in the crowd would accidentally shove me and keep walking, and I’d have this moment, you know? Where I’d wonder if they saw me. If I was even alive.”
“I see you,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why you’re scary.”
He shrugged. “Thanks. I thought it was because I’m Indian. You know, I didn’t fit in, either.”
“No?” she asked. Signs pointed for the open plains of Ashland. Another city where she and Betty had lived for a few months, hoping for a fresh start, and instead finding the same old mess. “But you were a lineman on the Choate football team. Who fits in better than that?”
He adjusted his seat belt so that the harness wasn’t against his neck, and she dropped her hand, because it was tired. “I don’t know. The white kid at Choate?” He said “white kid” with a bitterness that surprised her. She’d never known him to hold a grudge. Mr. Laid Back People Pleaser. Once, he ate undercooked chicken at his second cousin’s restaurant in Queens, just because he hadn’t wanted to complain. He wound up in the hospital the next day with a bad case of salmonella.
“It didn’t help that I was a day commuter, and my parents wouldn’t let me date.” He let out an audible breath. “Some of them, you know…”
“What? I don’t know. People are like aliens to me. I can never guess what they’ll do.”
Saraub smiled wide enough that she could see the tiny space between his incisors, but once he started talking, the smile turned stiff. “Well, you know me and cameras. I was always filming things, kind of a Peeping Tom.”
“And then?”
“So I took a camera into the locker room after a game. I was interviewing everybody. You know, stupid stuff: how does it feel to be division champs? I thought everybody liked it—I’d make copies so we could all remember the season. And then, I don’t know. I went to my locker the next day, and somebody had spray-painted ‘fag.’”
She squeezed the wheel. “Who? Who did that?”
“These puffy red letters, like subway graffiti. Andrew Lafferty.”
“Andrew Lafferty is a stupid asshole and I hate him and I’m going to find him and punch him in the face.”
“That helps, Audrey. You fixed that real good.”
“Right now I’m scanning his brain until it explodes. You’ll see it on the news tonight.”
Saraub nodded. “Take out my cameraman for me while you’re at it. He’s been drinking again.”
“Oh, good, we’re being mean. I hope Jill Sidenschwandt gets explosive diarrhea. Truly. So what happened after that?”
“Well, Andrew thought I’d been coming on to him. I, I guess I did like him. I wanted to be his friend. Mr. Captain America. When I was interviewing him, I didn’t punch him in the shoulder, you know? Instead”—he winced with shame—“I slapped his ass.”
“So?” Audrey asked.
“So, men don’t slap each other’s asses in locker rooms.”
“I thought that was a thing. You were all into that.”
He shook his head. “I thought so, too, because the Giants did it on Monday Night Football. But no. So Andrew didn’t say anything when I did it, but I guess he didn’t like it. After the graffiti, the rumors started. Everybody thought I was a fag. By the next season the team wouldn’t change in front of me. Maybe they really believed it, maybe it was just an excuse, because I was this Indian kid with a weird name, and I smelled like curry.”
Throughout, his voice was level. Matter-of-fact. She marveled at how good he was at keeping his feelings tight as piano strings. “It’s embarrassing, when you have to explain to your coach that the reason the team makes you put your jock on in a corner is because they think you’re perving on them.”
Audrey shook her head. “You have such a good personality. You could get along with Hitler. I always figured you’d fit in anywhere,” she told him.
His smile was an empty grimace. She was surprised by it. “Thanks. It was just that year. Mostly, I did fine. But to be honest, I never tried very hard, either. I liked my movies and football, and until you came along, that was about it.”
“Well fuck ’em. Fuck every one of them.” The anger in her voice came as a surprise to herself. “Why would you want to fit in with people like that?”
He shook his head. “We’re just different. Both of us. We want stuff most people don’t care about. With the stuff we make, we want to change the