Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,1

morning, nothing to smoke it out of but an empty can of Orange Slice.

Last night they’d shared a jug of Carlo Rossi and the pot they’d found in the glove box of Teddy’s mom’s car, while they listened to Metallica’s first album, Kill ’Em All, which skipped, and to Teddy’s mom, Queen Bea, who had her own stash of booze, getting sick in the bathroom, retch, flush, retch, flush. Around midnight, they’d taken what was left of the pot and skated to Jude’s to get some sleep, but in their daze had left Jude’s bong behind. When they returned to Teddy’s in the morning (this was the rhythm of their days, three rights and a left to Teddy’s, a right and three lefts to Jude’s), the bong—the color-changing Pyrex bong Jude’s mother had given Jude that morning as an early birthday gift—was gone. So were Queen Bea’s clothes, her car, her toothbrush, her sheets. Jude and Teddy wandered the house, flipping switches. The lights didn’t work; nothing hummed or blinked. The house was frozen with an unnatural stillness. Jude, shivering, found a candle and lit it. When Teddy opened the liquor cabinet, it was also empty—this was the final, irrefutable clue—except for a bottle of Liquid-Plumr and a film of dust, in which Teddy wrote with a finger, fuck.

Beatrice McNicholas had run away a few times before. She’d go out for a six-pack and come home a week later, with a new haircut and old promises. (She was no nester or nurturer; she was Queen Bea for her royal size.) But she’d never taken her liquor with her, or anything of Teddy and Jude’s.

The boys had stolen enough from her over the years to call it even. Five-dollar bills, maybe tens, that Queen Bea would be too drunk to miss in the morning, liquor, cigarettes. She was the kind of unsystematic drunk whose hiding places changed routinely but remained routinely unimaginative—ten minutes of hunting through closets and drawers (she cleaned other people’s houses, but her own was a sty) could almost always turn up something. Pot was more difficult to find at Jude’s house—his mom’s hippie habits were somewhat reformed, and though she condoned Jude’s experimentation (an appreciation for a good bong was just about all Harriet and Jude had in common), occasional flashes of parental guilt drove her to hide her contraband in snug and impenetrable places that recalled Russian nesting dolls. In Harriet’s studio, Jude had once found a Ziploc of pot inside a bag of Ricola cough drops inside a jumbo box of tampons inside a toolbox. While Queen Bea seemed only mildly aware that teenagers lived in her midst, sweeping them off her porch like stray cats, Harriet had a sharp eye, a peripheral third lens in her bifocals that was always ready to probe the threat of fast-fingered boys. So Jude and Teddy stole what was around: a roll of quarters from her dresser, the box of chocolates Jude’s sister, Prudence, had given her for Mother’s Day. They took more pleasure in what they stole out in the world: magazines and beer from Shop Smart (Shop Fart), video game cartridges from Sears (Queers), and cassettes from the Record Room, where Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph worked. And half the items in Jude’s possession—clothes, records, homework—were stolen, without discretion, from Teddy.

But this bold-faced thievery beneath the bleachers embarrassed Teddy. It was so obvious, so doomed to failure. Sometimes Teddy thought that was the prize Jude wanted—not the money or the beer or the cigarettes but the confrontation, the pleasure of testing the limits. Jude was standing on tiptoe, umbrella still raised like a torch, eyeing the spilled contents of a lady’s bag. His tongue, molluscan and veined with blue, was wedged in concentration in the cleft under his nose.

“Hey,” said someone.

Teddy tried to stand very still.

A pair of eyes, upside-down, was framed between the seats above them. It took Teddy a few seconds to grasp their orientation—the girl was leaning over, her head draped over the ledge. “What are you doing?” she said.

Jude smiled up at her. “You dropped your umbrella.”

“No, I didn’t.” The girl had her hands cupped around her eyes now, staring down into the dark. No one else seemed to notice.

“It fell,” Jude insisted, hoisting the umbrella up to the girl, his arm outstretched, letting it tickle one of her fingers.

“Just give it back,” said Teddy. It was the way Jude always made him feel—tangled up in some stupid, trivial danger. Teddy closed