Moondogs Read Free Page A

she pecked him on the cheek—as much affection as either of them ever showed on school grounds—and snatched his book from him. “How’s the war going?” she asked.
    “Not well.” He kept his hand on her hip as they walked to her truck. “Not at all. Those poor guys are fucked.”
    “That’s unfortunate.” She pulled her keys from her purse and threw them in the air. Benicio caught them.
    “We need to make a stop on the way home,” he said. “The shop called—my gear’s good to go.”
    “If we must,” Alice said, a slight grin marring her put-on pout. She had one of those rare faces that looked much prettier up close than it did from far away, and when she got playful like this he found it downright irresistible. Closing the truck doors behind them, Benicio leaned into her for a real kiss, longer and deeper than usual.
    “I’m going to miss you, too,” he said.
    “Too? I’m not going to miss anybody.”
    And there was that grin again. Benicio returned it, gamely. He put the key in the ignition. “Yes, you are. You’re going to be lonely, and sad. But don’t worry. It’ll be a short trip.”
    “Oh yeah?” Alice shifted in her seat and threw her leg over the hand brake. “How short, would you say? Because I’ve got affairs and trysts and whatnot to plan.”
    He put his hand on her knee, caressing it for a moment before moving it aside and lifting the brake. He started the engine, shifted into first and brought them out of the lot. “Stay this shitty, and I might not come back.”
    “You’ll come back,” she said. “I’m the best thing you’ve got going for you.”
    And no question about it, she was right.
    THEY’D MET WHEN BENICIO was in his third year as an undergrad at the University of Virginia, the same school where Alice was finishing up a master’s in secondary education. They were little more than casual acquaintances—just familiar enough to exchange smiles and hellos—and only began dating as the result of a drunken hookup, embarrassing only for how utterly typical it was. Benicio had just graduated, and for a while they both seemed happy enough to treat their relationship with the lightness its beginning seemed to warrant. But that changed when he got a job at the same school where Alice worked. It later became a point of contention as to whether he’d found the vacancy announcement on his own, or if she’d pointed it out. He’d asked her permissionbefore applying, they both agreed on that, and she’d given it in an offhand, careless way.
    And so, for the last year Benicio had worked as a systems administrator for Montebello High. It wasn’t even a partial lie when he told friends and family that he enjoyed the job. He was in charge of managing the local network and user accounts, maintaining each of the workstations and doing technical assistance as needed for the faculty and staff. He may not have felt especially passionate about it, but the pay was good and it usually kept him interested. Moreover, it was comprised of tasks that were straightforward and none too challenging, but that seemed impenetrable to everyone else he worked with. He loved the way older teachers and administrators would gawk at the simplest of his daily tasks, the way they’d try to escape a conversation at the mere mention of firewalls, IP switches or routers. He got a kind of pleasure from this, similar to the pleasure he felt when speaking a language that the people around him couldn’t. Like on his childhood visits to his mother’s old home in Costa Rica, teaching his beaming cousins absurd English phrases that in retrospect weren’t nearly as naughty as he’d thought. Or the exclusivity he’d felt as a teenager in their Chicago townhouse, walking through the living room where his father was watching the news, speaking to a friend on the phone in side-slung Spanish that—as far as his father could tell—flowed out effortlessly and without the slightest trace of an accent.
    But that had