Page 27 of What Boys Learn

But most of that wasn’t written on the legal pad. It was all in my head, a mix of half-remembered dialogue and conflicted feelings, because much as I worried for Izzy, I also disliked her, which made me question myself yet again. It wasn’t in my job description to like or dislike. My job was to care.

I thought back to what Benjamin had said.Girls use guys. Maybe they did, sometimes, but maybe that was their way of asserting power in a world of angry, frustrated, “dangerous” men.

I heard the sound of familiar steps, coming up the walk. The front door swung open. I flipped over the legal pad and jumped up like I’d just remembered I needed to defrost something for dinner.

11

When I was fourteen, my first year in the foster care system following my stepmother Martha’s death and my father’s institutionalization for dementia, I got in trouble for playing mini-golf.

Janessa, a girl in my home, had invited me and we had just enough scavenged quarters to play, especially after the pimply cashier was convinced to let us pay half rate. The place was empty. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, blue sky, crisp air. I’d never played mini-golf before, and the little windmills and bright green turf made me feel like a kid again. Iwasa kid, of course, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like a jaded adult.

Janessa had played before. She rolled up her flannel sleeves to the elbows, and I spent lots of time standing beside her, looking down at her hands and thin wrists, gripping the club, thumbs pointed down.

“They’re from my dad,” she said at the fourth hole.

“I wasn’t trying to stare. I was just watching how you swing.”

She made a dubious sound, shook her arms so the flannel sleeves settled farther down her scarred forearms, then smacked the little ball.

“You got anything like that?” she said after she’d finished the hole.

Cigarette burns?

“No.”

No burns, no scars, no poorly healed broken ribs.

“Then what do you got?”

“She sent my brother away.”

“Your mom?”

“Stepmom.”

“But before that?”

“She hated both of us. But him, most of all.”

“So, she never touched you.”

I wasn’t in the mood to visit any specific memory or to play the “my family was worse” game, so I said, “Not really.”

“Then after your brother was gone, she kicked you out?”

“Something like that.”

I didn’t tell people my full story. Benjamin didn’t know it; Robert thought he did, but I’d given him only partial details. My mom’s death by stroke when I was eight. Martha’s accident in the kitchen—one wrong step on a slippery floor, head cracked on the counter’s sharp corner edge—shortly before I turned fourteen. Foster care for four years. It was only a couple of years ago that Benjamin did the math and said,You were twenty when you got pregnant with me? That’s not so young.

Oh, it was, honey. It was. I skipped over the next seven years.But things were better once I inherited a little money and could afford to start college.

But neither Benjamin nor the dream of college existed yet, during that mini-golf outing, long ago. Janessa and I played a round, went home, and received a full reaming out: no dinner, lost weekend privileges, extra chores. My foster father—Dan Baxter was his name, a church pastor—lectured us with his hand over his heart, incredulous that we could have chosen to do something frivolous on that day of all days.

But what else was there to do? Sit at home watching the news endlessly replay smoke and terror? September 11. No wonder the mini-golf place was empty.

I thought about that time and again, whenever a tragic public event happened and I found myself deciding whether to go to a movie, or the beach, or in today’s case, a private pool. It wasn’t like sitting at home, reorganizing the pantry or cleaning a toilet, would be more respectful.

So I said yes when Benjamin asked if we could go to the pool together, my first full day home with my Summit career uncertain, his last day of exams, one day after I’d made him talk about the underwear. He’d admitted to having some kind of involvement with Izzy, and if I’d been his age, talking to my father or stepmother about some boy I liked but wasn’t steadily dating, I couldn’t imagine providing more details than he had. Even if the picture was blurry, he’d given me something. There had to be a reward for that, or at the very least, no punishment. And anyway, for Benjamin, the pool wasn’t frivolous. He was preparing for a lifeguard test, hoping for a first job, trying to improve himself.