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that she didn't see the thicket between us, behind which I had to make my private way.

 

Against my mother's earnest wishes, I drove my car to a run-down neighborhood on the edge of town, where Billy—a boy from my high school, somehow emancipated at the ripe age of eighteen—rented an apartment. It was swampy land, near the river, the houses set back from the road and fronted by snarls of weeds. There were deep puddles in Billy's driveway that never drained, even in summer. His place, a claptrap house built out of plasterboard and plywood, had only the barest furnishings: an old plaid couch and a TV, a neon Hamm's sign on one wall. Billy worked at a nearby ranch. On any given day, his fridge might contain a half-eaten package of franks, a few vials of cattle vaccine, and a six-pack of Oly. When I came over, he'd offer me a beer and we'd small-talk our way into the bedroom, taken up almost entirely by his waterbed, a king-size ocean with vinyl sides.

There is no word that does justice to the sustained conjoining of mouths that went on there. It was more than kissing, less than sex. As the night wore on, shirts and jeans were peeled off, but it seems sweet, in hindsight, that we felt constrained by those last layers of cotton underwear. At one point, I remember him saying, "Your skin is so soft," with a kind of twangy complaint in his voice that I found amusing. I wasn't soft; it was only his hands—chapped from cold and salt and bridle leather.

At some hour of my own determining it was "time to go," and I retrieved my outer clothing and, after some gentle pleading on his part, tiptoed through the living room, past his roommate asleep on the foldout couch with a girl who had allowed him more mature satisfactions. Out in my car, I turned the ignition and sat idling in the dark, running a finger over my chapped lips and waiting for the frost to melt from the windshield.

F
OR YEARS MY FATHER
had been asking me to move in with him. It was difficult to be a holiday dad. He wanted to do the kind of parenting that dailiness allowed. The issue came up every year through elementary school and junior high, and always I put him off. It wasn't easy to say no. I loved him and I could see how much he wanted this chance; I even played sometimes at sharing his wishes: I want to come, but not this year, maybe next. In my heart, the choice was always clear. I was comfortable with my mother. Things were easy between us. I had my friends, and my routine, and I feared change. By the time I was a junior in high school, the topic of swapping households had ceased to come up.

Then Leslie remembered a program from her days at L.A. High. Bright students who had fulfilled most of their college requirements could enroll early at UCLA. You spent the mornings in high school, finishing up the last units of English and P.E., and in the afternoons took a class or two at the university. Leslie seemed under the illusion, along with my high school counselor, that I was an accomplished student, but my bad habits at the high school were starting to show. One morning at a time, playing hooky down at the doughnut shop, I had made a record for myself, and the record wasn't looking too good. My grades weren't shameful. Plenty of people would have been happy with them, but the gates of the best schools weren't going to swing wide for me, and the financing would be strictly pay-as-you-go.

The best perk of the high school scholars' program was that you didn't have to apply for undergraduate admission. You were automatically enrolled in the freshman class, and the courses you took during high school counted toward your degree. It was a recruiting program for the kind of students who might otherwise go to Stanford or Harvard. Leslie felt sure I could get in.

Flattered by her encouragement, I filled out an application. It was a small program, and it seemed to have fallen into some obscurity. All applicants who met the minimum standards were called in for an interview. (Some odd formula was applied to your SAT scores; I was lucky the equation favored verbal ability.)

When it came time to fly to L.A. for the appointment, my mother came to my room to help me pack. "How do you feel about the idea of moving?" she asked, trying to keep her voice light.

I shrugged. "I'm throwing myself at the mercy of fate. If I get in, I'll go." Easy to sound carefree: I was sure I wouldn't be accepted. I would be right there, in my same bedroom, in my same house by the river, when September rolled around, so why worry?

 

The interview was held in the Letters and Sciences Division in Murphy Hall. While I waited in the outer office, students came in to check class schedules and talk to the counselors. There was a friendly mood in the office. A woman came out and offered me a cup of tea, and I took it. "You can bring it back with you," she said, smiling and starting down the hall.

