Page 44 of Playworld

Boyd, being a mostly windowless space, shielded us from any sense of the day’s weather. Between chapel’s end and Kepplemen’s meeting, it had begun to snow. I caught a glimpse of it as I passed the front hallway, headed toward my locker—it was one of those heavy snows slowly falling on a windless day, good packing snow, gentling to the ground in theafternoon’s peculiar silence, the flakes laying hands on each other and padding the already-evacuated school’s stillness, as if it were an extra layer of insulation. A few straggler students and teachers were leaving now, a locker or two banging down the hallway. For a moment, I stood at mine and considered its contents.

Sneakers peeked out beneath dirty sweatpants on the bottom. On the top shelf,The Catcher in the Rye, Romeo and Juliet.The ties Naomi had given me, still in their Hermès box. The kneepads. My algebra textbook’s cover was coming apart at the corner. This scene looked like one of the staged lockers the set designer forThe Nuclear Familywould have populated.I could take these home,I thought,spend the break learning all the things I missed.We had exams upon our return from break, after all. I could pack my recipe box of index cards and memorize Spanish vocabulary and conjugations. Redo every math equation from our first lesson forward. Get a chapter or two ahead inDarkness at Noon,whatever that novel was about. I could come back in the new year a different person.

And I left.

—

For as long as I could remember, we had gone to my grandparents’ house for Christmas. Ever since my grandfather had retired from the military—he was a rear admiral in the Coast Guard—they had lived in the same general vicinity: in Crystal City, near D.C., when we were very young; in Alexandria for several years after that; and now on a golf course in Manassas. We visited them nearly every Thanksgiving as well—we’d skipped this year to celebrate with the Barrs. During the summers, while I was shootingThe Nuclear Family,Oren and Mom spent several weeks down here without Dad and me. But Christmas with my grandparents was unvarying. Aunt Maine, my mother’s younger sister by two years, had followed her parents wherever they relocated, a requirement my uncle Marco, who owned an accounting firm, never seemed to balk at. He even tolerated their houses being on adjacent lots in Alexandria, the back gate that fenced my grandparents’ yard opening onto their own backyard, and an arrangement that was ideal for Oren and me, since it meant easy access to our three cousins: Leo, Anthony, and Lucy.

Unlike my mother, I could not read during the ride because it made me carsick, and Oren wouldn’t share his Walkman, so like Dad I watchedthe landscape, joining in his sense of injustice, since Mom could not help with the drive. The blue signs let us know we had crossed into another state.Welcome to New Jersey, which was nothing, it seemed, but a highway spanning marshes full of poisonous brown water and coursed by the occasional egret, its wilderness punctured by chemical plants that belched white smoke, the smell at once sulfurous and sickening and almost magical in its opacity, in its refusal to dissipate. Pennsylvania was a long stretch of moist green fields rank with manure, the roadside absent skyline and dotted with billboards forHomemade Custard, which Oren and I begged Dad to stop for, to no avail. The Baltimore shipyards’ towering cranes put me in mind of Imperial walkers and meant that we were closer.

To pass the time, I dreamed. My reverie was such a vivid pastiche I sometimes struggled to distinguish between memory and fantasy. A victory over Goldburn, my team, Oren—the entire gym!—going wild. Miss Sullens, first to applaud, after I recited the Queen Mab speech fromRomeo and Juliet.Deb Peryton, taking my hand at Roy Adler’s party and leading me upstairs, into that wondrous top floor. Kepplemen’s eyes as he glanced at me in the bus’s rearview mirror, certain he knew, as I peeked back, that I was pretending to be asleep. The expectant silence, almost like a jinx, between Naomi and me as we drove from Juilliard to the Dead Street.

We had left New York in the late morning and by now it was dark, which meant we’d traveled a great distance, and the release I felt, having left the whole confusing roil of Manhattan far behind, was so tremendous that I slept all the way to Virginia. When we merged from 495 onto 66, the roadway turned from four lanes to two, and we saw signs for the Manassas National Battlefield Park, which meant Oren and I could find our way to the Evergreen Country Club on our own. My grandparents’ house was a half mile from there, its rear windows facing the third hole’s fairway. So many of the trees had been cleared from the surrounding properties the landscape looked like one great hilly lawn dotted with houses. None of us golfed back then, but Grandma and Grandpa were passionate about the sport and always played together. Sometimes we would catch sight of them from their back patio. The acoustics were such that from a chaise you could hear Grandma, after Grandpa’s shot andleaning over the cart’s steering wheel to watch its arc, say, “That one has eyes, Butcher.” She didn’t play much anymore now that she struggled to catch her breath, but she continued to smoke two packs of Marlboro Reds a day, no matter how hard Mom tried to get her to quit.

“We’re here!” Oren said to no one in particular. It was possible he loved coming to visit our grandparents even more than I did.

