“No, you answer one for me, Dad. Where does all this hate come from? What's the point? What does it get you?”
“Now, don't start, you two,” his mother said. Her fingernail made its faint scratching, a clean dry sound, on the china.
“What hate?” his father said. “I don't hate anybody, unless they give me a reason to. What I want to know is, why are you going to Harvard, to goddamn Harvard, if all you want to do is teach Neee-gro children?”
“That's it,” Will said. He took his napkin from his lap and threw it onto his plate. “Mom, dinner was delicious.”
“Honey, you've hardly eaten anything.”
“I've lost my appetite.”
“Come on,” his father said. “Don't be a prima donna. If you can't take a little straight talk, I don't know how you think you're gonna do in a classroom full of jungle bunnies.”
Will stood. He looked down at his father, who sat surrounded by his wealth, chewing. His father wore green plaid pants. On the wallpaper, blue pagodas rose over country bridges and wading cranes. Will wanted only one thing—to be strange to his family. To disappear. For a moment he thought of looking calmly into his father's satisfied feeding and saying, 'I sleep with men.' He thought of kissing his father goodbye. He was filled with fury and shame and an uncertain desire that sizzled in his blood like a swarm of bees.
“Billy,” his mother said. “Honey, sit down and finish your dinner.”
Billy. At the sound of his old name, spoken in his mother's voice, Will left the room. He hadn't told them about his new name. He felt dizzy with his emotions. He heard his father say, “If you can't take a little frank talk, I wish you luck with the world.” Will's stomach lurched. He wasn't ready to disappear, not yet. He still didn't know what was true about him, and if he said too much he could never come back.
Later that night, Zoe came to his room. She knocked so softly that he knew without having to ask. “Come in, Zo,” he said. His father would have pounded. His mother would have rapped, courteous but firm and measured, the sound of a body of intentions steady as hail. Only Zoe conveyed the impression that she could be ignored.
She wore a torn orange T-shirt that advertised the Carlsbad Caverns, where she'd never been, and a gauzy skirt covered with red arabesques. A bell the size and shape of a woman's thumbnail hung from a black velvet ribbon she'd tied around her neck.
“Hi,” she said.
“Come in, Zoe,” he said. The room still held artifacts. A Dylan poster, foil stars pasted to the ceiling. “Come on, sit here on the bed with me.”
He thought, briefly, of Cody, who claimed to see the light of human emanations. Sometimes Will believed he could see a faint light that hovered around Zoe, though it didn't resemble the electrified fields Cody described. It was barely visible, a phosphorescence, as if some ghost of Zoe occasionally rose a quarter inch off the surface of her skin. Will wasn't mystical. He never thought with any seriousness about tricks of vision. But right now he admitted to himself that sometimes, when he looked at Zoe quickly, he seemed to surprise a pale flickering light that skittered over her when no one watched.
She entered, smelling of patchouli, and sat on the edge of his bed. How had such a noisy, covetous family produced her?
“What's up?” he said. He touched the black tangle of her hair. Only for Zoe did he feel this painful affection. He loved others but Zoe was the one he worried over, the one who inspired his fear. She was precarious; she came and went.
“I'm glad you're home,” she said. “I've been missing you.”
“Zo, I won't make it through a whole summer here,” Will said. “I think I'd better go back to Cambridge.”
“Already?” she said.
“God, Zoe, what do you do to your hair? You don't have spiders or anything in here, do you?”
“It's so soon,” she said. “You haven't seen Bix or Larry or anybody.”
“Things'll get worse. Dad and I will be slugging it out in another few days. Remember last summer?”
“What would you do in Cambridge?” she said.
“I can find a job, I don't care what it is. You can always get a job if you don't care what you do.”
“Couldn't you stay for a while? A week?”
“I think I'd better just go,” he said. “I'm not even going