Down the Shore Read Free Page B

Clare said.
    â€œRelax,” I said. “I’m starving.”
    I wondered if Mrs. Baldwin had dragged Paige to the gym as punishment, which is what my mother would have done. Clare kept an eye on the front door and the foot of the stairs while I scarfed down some honeydew balls and half a corn muffin.
    â€œReady?” he asked as I brushed crumbs off my lapels.
    We cut across the lawn, making for my car. The electronic lock chirped over the distant whine of a mower.
    â€œSo how long before you call her?” I asked as I backed down the driveway.
    â€œHa ha.”
    â€œLook,” I said, punching the cigarette lighter into the dash and smacking a fresh pack of Camel Lights against my hand. “Even her stepdad says she’s a full-time job. Sometimes the fucking you’re getting ain’t worth the fucking you’re getting, as the saying goes.”
    â€œI’ve never heard that before,” Clare said, laughing.
    I’d never said that before; it was something that my mother’s produce supplier used to say about sleeping with his ex-wife.
    â€œSo you heard us talking,” Clare said.
    â€œThe window was open.”
    â€œThe window was open, or you opened the window?”
    â€œThe window was open,” I said. “Take it easy. You had no idea who her stepdad was?”
    Clare shook his head and said: “Small world.”
    No,
I thought, it’s not. But after four years at Lawrenceville, I was used to everybody in this circle knowing everybody else.
    â€œAre you on campus for the weekend?” I asked. “I heard you’re a boarder now.”
    â€œI switched over a week ago. That’s when my parents left. They gave me Harrison’s room like two hours after they expelled him. The deans don’t really know what to do with me.”
    The new music building was named for Clare’s mother; I was pretty sure the deans would figure something out, but I didn’t know what to do with him either. I had written him off after our Christmas break encounter, and now we were rolling through the suburbs of New Jersey on a sunny Monday morning with nowhere to be. Tuesday was our senior skip day, twenty-four hours of school-sanctioned rebellion. I searched for some tactful way to ask Clare how his father had gone from a man listed under “Angels” in Princeton symphony programs to a man on the run. Did Clare try to reconcile those versions of his father, or did this mess make him realize that he didn’t really know the man at all? We probably had that in common. I didn’t know three things about my dad.
    My mother had a catering company in downtown Princeton. The first floor of our house held a commercial kitchen and a market that sold breakfast and coffee and ready-made meals. One night in January, a woman came in, bought dinner, and then asked for our trash, the empty packaging from the ingredients, to leave on the counter of her kitchen as if she had made the meal herself. She offered to pay for it. My mother told her that the garbage was out at the curb, but she was welcome to dig through it at no extra charge. I had been studying in a corner of the kitchen, which is what I had planned to do before Clare and I got sidetracked. My mother had a hard-ass catering captain she brought in for big jobs, and watching Clare drum his fingers on my dashboard reminded me of a line he used on lazy staff. “You know what you look like?” he would say, walking up on someone’s third cigarette break. “You look like my money just standing around.” It was actually the client’s money, but people felt like they owed him something when they heard that, which got them back to work. You know what you look like? I thought, glancing sideways at Clare. You look like my AP econ score going down. Clare was staring out the window at a man and a boy who were pushing a mower into the bed of a dirty red pickup, a striped and shining lawn