“So,” he said, his eyes on the floor.
“Yeah, so.”
“We could use some sort of system of marking slips to avoid this.”
“Agreed.”
Grateful that she agreed, he looked up at her. She didn’t have a Crossroads wardrobe yet, no overalls, no painter’s pants, no army jacket, but she was wearing an old sweater that at least had some holes in it. He still couldn’t believe she’d joined Crossroads; it upset the natural order of things.
“I really admire how smart you are,” she said in a rote kind of tone, not looking at him.
“Thank you, sister. And I admire, I really do, how sincere you always are. You’ve got a lot of phony friends, but you’re not phony. It’s actually kind of amazing.” Seeing her mouth harden, he added, “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to criticize your friends. I was trying to say something positive about you.”
Her mouth remained set.
“Maybe we should move right along to the barriers,” he said. “I suspect it’s more fruitful terrain.”
She nodded. “What is a thing I’m doing that’s a barrier to you getting to know me better.”
Perry realized that the wording of the exercise left something to be desired. It presupposed, for example, that he and Becky wanted to get to know each other better.
“I would say,” he said, “that the fact that you don’t seem to like me, and always seem vaguely pissed off with me, including right now, and haven’t tried to have a personal conversation with me in the last three or four years, at least not one that I can remember, despite our living in the same house, could be considered something of a barrier.”
She laughed, but in a shaky way, as if a sob had also been an option. “Guilty as charged,” she said.
“You don’t like me.”
“I mean the part about us never having a personal conversation.”
Her face, which he took this unusual opportunity to observe from up close, was faultless. One’s eye sought for a blemish （he himself had several raging） or some underlying feature that detracted, a thinness of lip, a squareness of jaw, a defect of nose, and found none. Same thing with her long, straight, shining hair, which was of a richer color than the slightly false-seeming yellow of his own: she had the platonic teen-girl hair to which other girls compared their own invidiously. Perry could see why the world considered Becky attractive, but also why it was wrong to. An absence of negatives wasn’t necessarily a positive. It could be a thing that merely offered no resistance to the eye, like an invisible balloon on a string. Maddened by the sight of a taut vertical string that ended in nothingness, people followed it around and concluded, from their following it, that it must be highly desirable.
He didn’t like her either.
“So it’s something I’m doing,” she said. “Is that the idea?”
“In this half of the exercise, yes. I’m naming what appears to me to be a barrier.”
“Well, one thing that’s kind of a barrier for me is the way you speak. Are you aware of how you sound?”
“Let the character assassination begin.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. The way you just said that. Like you’re an English aristocrat.”
“I have a Midwestern accent, Becky.”
The flaw of redness entered her face. “How do you think it feels to the rest of us to be around a person who’s always looking down on us, like we’re funny to him? Who’s always smirking like he knows something we don’t know.”
Perry frowned. To object that he didn’t look down on Judson, except in the most literal physical sense, would have conceded her larger point.
“Who acts like I’m mentally deficient because I got a B in chemistry.”
“Chemistry isn’t a subject for everyone.”
“But you’ll get an A-plus in it, won’t you. Without even trying. Without even giving a shit.”
“It could happen. But you could have done it, too, if you really wanted. I don’t think of you as dumb, Becky. That’s just false.”
He could feel himself becoming sentimental, and there were no points to be scored for it here, in the privacy of the coat closet, with his sibling.
“I’m talking about my feelings,” she said. “You can’t say a feeling is false.”
“Yes, true. So, you’re saying you feel that my being good at school is a barrier.”
“No. I’m saying I don’t feel like you’re even there. Like you’re a thousand miles away from all of us. I’m saying that doesn’t make me want to get to know you better.”