Read Siracusa for Free Online

Snow’s arm. She batted him as if she were swatting a fly, which only made him laugh.
    Are you beginning to see how he drives his daughter crazy?
    An odd thing. It only registered later when my head hit the pillow. Between jet lag and the nun attack, I was discombobulated enough to wonder if I’d imagined this, but when Michael opened the door to Beppi’s, he slipped something out of his pocket, unscrewed the top, and took a sip.
    The man with the flask. Doesn’t that have an appealing wickedness?
    He really, really was especially disarming that night. At dinner he continued to enthrall Snow, entirely my doing. I’d suspected that would happen if I asked him about his play
Dealing
, his first success. I was just a kid when it opened. I remembered my parents went to see it. My mother was shocked by the language. Isn’t it funny that years later, we were friends traveling together?
    “Listen,” Michael said to Snow. “I’ll tell you this story but I was bad. I don’t want you thinking,
I want to be like that when I grow up
. Do you swear? ‘I, Snow Dolan, promise that I will never be like Michael.’”
    Snow laughed the way she does, with her fist pressed to her lips.
    Michael held up her right hand. “‘I promise to forget everything Michael says right after he says it.’”
    She looked at me. I nodded.
    “I promise,” said Snow.
    Even though his story was about drugs, it was wonderful to see her hanging on his every word. She watches television, shehears the news, she goes to the movies. There is only so much screening a mother can do.
    Michael had a hardscrabble childhood. He made it sound almost like a Grimms’ fairy tale or Harry Potter’s life before Hogwarts. He grew up in Brooklyn, in a scruffy neighborhood near Sheepshead Bay. He was mugged four times before he was ten. Play meant running up and down the aisles of the 99 cents store. “Stealing,” Lizzie whispered in my ear. His dad left when he was five, and he never heard from him again. How heartbreaking. His mother taught second grade in the public school. My Manhattan privileged life and his in Brooklyn were a world apart. “I lived there before Brooklyn was Brooklyn,” he said, “or when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, depending on your point of view.” He is so clever. The only times he came to Manhattan were for museum field trips, and he was very funny about his teachers herding them onto subways with bullhorns. Then he got a scholarship to Yale.
    “His IQ is one-forty,” said Lizzie.
    “That’s genius,” I told Snow.
    “Ignore them,” said Michael to Snow. “If anyone here is a genius, it’s you.”
    Her cheeks glowed from his flattery.
    His roommates—Schuylar, Dexter, and Rachlan—were all rich WASPs while Michael didn’t even know that there was such a thing as two forks at a place setting until he visited Schuylar’s over Christmas vacation. “I had never seen a pureed soup,” he said. “Who would eat a soup so thick that it had wrinkles?”
    I loved that detail and pointed it out to Snow.
    They sold pot that Rachlan had grown over the summer. His roommates needed the thrill. Michael needed the money. He was trying to keep up with his friends, who regularly commandeered a choice table at Snookers, a Yale haunt for the wealthy and snotty. “I wanted to belong,” he said.
    “Belonging is a stupid thing.” He said this especially to Snow. “Belonging is stupid. Standing out is what matters.” She sucked in her cheeks so I knew it registered.
    “One day,” he said, “the maid came to pick up the laundry, and Rasky, who was stoned, gave her the laundry bag full of weed by mistake. He was an idiot whose parents had bought his way in. You can buy your way in and out of anything, did you know that, Snow?”
    “Anything?” said Snow. That especially caught her interest. I loved how engaged she was. A rarity. She spoke so quietly, however, I wasn’t certain Michael had heard.
    “Snow asked, ‘Anything?’” I told