girls he talked most highly about were the more athletic ones, girls with natural, understated beauty who in a pinch could fill out a prom dress or act like one of the guys. He didn't have a steady girlfriend, but if he'd wanted one he could have had his pick. His easy manner around them astounded me. On one occasion, while standing in his driveway talking nonsense with a couple of girls, Brooks, completely unannounced, let loose with a raucous, gurgly fart. The sound was two-pitched--quite staggering in the graphic nature of its acoustics. He even lifted his leg slightly. There was a moment of silence while we waited to see if there would be more. I was horrified. Then the girls erupted into a fit of giggles. Brooks lowered his leg and smiled at me, as if to convey a point only the two of us were capable of grasping.

Even my parents liked him. Though his life that summer was obviously one of leisure, he had the annoying habit of being seen performing gratuitous household chores--mowing the lawn, vacuuming the car, up on the roof picking muck from the gutters. My mother routinely asked after him, and my father held him up as an example of what I should be striving for in life. Brooks, there was no doubt, could handle more than seven lousy ravioli in a sitting.

Which is why we didn't hang around our place much.

We spent a lot of time in his driveway, shooting baskets, waiting for people to stop by--and they always did. Sometimes those people were invited into the garage, but never the house. The reason for this was simple: it was a sty. The place truly had to be navigated. Pieces of furniture were hidden by mountainous piles of laundry. It was not uncommon to trip over stray cinderblocks, ski boots, a stereo turntable, a batting machine, a turkey fryer, croquet mallets, a sleeping dog. Jockstraps hung from curtain rods. And nobody cared. Brooks' mom was an RN and a marathon runner. She pulled part-time hours over at Cape Fear Regional, but when she was home she scurried about the house in jogging suits, straw-colored hair tied up in a bandana, trying to exact some semblance of order. She was forever ironing something or transferring stuff from one pile to another, but you could tell her heart wasn't in it. My first thought upon entering the house was that these people really could use a basement.

The first time he took me in there was to play a record. During the course of one of our games he'd dropped the name John Coltrane and I'd admitted I had no idea who that was. So he marched me into the house--up into the "frog," actually--and put on this CD called A Love Supreme. The first song seemed to go on forever--just sax and snarey drums and then tinkly piano. It sounded like a sunrise and bored me nearly to tears, but Brooks shimmied around the room, knocking into exercise bikes and lampshades and empty birdcages, snapping his fingers and making strange trumpet sounds with his lips.

"Listen to that, man," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"Listen. It's the sound of redemption."

It was obvious he'd been rehearsing this description in his head, but I didn't call him on it. "I'm listening. It's cool."

"Fuckin'-A, it is."

I sat on a metal file cabinet by the window. Twice cars pulled up and slowed in front of the house, then kept going. I didn't recognize either one. It looked like it might rain; fat swirling clouds moved in off the coast. During a silent gap between two songs Brooks said, "Let's smoke a little one. What do you say?"

He'd been tentatively floating this offer off and on the whole time we'd known each other, but this was the first time he made any move to make good on it. He tossed a beanbag chair aside and slid open the closet door. I heard him digging around in there for a few seconds and when he emerged he held a little rolled-up baggie, which he promptly uncoiled with a flick of his wrist. The contents inside were green and clumpy.

"We were finished playing anyway, weren't we?" His head bobbed around with the rhythm. His question was rhetorical: we were done. I'd yet to beat him in a single game, but his largest margin of victory was only four points. I was routinely saving face.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess I could call it an afternoon."

"Excellent."

He peeled a tiny sheet of tissue paper from a razor blade-size dispenser and held the paper in his palm; he creased it down the middle then began crumbling the clumpy green substance onto it with two fingers, surprising me with his dexterity. He rolled the paper up tight with his thumbs, licking and twisting, and then he put the whole thing in his mouth and pulled it out slowly. He admired it, just for a moment, then produced a lighter out of nowhere and lit the thing up. Instantly the room filled with smoke and with a smell I could only equate with marshmallows roasting. But that correlation quickly seemed inadequate and I imagined leaves burning, and then I thought, No, I've never smelled anything like this before.

"Open that window," Brooks croaked. He was squeezing his lips in against his teeth.

I used the crank-handle to open the window. "Is your mom home?" I asked.

"Here." He was holding the cigarette-thing out to me, lit end pointing back at him. Smoke trailed up through his palm and over his wrist. "Huh-uh. Work." He exhaled, but no smoke came out of his mouth. "Here."

Of course I coughed and coughed until I thought an aneurysm had burst in my brain and was convinced I would surely die in the next instant. Of course I didn't know what I was doing. I was fifteen. How did he know? Eventually, though, I settled in and was able to take cautious puffs without my skull flaming up.

"Where'd you get it?" I managed. If someone had put a gun to my head and insisted I find some pot I would have had to let him shoot me. I wouldn't have known where to start.

"Couple of guys. One's on the wrestling team."

I was still sitting on the file cabinet, but Brooks moved around the frog with purpose, taking one CD out and putting another in, using his index fingers to play air drums to the beat. In anyone else, his taste in music would have seemed rather nerdy, or at least behind the times: after the Coltrane he put on some Bee-Gees (not the disco stuff but something else I'd never heard before), Prince (pre-Purple Rain, pre-The-Artist-Formerly-Known-As), Steely Dan, and then some Supertramp. He never let a CD finish, sometimes taking it out in the middle of a song. Occasionally he'd flop onto the floor and throw down thirty or forty push-ups.

