Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,51

table.

“It’s not like they’re too lame to do drugs,” Jude said, ignoring the cigarettes, suddenly defensive of Johnny and his friends. “Some of them are recovering addicts,” he said, using Johnny’s phrase. “Some just have parents who are addicts.”

“Well, I think that sounds like a wonderful organization,” said Di, waving away Les’s smoke and Jude’s remark as the waitress set down their food. Everything was cold and pink. Jude slipped out his retainers when Di wasn’t looking and hid them in a napkin under the table. “I wish Eliza would get involved in something like that. She never took to ballet. She’s not normally one for self-discipline.” She took a bite of something slippery-looking. “Salmon. It’s good. Try it.”

Jude captured a jiggly piece with his chopsticks.

“But, do you know, I believe she’s turned a corner? Knock on wood.” She knocked lightly on Les’s bald head. “She’s been positively sober. Doesn’t take wine with dinner. And quite studious. She barely even comes home anymore, stays at school all weekend to study.” She spewed a few grains of the rice she was chewing. “I wonder if she’s finally growing up,” she said. “Is it possible?”

Jude looked to his father, who was putting out his cigarette. Which of them was she asking? “Sure,” Jude finally said, with false enthusiasm. How did he know? He barely knew the girl.

“Or perhaps,” Di began. She stared dreamily into her plate, fiddling with her chopsticks.

“What?” said Les.

“Perhaps . . .” She looked directly at Jude. “I know she didn’t know your friend terribly well. But I do believe she was quite shaken by what happened to him. Having to speak to that detective. And having spent the evening with the two of you, just before it happened. That sort of brush with death can cause one to reexamine lifestyle choices. Don’t you think?”

Jude looked out the window at the rain-soaked street. Suddenly he was sure that Eliza had been with Teddy while Jude had searched the house for them, and there was nothing he could do about it then, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

“I’m sorry, darling. I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”

“No, it’s okay,” Jude said.

“We’re so glad you’re here with us.” She gave Les a sideways smile and stole a roll of sushi from Jude’s barely touched plate. “Don’t you like your food?”

After lunch, they all took a taxi downtown. It was Jude’s first cab ride, and he studied the map of dick-shaped New York posted on the back of the driver’s seat. Here they were—Di showed him with a wine red pinky nail, leaning across his father’s lap—and here was where they were going. They were full of food and tea and wine, sleepy and dry. Out one window, Central Park sped past, and on the other side, blocks and blocks of gray. It was the sterile, efficient, adult New York Jude had figured didn’t exist, but somehow it was reassuring to him, the boundless span of this island. So many blocks between Upper and Lower—it made his stomach lurch with pleasure. They flew through the yellow traffic lights, rain blurring the bare trees, taxis kicking up puddles.

When the cab dropped them off in front of Les’s apartment, an ambulance was parked at the curb. One of the guys shooting up on the steps of the rehab center had OD’d, and the paramedics were sliding his stretcher into the back like a sheet of cookies into an oven.

Later, months later, when Jude thought back to the way it all went down—how did a burnout like him end up straight edge?—he’d remember that ambulance, just like the one he’d been unconscious inside. Its red cross, when viewed from the right angle, was an X on its side.

He didn’t follow his father into the apartment. Instead, he got on his skateboard and flew to Johnny.

“Don’t get too attached to these,” Johnny told Jude. “It’s just so you don’t get your ass kicked in the pit.” When he was finished with one hand, he started on the other, two Sharpie-black Xs, each leg an inch wide.

“Where’s the X come from?” Jude wanted to know. The smell of the marker was making him dizzy.

Johnny told him. When Ian MacKaye’s first band, the Teen Idles, wanted to play all-ages shows in D.C., they proposed that the 9:30 Club mark kids’ hands with an X, the way they did on the West Coast, to show that they were underage. Before long, the straight edge scene