You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Page A

numerically.”
    “All right, so, if x is one, y is minus ten?”
    She laughed again.
    “But I know I’m getting one of the numbers right.”
    “My dear, don’t you know that to be half right is to be all wrong?”
    “How can that be?”
    “And yet it is.”
    She sat beside him on his narrow bed, softly stroked his cheek, and stared into his eyes. He stared back at her and cried.
    He woke and went to the room of the man he’d thought he’d killed. There was residual annoyance about his being alive. He stood in the doorway and gazed at the oblong head resting on the high-thread-count pillowcase like a mutated fruit that would cause the one who bit it endless misery.
    The fruit opened its eyes. “Let’s go for a ride.”
    “You need to go to the emergency room?”
    “No, somewhere else.”
    “Where?”
    “You’ll see.”
    “Are you going to retaliate for the beating?”
    “No.”
    “Should I trust you?”
    “Not up to me to figure out, numbnutz.”
    Karl tried to help his housemate down the stairs and out to the car and was elbowed in the ribs.
    “Go to the Long Island Expressway and take a right, basically.”
    Karl drove. “We’re going to the city?”
    “Yes.”
    “What for?”
    “You’ll see.”
    “I’d like to know now.”
    “I don’t have the energy to explain it to you.”
    “How much energy does it take?”
    “With you, a lot. You’re like one of those boys who has to live in a bubble of purified air to keep diseases away from his deficient immune system, only in your case the diseases are ordinary facts about the world, which apparently would kill you if you knew any.”
    Karl pulled the car over to the side of a street almost identical to his own, in front of a house hardly distinguishable from his. A Martian visiting this section of Long Island, unable to decipher signs designating street names, would be so confounded by the similarity of the streets, the two-story houses, and the bright, dense, mown lawns, that it would, as if trapped in the labyrinth of a sadistic god, die a little in its Martian soul; not a bad outcome from the human point of view: Martians drive down property values; their children are bullies and perform poorly on standardized tests.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Until you tell me where we’re going, I’m not taking you there.”
    “Could it be the boy’s testicles have belatedly descended?”
    “It could.”
    They sat in the car without speaking and looked at the world in the windshield. Each man rolled down his window and took a gulp of air. In a tree nearby sang the ten thousandth robin of spring.
    “You’re taking me to visit my girlfriend.”
    “You have a girlfriend?”
    “For about a year.”
    “How come you didn’t tell me?”
    “I figured the dozen and a half or so times I brought her to the house would be a sufficient clue.”
    “Where was I?”
    “In your room. What do you do in there all that time, anyway?”
    “I don’t know.” Karl started the car and pulled away from the curb. “And now you want me to meet her.”
    “I don’t give a crap if you meet her. She and I have a date and I’m too under the weather to drive.”
    “A date, unbelievable.”
    “You’re jealous.”
    “Of what?”
    “That I have a girlfriend.”
    “No, it’s the very concept of girlfriend , in the context of you, that confounds me.”
    “You have one too.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “She’s your girlfriend.” There were years when the monosyllable she , uttered by either to the other, meant only, and almost violently, Belinda Floor; two days had changed that.
    “She’s just someone who was in my house when I came home on Friday.”
    “Admittedly that sounds more like a wife. She’s turned out quite wonderfully, despite her present difficulties.”
    “What are they?”
    “I don’t know, she won’t tell me, but a father can sense when his daughter is upset.”
    “It really grosses me out that she’s your daughter.”
    “You