He knew how people felt, though—he couldn’t imagine not having an urge to travel, to see new things, to encounter the unexpected. Those Florida sophomores hadn’t been able to hide how alien the California landscape was to their eyes, how small differences cropped up everywhere once you started looking for them: in the trees, in the air at dusk. There’s something appealing about being a visitor. The whole world’s a new thrill.
Ohio. A world away. Cold winters, wet springs. The brochures from the schools were, themselves, a kind of science fiction. They represented the possibilities he’d only vaguely known he was working toward over the past four years, urged on by his mother, and, more quietly, by his dad, who saw, in his son, a kind of resolve that seemed miraculous to him. He hoped some of it was down to good parenting, but it felt bigger than that, and better, too. He didn’t want to go spoiling it with awkward comments and observations.
As the pile of envelopes from the colleges grew higher, the feeling of new possibilities became general within the Hall household. It felt more like spring than autumn. Something new was under way for everybody. Who can resist such a good feeling within a family?
He let that feeling ripple for a second, and then reflected involuntarily on the question of Alex. It made him sad. Why shouldn’t Alex, who was as smart as Derrick, also be setting out into a new and exciting chapter of his life instead of just trying to secure a safe place to sleep? There were so many things to consider in this world. The scope of it all seemed too great to grasp. Maybe it got easier as you grew older, or maybe you just got numb. Either way, it was probably worse for a guy like Alex, whose options seemed to be sealing themselves off daily, like a long hallway interrupted, every few steps, by a new door, each of which locks itself behind you as soon as you’ve passed through it.
He looked again at the picture on the cover of the Kenyon brochure as he considered all this. Everybody in the picture looked sharp. They were walking across a campus in autumn, huge orange maple leaves underfoot. All of them were smiling. It was a hard image to resist.
THE HAGGLER’S LOVE OF DISCRETION
“This is some weird shit,” Buckler said as they entered the building. It was a planned line; he’d read in one of his how-to-succeed-in-business books that delivering a mild shock to the seller was a prospective client’s best leverage. Establish your ground. Make them inhabit your space, not the other way around. Evelyn Gates hadn’t even flipped the lights on before he said it, and she recognized the desperate cadence of an over-rehearsed opening.
“Excuse me?” she said. Her practice in business predated Buckler’s grade school days.
“Weird stuff,” Buckler corrected himself, making eye contact with her quickly and smiling. He had a lot of faith in that smile. “Weird stuff, I mean. No offense intended.”
Gates understood, then, the extent of the wetness behind her client’s ears. Her father had taught her how to spot a novice; now she began calculating markup, contemplating which structural anomalies she’d now frame as features. Her eyes would have been on Buckler, not out among the racks—a failed porn store didn’t interest her. She was a little annoyed that all the sordid merchandise was still there in the building, but not terrifically surprised. A tenant who can’t afford to make rent probably can’t afford to hire movers, either.
But Buckler—young, nervous, and out of his natural habitat—blinked once, and then again. To be in a place like this in the company of a woman old enough to be his mother was uncomfortable enough. Trying to find the least self-incriminating spot for his gaze to land made matters worse; no line of sight seemed safe. So he settled on some magazines, since their outer sheen seemed moderately less trashy than the big, glossy VHS cases lining the walls. He tried to diverge his gaze, to make it seem like he was lost in thought instead of scrutinizing a skin mag; but then some grainy break in the shiny surface would catch his eye and draw him in.
It was mainly Seth’s handiwork, one of his earlier pieces from the first day he’d spent in the store with Derrick. The magazine had originally been called Sinful Sluts. It had a parochial school theme. The model on the front, facing the camera naked from the waist down, now boasted curling ram’s horns drawn in ballpoint on either side of her head; Seth’s curling interior lines, simple but effective, made these horns look gnarled and ancient. On her thighs were tattoos of swords, their tips and hilts reversed to face one another from either side of the gap between her open legs. Her right hand had originally held an erect penis, jutting from the body of a man whose remaining parts were all out of the frame; Seth had shaded the shaft and sketched wire mesh across the glans to turn it into a microphone. Finally, with the X-Acto, he’d removed her eyes—a recurring and reliable motif in the renovated Monster Adult X; any face in the world looks creepier if you cut out its eyes.