I waited for something to happen to me but other than my dry throat and the burning in my brain and the contact lenses stuck to my eyeballs, I felt nothing but a little sleepy. But on the off chance that I might now have access to some deep inner revelatory insight, I decided to share a piece of myself with Brooks and was shocked when that piece came out in the form of a confession.

"Think I'll go out for the football team this fall," I said.

"Yeah?" The joint was long gone and Blondie now played on the stereo. Brooks was sitting on the floor cutting pictures out of a Sports Illustrated. He didn't do anything with the pictures, didn't paste them up on his bedroom wall or anything; he just cut them out--carefully outlining players in mid-shot or -swing or -tackle--and threw them away. "Cool. Hey--" he maneuvered the scissors around Michael Jordan's one raised arm, wrist bent in accentuated follow-through--"we start our off-season training next week. Just a voluntary thing-well, it's supposed to be voluntary--over at Gold's on Oleander. Three days a week. You should come. It'd be a good intro for you. Get to know the guys. You know. And sometimes the coaches pop in to see how things are going."

He hadn't looked at me; the picture was taking up a lot of his attention.

"Okay," I said.

I wanted to know what he was feeling--if what I felt, or didn't feel, was normal--but I didn't dare ask. A moment later the Cabrio convertible pulled up in front of the house and Kasey and Jessica got out. They stood in the driveway looking around and brushing hair blown by the wind from their eyes. Finally Kasey spotted me in the frog window and waved.

There was something--I don't know--about her face, a pinched-in quality as she squinted up toward the window, and I started to laugh. It was harmless enough at first and I kept thinking it would stop but it didn't. Soon I couldn't catch my breath.

"Oh no," Brooks said. "No, no, no, no, no. Please don't tell me. Not the giggles. No way. Don't even start with that."

I wiped some tears from my eyes and swallowed a mouthful of air to try and steady my breathing. "Jessica and Kasey are here," I managed finally. "In the ... in the driveway."

Brooks made one last meticulous snip and the picture of Jordan fell to the floor. He picked it up with two fingers and inspected it. "Wanna go down?"

Debbie Harry was singing about ripping someone to shreds and my hair felt heavy on my scalp, as if it'd grown six inches in the past hour. "Yeah," I said. "Let's go down."

IV

Then a strange thing happened. Two strange things actually, though one had nothing to do with the other, except that they both happened on the same day. The first is that I heard my parents having sex. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Tuesday or a Wednesday, sometime in the middle of the week. I'd been out with Brooks running a few full-court games at McAdams Park. I guess my parents weren't expecting me to be there. The games broke up early and Brooks wanted to get back to let his dog out. He'd forgotten. The dog, a beagle named Blackie, was prone to crap in the house out of sheer spite, and if Brooks' mother came home and found a mess of this sort waiting for her she'd go ape. She could tolerate clutter, disorder, but Blackie's spiteful "leavings," as Mrs. Johnston referred to it, were another matter.

I must not have noticed my dad's truck in the driveway. Since that afternoon in Brooks' frog, even though it was still my one and only time for such a thing, I'd been walking around inside my life with the conscious knowledge that I smoked pot: I was a pot-smoker, motherfuckers, that's goddamn motherfucking right! I figured it must radiate from me, like confidence, or a smell, and I must have been ruminating on this big-shit enigmatic pot-smoking persona of mine as I removed a can of Pepsi from the refrigerator and heard sharp, rhythmic creaking sounds seeping through the ceiling above me.

So I took my soda and headed toward the sounds. I walked up the stairs and the sounds got louder and I kept going. For some time afterwards I would berate myself as to why in God's name I would do such a thing. How, as I kept getting closer, zeroing in on my parent's bedroom, could I not have known? At least, thankfully, I did not go in. By the time I got to their door I had visions of solving some mystery, saving the day, of fixing a faulty ceiling fan about to fly from its hinges or surprising an intruder (both of these possibilities crossed my mind). When I heard them giggling between creaks I realized what was going on and stopped dead on the brand-new beige hall carpet. I held still and waited and, yeah, I listened, and my first thought was not one of fear or disgust or even embarrassment: I thought of how this move, to Wilmington, had affected my parents in a way I hadn't expected. A good way. They were, for the first time that I could ever remember, downright optimistic--giddy with the prospects of their future. My dad now had his contracting to keep him busy and to keep the dough coming in, my mother had her new fixtures and appliances and bay windows, and we all had Brooks--someone after whom I could model myself. I felt a sudden jolt of happiness for them move through me, and when it passed I crept quietly back downstairs.

The other strange thing that happened on this day was a phone call I received from Kasey. This event was strange for two reasons: first, I didn't receive phone calls. Ever. Not since moving. And secondly, Kasey and I had never really talked to each other before. Whenever she was around, always with Jessica, it was obvious that I was merely part of the backdrop for Brooks' scene. I was set decoration, an accessory, like his Adidas high-tops or the rubber band that tied back his hair.

The voice in my ear threw me for what seemed like a good minute or two. There was a period when I couldn't remember which one she was.

"Hey. So, what'cha doing?" she said, as though we'd just spoken an hour ago.

"Um, just--" I had to stop and think. What had I been doing? "Just, you know ..."

"Yeah." She made a little groaning sound. "Oh. There. Sorry, I was just, mmm-ah, I was just waking up from a nap and thought I'd see what you were up to." I could hear her bedsheets rustling and I began, immediately, to sweat.

"Oh," I said. "Sounds good."

"I loooove a good nap on a summer afternoon. Don't you? Makes me feel all tingly. Like I'm getting away with something."

