on Massachusetts Avenue. Paisley bedspreads blew from its rattling windows; silver chimes glittered fretfully on its prim front porch. Billy adored the house. He loved Charlotte for being wry and mannered and faintly masculine. He loved Inez for her willful and methodical rejection of common sense. Because of her, there was speed and blotter acid. Because of her, a procession of strangers, usually thin contemplative men, appeared in the shower or fingered guitars on the porch or sat shy and unshaven at breakfast. Billy called Inez and Charlotte the Holy Sisters of Permission. He told them all his secrets, and then began inventing new ones.
The name Will stuck to him, as he'd scarcely dared hope it would. His other friends took it up readily, because it seemed that almost everything in the world was old and out of plumb and needed renaming. The name Will became first his sly privilege, then his right, and finally an outward fact. Among his friends he was no longer someone called Billy. Billy belonged to the old past, the dying era of cars and sorrow and colonial greed, the prosperous desolation of houses. Will had a new beauty: clear skin, a sharp delicate face framed by hair that fell past his shoulders. Will was sinewy and even-tempered, symmetrical of body, with long legs and a soft, ragged triangle of hair at his breastbone. He moved gracefully, a little tentatively, inside his army jacket and shapeless khaki pants. Sometimes, in certain lights, he was able to believe he had turned into a man named Will. Then it passed and he returned to himself, a boy named Billy, someone small and foolish. Others called him Will but in his dreams and his thoughts he was Billy, just that, a boy smart enough to fake his way through, a boy well acquainted with the limits of the possible.
On a warm evening in April, when the air smelled like rain and people walked on Brattle Street carrying tulips in paper cones, a man leaned over Billy and said, “You know, you're a rare soul. Do you mind me telling you that?”
Billy, who had been reading Faulkner and drinking coffee at a white marble table, looked up in a bright panic, as if a disembodied voice had publicly announced his most embarrassing secret wish. The man leaned over the table. He was well past thirty, with complex, vaguely geological facial bones and liquid eyes. He had a lunatic enormity, although he wasn't large. His hair was windblown on a windless day.
“No,” Billy told him. He was full of fear but his voice came out steady and slightly bored, as if he was used to attentions of exactly this kind. He couldn't tell whether the man was crazy or inspired. The man's face had a doglike ardor. He wore white bell-bottoms and a brown leather vest and a yin-yang symbol on a thong around his neck.
“A rare and ancient soul,” the man said in a speculative tone. “I had to stop and tell you that. You shouldn't drink coffee, it excites the body but kills the spirit. That coffee has got orange light crackling all over you.”
Billy nodded. He knew the man was ridiculous, and possibly even dangerous, but he didn't want him to leave quite yet. The man was watching him with such naked reverence.
“I like orange,” Billy said, sipping his coffee.
“Right, youth,” the man said. “Burn it up, it'll last forever. I don't blame you, I was like that, too. My name's Cody.”
“Do you always just start talking to strangers like this?”
“Not all of them. I see something I recognize in you, just like I can see the light you're putting out. Orange, but with an outer layer of the most beautiful pure blue. Think of the color of the flame on a gas stove.”
“I'm Will,” Billy said defiantly, and he felt, immediately, that he was giving a false name. When he caught up with the name a flood of possibility opened in his blood.
“Lovely,” Cody said. “Charmed, I'm sure.”
Cody shook his hand in the new way, palm first, so that his hand and Billy's joined like a boxer's gesture of triumph. Cody's hand was large and dry and uncallused.
“Do you—are you from around here?” Billy asked.
“I'm from Mars, child,” Cody said. His eyes were shot through with green. He had an angular woody handsomeness that flicked fitfully across a ravaged, homely face. He might have been as old as forty. “You're a student? Hah-vahd?”
Billy nodded. He'd learned