Read Sag Harbor for Free Online Page B

in. The grass had been cut, though, so this was a promising sign. Maybe next weekend.
    “I think we're the only ones here,” I said. Private schools were done for the year, but not public schools yet, and I didn't know about the Catholic schools. Maybe it was just us.
    “Ma-a-nn,” Reggie said.
    Then we heard a far-off call. We listened and nodded to each other. One two three. Pause. One two. Pause. It was the metallic squeal of a basketball on asphalt, the teenage Morse code of indolent boys that said: I AM OVER HERE. We followed the trail.
    We saw NP bouncing about in his familiar rhythm. To observe NP was to witness a haphazard choreography of joints and limbs. His invisible puppeteer had shaky hands, making it seem that NP was always on the verge of busting out into some freaky dance move. Looking back, his condition was probably caused by him trying to keep his freaky dance moves in check, whatever convulsive thing he'd taken notes on at a party the week before and had just finished practicing in his room. That I wouldn't have heard of the dance was a given—the Phillie Bugaloo, the Reverse Cabbage Patch. Hanging out with NP was to start catching up on nine months of black slang and other sundry soulful artifacts I'd missed out on in my “predominately white” private school. Most of the year it was like I'd been blindfolded and thrown down a well, frankly.
    Not that I didn't learn anything in school, culture-wise. The hallways between classes were tutelage into the wide range of diversions our country's white youth had come up with to occupy themselves. When I had free time in between engineering my nexthumiliation, I was introduced to the hacky sack, which was a sort of miniature leather beanbag that compelled white kids to juggle with their feet. It was a wholesome communal activity, I saw, as they lobbed the object among one another, cheering themselves on, and it appeared to foster teamwork and goodwill among its adherents. Bravo! There was also a kind of magical rod called a lacrosse stick. It directed the more outgoing and athletic specimens of my school to stalk the carpeted floors and obsessively wring their hands around it, as if to call forth popularity or a higher degree of social acceptance by diligent application of friction. You heard them muttering “hut hut hut” in masturbatory fervor as they approached. Good stuff, in an anthropological sense. But these things were not the Technotronic Bunny Hop, or the Go-Go Bump-Stomp, the assorted field exercises of black boot camp. And as with DuBois, I knew I couldn't ask what these things were. I had to observe and gather information.
    Switch off this, switch on that. We hung out with each other every day, all day, all summer, and then didn't see each other for nine months.
    “Benji 'n' Reggie, Benji 'n' Reggie.”
    We exchanged friendly outs (“This morning,” “Us, too”) and told him we'd be out for the summer. There was also the language of prison in there, in how long are you out for. Time on the East End was furlough, a day pass, a brief visit with the old faces and names before the inevitable moment when you were locked up again. That hard time that defined the majority of our days. You did something wrong, why else would such a thing like the city happen to you. For a couple of weeks each year us habitual offenders got together and got up to no good before the handcuffs pinched our wrists again. Earlier, I described Sag as a kind of trap, but the place also attracted the language of freedom. I don't know which is worse, the trap or the prison. Either way, you're stuck.
    We called him NP, for Nigger Please, because no matter what came out of his mouth, that was usually the most appropriate response. He was our best liar, a raconteur of baroque teenage shenanigans. Everything in his field of vision reminded him of someescapade he needed to share, or directed him to some escapade about to begin, as soon as all the witnesses departed. He was