I tried to give a little laugh. I was in the living room and my mother was in the kitchen, within earshot, slicing tomatoes for a salad. Her hair was a bit frazzled; her cheeks were pink and the trace of a smile moved across her face as she stared down at the cutting board.

"So what do you have going tonight?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe see what Brooks is up to."

"Well--" she was moving around the room now. I could hear drawers slide open and closed, items clanking together--"I was going to watch a movie or two, if you feel like it. I rented...oh, I can't remember now. That new one with Bruce Willis. And an old horror movie--like, part twelve or something. I like horror movies; don't ask me why 'cause they really scare the heebies out of me."

"Oh. Okay." My mother was filling a pot with water, which meant pasta. It clunked against the sink as she lifted it out.

"Okay what?"

"Okay I'll see what's going on."

"Oh," she said. "All right. Well, just, I guess, call if you feel like it," and she quickly rattled off her phone number and said buhbye and I sat on the sofa with the phone in my lap as my mother, rather loudly and melodically, began humming to herself.

At dinner I couldn't eat, but my dad didn't ride me. He and my mother talked about their days as if they hadn't seen each other since he'd left the house that morning; every now and then their eyes would meet and they'd hold it for a moment, smile, and reach for their water glasses. I swirled my angel hair around on my plate and tried to examine this Kasey business from every conceivable angle. I floated the idea that she had a thing for me, plain and simple, but couldn't get away from the notion that my connection to Brooks made me significantly more attractive. What else could explain her sudden interest? She was sixteen. She drove. She was pretty. And her association with me alone on this level could do nothing to increase her current standing in the world. Still, I liked her freckles, and her tan lines, and her bare feet with their clean, unpolished toenails, and the way she talked with me on the phone--the instant familiarity--as if the call had not been planned or rehearsed at all but executed as a natural course of events. And I wanted to see the inside of her house.

"You're not hungry?" my mother said, as if suddenly remembering I was there.

"Not really."

"You don't know what you're missing," my father said, twirling another forkful.

"It's okay," my mother said. "Want some ice cream? Or I have strawberries. They're fresh. With whipped cream?"

"How come you guys never had any other kids?" I said suddenly. I hadn't planned to ask this, hadn't even been wondering about it. But once I'd said it, I was interested to know the answer.

"Oh, honey," said my mother. She reached over and put her hand overtop of mine. "Why? Has this been bothering you?"

"Yeah," I said. "A little."

"Well, honey ..." my mother began, looking across the table at my father. "We'd always planned to. It's just that I have a ..."

"It just never came up," my father said. "You know, the timing. As you get older you'll understand that timing ... it--it means a lot."

"Oh."

"Would you like us to have another one?" my mother asked me then. "A brother or sister?"

As if being asked out by a sixteen-year-old didn't make me feel childish enough already, this question made me feel absolutely infantile.

"We're not too old, you know," she added, smiling, "to adopt."

"Whatever," I said. I was through talking about it, and utterly sorry I'd brought it up.

"Sweetie, I don't want you to feel--"

"No," I said. "I don't."

Slowly, almost apologetically, they began eating again. Bars of late afternoon sunlight streamed in through the sliding-glass door and I could see dust floating in the luminous air around us.

"I might go out tonight," I said.

"Oh. Do you need a ride?" my mother asked.

"No. Can I be excused?" This was something I never bothered to ask and my formality must have stunned them for a moment.

"Well..." My dad looked at my still-heaping plate. "Uh, sure."

But I did need a ride. Kasey lived on Forest Hills Drive, about five miles away, in one of the old-money neighborhoods in Wilmington, with squared-off lawns and striped awnings over the porches, near the center of town. After dinner I'd called her and, after asking her father--a gruff man with a hearty Southern drawl, like a plantation owner--if I could speak with her, said that, yeah, I thought I'd, you know, come over for a little while, if it was, you know, still okay and all. She said "Super!" and gave me directions and I hung up and realized I had no way of getting there, short of asking her to come and get me, or riding my bike, both of which were out of the question. But Brooks said not to sweat it, we'd figure out a way to get me there, no problem. Ten minutes later he called back and said to be ready at seven. Someone would be by to get me. Who? I said, and he said, Dude named Zorn. Just be waiting. Outside.

I'd only been waiting a few minutes when I heard the roar and saw the pickup truck shimmying down the street. It was royal blue and the running boards seemed about eight feet off the ground. A row of siren-like strobe lights was bolted to the roof of the cab.

"You Nick?" he shouted over the roar of the engine. I nodded. "Well, climb your ass on in here."

Zorn was thin and sat hunched over the steering wheel. He had a full beard but no mustache, and wore a mesh baseball cap turned around backwards, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, even though it was July, rolled up to the elbows revealing a tattoo of a fire hydrant on his right forearm, and jeans. A chain connected his belt loop to his wallet and it slapped against the vinyl seat as we got rolling.

"Hot date tonight?" he said and flicked his eyebrows. Facing straight at me like this I realized he must be at least twenty. He was chewing gum and I could see it inside his mouth.

"Kind of."

We pulled out onto Wrightsville Avenue. An old man in a straw hat was closing up his fruit stand along the side of the road.

"You know how to use a rubber, don't'cha, little man?"

I felt my back muscles tighten. "Of course."

"Good. Well, here." He pulled one out from his shirt pocket and handed it across the seat to me. It was in a purple wrapper with the word magnum printed across it. Underneath it said EXTRA-LARGE, and I realized I was being messed with.

"No thanks," I said. "I got it covered."

He returned the condom to his pocket. "That's a good man."

"So how do you know Brooks anyway?" I asked. I tried to make my voice sound combative, but wasn't sure how it'd come out.

