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could name the systems of the body, could explain what a recessive gene was, could tell a kingdom from a phylum. Robin did his best to keep up, though mostly he just cheated off George. But you don’t stay friends with someone for years simply because he lets you see his test answers.
    In the middle of Robin’s freshman year, his younger brother, Jackson, was injured in a playground accident, and, after a couple months spent comatose, died in the hospital. For Robin, everything fell apart, and when he finally picked himself up and looked around at what seemed to be a changed world, the only one of his school friends he was drawn to was George Lincoln. It wasn’t that their friendship was especially deep; in fact, the opposite was true. He found that he and George had a lot to talk about, none of it in any way related to Jackson’s death. It started with the simple discovery that they each had subscriptions to Time magazine, and they would spend study hall in the library talking about the hostage crisis in Iran or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, talks that for Robin were a great distraction from the sadness and tension that had taken over his family, from the earnest-eyed teachers treating him like someone delicate and broken.
    At Greenlawn High School, it wasn’t common for a black kid and a white kid to become close friends, after-school friends, unless you played sports together, which neither of them did. To make friends across the color line, you had to work against all these unspoken rules, like who sat where and with whom on the school bus or in the cafeteria. They never talked about it. It seemed to Robin it would be rude to do so; his parents had raised him not to “see color.” Talking about race, they insisted, was a kind of racism, and so, for years, he never raised the subject. This summer, things have shifted. Like George’s remark about him not knowing much about black folks. Like everyone at work calling him Blanco. Like all the little ways George has made it clear that the two of them are different, and have all along been living essentially different lives. It’s only now, being a white guy in a largely black world, that Robin has begun to understand that silence around race is its own kind of racism. Working at Rosellen’s, living in this apartment, in this neighborhood, it’s like he’s decided to sit on the black side of the cafeteria, and everybody, maybe even George, maybe even Robin himself, keeps wondering what he’s doing here.
    The summer after Jackson died, Robin’s parents announced their divorce. When Robin told George he’d be leaving New Jersey with his mother and his sister and moving into an apartment on West 71st Street, George said, “That’s on the same subway line as my grandma’s.” She lived in Harlem, and George visited her every few weeks. In a city full of bad neighborhoods, Harlem was supposed to be one of the worst, though Robin couldn’t imagine it was much worse than 72nd and Broadway, around the corner from his new apartment, an intersection frequented by so many junkies it was known as “Needle Park.” There was even a movie about it, though he was too young to see it.
    The first time George took Robin on the A-train to his grandmother’s, it was the bright middle of the day, and Harlem seemed to Robin like a lot of places in New York in 1979: run-down but active; dirty, druggy, and menacing in the shadowy corners but also lively wherever people gathered in the light. The old brownstones on Grandma Lincoln’s block were stately in the slanting winter sun, and inside, amid the upholstered wooden furniture, the dust motes floated in beams that looked plucked from a Rembrandt. Grandma Lincoln was only fifty-five, but she seemed ancient and timeless. She was the first person Robin met after moving to the city who struck him as a genuine New Yorker. Dorothy’s college friends, dropping by to gossip and drink wine, didn’t count. They’d all come from