Love May Fail by Matthew Quick Page B

left side of the living room really.
    She puts ice into two small plastic cups and pours the Jack liberally.
    My cup is from a fast food restaurant and advertises an Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. in a robot suit. I remember when Robert Downey Jr. was just doing regular roles about regular men.
    I also think about the Baccarat crystal glasses Ken and I drank from nightly in Tampa and wonder how many hours working at the diner it would take Danielle to earn enough money for just one of those. An entire week’s worth of pay and tips, maybe more.
    “To good ol’ Haddon Township High School,” Danielle says.
    “To rock and roll,” I say.
    We touch plastic and sip.
    The burn is the same, but whiskey definitely tastes better out of fine crystal, no matter what your roots happen to be.
    That’s the problem with money—it changes your tastes. You can never go back to liking some things, like drinking alcohol from plastic cups, as much.
    We return to the futon, and Danielle puts on Mötley Crüe’s first album Too Fast for Love with the volume much lower than when we listened to Quiet Riot.
    “You have this on vinyl?” I say.
    “Original pressing,” Danielle says proudly as Vince Neil sings “Live Wire.” “It’s Chuck’s. He has quite a collection. Tells Tommy it’s his when Chuck dies.”
    “Cool uncle.”
    “Did you fuck Mr. Vernon back in high school?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “That was the rumor. It was decades ago, Portia. No one would care anymore anyway. They’re not going to send him to jail now.”
    “There were really rumors about that?”
    “Sure. You were always spending time with him alone after class and before school. Some girls are into older men. Daddy issues. I heard you used to go to his apartment too. So of fucking course there were rumors. It was high school!”
    “Unbelievable.” I shake my head. “Mr. Vernon was the closest thing I had to a father figure in high school, so thanks for making my one good teen memory weird. Jesus Christ, Daddy issues? Yuck!”
    “So you didn’t fuck him?”
    “No. I did not fuck Mr. Vernon. You didn’t know him if you could even think that.”
    “Was he gay?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “People used to say he was gay.”
    “Kids said everything and everyone was gay back then. It was the default adjective of our homophobic MTV generation.”
    “So what did you talk about all alone with Mr. Vernon?”
    “Literature, writing, what I wanted to do with my life, becoming a novelist, if you can believe that,” I say, leaving out the thing we talked about most—my mother—and the Christmas Eve I spent with Mr. Vernon senior year because Mom thought the government had bugged our house, so she was refusing to let me speak, and I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else but him. “What’s happened to him? I’d really like to know.”
    Danielle studies me for a long moment, and it strikes me that she seems to be enjoying withholding the story. But then I tell myself that she doesn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, that’s all—she doesn’t want to upset me. And yet I’m starting to wonder if the years haven’t been downright cruel to Danielle Bass, and whether the bright, cheery side she’s shown me so far isn’t a bit of an act. The look in her eyes now seems almost sadistic, as dramatic as that sounds.
    Finally she says, “One of Mr. Vernon’s students beat him up during class with a baseball bat a few years ago. Fractured his legs and arms before the other kids broke it up. I remember a kid being interviewed on TV, saying that the attack seemed to come out of nowhere. In the middle of class one of the baseball players pulled a bat from an equipment bag—which he apparently had with him, who knows why—and just started swinging away. I remember the kid said he could hear the bones breaking and Mr. Vernon screaming in this very high-pitched squeal. ‘Like a pig.’ Some other students saved Mr. Vernon by tackling the baseball