Zorn wiped a hand across his beard then gave a shrug. "I owe him a favor or two. Let's just leave it at that."

"Whatever you say." I felt suddenly better about myself, in control, and I called out each turn on the way to Kasey's with a rare degree of composure. Zorn didn't speak again until we were in front of her house--which was gorgeous, like a small country club, complete with sculpted hedges and ivy crawling up one brick wall--the sight of which made Zorn slink even further down in his seat.

"Well, I'll be," he said, and then whistled. "Stately."

I looked at him.

"It's the home of The Rich."

"Whatever."

"I'll be back to pick you up," he said.

"When?"

"Whenever. Get the fuck out."

I jumped down and as soon as I swung the door shut he was pulling away. I walked up Kasey's front steps thinking, How insane is this? and suspecting I might have splashed on a little too much cologne before I'd left the house.

The Cabrio convertible was in the driveway, its top down, shaded by a blooming dogwood.

She swung open the front door before I could ring the bell. She had on a light blue sundress. The ends of her blond hair brushed her shoulders, which were round and tan, and she was wearing oval wire-rimmed glasses I'd never seen before. This is my "at-home" look, it all seemed to be saying. But you're welcome to it.

"Who was that guy?" she gasped.

"Him? Zorn."

"Man, he was uh-glee."

"Yes, he certainly was. Is Jessica here?"

"Oh," she said, catching me glance toward the driveway, "no. She just likes to drive it, so I let her sometimes. Come on in."

She led me through the house, pointing out various rooms as we passed them--that's the den, here's the kitchen, that's a room we never use that we call the yellow room--but offering no details, though none were necessary: the house looked to me like a series of Ethan Allen showrooms--the way a Russian spy might decorate his house if he were trying too hard to appear American.

The house percolated with a profound emptiness and soon it became evident that her parents were not home. I felt my armpits heat up.

We settled in a room off the back that contained a sofa, recliner, coffee table, TV and VCR. The room was bright--three walls were largely taken up by windows; the remaining wall space displayed British-looking paintings of out-of-focus farm scenes and vast fields of wildflowers. The sofa, however, was plaid and bowed and battered with age and Kasey plunked herself down into it.

"Something to drink?" she said.

"Nah. Thanks."

"Okay. Pop in the movie. It's right there." We watched the Bruce Willis movie first. I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd already seen it. She curled her bare feet underneath her and leaned into me and commented on the scenery--which, for the most part, was New York City--and the actors' clothes. She wasn't very good at following the plot and frequently asked me to explain why a particular character was dangerous or how two others came to be in cahoots, as she put it. At one point, when the Bruce Willis character kicked another man in the balls she went, "Ooo, yikes!" while twisting the sleeve of my shirt, and then laughed heartily.

"Brooks told me you were a Jesus freak," I said.

Oddly, this made her inch closer to me.

"Well, he said that Jessica wasn't," I clarified, "which I guess I took to mean you were."

Strands of hair tickled my nose and her one knee lay across my thigh. "Was that a warning or an endorsement?" she said.

"Coming from Brooks? I'd a say a warning."

Bruce Willis pulled a gun on one of the bad guys and threatened to blow his fucking head off.

"Well," she said. "You're probably right."

"You don't seem like a Jesus freak," I said.

"No? That's good."

She shifted her face, just a hair, and then, suddenly, we were making out. She rolled her head into the crook of my arm and I held her like a baby, her body lying across my lap. Her tongue flicked the fronts of my teeth a couple of times before I realized I had to open my mouth a bit more, but once we had a rhythm going I felt absolutely huge. She had one hand on my bicep and the other behind my neck, mashing my face into hers, her glasses clicking against my eye socket. She was making soft little sighing sounds in the back of her throat. An explosion went off on TV, followed by screams and a chorus of car alarms, but we kept at it. At some point we'd slid down on the sofa and were laying on our sides, facing each other, my arm now under her head, our legs intertwined. Her sundress had ridden up to just above mid-thigh. I dared not touch it, or her leg, or anything down there, but my knowledge of what was happening made my head swim with sheer joy. I opened my eyes and saw that hers were closed, so I closed mine again.

The movie ended; the credits rolled and then the TV went silent. The room filled with a faint blue glow. She took her hand from behind my neck and placed it on my hip, her last three fingers on my belt and her thumb brushing the skin under my shirt, right below my ribs. I wanted to touch something, too, but knew the only place for me to go was up under her dress, which, at this point, seemed excessive, and I didn't want to ruin anything. I felt my mind freefalling for a moment, trying to come up with an alternative. I squirmed; our eyes popped open at the same time and she smiled at me with her lips still pressed to mine and in the next moment we heard another series of explosions, like thunderous popcorn blasts, only this time the sounds came from out in Kasey's backyard. We lay there for a couple of beats and then she said, "Did you hear that?"

Against my better judgment I admitted that I had.

We picked ourselves up and went to the window. Outside, it was not quite fully dark yet: trees outlined in a pulsing white aureole faintly glimmered as night fell around them. I could see a hammock strung up between two sturdy maples. The yard looked quiet enough, though an eerie post-battle vapor seemed to be hanging in the air. Kasey stood next to me with her hands on the windowsill. She wore a plain silver ring on the fourth finger of her right hand and all I could think was, Those fingers were just on my hip.

"What do you think that was all about?" she asked.

"Brooks," I said without thinking.

"Huh?" She kept looking out at the yard. "Why?"

"I don't know why. But that's what it was."

"Yeah. Right."

I couldn't tell if she thought I was joking or if she flat-out didn't believe me. "Come on," I said. "Let's go have a look then."

