“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be hard to hear. I mean, you are my brother. But maybe it’s good you picked my name tonight, because I’ve lived with you my whole life. I can see you better than other people can. I … I do want to get to know you better. You’re my brother. But first I have to see that there’s a person there worth knowing.”
She stood up and left him in the closet like a city leveled by a hydrogen bomb. Out of the rubble, he painfully reconstructed the gist of what she’d said. She knew a lot more about his extracurricular activities than he might have imagined. （The only blessing there was that she didn’t seem to know that he sold drugs to seventh graders.） Ambrose thought he was “trouble.” （The only consolation there was the certainty that Ambrose would be angry if he knew she’d betrayed this confidence.） His seeming good works in Crossroads counted for nothing. （But at least she’d reported that people thought well of him.） He was a bad person. He merely used Judson.
Too ashamed and self-pitying to leave the closet, he listened to the group reassembling in the function hall, the glad buzz of dyad partners who’d successfully worked on their relationships, the barking of Ambrose, the skillful strumming of guitars, the sing-along of “All Good Gifts” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” He wondered if anyone noticed he was missing. Though not yet in the inner circle, he was among the sophomores most likely to get there, a fairly bright star in the Crossroads sky, and he certainly would have noticed if, say, one of the stars in Orion’s Belt went dark. As the meeting broke up, he waited for a tap on the closet door from someone—a remorseful Becky, a worried adviser, a reassuring Ambrose, a fellow member who valued him, or even just someone who saw the strip of light under the door when the function-hall lights were turned off. That no one came to him, not one person, seemed to him a damning confirmation of Becky’s judgment. He was not a person worth knowing.
It was partly to prove his sister wrong and partly to become a person whom Rick Ambrose ought to trust （and perhaps prefer to Becky） that he’d formed his new resolution that night. Not the purest-hearted of motives, surely; but one had to begin somewhere.
Leaving only two Quaaludes behind in his strongbox, as a tiny Christmas present to himself, he readmitted Judson to their bedroom and hurried forth in his parka, under snow-threatening skies, to Ansel Roder’s house. A peculiarity of the Crappier Parsonage was that, although more in need of razing than of renovation, it stood in a much tonier part of town than the senior minister’s house. All of Perry’s old drug buddies lived close by. In his reluctance to liquidate the asset, he’d dithered past the start of Christmas vacation and now couldn’t rely on finding any of his regular customers behind the Lifton Central baseball backstop, but Roder was always Mr. Liquidity. The stuccoed Roder manse had a round turret with terra-cotta shingles. Inside were beam-ceilinged rooms whose least-fine piece of furniture was finer than Perry’s family’s finest. Such was the heating situation that Roder came to the front door barefoot and shirtless, like G.I. Joe on a beach holiday. “Just the man I’m looking for,” he said. “I’m getting this weird fuzz tone in my speakers.”
Perry followed his friend up a broad staircase. “Both of them?”
“Yeah, but only with the turntable, not the tape deck.”
“That’s useful information. Let’s have a look.”
He had neither the time nor the inclination to play stereo doctor, but one of the ways he balanced accounts with his friends was by applying his manifold dexterity to petty problems of theirs, home-appliance puzzles, clogged aquarium hosing, calligraphy for signage, forgery of parental handwriting, interpretation of dreams, anything involving glue or tweezers. Upstairs, in his bedroom, Roder blasted a bit of “Whiskey Train” on his powerful stereo, and Perry readily diagnosed and fixed the looseness of the phonograph’s needle cartridge. Without ceremony, he drew the asset from his parka pocket and tossed it onto Roder’s bed.
Roder’s eyes widened. “That is a princely Christmas present, Perry.”
“I was hoping you might buy it from me.”
“Buy it.”
Between them, unspoken, the matter of Roder’s perennial largesse, and the question of why Perry invariably accepted it if he had drugs of his own and didn’t share them.
“I need funds,” he explained. “There’s something I want to get Jay for Christmas.”