than the first two words of the song. Of the three friends Lincoln’s came next at 189; better, but not safe enough, and impossible to make plans around.
As the lottery continued, a relentless drumbeat of birthdays—April 1st, September 23rd, September 21st—the mood in the room grew more somber. Earlier, while serving the girls’ dinner, they’d all been in the same boat, but now their birthdays made individuals of them, people with singular destinies, and one by one they drifted away, back to their dorm rooms and apartments, where they would call their parents and girlfriends and discuss the fact that their lives had just changed, some for the better, others for the worse, their grades and SATs and popularity suddenly beside the point. By the time Teddy’s birthday finally came up, he and Lincoln and Mickey were the only guys left in the hasher room. Passionately opposed to the war, Teddy had told his friends earlier in the day that he would go to Canada or jail rather than get drafted, so to him the lottery was meaningless. But of course that wasn’t really true. He didn’t want to go to Canada and wasn’t sure that when push came to shove he’d have the necessary courage of his convictions to actually go to jail in protest. Distracted by these thoughts, by the time only twenty-odd unannounced birthdays remained, he was convinced that his had already been read out and he’d somehow missed it, maybe when they were adjusting the TV’s rabbit ears. But then there it was, 322nd out of 366. He was beyond safe. Reaching to turn off the TV, he realized his hand was shaking.
There were a dozen or so Thetas they counted as friends, but only Jacy Calloway, with whom all three were in love, was waiting outside the sorority’s back entrance when they finally emerged into the frigid dark. Once Mickey told her—with that big, goofy grin plastered on his face—that it looked like he was headed for Southeast Asia, she slid down off the hood of the car she’d been sitting on, buried her face in his chest, hugged him close and said, into his shirt, “Those fuckers.” Lincoln and Teddy, both luckier on a night when that—not smart, not rich—was what you wanted desperately to be, managed nevertheless to feel intense jealousy when they saw the girl of their collective dreams in Mickey’s arms, never mind the uncomfortable truth that she was already engaged to another young man entirely. As if Mickey’s good fortune in this brief moment somehow mattered more than the short straw he’d drawn an hour earlier. Then, as his birthday was announced, both Lincoln and Teddy had the same sickening reaction: that two years ago the people in charge had taken one look at Mickey and assigned him the shittiest hasher duty in the Theta house, and when he reported for duty, he would again be sized up at a glance and sent straight to the front lines, a target no sniper could miss.
Right this minute, though, with Jacy nestled in his arms, they couldn’t believe his incredible good fortune. This is called youth.
* * *
—
LINCOLN HAILED FROM Arizona, where his father was minority owner of a small, mostly played-out copper mine. His mother was from Wellesley, the only child of a once well-to-do family, though, unbeknownst to her, not much of that wealth remained when her parents were killed in a car accident while she was a senior at Minerva College. Another daughter might’ve resented how little was left of the family fortune after their debts were squared, but Trudy was too devastated by sheer grief for anything else to really register. A quiet, solitary girl who didn’t make friends easily, she was suddenly all alone in the world, untethered from love and hope, and terrified that tragedy might befall her as suddenly as it had her parents. How else to explain her decision to marry Wolfgang Amadeus (W. A.) Moser, a small, domineering man who had little to recommend him besides his absolute conviction that he was right about anything and everything.
Not that she was the only one he managed to bamboozle. Until his sixteenth birthday, Lincoln actually believed his father, whose outsize personality was in stark contrast to his diminutive stature, had done his mother a favor by marrying her. Neither attractive nor unattractive, she seemed to disappear so completely in large gatherings that people afterward couldn’t remember whether or not she’d been present. She