I thought she was the receptionist, but when I followed her into a small office filled with books and dried-out spider plants, she pulled up two chairs and shut the door. "I'm Janice. I run the high school scholars' program," she said, holding out her hand. I gave her mine, still warm from the teacup, grateful that I hadn't had time to get sweaty palms.

Janice sat back in her chair and propped a foot on one knee. "So, tell me a little about your interests," she began. She had a pleasant, open face, the face of someone who was used to being told the truth.

I didn't have the good sense to disguise myself. I told her I liked English quite a lot and Spanish less so. I didn't care much for math.

"I can see that," she said, glancing at my transcript.

I racked my brain. My interests. "I like to dance," I told her.

Janice glanced up from my grades. "As in disco?"

"No—well, yes, that too," I told her, feeling things weren't going well. "But I was thinking more of soft-shoe."

Janice's face lit up. "No kidding? I just started tap lessons last month." The foot came down off her knee and she leaned toward me. "How long have you been at it?"

"Oh, off and on since junior high. I've been in some musicals, so I get practice there."

"Can you do a time step?" she asked. "I have a problem with time steps."

"Sure," I said, suddenly flush. "Doubles, triples."

"It's that first part that throws me off."

I stood up and did a single in front of my chair. "It helps to mark the beat out loud."

Janice got up beside me, tucking the hair behind her ears. "Okay. Shuffle, hop—this is where I get stuck, on the weight change."

We went through a few time steps together, the tile floor clicking brightly under our heels. "This floor is perfect," I told her. "You could practice in here on your lunch hour."

Janice laughed a little, and then seemed to remember the purpose of our visit and returned to her chair. "So," she said, picking up my transcript. She didn't seem to be reading it, but rather musing as she stared at my uninspiring grades. "Goodness, I'm still out of breath," she said conspiratorially, putting a hand on her chest. She slipped a finger under a gold chain at her throat and slid it back and forth, then spread the transcripts out on the edge of her desk, as if they might improve with rearrangement.

"You don't have the GPA," she said, looking at me squarely. "But I think you'd be a good addition to the program. I'm going to admit you, on the condition that you bring your average up by the end of the year."

"That, wow, that would be fabulous." I stuck my hand out and she shook it. "I'm sure I could do that."

"Great," Janice said, opening the door. "I'll look forward to seeing you in the fall."

 

Buoyed by Janice's gamble, I cut back on trips to the doughnut shop and finished the year with the minimum grades required of me. I was moving to L.A., and though I had scarcely shown any volition for the change, once it was decided, I began to look forward to it. Most of my school friends were a year or two older and would be leaving for college in the fall. I was bored with my routine at the high school. I shrugged and let myself drift, borne along by chance.

Since I was going to spend the coming year with my father, I stayed with my mother that summer and got a job at a carpet store in town. On the weekends, I went to a small swath of lawn beside the lake and met up with Chrissy Taylor, my friend of the hour, who had recently fallen out with her sixty-year-old parents over returning home late from her junior prom. We claimed a patch of grass above the beach and the roped-off rectangle of algae-tinged water, greased ourselves with coconut oil, and lay back to discuss the few available guys who were not either former boyfriends or distant relations.

On one such weekend, we met two men who looked promising. Chrissy spotted them playing Frisbee on the lawn and managed to start up a conversation. Jack, the taller one, was a thick-featured fellow with an unfounded pride in his looks. (I later learned he had spent nearly a thousand dollars at the Barbizon Modeling School in San Francisco, learning runway turns and buying vanity shots for his "portfolio." The handlers took his cash and neglected to tell him that he had wide-set eyes and the blunt nose of a boxer and would never be paid to stand in front of the camera.) Still, Chrissy liked a show horse, as she was a bit of one herself. She was lithe, with white-blond hair, a little-girl voice, and a weakness for sloe gin. The package turned men to putty.

She and Jack quickly paired off, which left me with Clay. "We would take you out on our boat," he said, leaning back on the lawn, a smile breaking over his face, "except we don't have a boat." He had a chipped front tooth that I found oddly winning.