I followed her through the kitchen and out the back door. It was like we were strangers again. She flicked on an outside light and ran a hand through her hair as if to wipe away all evidence of the past half-hour.

"Be careful there. My dad hasn't had that loose stone fixed yet."

We stood on a ground-level brick patio with a glass table, wrought-iron chairs, and a gas grill. A faint ocean smell lingered in the air. Wind rustled the row of pines that bordered houses on both sides and from an adjacent street, giving the backyard the feel of an arena, and in the distance I could hear frogs croaking. The grass looked silver, cool, and I imagined us lying on it, her little sundress twisted and bunched, the grass tickling our skin, and wondered if something like that might still be possible.

"So what now?" she asked. "What're we looking for exactly?"

"Just come on," I said.

She followed me to the center of the square, carpet-like lawn, exactly the spot where I'd been thinking about us lying, and we stood there. I made like I was thinking, looking for clues, and she folded her forearms across her waist and stared down at her bare feet.

I suppose what was going through my mind was that Brooks had somehow endeavored to foil my evening with Kasey. Why? Well, it seemed obvious enough to me at the time: jealousy. He couldn't handle the fact that here I was, out of nowhere, with the prettier of the two girls who most often stopped by to see him. I couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to me before--he must be absolutely beside himself! And his response? Childish pranks. Firecrackers or M-80s or whatever. Probably went over the border to South Carolina special for them, for the good stuff. Or he'd sent Zorn for them. The thought must have made me smile because Kasey said, "I really don't think this is all that funny."

"No," I said, shaking away the grin. "No, it's kind of sad, when you think about it."

"Well, I don't know about that." She looked up into the sky and I followed her gaze. Stars blinked back at us. "But maybe we just ought to skip the other movie. I've seen it before anyway. And it's getting kind of late."

It was barely nine o'clock.

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Sure thing."

"What?" she said. "What's a sure thing?"

"Nothing. Just, you know, what you said." I scanned the silver grass by her feet. I kept thinking if I could just find one scrap of evidence, an exploded firecracker casing or a patch of scorched grass, I could clear all this silliness up.

"You know, Nick," she said and looked right at me. Her eyes behind her glasses were masked by vague reflecting light. "You didn't have to do this. We could've just watched movies and, you know, hung out." She shrugged. "Whatever. Come on, I'll see you to the door."

These last words were delivered with her best Southern inflections and affectations and I understood that a crucial opportunity in my life was at that very moment slipping from my grasp. I was already feeling the regret in my stomach.

"No," I said, following along at her shoulder, "I'm not doing anything. I just thought ... I mean, when we heard that explosion ... I sort of thought it was Brooks, you know, messing with us. Just give me one more minute to find--"

"Don't worry about it, Nick," she said, not looking at me. "And don't take this the wrong way. I mean, it's not that I don't like you or anything, or that you can't call me, you know, sometime, because I do like you, and could maybe like you a lot more, if we got to know each other better, because I think--" and here she looked at me--"I think there's something in there that's, I don't know, honest. You don't see that much around here."

"What do you mean, honest?" I asked.

"Oh, for cripes' sakes," she said, turning away and quickening her pace. "I don't know what I mean. I don't have answers to every single question. I'm just a kid. And so are you."

I was certain that the ocean smell I'd detected in the air had been replaced by a dim hint of cordite.

We crossed the brick patio and stepped back up into the kitchen. Apparently she wanted the formality of seeing me out, and to do that we had to first go back into the house. She flicked lights on as we worked our way to the front door, which she unlocked and held open for me.

"Thanks for coming over," she said. She stepped forward and kissed me, on the mouth, but a short one. "It was fun."

"You're welcome," I said, and immediately felt stupid.

"So, call me, okay?"

When the door closed behind me I looked at my watch. It was nine-fifteen. I stood in the glow of the porch light for a minute or two and then headed across the front lawn to the street. I had no idea what time Zorn would be back for me, or if he would be back for me at all. Part of me hoped he wouldn't. Still, with nowhere else to go, I sat down on the curb in front of Kasey's house and waited, feeling the eyes of every nosy neighbor peering out through parted curtains: they didn't know what to make of this pale, scrawny kid, so confused, so obviously out of place, obviously nothing like them, just an accidental visitor in their world.

V

I slept late the next couple of days, well past noon. Zorn did finally pick me up the night I'd been at Kasey's but by that time it was after three o'clock. I waited out on Forest Hills Drive till after one, receiving strange, squinty looks from drivers of slowed-down passing cars and expecting any minute that Kasey would see me out there and call me inside, wondering what the hell was the matter with me. Or for her parents to return home. But neither happened, so I began walking. Zorn picked me up on Wrightsville Avenue, only stopping because he almost hit me, those enormous tires on his pickup crunching to a lunging halt in the gravel a foot or two from my chest. I slept in the following morning, deflecting my mother's questions about the night before, stayed up late that night, and couldn't seem to get back on schedule.

When I was awake my parents kept asking about Brooks: Where's Brooks been? Why hasn't Brooks been around? Did you and Brooks have a fight? Why don't you invite Brooks over? Are they on vacation? So what's Brooks up to today? Where's Brooks? It was exhausting, so I skipped meals and slept. My father was simmering with anger, I could tell, and on the third or fourth morning of this routine, as I lay in bed, half asleep, dazzling sunlight stabbing in through the window and brightening the underside of my eyelids, my sheets were suddenly whipped away, leaving me sprawled and exposed in my twisted boxers. I felt like a slug whose rock had been overturned.

I pulled my knees to my chest and shielded my eyes and when they focused I saw Brooks, not my father, standing over my bed.

