Chapter 1
Carson and I share a room in a house with eleven other people.
We pay forty-four dollars in rent each month.
There’s no heat and at the end of November we all pitch in and buy a large propane gas heater we call Mavis and keep her in the living room.
To be warm in that house in winter you are either asleep under blankets or draped over Mavis.
I start spending more and more nights at the Breach House—Dr. Gastrell named it after D.
H. Lawrence’s childhood home—where there are tall radiators in every room that crack and sizzle with real heat.
Utilities are included in their free rent, so they keep the thermostat cranked.
The first time Carson comes over she cannot stop talking about the temperature.
She sheds layers, piles them on an armchair.
‘I feel like I’m going to get malaria in here.
’ She strips down to a T-shirt and twists her raised arm around. ‘I have not seen my elbows in weeks.’
‘You don’t shower?’ Sam says.
‘God no. You can’t shower on Pye Street in winter. You would die. I shower at the gym.’ Carson was on the volleyball team. ‘Fast. All my teammates want me.’ She flashes Sam her big smile.
I take her upstairs.
‘It’s even hotter up here. Jesus.’
‘Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain in this room.’
She looks at the bed. ‘So this is where you don’t fuck.’
I shush her.
She looks at the books on the bedside table I’ve told her about. ‘It’s not going to end well.’ She shakes her head. ‘But the heat.’ She flaps her bare arms around. ‘I get it.’
Ivan teaches us a new card game called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster that some girl from Connecticut taught him.
He removes the fives, sixes, sevens, and eights from the deck and with the remaining cards explains that each suit is a family, every king the head of his family: Spade the Gardener, Club the Policeman, Heart the Lover, and Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, who is the king of diamonds.
The remaining cards are different members of each king’s family.
The first person to collect a full family wins.
All the cards are dealt out and the only way to obtain cards is to ask another player for one, but each request has to be spoken with the exact same polite phrasing, and you must say thank you before you touch a card someone gives you.
If you mess up, the first person to scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ gets your turn.
‘Sam?’ Ivan says.
‘Yes.’
‘May I please have Spade the Gardener’s twins?’
‘Yes, you may.’
Sam slides the two of spades across the table.
‘Thank you,’ Ivan says, but too late, after he touches the card, so we all scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster!’ as loud as we can. Then we argue about who started screaming first.
You have to pretend you’re not looking for the suit you want, and you’re always trying to disrupt others from getting what they’re looking for.
There is ganging up and subterfuge. We all have our tics and tells.
I always ask for the parrot—the three—of the suit I’m pursuing.
Sam always asks for the eldest son. Ivan never learns to say thank you before touching the card he’s asked for, and Yash always forgets about the donkey.
Sam cannot scream ‘Sir Hincomb Funnibuster’ without leaping up and knocking things over.
When I scream, Yash says my eyes look like they’re going to pop off my face like buttons.
It’s deeply satisfying to win that game, to fan out a whole family before anyone else does.
In bed that night after a few hours of Sir Hincomb and then our celibate sex, Sam tells me about his relationship with Valerie.
She was Baptist like him, very pious, he says, and made it clear on their first date that she would not have sex before marriage.
They fell hard in love and were together for months until they lost control one night and did it.
He covers his face. ‘We prayed, we went to each other’s ministers, we stopped receiving the sacrament. But it ruined us.’
I do not say, you ruined it by believing in this man-made bullshit. I say, ‘You were in love. It was a natural impulse.’
‘I will never forgive myself for that. For doing that to her.’
‘Sounds like you did it together.’
‘It was my fault.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s always the man’s fault.’
‘Why? Did you rape her?’
He glares at me.
I laugh. I’m incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.
‘Why couldn’t you apologize to each other, just say oops, that was a mistake, and move on? Isn’t the whole point of Jesus about forgiveness?’
‘We tried, but . . .’ He struggles for a while to find the words, then says, ‘We are all our sins remembered.’
‘What the fuck, Sam. That’s Hamlet, not the Bible. And it’s a load of crap.’
He’s angry after that and rolls over and won’t speak. After he falls asleep I go back to my freezing house. On Monday morning he walks me to Modern Furniture like nothing happened.
