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slumped in the hallway outside his door. “Gwennie,” Chollie said, and groaned, folded himself in half. Lotto dragged him into the room. He got a garbled story; Gwennie had overdosed. She couldn’t have died, dangerous Gwennie, vibrating with life. But she had. Chollie had found her. He’d run away. He had nowhere to go but to Lotto. The beige linoleum floor turned into the ocean, crashed and crashed against Lotto’s shins. He sat down. How swiftly things spun. Two minutes ago, he’d been a kid, thinking about his Nintendo system, worried about asymptotes and sines. Now he was heavy, adult. Later, when the boys had calmed and they went for pizza in the little town,Lotto said to Chollie what he’d wanted to say to Gwennie since the night of the fire: “I’ll take care of you.” He felt brave. Lotto let Chollie sleep in his bed for the rest of the term; he didn’t mind the floor. [Through the rest of Lotto’s high school, through college, Chollie would take the money Lotto would give him gladly, go out into the world, eventually return. He sat in on every class he could; he had no degrees, but he learned more than enough. If people didn’t report Lotto, it was because they loved Lotto, not because they cared a whit about Chollie, who was a person only Lotto could stand.]
    The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math. If one might die at any moment, one must live!
    Thus began the era of women. Trips to the city, sweating through polo shirts at the nightclubs, lines of coke on midcentury-modern coffee tables, parents out of town. It’s okay, man, don’t freak, the housekeeper doesn’t care. Threeway with two girls in someone’s bathroom. “Maybe you could come home this summer,” Antoinette said. “Oh, now you want me,” Lotto said sarcastically, refusing. Headmaster’s daughter on the lacrosse field. Hickeys. Maine again, forty-one-year-old cousin at a seedy motel, neighbor girl in a hammock, tourist girl swimming out to the sailboat at night. Samuel rolling his eyes with envy. Volvo station wagon bought with Lotto’s fat allowance. Three inches by September, six-foot-six. Othello in eponymous same, and a Desdemona from town, seventeen, shaved down there like a prepube, Lotto discovered. Spring; summer in Maine; autumn, Head of the Charles, the varsity eight placed. Thanksgiving at Samuel’s New York house. Christmas, Sallie took him and Rachel to Montreal. “No Muvva?” he said, trying not to show his hurt. Sallie blushed. “She’s ashamed of the way she looks,” she said gently. “She’s fat now, hushpuppy. She never leaves the house.” Early admission to Vassar, the only school he applied to, overconfident; an excellent party there, a party to end all parties, no reason for his choice but that. Celebration withSamuel’s fifteen-year-old sister up for the weekend, in a handicapped bathroom. Never, never tell Samuel. Searing glare. What am I, an idiot? Surprise! Samuel was going to Vassar, too, had gotten in everywhere but would have died before he missed Lotto’s fun. Only skinny Sallie and four-year-old Rachel, who wouldn’t let him put her down, came up for his graduation. No Muvva. To offset the sadness, Lotto imagined his mother as the mermaid she’d once been, not the obese woman who’d swallowed her. In Maine, Samuel’s forty-three-year-old cousin in Switzerland, alas. Samuel’s sister in an orange bikini, with a mop-haired boyfriend mooning behind her, thank god. Only one girl that whole summer, adder-tongued ballerina: what she could do with her legs! Games of croquet. Fireworks. Keg on the beach. Sailing regatta.
    Then it was the last week of the summer. Samuel’s parents getting misty, untangling the new Labrador puppy from the table. “Our boys,” the mother said at the lobster restaurant. “They’re growing up.” Boys, considering themselves grown-up lo! these four years, were kind to her and kept straight