“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” says Jackson, the King Filipino. He is glowering.

“Give the kid a second, he needs time. This is a big fucking decision, right?”

I look at him. It is, actually.

“I used to be like you. I used to be afraid to try new things. I wouldn’t climb trees. I wouldn’t climb the monkey bars. I wouldn’t take risks. Look at you. You’re a risk taker, and you won’t take risks. You take risks in your professional life, but not your personal life. I’m not even a risk taker, and I take risks. That is what I had to learn, growing up. Unless you try new things, your world stays pretty small. You don’t push yourself. You don’t expand your boundaries. Look at you. You always operate within your comfort zone. Look at me. I try to spend as much time outside my comfort zone as possible. Because when you try something new, something you know isn’t going to hurt you, you grow as a person. Your boundaries expand. And nothing hurts you in small quantities, bra.”

He sounds like he has given this speech many times before.

I feel myself lunging toward the dresser, and in the time that it takes for me to do that, I wonder about the actual mechanics of what happens to powder when it goes up your nose, like, does it stick up there? Maybe I should have tried this with salt or pepper first or something. And then I think about being in an amusement park with my brother and my father when I was about ten. They had this roller coaster called Lightning Loops. I didn’t want to go on it. My dad and my brother did. But since I didn’t, there was nobody to watch me, so none of us ended up going. My dad was pissed. And I knew, intellectually, that thousands and thousands of people go on that roller coaster and nothing happens. But I was still scared, just like T22 when he was a kid. Which is one of the reasons I forced myself to go to Marine OCS. If you’re not afraid of dying, what are you afraid of? And it was very liberating. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I would do belly flops in the pool off the high dive, just for kicks. But the thing is that people are supposed to be afraid of things. Normal people are afraid of things. It is healthy to be afraid of things. And as time passed, after my Marine Corps experience, I began to be afraid of things again. Maybe it was from watching so many people blow themselves up trading, losing everything. But T22 isn’t afraid of anything at all. He has that luxury, because he doesn’t handle risk.

I’m fucked.

I look at T22, and Jackson, who is now registering a faint smile. I laugh. They laugh. It’s brighter in here—did someone turn on the lights? And the paint job in this room is great. And like I said, T22 really did wash his hair. It’s weird, I can see details in his face that I couldn’t see before. He looks handsome, in a way. His eyes aren’t so hollow. And Jackson lost a bit of weight, or he looks slimmer out of that trading smock. Jesus, T22 has a great house.