My favorite nights are staying in and helping Yash pick out a shirt for a date, seeing him off, making dinner with Sam, and watching a movie or reading until Yash—and often Ivan—come back from their dates and tell us everything.
Ivan is all about Ivan. ‘I was tremendous,’ he says after an encounter on a waterbed with a med student. ‘She’ll never have it better than that.’
Sam laughs. He doesn’t judge their behavior, though Yash doesn’t seem to be having any sex at all.
He comes back a lot earlier than Ivan and makes every evening sound like a complete fiasco.
He takes a lot of girls out but never the one Sam says he has a real crush on.
Lara Mertens. She’s Austrian, with an accent so mild you have to listen closely for it.
She was in a Japanese history class with me a few semesters ago, very stylish, a little sad, putting up with all the Americans.
They call her the goddess. She doesn’t seem right for Yash.
I can understand the appeal—the beautiful skin, the pouty disdain, the tailored jackets—but she doesn’t look like she has any fun.
He’s so sharp, so quick, so eager to make a fool of himself. He needs someone who gets him entirely.
A few weeks before I met Sam, a girl I knew had been killed off campus, stabbed to death, the school paper said in the only article they wrote about it.
No one I knew knew her. Carson had gone home for the summer and I’d cobbled together a few sublets before we moved into Pye Street together in September.
In August I ended up in Franklin Terrace for a few weeks and so had she, this girl from Iran.
She was going to be a sophomore and took summer classes during the day.
I was working at High Five at night, so we didn’t see each other much.
I only remember a few real conversations.
She told me her father had worked for the Shah and they’d left Iran when the Shah did, nine days after the start of the revolution, when she was nine.
She had the most delicate and pale skin I’d ever seen, as if a ray of sun had never touched it.
She had a crush on the boy in the apartment next door.
He was going to be a sophomore, too. When she told me he’d asked her out, she leapt around the apartment like a deer.
She was a virgin, she told me. She’d never had a boyfriend before.
We lived together for three weeks. I don’t remember saying goodbye.
She wasn’t there the day I moved out. I didn’t see her on campus after that.
A month later she was dead. That boy’s roommate had raped her and stabbed her sixteen times in the apartment next to ours.
I heard the news on the college radio station the morning after it happened.
I went to the funeral alone. I didn’t talk about it.
But sometimes I woke up in the dark in Sam’s bed and thought of her—Cyra was her name—and her small upturned nose and that tender skin.
One day in January, after we’ve come back from the holiday break and our schedules are all different, I go over to the Breach thinking Sam will be there, but I find Yash alone, smoking a pipe in the study.
‘Is this what you do when no one else is home?’
‘It is. Sam doesn’t think we should touch them.
He says they’re antiques, but it just makes you feel so’—he holds the pipe by the bowl and takes three exaggerated squint-eyed puffs—‘Lord Mountbatten.’ He opens the drawer.
‘Here. Sit. I’ll fix you up.’ He lifts an ivory pipe from the holder, stuffs it with tobacco, lights it, and passes it over.
’ This pipe has a spectacular downward curve to it.
The stem is a little wet from where Yash put his lips.
‘Do you inhale?’
‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
We puff together and laugh at our poses.
Then he takes the pipe out of his mouth. ‘I need to tell you something, Jordan. I feel like I should have somehow mentioned it sooner.’
I stop puffing too.
‘I was at the funeral. For Cyra. I saw you there. I recognized you from class and I wanted to say something to you—you looked so upset and you weren’t there with anyone—but I didn’t and I’m sorry. I was there because I knew the guy who killed her, and I didn’t want to tell you that.’
‘You knew him?’
‘His older brother was on my hall freshman year. The police found a sweatshirt with my name in magic marker—my mother labeled all my clothes in magic marker—in that guy’s apartment.
His brother must have swiped it from me and he ended up with it.
They questioned me about him and I didn’t know why, then I saw the article in the paper. ’
‘The one article.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did they keep it so quiet?’
‘I don’t know. Because she was foreign, probably. How did you know her?’