"Let's go, muchacho," he said. "Get dressed. Training today."

At first I didn't know what he was talking about. Then I remembered how he'd mentioned the football team's off-season training program, that day we smoked the joint in his frog, and how I should come along. I guess I hadn't taken the suggestion seriously and assumed it would go away.

"Whoa," Brooks said. "First thing we gotta do is build up those chicken-legs."

He wore a gray hoggard athletics tee shirt with the sleeves torn roughly off. A fat vein ran vertically through each bicep, as if he'd already pumped out a few sets of curls before entering my room. I wanted to disappear.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Ten, ten-thirty." He wandered over to my desk and picked up a little horse figurine from several I had on a shelf there. "You like horses?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Not really." I'd gotten those things when I was about eight because I liked the sound horses' hooves made in the movies, clopping over packed dirt or cobblestones. Seemed everything in my room was from when I was about eight--I'd just never bothered to update it--and my abrupt recognition of this embarrassed me.

He put the horse back on the shelf. "So how was your date?"

"Fine," I said. "You know, good."

"Yeah? So tell me."

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and wondered if I owned anything shabbily cool enough to wear to the gym. "There's nothing to tell, really."

"No, huh? Well I heard Zorn found you wandering on Wrightsville Avenue. What's with that?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's no big deal. I was tired of waiting." I watched his face for signs of his own role in the abrupt conclusion of my date the other night, but there was nothing.

"All right, well, whatever. Let's get going."

The gym was a huge, shiny building with twin pillars flanking the entrance and floor-to-ceiling glass along the front rooms, so cars passing by on Oleander could see in. The training sessions were an informal affair: members of the football team met up there to work out, commandeering one section of the free-weight room. Guys came and went--about a dozen in all, obviously the A-listers of the team. There was plenty of laughing and horseplay and crotch-adjusting. I didn't see any coaches--didn't see anyone who seemed to exude any authority whatsoever. But when Brooks showed up, it became clear who called the shots. They looked to him for approval on all matters, from which exercises to do next to which girls were the hottest in the school to whether or not one particular guy I did not know really was, in fact, a fuckin' retard.

Still, as usual, Brooks took care of me. His first order of business was to lead me to the front desk and get me a weight belt. I felt absolutely ridiculous in it but nobody else seemed to notice. Brooks and I were promptly worked into the rotation and spotted each other on our sets. We started with legs: presses, curls, extensions, then moved over to the area where a bunch of guys were doing squats and grunting like bears. We had to wait a couple of minutes and I found I was having trouble standing. I didn't ordinarily work on my legs very much and now they felt strange to me, numb and jittery, like the reverse sensation a recent amputee might have.

"Let's get some water," Brooks said to me.

"Wanna jump in, Brooks?" said a big guy with bushy eyebrows and white-capped pimples all across his shoulders and upper arms. He'd just finished his set of squats and stood panting with his mouth open.

"Negatory. We'll be back."

We headed out of the free-weight room and into the hallway. At one point Brooks lifted his shirt a few inches and checked his stomach muscles in a mirror as he passed.

"Honestly," he said, straightening at the fountain and wiping water from his chin. "No shitting. How much can you bench?"

"I don't know," I said. "Why?"

"A deuce? You think you can put up a deuce for five reps?"

"Maybe. "I've done one-eighty-five."

"And that's at home--with no spotter. Right?"

I nodded. My hamstrings had tightened into steel rods.

"Cause here's the thing. Simmons--the dude in the Hawaiian shirt and yellow headband-he's the starting free safety on varsity. And I know he can't bench two bills. You go in there and put up a deuce, it'll make a statement. Get people's attention."

He glanced around him as if checking for spies.

"You mean--now?" I asked.

"Right fuckin' now."

"But, there aren't even any coaches around. Even if I did it, what would it prove?"

"The other guys'll see it. They'll start taking you seriously--treat you as if you belong with them. You'll have instant credibility. And the coaches will notice that when the time comes. They pick up on what the players think of each other, and it makes a difference. As soon as you step foot on a practice field you'll be on their radar."

I had to admit that made sense. But I really didn't feel like getting into some kind of macho turf war with this Simmons guy right off the bat. Plus, what if I couldn't do it?

"Hi, Nick."

I turned and found Kasey standing there. My knees nearly buckled. She smiled and blinked and flicked her eyes over to Brooks and then back to me, and in that moment I knew Brooks had told her I'd be here today and had suggested she come. My suspicions about his role in the odd disturbance at Kasey's house the other night came pouring back at me.

"What are you doing here?" I said to her.

She squinted at me. "Working out. Why? What're you doing?"

"Oh, well, yeah. I mean...nothing. I mean, you know, same."

She looked fantastic. Her cheeks were a little flushed from exercise and her hair was pulled back revealing a pebbling of dampness on her forehead. She wore a little yellow tank top and black spandex pants that came to just below the knees, exposing her tan calves. "Hi, Brooks," she said.

"Hey." He turned to me. "All right, man, come on. Let's do this. You ready?"

"I guess."

"Nice belt," Kasey said to me. It was an attempt, at least to some degree, at intimacy, and I realized this almost at once. Still, I felt oddly ashamed and put my hands over the buckle, as if to cover it. Apparently, this amused her. She smiled, then reached out and punched me playfully in the shoulder. "Brooks whipping you into shape?"

I took a step back.

"Fine," she said, turning on her heel and heading back into the main exercise room, her ponytail bobbing up and down behind her, and disappearing into the steady whine of treadmills and Stairmasters.

"The hell's your problem?" Brooks said.

