Read Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 02 for Free Online Page A

day so I could devote full time to all of them. It was
fantastic.” Janet had trouble following—“gym” and “soccer” were foreign words
to her. Not, of course, baseball. The way he told his story was eerie, as if he
was relating some sort of mystical out-of-body experience.
                “That was all you did? Sports?”
                 “No,
I had lots of dates. I went out every Friday and Saturday night. My mom and
Frank—that’s my stepdad—were home only one week out of five, so I had the run
of the place. Except for the maid, of course.”
                 “Tell
me about your dates, Kenneth.”
                 Again,
that smile. “I saw Cathy Sawyer the most. We’ve been going out almost all year.
Nothing special ... a movie, dinner once in a while. I helped her with her
homework, she can’t seem to pick up calculus no matter how hard I try to
explain it to her.”
                 Listening
to him, watching him, it was like hearing someone not just talk about but
actually live another life in front
of you. They had done a complete job, it seemed, on Andrei Maraklov. Now he was Kenneth James. “Were you ever
passionate with her, Kenneth?”
                 Suddenly
his eyes grew dark. “Ken?”
                 “She
doesn’t want me that way.” His voice had been deep, harsh. She touched his
shoulder—his body seemed to have turned to ice.
                 .
. She doesn’t want me,” he repeated in a dead-sounding voice. “No one does. My
dad’s an alcoholic schizoid. People think some genetic germ is going to rub off
from me onto them if I get too close. Everyone thinks I’ll whack out on them
just like my dad whacked out on his family.”
                 Whack out? More mumbo-jumbo. “Ken . . .”
                 “All
they want is my brains and my money.” His body was now as hard, as tense as his
voice, his eyes were hot. “ ‘Help me with my homework, Ken’... ‘Help us with
the fund-raiser, James’. . . ‘Come out for the team, Ken’ . . . Ask, ask, ask.
But when I want something, they all
run away.”
                 “It’s
only because you are better than they are, Kenneth—”
                “Who cares about that?” It was like a cry. She gasped at
the anger in his face. “When am I going to get what I want? When am I ever going to feel accepted by them . . . ?” He
took hold of her right hand and squeezed hard. “Huh? When?”
                He tossed her hand aside and rolled
up out of bed. She gathered a sheet around her and slid out on the other side.
                 “.
. . I was glad when they asked me to be valedictorian because then I could turn
them down. What’s the difference? My mom was going to be in New Zealand or some
other place, something too important to cancel even for her only surviving
son’s high school graduation—and my dad’s dead or in a gutter somewhere . . .
Nobody that I cared about was going to hear my speech, so I arranged to have my
Regents diploma mailed to me. When I told my mom, instead of being angry, she
sent me first-class plane tickets to Oahu and five thousand bucks. I got the
hell out of that school as fast as I could.”
                 Janet
sat on the edge of the bed, carefully watching this Ken James as he told his story.
There was something frightening in him. It was so weird listening to him tell
that story, not his and yet entirely his, and the way he slid into the
first-person present tense ... All of
the students at the Connecticut Academy studied their alter egos, but in her
memory Andrei was the only one in the Academy who actually seemed to live his
alter ego, experiencing everything he did, every hurt, every triumph, every
sadness. And Maraklov’s eyes, they were scary but held Janet—born Katrina
Litkovka, the daughter of a Red Army colonel—so that she didn’t want him