We bolted from the car without our bags.

—

Mexican food was the first night’s meal, and we could smell it from the garage as we raced up the stairs that led to Grandpa’s study. Gramps, greeting us, looked smart in his insulated overalls and watch cap. Grandma stood down the hall from him, in the kitchen, arms akimbo, a wooden mixing spoon in her hand, feigning shock at the sight of us. “Look at you two giants,” she said. When she hugged us, her lungs whistled.

By the time we’d unpacked, our cousins, the Locatellos, arrived.

Lucy, being the youngest, shouted her greeting as she pounded up the garage steps. Anthony and Leo appeared wearing matching Redskins jackets. Leo, being standoffish and cool now that he was sixteen, shook our hands. Anthony, who was Oren’s age, copied his reserve—a pose both borrowed from their father, my uncle Marco, who never hugged us. Unlike Auntie Maine, who said to us, “Come here!” and, roughly gathering us into her arms, kissed us unabashedly. “Jeepers,” she said, “you’re both huge!” Anthony’s hair had gone curly. Leo, whose hair was straight and blond and whose features were fine, had grown lean, and seemed older in a way that was mysterious. Grandma rang the dinner bell.

“Are we gonna play flashlight tag after this?” Oren asked Leo.

Anthony glanced at his older brother. You could tell he was dying to play too.

Leo said, “I’ll see how I feel after eating,” and touched his belly like the exercise might give him indigestion.

My burps were the red, green, and yellow of the La Preferida can; for dessert I’d have eaten only one slice of pecan pie, but Leo spent an extra-long time at the adult table, so I helped myself to seconds. When no one was looking, I stood in front of the fridge and drank the eggnog straight from the carton to wash it down. After Leo agreed to play, Orenand I went to our room and put on our darkest clothes. He had filched the cork from Mom’s wine bottle and burned it at one end to make eye black. We bundled up and then gathered outside.

There was an unspoken zone in which the game was conducted, a ring of perhaps fifty feet, with the house at its bull’s-eye, beyond which you could not wander. The property was only marginally landscaped. There were several boxwoods and prickly hollies surrounding the house that were difficult to hide behind, so the goal was to keep as much space as possible between yourself and the person who was it. On moonless nights, the house was black against the lawn’s blue and the sky’s pail-flung constellations, which made it easier to go undetected, to lie down next to the lattice that bordered Grandma’s garden or flatten yourself against a gutter’s downspout as Anthony huffed past, the flashlight’s beam shaking as he ran, its circle of light elongating ahead of him while you watched, unseen, belly down on the grass.

We’d been playing for a solid hour, and whatever reservations Leo felt about participating had dissipated. He was it now, and Oren, Anthony, Lucy, and I, crouched by the house’s far corner, were lined up each behind the other, our hands hanging on to each other’s waists, our fingers through each other’s belt loops, cracking the whip and jockeying for position, howling and shushing each other while we waited for some sign of Leo.

Then a car came down the hill behind us, slowed at the mailbox, signaled, and pulled into the driveway.

At which point we let go of each other and stood up straight to watch.

Two people got out. In the dark, we couldn’t recognize them. Leo appeared from behind the boxwood right next to us—“Time out,” he said—then turned on the flashlight and shined it at the pair. “Over here,” he called, and they walked up the rise. Leo met them halfway and they spoke out of earshot. Then he turned to join us with them in tow. He introduced Oren and me. He said, “These are my cousins, Oren and Griffin. From New York. Griffin, Oren, this is Bridget and her younger brother, Patrick.”

Bridget wore a dark down jacket and mittens. She held a stocking hat in her hand but would not put it on, I guessed, because the attentionshe’d given to her hair, which was red and carefully feathered. She was slightly taller than Leo and absolutely beautiful.

“New York,” she said to me. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Oren, after a moment, smacked my down jacket.

“You should,” I said to her, and then felt my face flush.

Patrick, who was Anthony’s age, said to me, “Got any more camo?” which did not entirely relieve me of my embarrassment. He was dressed for the game in jeans and a black Oakland Raiders hoodie and a stocking hat. He was the tallest of everyone, gangly and thick-lipped. His eyes bulged slightly. He too was a ginger, and his ’fro was so big it Jiffy Popped his beanie. Nine years from this night, after serving his first tour as a Navy SEAL, he would fall asleep at the wheel driving home for the holiday and, just a few miles from where we stood, hit a tree head-on and be killed instantly. Leo explained the rules to them in a tone that oscillated between amusement and embarrassment. He chuckled, for instance, at the idea of boundaries, that there were places you couldn’t go, as if this were all new to him, and we hated him for the mockery. Lucy, he said, would be it—

“I’m not it,” she said.

Leo said, “Time in,” shined the light on her, then placed the flashlight on the ground and bolted. “You are now.”