"Nothing. Let's go do this."

He shook his head sadly. "You got balls, my friend. She liked you." There was a slight twinge of awe in his voice. "So much for that."

"Could we just do this, please."

He shrugged. "Yeah."

"Well then, let's go."

"Hey." He touched an index finger to my chest and kept it there. "Don't get all up in my face, muchacho."

"I'm not." I brushed his hand away. "Come on."

Back in the weight room guys looked suddenly sluggish, just milling around. Without Brooks, it seemed, they weren't sure what to do next. Brooks went to one of the benches and began rearranging plates and a handful of guys did the same on the other two benches. An unseen radio blared a Metallica song. Three guys stood in tight formation, nodding their heads and mouthing the words at each other, all the while flexing their arms as though receiving a continuous electric shock. It struck me that these guys--all of them, with their torn sleeves and spikey-shorn haircuts and barbed-wire tattoos and pasty-white thighs rubbing together--believed that how much weight they lifted today would somehow make them more worthy human beings: stronger, tougher, braver, more grown-up, more loveable.

"What do you say, Nicky," Brooks said loud enough for those around us to hear. "One- ninety-five? Two-oh-five?"

"Two-fifteen," I said.

It was not a lot of weight; I could have waved my stupid belt around and hit someone capable of putting up twice as much. But I was not a big guy, by anyone's standards, and the motions of those near me slowed for a moment.

"No problemo," said Brooks, and slid another five-pound plate onto each side.

I positioned myself on the bench and lay back, staring past the bar to the casually rotating ceiling fans. My palms were sweaty and I wiped them across my shorts.

"Focus," Brooks said. "Get it together now."

As luck would have it, a slower song began playing on the radio, a power ballad from the eighties: at some point the music would build to a fist-pumping crescendo, but now it was just gooey whispered promises on top of spineless piano. I thought: That is my life.

I took hold of the bar and wrapped and unwrapped my fingers a few times, prepping. I sucked in a deep breath and then let my lungs empty out.

"Bear down," said Brooks.

When I tried to force the bar upwards it didn't seem to want to budge and I thought, Jesus Christ, I can't even get the thing out of its cradle, but finally it did dislodge and I brought the bar down to my chest. I held it there for a moment, which was unfortunate because I lost any momentum I'd built, then tried to force the bar back up.

"Push it, Nicky," Brooks shouted.

The bar rose steadily. I could feel a hot cloudy pressure in my temples and a crackly pain shot through the back of my neck, but the bar was ascending--I was doing it. After one rep I relaxed a little too much and the bar nearly fell back down to my chest; the rush of knowing I'd already put two-fifteen up once, though, made the second easier and I shoved the bar up forcefully until my elbows locked. Guys started crowding around; blurry images of bare knees and wristbands and flashing fingers filled my peripheral vision.

"That's two!" Brooks called out. "Come on, now!"

The third was easy, too. But as I brought the bar back down for the fourth I felt something give way in my shoulders and arms, an odd numbness deep in the marrow of the bones. A third of the way up I hit a wall and could feel myself strain. A grunt escaped my lips, followed by a spray of spit.

"Push it, Nicky!" Brooks said, "you got it now!" and placed his hands--just his index and middle fingers, really--underneath the bar. It was common practice, just steadying the bar so it didn't fall and crush the lifter, theoretically. But I could sense Brooks give the underside of the bar a little pressure--nothing elaborate or obvious; I was sure nobody else even noticed it--but it was enough to nudge me beyond that wall so that I could extend the bar the rest of the way up.

"Yeah!" somebody shouted. "All right, one more!"

I wanted to stop--I'd proved my point, as far as I was concerned--but couldn't. My hands were burning and the ceiling above me had gone blurry. I lowered the bar, bounced it slightly off my chest, and thrust upwards with all I had; surprisingly, I made it about halfway up before everything locked. The bar wavered above me, trembling in a sort of no-man's-land. My elbows were awkwardly bent; I was unable to muster any additional force beneath the weight. I hoped I wasn't whimpering. Then Brooks put his fingers underneath the bar again and yelled, "Come on, Nick, push, goddamnit it!" and the weight, seemingly without any additional exertion on my part, began to rise. When my arms were fully extended Brooks made a show of helping me to guide the bar back into the cradle.

Cheers went up around me. I lay there for a moment, letting my vision right itself, but it didn't, not exactly, and then I realized that, with all my straining, a contact must have popped out of my eye. Blinking wildly, I sat up and accepted the pats on my back. Brooks wrapped his arm around my head and ruffled my hair. Fists were offered for me to tap, but I could barely make a fist of my own. The smell of metal and exercise-mat-rubber filled my head. I didn't feel as though I'd attained any sort of conquest. I felt stunned.

Almost immediately I was welcomed into the players' sphere of influence. I understood that this was due in part to the weight I'd just lifted, but also, and perhaps more importantly, due to Brooks acting as my spotter and chief supporter. Within minutes I was being probed on my background--where I was from, did I go to many Steeler games back in PA, did I play ball up there, what else did I play, what position was I shooting for this year. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt, Simmons, I noticed, kept his distance. I figured this was because, as Brooks had predicted, he felt threatened, but part of me wondered if he was wise to the fact that I hadn't put the last two reps up on my own, that Brooks had helped me.

A couple of guys were talking about how they'd watched their buddy's boa constrictor eat a hamster--not to me but including me in the discussion, allowing me to listen--when Kasey walked into the room. The room was not closed off; anyone could come in, it's just that, when they got a load of us in there, not many people did. Conversation seemed to muffle for a moment before resuming. I couldn't see clearly but she appeared to glance at me before heading over to the far corner to do some lat pull-downs.

