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naked dressmaker’s judy, and two neon-orange puffed down jackets. The kind that make Ivy look like a cozy beach ball.
    “I cleaned out a shelf of the fridge for you,” his mother says.
    Jason ignores her, rounds the stair-turn, vanishes. Are he and Ann not talking? Oh, wait—she means for Ivy, for her food. Ivy has not bought any yet.
    “Where’s the store?”
    “Three blocks west to the Lucky Dollar, or drive to the mall for Superstore.”
    “I’ll shop tomorrow,” Ivy says. Feeling forlorn.
    “Eat with us tonight, if you want.”
    Ann is not asking very nicely, but Ivy says thanks, perfect—then goes up to her room to look at her empty shelves. The lovely emptiness, bare wood, clean walls. So unlike the home life of our own dear Queen . The thought of her apartment, and its tenant, makes her feel sad and sick.
    When Ann calls up the stairs, “Dinner! Jason?” there’s no answer from the boy’s room. Ivy sticks her head out into the hall and waits. Smells like spaghetti down there.
    No response, nothing.
    “Jason!” Ann’s voice comes shrilling up again. Then, “Ivy? Will you tell him dinner? He’s got his headphones on.”
    Ivy slips down the hall and knocks on Jason’s door, too lightly. Again, louder, to penetrate the headphones. Still nothing.
    She hesitates, not wanting to find him in an embarrassing situation, then turns the knob and opens it into a blizzard of white, a floating storm of airy nothing swirling away from the door’s gust of air. Jason gapes, delighted, head up and mouth open as if to catch a snowflake of down.
    “It just—it just—!” He pulls the white lines and pops his earbuds out, trying to tell her.
    “Exploded?”
    “Ex plo—! I just, I slid the knife—” He motions with an X-Acto knife along the orange nylon of a jacket, and another eddy of down swoops up in the breeze the motion makes. “I didn’t know—I didn’t think it would do this!”
    For the first time he looks alive. Down begins to settle on his dark mink hair, on the brightness of his suddenly open face, and Ivy cannot help but be uplifted.

8. HUGH GETS EATEN
    Hugh walks over to Meet the Teacher with Newell and Burton, although it nearly kills him. Strung up with the strain of dinner and Newell’s announcement, he finds it hard to endure Burton’s self-important spiel to the drama students’ parents, all seeking reassurance that the master class is worth the after-school hours and the two hundred dollar fee. A précis of the brilliance of Sondheim, the use of Stanislavskian ensemble in musical theatre, tra la la, history of Burton’s brilliance, theatres he’s graced, actors privileged to have worked under him, more on Burton’s brilliance. Questions?
    Parent after parent stands to ask if their offspring will have a significant role, or a solo, apparently not listening to Burton’s repetitive ramble re: emphasis on company , collaborative philosophy, exploratory work, and “nothing set in stone.”
    Newell is not contracted, except as eye candy, for this parent event. Once he’s been introduced, and has waved and grinned for the crowd, he slides away and stands with Hugh in the shadows by the back wall. Just like junior high. “He’s happy,” Newell says.
    “In his element,” Hugh says. It’s hard, but vital, not to sulk.
    “You surprised?”
    What can you say to that? Hugh tries, “I hadn’t realized he was looking for a harbour.” Even that sounds petulant.
    Newell leans closer. “He’s had a rough couple of years. His lover, a—well, they went to Bali for treatment, but it didn’t work. Not AIDS, some kind of cancer.”
    Hugh assumes that Newell helped to finance that.
    “It went very badly at the end and they were stuck there because, oh you know, all the shit and horrors. He died in June. It was a fish cure or something spiritual.”
    Newell’s brown leather bomber jacket smells good. Old, real, like himself. The Hermès cologne nobody else wears. Alexander the Great