She smiled. “I don’t get a whole lot of stimulation stacking books at the library five days a week, if that’s what you mean. I liked them. I liked the whole, what do you call it, vibe Saturday. It was good to get out of the house, good to go to a party for a change . . .”

“But it wasn’t a party. It was a session.”

“Tell me about it.”

He reached across the table to take her hand again and give it a squeeze. He felt himself stiffening. “Right, you’re right, you’re always right—it was a session and a party too and a whole lot more. You know what Tim said? He said he’d up the dose next time because we just barely scratched the surface.”

“You’re kidding? If that was scratching the surface . . . But I thought you said you wanted to take it slow?”

“I’m not talking like next Saturday or anything—I mean, in a couple weeks, maybe. Or spring break. Maybe spring break. I mean, I’m intrigued, aren’t you?”

She let her thumb rove over the back of his hand, so soft, skin to skin, tracing a series of concentric circles that radiated all the way down to his groin. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “absolutely,” and then Corey was there, burning up with excitement, telling them the astonishing story of how he’d won two free games, his high fluting adolescent voice like a new kind of music created in that very instant while the pinball machines provided the beat and the counterman—Joey Carbone himself—called out their number, blessed forty-two, to say their pizza was ready, and all the while the neon sign blinked bright and cool and bright all over again.

Chapter 3

3.

The weeks fled. Winter got grimmer and grimmer. Half the time the car refused to start, no matter how much dollar-twenty-five-cent ether it ate, and eventually it just sat there in the driveway like a hulking steel sculpture that had no function at all beyond bad art. So it was the bus for both him and Joanie, the pocketful of change that was always running out or insufficient, nickels when you needed dimes, dimes when you needed quarters, and it was the same students, the same courses, the same desk in the same library and the wooden rack of a chair that remade his lumbar region every time he sat down in it. If the weekdays were dull, the weekends were even duller—to have variety, to have fun, you needed money, and money was a commodity they were chronically short of.