Dylan hurried the comic book into his binder. He’d bought it on Court Street at lunchtime and debated allowing it to be seen inside the school, a breach of general good sense. It was a lousy comic, though, stiff with fidelity to the movie, and Dylan had decided he wouldn’t care anymore than he’d be surprised if it was taken away. This, a conversation with his homely double, wasn’t the price he’d expected to pay. But Arthur Lomb seemed to sense the dent he’d made in Dylan’s attention and pressed on.

He smirked again at the comic book where it had vanished into the binder.

“Seen it?”

“What?”

“Logan’s Run.”

Fuck you looking at? Dylan wanted to shriek at Arthur Lomb, before it was too late, before Dylan succumbed to his loneliness and allowed himself to meet Arthur, the other white boy.

“Not yet,” Dylan said instead.

“Farrah Fawcett is a fox.”

Dylan didn’t answer. He couldn’t know, and was only chagrined that he even knew what Arthur Lomb was talking about.

“Don’t feel bad. I bought ten copies of Logan ’s Run #1.” Arthur Lomb spoke in a hurried whisper, showing some awareness of his surroundings, but compelled to spill what he had, to force Dylan know to him. “You have to buy number ones, it’s an investment. I’ve got ten of Eternals, ten of 2001, ten of Omega, ten of Ragman, ten of Kobra. And all those comics stink. You know the comics shop on Seventh Avenue? The buildings on that corner are all brand-new because a plane crashed there, you heard about it? A 747 tried to crash-land in Prospect Park and missed, no kidding. Big disaster. Anyway, guy runs that shop is an a-hole. I stole a copy of Blue Beetle #1 from him once. It was pathetically easy. Blue Beetle is Charlton, you ever hear of Charlton Comics? Went out of business. Number one’s a number one, doesn’t matter. You know Fantastic Four #1 goes for four hundred dollars? The Blue Beetle might be an all-time record for the stupidest character ever. He was drawn by Ditko, guy who created Spider-Man. Ditko can’t really draw, that’s the weird thing. Makes everything look like a cartoon. Doesn’t matter, it’s a number one. Put it in plastic and put it on the shelf, that’s what I say. You use plastic, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Dylan resentfully.

He understood every word Arthur Lomb said. Worse, he felt his sensibility colonized by Arthur’s, his future interests co-opted.

They were doomed to friendship.

chapter 8

Three weeks earlier, Dylan Ebdus had stood on the slate in front of Mingus Rude’s stoop, waiting.

Women trudged little kids to kindergarten at the Y or moved alone up Nevins to the subway. Two gays from Pacific Street tugged leashed dachshunds, in another world. A bunch of black girls swept up from the projects to gather Marilla, who was in high school now, at Sarah J. Hale, down on Third Avenue. They shared a cigarette for breakfast, rumbled around the corner in a ball of smoke and laughter. All under the angled morning light, distant Jersey haze, merry solvent-factory stink getting you mildly high, the pillar of the Williamsburg Savings Bank clock tower organizing the sky, time different on its two visible faces but either way it was time to go, today the first day of school everywhere in the world, possibly. This day when summer ended was as hot as summer, even at eight in the morning.

Only one thing wrong with this picture, as the block cleared, the bus breathed past, a dog barked in a cycle like code. Dylan standing in long pants and with his backpack full of unruined binder pages and dumb pencils and hidden glasses and still-virgin El Marko. He felt like an apple skinned for inspection at the new school, already souring in the sun. Those dogs could tell and probably anybody else too, he stank of panic.

If Mingus Rude would walk with him up Dean Street to Smith or Court, walk through the doors of the school with him, side by side, it might be different.

Dylan went to the shuttered basement window and rapped. Mingus’s own entrance under the stairs had no doorbell.

Dylan should have planned it with him in advance, he saw now.

Up the stoop, he rang the bell.

He rang it again, shifting in his Keds, anxious, time ticking away, the day and the prospect of seventh grade rapidly spoiling with him in the sun.

Then, like an irrational puppet, panicked, he leaned on the doorbell and let it ring in a continuous trill.

He was still ringing it when the door opened.

It wasn’t Mingus, but Barrett Rude Junior in a white bathrobe, naked underneath, unhidden to the street, arms braced in the door, looking down. Face clotted with sleep, he blinked in the slanted, scouring light. He lifted his arm to cover his eyes with shade, looking like he wanted to wave the day off as a bad idea, a passing mistake.

“Hell you doing, Little Dylan?”

Dylan took a step back from the door, to the first step down.

“Don’t never be ringing my doorbell seven in the morning, man.”

“Mingus-”

“You’ll see Mingus at the got-damn school.” Barrett Rude was waking into his anger, his voice like a cloud of hammers. “Get out of here now.”

Seventh grade was where it turned out when you finally joined Mingus Rude in the main building Mingus Rude was never there. As if Mingus walked another Dean Street to school, another Court Street, had actually all this time gone to another I.S. 293 entirely. The only evidence in the opposite direction was the proliferation of DOSE tags on lampposts and mailboxes and on trucks which moved wearily through the neighborhood, Mingus’s handiwork spread in a nimbus with the school building at the center. Every few days, it seemed, produced a fresh supply. Dylan would covertly push a forefinger against the metal, wondering if he could measure in the tackiness of the ink the tag’s vintage. If his finger stuck slightly Dylan imagined he’d followed Mingus by minutes to the spot, barely missed catching him in the act.

For three weeks Mingus Rude was like the flying man, a rumor with himself Dylan couldn’t confirm. Mingus’s vacancy from his own schooldays, and from Dylan’s, was the secret premise of an existence which was otherwise unchanged except by being worse every possible way. Seventh grade was sixth grade desublimated, uncorked. It was the Lord of the Rings trilogy to sixth grade’s The Hobbit, the real story at last, all the ominous foreshadowed stuff flushed from the margins and into view. It wasn’t for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Bodies ranged like ugly cartoons, as though someone without talent was scribbling in flesh.

The biggest shapes were the angriest. That’s what they were, shapes-between hiding your glasses and averting your gaze you were Mr. Magoo now. The less you met anyone’s eyes the less chance you’d ever risk doing it, a self-fulfilling program.

Chinese kids had apparently gotten some warning well in advance, and had thoroughly disappeared.

Puerto Rican or Dominican kids seemed to be tiptoeing away from the scene of everything. They decorated themselves differently and spoke more Spanish each passing hour. The way they occupied space in homeroom or gym class they were there and not there, an operation of mass adjacency.

The scariest fights were between two black girls.

On Court Street and Smith Street it wasn’t even clear who was and wasn’t in your school. Other bodies floated around, loose elements. A couple of black kids might corner you and ask, “You Italian or a white boy?” and all you’d know for sure was not to point out that the Italian kids were white. A black kid might be scared of something, might be watching his back on Court like an Italian kid watched his on Smith, but whatever they were scared of it was never going to be you. Anyway, no Italian kid would’ve answered I’m Italian. He’d have said Fuck you think I am? Or just grabbed his dick through his pants and sucked his teeth, flared his nostrils.