Now the sixteen-year-old wore all black. The younger one, thirteen maybe, was in camouflage. They weren’t smiling anymore. They wore flat-brimmed baseball caps over shaggy skater curls and grim masks of teenage boredom. Alex ordered his slices and a local pale ale and sat down in a booth near the window. He opened Tender Is the Night, which was going quite slowly, and tried not to look over at the kids, who, of course, sat down at the table next to his.

“Yo, can I get that Parmesan?” the older one said, suddenly looming over him. Jason, that was his name. Alex passed it to him.

“Thanks,” Jason said. Then, under his breath, he added: “Faggot.”

Alex tried to make his face look stern, like a disappointed adult. Jason and the little one—Matthew?—covered their mouths and mimed silent laughter. Alex was a twenty-four-year-old bookstore manager, which made him twenty-two years younger than Kate, the kids’ mother, who, she’d made clear, was not his girlfriend. He was too old to pick a fight with her children, but still young enough to feel the sting to his pride. The fact that he could say “I’m having sex with your mom,” the ultimate adolescent trump card, gave him some peace. The fact that he could also say “I’ve been wearing your mom’s panties all week,” and “I recently spent the night under your mom’s bed at her request,” was maybe more ambiguously triumphant for their age group.

He read and listened to the boys discuss an episode of South Park in which the citizens of South Park are plagued by a sound that makes them uncontrollably flatulent. When the kids got up to leave, Alex looked up from his book.

“You know, guys,” he said. “It’s not cool to commit hate crimes against random strangers.”

“Stop checking out my dick, dude,” Jason said. Matthew giggled and looked at Alex expectantly.

“I know your mother,” Alex said.

“Cool, bro,” Jason said. He inexplicably switched to a terrible British accent. “You probably shouldn’t tell her you were examining our willies, mate.”

“Oy, mate!” Matthew added, in an even less accurate accent. “Oy! You’re fatter than Batman!”

They threw their plates in the trash and walked out of the restaurant.