"So you're the guy she had the date with, huh?" said one of the guys, a barrel-chested Neanderthal with an elephant-shaped head and splotchy red patches all over his skin.

"What do you mean?" I said. "What do you know about it?"

"Nothing." He looked at his buddy. "Just that it ended early."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"Just things I'm hearing. It's on the wind, man. Shit like that."

"Wasn't me," I said.

"No?" He shrugged. "Whatever you say, chief. Wasn't you. Cool. I got'cha."

"It wasn't."

"Sure. Roger-Wilco. Case of mistaken identity."

His buddy laughed and held out his fist to me, which I tapped with my own, even though a rank sourness was beginning to form in my stomach. One thing seemed clear to me then: if you're the butt of a joke, you couldn't really consider yourself in on it.

Some guys took off; the rest of us went back to our workouts. Brooks wanted to do some shoulder presses and waved me over to an incline bench. We readied the bar, sliding on plate after plate. I wasn't keeping track, but it was a lot of weight. Kasey was standing in front of the mirror now, doing eight-pound dumbbell curls, stray wisps of hair springing loose from the ponytail, a sweet look of concentration on her face.

Brooks ran through a quick set of ten, took a short break where he stood and again checked his stomach in the mirror--the mirror that reflected right back at the one Kasey was staring into--then sat back down and pounded out ten more, forcefully, his muscles rolling under his skin like marbles in a sack. When he finished those he added a couple of plates and told me to be ready; he might need help with these, knowing, of course, that he wouldn't.

A couple of guys stood by, talking, passing around a bottle of baby powder, keeping one eye on Brooks. It was part awe, part simple curiosity. Brooks threw up seven or eight reps with ease, struggled mildly with the next two, and I expected him to stop there, but he kept going. The effect was much like blasting through a roadblock and now people did take overt notice. He was looking to make his own statement. Across the room, Kasey turned and watched, holding her dumbbells at her sides like suitcase handles, and when Brooks hit that point of the weight's resistance pressing down on him, I dutifully placed my hands--index and middle fingers only--underneath the bar, as he'd done for me. My hands were in place, but I was watching Kasey. In that moment I became acutely aware of the smell of Brooks' sweat in the air between us. Brooks trumpeted and puckered his lips; spit flew. The bar held perfectly still and Brooks squeezed shut his eyes and gave a heave and the bar inched its way up.

My index and middle fingers were underneath the bar but I guess I had my thumbs on top of it. I guess I knew even then that this was the case. I guess even then I knew that, with my thumbs, I had begun to apply a tiny bit of downward pressure to the bar. It stopped rising. Brooks kicked his legs out away from him in a move that looked remarkably like panic. His ass writhed in the seat and he let out a jungle-like yell. Kasey's face fell. She took a step toward us and I pressed down harder on the bar. Brooks was stuck.

"Haa-ah!" he blurted.

"What?"

"Help!"

I took the bar full in both hands now and helped him lift it and replace it in the cradle with a harsh clatter. Brooks collapsed with his arms splayed out to the sides, panting, and screamed, "FUCK!" rattling the mirrors around us. He rolled to his side and sat with his elbows on his knees, shoulders heaving with each breath. "God fuckin' damn!" When he caught his breath he stood and exhaled one last time, as if he'd at that moment come to a decision, then turned to me and smiled. He looked almost shy.

"Close," I said.

He blinked. "Yeah."

"Almost," I said.

He just stared at me.

"I thought you had it. I swear."

"I'm getting a drink," he said, and headed for the door. Some people glanced up from their exercises and watched him. Kasey was down on the mat, stretching, her nose pulled all the way to her knee.

VI

Later that afternoon she called and asked me out, a real date this time, she said: dinner, movie, et cetera, et cetera, but how about if we double with Jessica and this guy she met at the beach the other day. He'd drive. It'd just be easier.

"I'll think about it," I told her.

"Well, the movie's at seven-fifteen, so ..."

"I said I'll think about it."

Look: it wasn't as if some great injustice had been done. There was no way anyone could be sure that Brooks would have managed to work that last rep all the way up. He was past his limit anyway, and a pothead besides. His stamina had to give out at some point. And for that matter, how could anyone be sure I wouldn't have put up those last two--on my own? There's no way of truly knowing so it's not worth dwelling on. Brooks certainly didn't. When we got back from the gym he invited me in for a fatty and when I said nah he told me he'd be by tomorrow to shoot around or something and by the time I made it to my front door I heard the Johnston's frog window squeak open and the opening guitar licks of Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit" pour out into the neighborhood.

My parents were in the kitchen, their backs to me as I came in. My mother stood at the stove using a spatula to remove slices of green peppers from a sputtering pan of hot oil, and my father hovered over her shoulder with his enormous hands on her hips. He was still in his work clothes. Every couple of seconds he'd reach for a pepper and she'd smack his hand and he'd squeeze her and they'd both laugh.

Suddenly my father swung around to me. His smile was still there, resonant, like the lingering image on a just-turned-off television. "Hey!" he said. "There he is."

"Dinner'll be ready soon," said my mother.

"Great," I said. "I'm starving."

My father gave me a raised brow. "So how was football practice? Pull up a chair and tell us all about it."

It wasn't "practice," of course, but I didn't have the heart to clarify. It didn't matter. Our new house wasn't even broken in yet and already we seemed happy; the sweet smell of sauteed peppers and slightly burnt olive oil was in the air, and it wasn't worth upsetting such a palpable balance.

I slid a chair out from the table and settled in.