Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,5

his temperament, and his fingers itched for a joint. “Come on, Ma, I need more than two dollars.”

“I believe you already got your birthday gift, fella.”

“Yeah, well, something happened to it already.”

Teddy shot Jude a look.

“What happened to it?” Harriet asked.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “He just lent it to someone.”

“Who’d you lend it to?”

“We’ll get it back,” Teddy said. Quickly he and Jude exchanged a silent, reflexive pact. “It’s just temporary.”

“It better be,” Harriet said, picking up her burning cigarette, which she’d propped in one of the ashtrays. “I spent a long time on that.” She expelled a lungful of smoke and shook her cigarette at him, remembering something. “Your father called again. Eliza will be here at six-oh-five. She’s taking a different train. Still staying till midnight, I think.”

“Who’s Eliza?” Teddy asked.

Jude thwacked him on the sleeve. “Eliza? The chick who’s hanging out with us tonight?”

“His father’s girlfriend’s daughter,” said Harriet, crossing her legs. “Eliza Urbanski.”

In the seven years since Les had left their family, Jude and Prudence hadn’t laid eyes on him. His calls and cards came once or twice a year, cash less, although not because, as far as Jude knew, he didn’t have it—he paid his child support on time, regular as rent. The last birthday gift Les had bestowed on Jude was for his thirteenth: subscriptions to Playboy, Barely Legal, and Juggs—the excess and range signifying both an uncertainty of the boy’s tastes and what Jude considered a boastful display of financial prowess.

But on Christmas night, when he called to wish his children a happy holiday, he had announced that his girlfriend’s daughter would be in town, skiing with her friends in Stowe for winter break—would Jude and Pru like to show her around? “She’s about your guys’s age,” said Les.

“How old is that?” Prudence had asked him—she, even more than her brother, had moral objections to pleasing Les—and passed the phone to Jude.

It had been known for years that Les had a girlfriend, a ballerina from England. This brief characterization had so belabored Jude’s imagination that he had been only abstractly aware that she came with a daughter. Standing with the phone in his hand, he had looked at his mother, who was scrubbing the empty sink with wanton cheerfulness, pretending not to eavesdrop, and understood that his father wanted to make her jealous. Skiing at Stowe—the girlfriend was probably loaded. Jude said okay, whatever.

Despite himself, he’d dreamt about the girl. Eliza. Dreamt, dreamed. It was a faceless, plotless, colorless dream—he knew only that she was there, the idea of her, and that, as with most dreams these days, he’d woken this morning in the viscid pool of his own anticipation.

The Ass Street Mall was long and dark, like a tunnel that went nowhere, and Jude had memorized every one of its uneven, roach-brown tiles. He and Teddy darted in and out of stores, up and down escalators, past the food court comprised of a Häagen-Douche and a Pizza Slut, searching for Jude’s sister, who always had money, until they found her behind the glass wall of Waldenbooks. She was standing at the magazine rack with a pair of friends, reading Tiger Beat, and when she saw them, she looked up for a moment, then away.

Jude didn’t see Prudence much, but when he did, he saw a girl in bloom. One recent morning, he’d walked into the bathroom and found her standing naked over the heating vent, pale and nippley and terrified. He thought immediately of their childhood pet, Mary Ann, a tabby cat who had nursed a litter of kittens on a set of pink, swollen mammaries the size and shape of his sister’s. Since then, it had taken him a great deal of effort, when coming across the pastel bras hanging from the bathroom doorknob, to ward off that horrible, wet-haired vision. Teddy liked to point out that, not sharing the same DNA, Prudence was like any other girl in Lintonburg—in another life, if he hadn’t been adopted by her parents, Jude could get a hard-on looking at her and not have to feel weird about it. There was no way his sister could give him a hard-on, but the possibility did make him feel lonely and sick. His sister was smart and pretty and she and Jude had nothing in common, and seeing her naked was seeing how irreconcilable they were.

“What do you want?” she mouthed now, flipping through her magazine. Her voice was far away, muffled through the glass.

“Forty bucks,” Jude