As soon as they could, the two boys escaped to the basement rec room, whose amenities shamed even those in Blake and Carol’s great-room. Tennis could practically have been played on the blue felt expanses of the mahogany pool table. Jonathan introduced Joey to a complicated, interminable, and frustrating game called Cowboy Pool that required a table without a central ball-collection mechanism. Joey was on the verge of suggesting a switch to air hockey, at which he was annihilatingly skilled, when the sister, Jenna, came downstairs. She acknowledged Joey, barely, from the pinnacle of her two-year age advantage, and began to speak of urgent family matters with her brother.
Joey suddenly understood, as never before, what people meant by “breathtaking.” Jenna had the unsettling kind of beauty that relegated everything around her, even a beholder’s basic organ functions, to afterthought status. Her figure and complexion and bone structure made the features that he’d so admired in other “pretty” girls now seem like crude approximations of beauty; even the pictures of her hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thick and shining and strawberry blonde, and she was wearing an oversized Duke athletic jersey and flannel pajama bottoms, which, far from concealing her body’s perfection, demonstrated its power to overcome the baggiest of clothes. Everything else that Joey rested his eyes on in the rec room was notable only for not being her—was all the same second-class blah. And yet, when he did steal a glance at her, his brain was too unsettled to even see much. The whole thing was weirdly tiring. There seemed to be no way to arrange his face that wasn’t false and self-conscious. He was painfully aware of smirking stupidly at the floor while she and her amazingly unawed sibling bickered about the New York City shopping expedition she intended to make on Friday.
“You can’t leave us the Cabriolet,” Jonathan said. “Joey and I are going to look like a couple of life partners in that thing.”
Jenna’s one evident defect was her voice, which was pinched and little-girly. “Yeah, right,” she said. “A couple of life partners with jeans hanging halfway down their ass.”
“I just don’t see why you can’t drive the Cabriolet to New York,” Jonathan said. “You’ve driven it there before.”
“Because Mom says I can’t. Not on a holiday weekend. The Land Cruiser is safer. I’ll bring it back on Sunday.”
“Are you kidding? The Land Cruiser is a rollover machine. It’s totally unsafe.”
“Well, you can tell that to Mom. Tell her your freshman car’s an unsafe rollover machine and that’s why I can’t take it to New York.”
“Hey.” Jonathan turned to Joey. “You want to go to New York for the weekend?”
“Sure!” Joey said.
“Just take the Cabriolet,” Jenna said. “It won’t hurt you for three days.”
“No, this is great,” Jonathan said. “We can all go to New York in the Land Cruiser and go shopping. You can help me find some pants that meet your standards.”
“Reasons that’s a nonstarter?” Jenna said. “Number one, you don’t even have any place to stay.”
“Why can’t we crash with you at Nick’s? Isn’t he, like, in Singapore?”
“Nick’s not going to want a bunch of freshman guys running around his apartment. Plus he might be back by Saturday night.”
“Two is not a bunch. This would just be me and my incredibly tidy Minnesotan roommate.”
“I am very tidy,” Joey assured her.
“No doubt,” she said with zero interest, from her pinnacle. Joey’s presence nevertheless seemed to complicate her resistance—she couldn’t be quite as dismissive to a stranger as she could to her own brother. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I’ll ask Nick. But if he says no, you can’t come.”
As soon as she went back upstairs, Jonathan presented Joey with a palm to high-five. “New York, New York,” he said. “I bet we can crash with Casey’s family if Nick ends up being as big a dick as he usually is. They’re on the Upper East Side somewhere.”
Joey was just stunned by Jenna’s beauty. He wandered into the area where she’d stood, which smelled faintly of patchouli. That he might get to spend an entire weekend in her vicinity, through the sheer happenstance of being Jonathan’s roommate, felt like some kind of miracle.
“You, too, I see,” Jonathan said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the story of my young life.”
Joey felt himself reddening. “What I don’t get is how you turned out to be so ugly.”
“Ha, you know what they say about older parents. My dad was fifty-one when I was born. There was a crucial two years of genetic deterioration. Not every boy gets to be pretty like you.”
“I didn’t realize you had these feelings.”
“What feelings? I only look for prettiness in girls, where it belongs.”
“Fuck you, rich kid.”
“Pretty boy, pretty boy.”
“Fuck you. Let me kick your ass at air hockey.”
“Just as long as kicking it is all you want to do.”
