The Incident on the Bridge (13 page)

O
n the night of what Clay called his Spring Fiestathon, Clay's older sister, Renee, was supposed to be in charge, which was a laugh. “Be good,” she said before she left. There were already fifty or sixty people there.

Even when the house was full of kids drinking out of red cups and making out, you could sit and stare at the water flowing past like a river. That's what Jerome usually did: sat in one of the ultramodern chairs with immaculate white upholstery (they somehow never got stained or grimy like the chairs on the balconies of the Deckerling Arms) with a rum and Coke that he dumped out in the bathroom sink when the ice melted so he could refill. This way he never felt more than a slight buzz, which he would have gotten anyway from sitting on that lawn by the bay as it turned cobalt, then lilac, then flickered in the dark like a black-and-white movie.

It wasn't like he spent a lot of time with Clay at the parties now. The parties were places for Clay to circulate, sexually speaking. The girls he'd had in the past still came to the fiestathons—Clay couldn't really stop them, because once the word got around, all the juniors and any underclassmen who thought they could enter unchallenged would show up—but Clay wouldn't talk to conquered
facilones
(which even Jerome with his mediocre Spanish knew meant “the easy ones”), no matter what they wore or said or did. The girls never seemed to learn from each other. Didn't they think the same thing could happen to them? Was it just Clay's looks, or was it the house?

Until Clay had started fishing for Thisbe Locke, not one girl had ever been hard to catch. Thisbe was smarter than the girls Clay usually liked, for one thing. She took multiple AP classes, which is why Jerome knew her. She didn't go to parties. She didn't (though he sort of wished she would) post pictures of herself in a bikini so her girlfriends would write,
you r so gorgeous girl!!!
She was beautiful, in Jerome's opinion, with a narrow, intelligent face. Her lips were naturally dark and full, like lips in a painting, and her eyes were the exact shade of brown as his Doberman Maddy's eyes, which would have been a weird comparison except that no one looked at you the way that dog did: the steady, confused, worried response to being stared at. If you looked into Maddy's eyes, she looked back with a sweet, unnerving doubt that always made him say, “Relax, Maddy, you're the predator here.” Maddy didn't seem to know her own power, and neither did Thisbe.

Thisbe's legs were long and she didn't have a narrow waist or wide hips; she just went straight up. He'd see her walk in and sit down and he'd forget to notice what they were talking about in English because his whole mind was now occupied by the nearness of her. One time on his way to a tennis lesson, he saw her walking down the sidewalk in pink rubber boots and shorts and a tank top. Rain boots, even though the rain had stopped so long ago that Jerome was positive the courts were dry. “Hi, Thisbe,” he said, turning around so he could see the way the tank top was tight on her breasts. “Hi, Jerome,” she said, which was the first time she uttered his name.

The worst, most soul-corroding part was that Clay never would have noticed her if Jerome hadn't pointed to Thisbe (crossing the quad in a white skirt, arms folded, hair in a ponytail) and said, “Her,” when Clay said, “Come on, Jeronimo, who would you pick? First choice, I mean, not who could you
get.
”

Thisbe walked, Jerome pointed.

“Frisbee?”

Jerome had forgotten that people used to call her that, and Clay sounded incredulous.

“Forget it,” Jerome said. He didn't want to hear why she was inferior to girls Clay picked up.

“Awesome taste, bro. You should do it,” Clay said. “Make a move.”

“Nah.”

“Come on, Hairr-oh-nee-mo. I thought you said you liked her.”

“Forget I said anything.” He liked her but he didn't want to talk to Clay about it.

“You're a junior, bro! You never get any, and it's disturbing. I've seen how you work on the courts—you like to be the dark horse. Maybe that's your problem.”

“I don't even know what that means.”

“You have to be four down before you try to win.”

“That's not true,” Jerome said, though for a second it flattered him that Clay knew his game so well. Clay had seen more of Jerome's matches than anyone except Jerome's dad, and he always knew the score, which was more than you could say for the other four people in the stands, usually the mothers of freshmen. Ask Clay after a match if that kid had hooked you in the second game of the first set, and he'd know.

The winter went on, bright blue and cold in the morning, balmy all afternoon, rain falling seldom, though it was the season for it. Jerome went on going to class and hitting with Rolf and not doing anything about Thisbe until he got the flu and missed two days of English. He thought about texting her,
Did you get the notes in Shao's class?
but he didn't have her number. That Friday night he was doing homework because he had a tournament in Palm Springs, and Clay was lying on his bed, telling Jerome to get done already because Clay wanted to get MTO, and it took Jerome a second to remember that MTO wasn't a drug or a sex thing but Mexican takeout. Suddenly Clay said, “Look who's posting helpful homework hints on a Friday night! She's your total soul mate, man.”

Clay held out his phone to show Jerome the name beside a tiny picture of what looked like a painting of squiggly vases:
Thisbe Locke
.

“What the hell is that?” Jerome asked.

“She says it's the painting in the poem.”

They stared at the picture together. Vases, bowls, a strange blue blob. This was going to be one horrible essay assignment.

“Dude,” Clay said. “I'm getting a headache because you're taking so long! Do you have any Motrin?”

Jerome shouldn't have left his computer behind, since he was logged on to Facebook, but the Motrin was in his mother's bathroom, and then he had to wash a glass because his mom hadn't done the dishes in a while, and then he went to the trouble to get fresh ice cubes out of a tray because one time Clay had said, “Why does your ice taste so weird, man?” and Jerome didn't say it was because the Mooreheads probably had springwater piped from Switzerland to their giant freezer's ice-cube maker. Jerome's extra effort allowed Clay to have a pretty long chat with Thisbe on Jerome's computer.

When Jerome came back with the bottle of pills and the ice water, Clay was looking very amused.

“What?” Jerome said.

“Laying the groundwork, man. Laying it down.”

“What are you talking about?”

Clay showed him the speech bubbles:

“
Crackadilic
?” Jerome said, practically exploding. “What the hell does that mean? Did you have to pretend to be me
and
talk like a total imbecile?”

“ ‘You have a large and interesting vocabulary,' ” Clay said, quoting one of their English teachers.

“In which the word
crackadilic
does not appear.”

Clay just laughed while Jerome started typing in a mad rush to tell Thisbe that wasn't really him a minute ago, and she said,
Sayonara, you crackadilic pranksters.
That was sort of funny but it was hard to tell if she thought he was a jerk, so when Clay left by himself to get MTO for both of them and Jerome saw she still had a green light by her name, he said,
Hi again.

He could have taken a picture of himself but he always looked stupid in that camera's little eye, like his nose was a foot wide and his eyes were closed. The poetry handout was nearby, flipped open to the poem Jerome was writing a bunch of nonsense about, something called “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” so he skimmed it for the lines he'd sort of liked when Mr. Shao had read it aloud:
I am one of you and being one of you / Is being and knowing what I am and know.
God, no, not that. It would sound like he wanted carnal knowledge or something.