Later, the two of them swam out past the wading area and Chrissy and I went in after them, laughing and gasping at the cold, knowing in a wordless way that we would meet them at the buoys. It was near the end of summer. We were about to start our senior year. The ranks of eligible boys were thinning before us as we moved toward graduation. Out in the deep water, our new acquaintances reached the edge of the swimming area and sat on the ropes, and we breast-stroked toward them, pushing the world of sexual possibility before us in soft waves.

I was tired when I reached the boundary and pulled myself over one of the slick floats. Out there, fifty yards from the shore, it was easy to feel insignificant, a tiny fleck bobbing on the surface, the water a hundred feet thick below, turning darker and colder until it reached the lake floor. That lake was once a valley, and a few hundred people lived there before the county bought them out and dammed the river at one end. Underneath us, in the murky depths, were bridges and chimneys, foundations and old vineyards, the grape stocks still rooted in perfect rows. I had walked through it once, during a drought year, and though my mother assured me they'd been given sufficient warning, I couldn't shake the feeling that all the inhabitants had drowned.

Chrissy and Jack were laughing a few buoys farther down. As I watched them, Clay pushed off from the rope, took a breath and dove under, the water closing behind him. I could just make out his arms, flashing like trout, and above them a line of bubbles headed my way. He surfaced close by and shook the water from his hair. "Don't sink us," he said, floating toward me and tugging on the rope.

A ski boat zipped by, and we rose on its wake, then over smaller ribbons of chop. I thought of that line from
In the Night Kitchen,
"I'm in the milk and the milk's in me."

"What?" Clay asked.

"Nothing." I guess I had been smiling.

"What?" he said, laughing and pulling his way toward me on the rope hand over hand.

I figured this was probably better than anything that would come after, bobbing on a thin rope, over a sunken town, with the crumpled hills black and green all around. We both stared at the shoreline, the guard shack, the toddlers scooping in the shallows, pretending the view was what held us there.

 

Later, in the parking lot, Clay told me to stop by a bar in town, where he would be working that night. "I get off around eleven. Swing by and we'll go take a hot tub."

I loved his ease with this proposition, even though I was sixteen and had no hope of getting into a bar. It was a far cry from the high school boys who stammered and fumbled and kicked the cement planters in the quad before blurting out their invitations. I couldn't stand the terror in their voices, a terror not of me, or of the prospect of my rejecting them, but of the duty of taking initiative. There was often a note of relief in their voices when they came to the last word, as if they couldn't believe they had given voice to a request, and the answer was nearly immaterial.

Clay may have been like them at sixteen, in fact he almost surely was, but he had passed through that now into some zone of sexual comfort. I looked him over. He was handsome, in a rough sort of way, an affable country boy with a broad back and slim legs. I figured I'd never see him again.

Late that night, I drove around town with Chrissy and a few other girls, trying to find someone to buy us beer. "That guy looks good," Chrissy said, pointing to a middle-aged man in front of a supermarket. He was pacing stiffly, hands stuffed in his windbreaker.

"No way," I told her. "You are not qualified to give advice in this matter." Earlier that year she had asked an undercover cop to buy her a bottle of gin. He said "Sure," took her money, and slapped the cuffs on her. There were probably two undercover cops in the whole town, and she managed to pick one of them.

"Fine," she said, laughing her baby-doll laugh. "You choose."

I remembered my own bad eye for security guards. "I've got a better idea. Why don't you take me by that bar?"

"You're not serious."

"Sure, why not?" I figured I might as well get into trouble through the front door.

Chrissy dropped me off on a side street and I walked toward the glow of neon, my heart thumping in my chest. I peered in first through a window. It was a sports bar, pennants hanging from the ceiling, a long pine counter bristling with taps. I took a deep breath and went in.

Clay stood up from below the bar, a pair of dripping beers in each hand. "Hey!" he said, setting the bottles down. "I didn't think you'd show up." He looked different with his hair dry: it was curly and cut close to his head, almost blond. He beckoned me to the counter and wiped it down with a towel. "What can I get you?" he asked.