been ripening for three days since my last trip to Galveston with Jeff.
“That’s rain in the bayou, Garrett.”
“Something organic,” Donna Li said, moving toward the rear of the vehicle.
“Here, guys,” I said, handing Garrett the bag of candy, sardine tins, and peanut-butter-and-cheese packs I’d brought him. I considered for half a second showing him the pile of rotting crustaceans; it would have been cool and he was my brother. But I didn’t want to give the geniuses the wrong first impression of the Plymouth.
“Good luck with your programming,” I told Donna Li, shaking her hand. “And Garrett, be kind to your rocketry.”
Garrett smiled at that again and said to Donna, “He’s my brother.”
And she added, “And he owns the largest car in Texas.”
I felt bad driving my stinking car away from the two youngpeople, but it was that or fess up. I could see them standing in my rearview mirror for a long time. First they watched me, then they looked up, both of them for a long time. They were geniuses looking into the rain; I counted on their being able to find a way out of it.
EVIL EYE ALLEN
JANEY MORROW WAS A GIRL who possessed unparalleled beauty, a beauty that stood out like a beacon, the kind of beacon that warns ships of danger, a powerful thing that, though it is intended to serve some greater purpose, inevitably draws attention to itself. I haven’t said that very well, but I tried to go that route because even to try to set out her features would be ridiculous. She was beautiful in a transcendent, unconventional way, and with such vitality and force that you knew—I did—not to look at her, her chinbone, the dark hair of her eyebrows as they flared, the arch of her mouth, any of it, because to look into or upon or near her bright, brooding, large-eyed face would seize you with a gravity you couldn’t even begin to understand or contend with, and you would be unable to look away, even as the bell rang ending your trigonometry class. And as the eleventh-grade students zipped their backpacks and rose to leave, you would be bound and frozen there to stare at Janey Morrow’s perfect, hyperperfect, superperfect face.
There was a relief in all of this in that even at seventeen I knew she wasn’t a girl I was going to have to talk to, ever. I could see her, sense the glow of her aura, but I would never talk to her. It was okay with me. She was in my trigonometry class and I was able to hear Mr. Trachtenberg say her namethree or four times every class period, for she was unparalleled also in her understanding of trigonometry.
I was having some trouble in trigonometry even before the real trouble that I will get to by and by, and I needed trigonometry to get into Dickinson College, which was my modest dream. I had heard of a writer there, a woman who actually let her students write stories and then talked to the students about this work, and that is what I wanted to do. To get into Dickinson I needed to pass trigonometry and I needed thousands of dollars. I started assisting Evil Eye Allen to solve the latter, but the power of his evil eye did something to assist me in the former as well.
My close friend Evil Eye Allen instructed me on more than one occasion as we reclined on the football bleachers that when I finally arrived at the story of his name, I must tell it truly yet with some delicacy. “Delicacy is absolutely underrated, Rick,” he told me. “Delicacy is a kind of care the real truth requires.” We were old friends by then, seventeen, everyone else having given us up as strange, me already known as a guy with notebooks, and Evil Eye, who never recovered from giving himself that name and never wanted to. It made me smile and remember his credo: Posture is message. Part of the reason he was considered too odd for friends was the way he had of posting his body when we sat or walked. He’d look straight up when he spoke to you or answer questions in class with his chin on his
“That’s rain in the bayou, Garrett.”
“Something organic,” Donna Li said, moving toward the rear of the vehicle.
“Here, guys,” I said, handing Garrett the bag of candy, sardine tins, and peanut-butter-and-cheese packs I’d brought him. I considered for half a second showing him the pile of rotting crustaceans; it would have been cool and he was my brother. But I didn’t want to give the geniuses the wrong first impression of the Plymouth.
“Good luck with your programming,” I told Donna Li, shaking her hand. “And Garrett, be kind to your rocketry.”
Garrett smiled at that again and said to Donna, “He’s my brother.”
And she added, “And he owns the largest car in Texas.”
I felt bad driving my stinking car away from the two youngpeople, but it was that or fess up. I could see them standing in my rearview mirror for a long time. First they watched me, then they looked up, both of them for a long time. They were geniuses looking into the rain; I counted on their being able to find a way out of it.
EVIL EYE ALLEN
JANEY MORROW WAS A GIRL who possessed unparalleled beauty, a beauty that stood out like a beacon, the kind of beacon that warns ships of danger, a powerful thing that, though it is intended to serve some greater purpose, inevitably draws attention to itself. I haven’t said that very well, but I tried to go that route because even to try to set out her features would be ridiculous. She was beautiful in a transcendent, unconventional way, and with such vitality and force that you knew—I did—not to look at her, her chinbone, the dark hair of her eyebrows as they flared, the arch of her mouth, any of it, because to look into or upon or near her bright, brooding, large-eyed face would seize you with a gravity you couldn’t even begin to understand or contend with, and you would be unable to look away, even as the bell rang ending your trigonometry class. And as the eleventh-grade students zipped their backpacks and rose to leave, you would be bound and frozen there to stare at Janey Morrow’s perfect, hyperperfect, superperfect face.
There was a relief in all of this in that even at seventeen I knew she wasn’t a girl I was going to have to talk to, ever. I could see her, sense the glow of her aura, but I would never talk to her. It was okay with me. She was in my trigonometry class and I was able to hear Mr. Trachtenberg say her namethree or four times every class period, for she was unparalleled also in her understanding of trigonometry.
I was having some trouble in trigonometry even before the real trouble that I will get to by and by, and I needed trigonometry to get into Dickinson College, which was my modest dream. I had heard of a writer there, a woman who actually let her students write stories and then talked to the students about this work, and that is what I wanted to do. To get into Dickinson I needed to pass trigonometry and I needed thousands of dollars. I started assisting Evil Eye Allen to solve the latter, but the power of his evil eye did something to assist me in the former as well.
My close friend Evil Eye Allen instructed me on more than one occasion as we reclined on the football bleachers that when I finally arrived at the story of his name, I must tell it truly yet with some delicacy. “Delicacy is absolutely underrated, Rick,” he told me. “Delicacy is a kind of care the real truth requires.” We were old friends by then, seventeen, everyone else having given us up as strange, me already known as a guy with notebooks, and Evil Eye, who never recovered from giving himself that name and never wanted to. It made me smile and remember his credo: Posture is message. Part of the reason he was considered too odd for friends was the way he had of posting his body when we sat or walked. He’d look straight up when he spoke to you or answer questions in class with his chin on his
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