Rounding the couch, he snatched up a remote control from the coffee table and pressed the power button. The screen went dark.
“Goddamn it, Arch!” a voice cried.
Arch picked up a can of Coors Light from the tabletop and shook it.
“Give me that,” the boy said.
He stood up and snatched at the beer, which Arch dangled in front of him like a dog’s chew toy. I recognized him from school; we had two classes together—math and history. Jamie Haltom straightened himself and cocked his head.
“Hey,” he said.
We must have been thinking the same thing—that we were being set up, like a playdate.
“Charlie, Jamie,” Arch said. “Jamie, Charlie.”
He emptied the beer into the bar sink and tossed it into a garbage can.
“Damn it, Arch,” Jamie said.
“Shut up, dumbass,” Arch said. “Come on, you need a little vitamin D.”
We had just come out of the pool house when she appeared: the loveliest girl I’d ever seen, emerging from the rose garden and traipsing across the yard in an oversized white T-shirt and a pair of white-framed Wayfarers, a thick paperback book under her arm.
“Is this Charlie?” the girl asked.
“I told her about you,” Arch said. “Charlie, this is Vanessa. Jamie’s twin sister.”
“Nice to meet you, Charlie,” she said.
“Hi,” I replied.
Vanessa pulled her T-shirt over her head to reveal a two-piece seersucker bathing suit. She walked around to one of the lounge chairs and settled in to read her book.
She was still very much a girl—just shy of fifteen—but she had emerged from the chrysalis. Were it not for their matching blond hair, no one would ever believe she and Jamie were twins. The only features that betrayed her youth were the braces on her teeth and a stray pimple near the corner of her mouth, which could have easily been mistaken for a beauty mark.
“Whatcha reading?” Arch asked.
“Sense and Sensibility,” she said. “Last of my summer reading books. The quiz is on Monday.”
“Can’t be any worse than Black Boy,” he said.
“It’s actually pretty good,” she said. “Did you do all of your summer reading, Charlie?”
I nodded. I’d read the books the first week of summer and had scanned back over them every night, thinking about what kind of questions I might ask about them on the first day of class to show how carefully I’d read.
“Which did you like best?” Vanessa asked.
“A Separate Peace,” I said.
“Oh, please,” Jamie said. “I’ve never been so bored in my life.”
“I thought it was good,” I said.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Jamie said.
I did like A Separate Peace. It was about a prep school for boys. Every page seemed pregnant with precious intelligence. I regarded it less as a story than as a user’s manual.
Jamie grinned and gave me a playful punch so I would know he hadn’t intended to embarrass me, or if he had, he wanted to walk it back.
“Just messing with you,” he said.
We didn’t do much of anything that afternoon, but it was all a dazzlement to me—splashing around in the pool, lounging on recliners, listening to the radio. Arch performing jackknife dives and backflips. Vanessa reading on her recliner. I was marveling at the fine shape of Vanessa’s calves when a shadow falling across the pool startled me out of my daydream. Mr. Haltom loomed over us in his shirtsleeves.
“Hey, Uncle Jim,” Arch said.
We climbed out of the pool to greet him.
“Hello again, young man,” Jim said.
“Hello, sir.”
Feeling his powerful fingers squeezing my own, I found it unfathomable that Jim Haltom could ever have been a boy himself.
“How are you liking Yeatman so far?”
“It’s great,” I said.
“Arch here taking care of you?”
“Yes, sir.”
He slipped his hand into the pocket of his suit pants. I heard the sound of jangling keys.
“Hey there, son,” Jim said. “Good day at school?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I guess.”
“Great. Say, kids, I’m meeting a few fellows downtown to go over a deal. Your mother wants to order in tonight. Would you mind calling the club, Vanessa? Ask Carl to run it over.”
“Okay, Daddy,” she said.
He turned and strode across the lawn. The moment his father disappeared through the French doors on the other side of the rose garden, Jamie went back into the pool house and emerged holding a beer. Vanessa let out a long, low sigh.
“It’s just a beer,” Jamie said.
Vanessa closed her book. “I’m going inside to call the grill,” she said. “Arch, are you and Charlie staying for dinner?”
“Do you mind?” Arch asked.
“Not at all. Charlie, what would you like?”
“They have good cheeseburgers,” Arch said.
“That sounds good,” I said.
“Order some seasoned fries,” Jamie said.
She slipped her T-shirt back over her head and started off toward the house.
“I’ll be back in a few,” Arch said.
He toweled himself off and jogged after Vanessa. Jamie went back into the pool house. I walked in after him.
“They’ll be a while,” he said. “You want a beer?”
He held the can out toward me.
“Okay,” I said.
I sat down on the couch next to him. Jamie turned on the television.
“So, Arch and Vanessa,” I said. “Are they—”
“What?” Jamie said. “Boyfriend and girlfriend? Not yet. Arch just recently got interested, now that it looks like Vanessa’s going to turn out hot. I mean, we’re practically related. Technically it’s not incest, I guess, but it’s pretty close.”
“Well, we are in Tennessee,” I said.
Jamie let out a harsh, barking laugh.
“So what’s your deal?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Your deal. Where are you from, what do you do, what brought you here to my humble abode? You’re clearly not a ringer.”
“What’s a ringer?” I asked.
“You know. A ringer,” he said. “A stud athlete meant to bring glory to the empire.”
The fact that most of my nonwhite classmates were talented athletes had not escaped my attention. I remembered what Terrence had said about his cousin.
“So what’s your special talent?” he asked. “All the scholarship kids are good at something.”
“How do you know I’m on scholarship?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said. “Where’d you get your shoes? Payless?”
My face flushed hot. I took a big gulp from the beer.
“I’m just curious,” Jamie said. “Are you a mathlete? A violinist? Did you build a nuclear reactor in your closet? You must be bringing something to the table.”
“What do you bring to the table?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes.
“Look around,” he said.
Jamie, at least, was always honest with himself. Most Yeatman boys—many who lived in similarly opulent surroundings—maintained the delusion that they had earned their places through their intrinsic merits. Jamie knew exactly what he brought to the table. He was neither proud nor ashamed; it was just a fact.