His mom cleared her throat, in preparation for a further revelation.
“We hear he’s been buying you clothes.”
Two weeks prior, on Saturday morning, Henry had been playing Tetris when Owen and Jason walked in, Owen calm and chipper as always, Jason sleepy-eyed and carrying a big paper cup of coffee. Henry closed the Tetris window, opened the website for his physics class. “Hi guys,” he said. “What’s up?”
“We’re going shopping,” said Owen.
“Oh, cool. Have fun.”
“The we is inclusive. Please put on your shoes.”
“Oh, ha, that’s okay,” Henry said. “I’m not much of a shopper.”
“But you’re not not a master of litotes,” Jason said. Lie-toe-tease. Henry repeated it to himself, so that he could look it up later. “When we get back I’m burning those jeans.”
“What’s wrong with these jeans?” Henry looked down at his legs. It wasn’t a rhetorical question: there was clearly something wrong with his jeans. He’d realized as much since arriving at Westish, just as he’d realized there was something wrong with his shoes, his hair, his backpack, and everything else. But he didn’t know quite what it was. The way the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow, he had only one for jeans.
They drove in Jason’s car to a mall in Door County. Henry went into dressing rooms and emerged for inspection, over and over.
“There,” Owen said. “Finally.”
“These?” Henry tugged at the pockets, tugged at the crotch. “I think these are kind of tight.”
“They’ll loosen up,” Jason said. “And if not, so much the better.”
By the time they finished, Owen had said There, finally to two pairs of jeans, two shirts, and two sweaters. A modest stack, but Henry added up the price tags in his mind, and it was more than he had in the bank. “Do I really need two?” he said. “One’s a good start.”
“Two,” said Jason.
“Um.” Henry frowned at the clothes. “Mmm . . .”
“Oh!” Owen slapped himself on the forehead. “Did I forget to mention? I have a gift card for this establishment. And I have to use it right away. Lest it expire.” He reached for the clothes in Henry’s hand. “Here.”
“But it’s yours,” Henry protested. “You should spend it on yourself.”
“Certainly not,” Owen said. “I would never shop here.” He pried the stack from Henry’s hands, looked at Jason. “You guys wait outside.”
So now Henry had two pairs of jeans that had loosened up slightly but still felt way too tight. As he sat by himself in the dining hall, watching his classmates walk by, he’d noticed that they looked quite a bit like other people’s jeans. Progress, he thought. I’m making progress.
“Is that true?” his dad said now. “You’ve got this guy buying you clothes?”
“Um . . .” Henry tried to think of a not-untrue response. “We went to the mall.”
“Why is he buying you clothes?” His mom’s voice rose again.
“I doubt if he buys Mike Schwartz clothes,” Henry’s dad said. “I doubt that very much.”
“I think he wants me to fit in.”
“Fit in to what? is maybe a question worth asking. Honey, just because people have more money than you doesn’t mean you have to conform to their ideas about fitting in. You have to be your own person. Are we understood?”
“I guess so.”
“Good. I want you to tell Owen thank you very much, but you cannot under any circumstances accept his gifts. You’re not poor, and you don’t have to accept charity from strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger. And I already wore them. He can’t take them back.”
“Then he can wear them himself.”
“He’s taller than me.”
“Then he can donate them to someone in need. I don’t want to discuss this anymore, Henry. Are we understood?”
He didn’t want to discuss it anymore either. It dawned on him — as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow — that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.
It was nearly midnight. Henry pressed his ear to the door. The noises that came from within were sweaty and breathy, loud enough to be heard above the pulse of the music. He knew what was happening in there, however vaguely. It sounded painful, at least for one of the parties involved.
“Uhh. Uhh. Uhhh.”
“Come on, baby. Come on —”
“Ooohhh —”
“That’s it, baby. All night long.”
“— uuhnghrrrrnnrh —”
“Slow down, now. Slow, slow, slow. Yeah, baby. Just like that.”
“— ooohhhrrrrgghhh —”
“You’re big! You’re fucking huge!”
“— rrrrooaarhrraaaah —”
“Give it to me! Come on! Finish it!”
“— rhaa. . . rhaa. . . ARH —”
“Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes!”
“— RRHNAAAAAAAAAGHGHHHH!”
The door swung open from within. Henry, who’d been leaning against it, staggered into the room and smacked against the sweat-drenched chest of Mike Schwartz.
“Skrimmer, you’re late.” Schwartz wrenched Henry’s red Cardinals cap around so the brim faced backward. “Welcome to the weight room.”
After hanging up with his parents, Henry had put on his coat and wandered out into the dark of the campus. Everything was impossibly quiet. He sat at the base of the Melville statue and looked out at the water. When he got home the answering machine was blinking. His parents, probably — they’d thought it over and decided it was time for him to come home.
Skrimmer! Football is over. Baseball starts now. Meet us at the VAC in half an hour. The side door by the dumpster will be open. Don’t be late.
Henry put on shorts, grabbed Zero from the closet shelf, and ran through the mild night toward the VAC. He’d been waiting three months for Schwartz to call. Halfway there, already winded, he slowed to a walk. In those three months he’d done nothing more strenuous than washing dishes in the dining hall. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions. Maybe they could teach you to build your own dorm furniture or grow your own food. Instead everyone kept talking about the life of the mind — a concept, like many he had recently encountered, that seemed both appealing and beyond his grasp.
“Skrimmer, this is Adam Starblind,” Schwartz said now. “Starblind, Skrimmer.”
“So you’re the guy Schwartz keeps talking about.” Starblind wiped his palm on his shorts so they could shake. “The baseball messiah.” He was much smaller than Schwartz but much larger than Henry, as became apparent