“Why not?”
“You weigh around two hundred?”
“One-ninety.”
He smiles. “What’s your forty time?”
“My forty time.”
He nods.
“I don’t know these days.”
He frowns.
“I’m not really an athlete anymore,” I explain.
“Hmm,” Gill says.
We drink in silence for a while. Suddenly Gill looks at me. I lean back toward him.
Gill says, “What’s your body-fat percentage?”
We are standing at the urinals in the bathroom at Neoterra and Kelly is saying. “The difference between assault and aggravated assault is mostly about the severity of the injuries.”
I say, “How bad does it have to be to be aggravated?”
“It’s subjective.”
We zip up. The urinals flush automatically when we walk away.
We hold our hands under the faucets, waiting for the sink to recognize that we are not just dust particles blowing in front of the electric eye.
Kelly says, “Last night I was reading about the human botfly.”
“I thought you said no books.”
He nods. “I think we’re going to have to forget that rule.”
“I already did, I tell him.”
The water begins to spray from our faucets.
He glances at me. “When?”
“From the beginning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrug. “I don’t care much about it. As long as we don’t say no movies.”
“Of course not,” he says. “That would ruin everything.”
“The human botfly,” I remind him.
“Right, right. Anyway, when it bites you, it raises a bump like a mosquito bite. Except that the fly has burrowed its way into your arm and the bump is covering it. It incubates for a while until it gets hungry and then it begins to consume you. You can feel it eating its way up your arm.”
We take our hands from under the faucet and the water stops. We stand with our hands under the nozzles of the hand dryers.
Kelly says, “There are tiny parasitic worms that can live in drinking water. Once they’re inside you, they gather in sores on your legs. The only way to get rid of them is to immerse them in water and allow them to flow out of the hole they’ll open in your skin.”
They are laughing when they leave the club and weaving as they walk. Both of them wear white baseball caps emblazoned with the letters of their fraternity.
Kelly says, “Are you ready for this?”
I nod.
“Deep breaths,” he says. “Try to swallow.”
I nod again.
The frat boys do not notice us until they are only a few feet away. Then they stop.
Kelly is wearing a long black overcoat and leather gloves with lead studs sewn into the knuckles on the inside. He says, “You boys sure you’re all right to drive? You look a little under the weather.”
The frat boys are silent.
Kelly says, “Is this your car?”
“Yeah,” one of them says.
“This a Corvette?”
The frat boy snorts. “Try Lamborghini.”
“Ah.”
He narrows his eyes. “You fuck with the alarm or something?” Kelly smiles. “Now why would you think that?”
“Should be going off with you sitting on the hood.”
“Well,” Kelly says, “we’re not as heavy as we look. The camera adds ten pounds.” He laughs.
The frat boy says, “If you get off the car by yourselves, we’ll give you a running start.” He spreads his hands, palms, up. He is thick through the chest and shoulders. His friend is taller than he is and wide.
Kelly slides off the car onto his feet. The frat boy smiles and turns his head to glance at his friend and when he turns back Kelly throws a straight right hand into the middle of his face. The gloved fist makes a dull-hollow slapping sound when it lands, followed immediately by the crunch of the nose breaking, and the frat boy’s head disappears in red mist and then he has fallen to his knees. His friend is staring, openmouthed, and does not notice me standing up off the hood. He is reaching for Kelly when I kick him in the groin as hard as I can. He crumples next to the other one. And then we are on top of them.
I take the big one, who is curled into a ball with his hands cupped between his legs. He is dry-heaving. White lines of saliva hang from his chin. I kick him a few times in his kidneys and he rolls onto his back and I stomp his forearm with the heel of my boot and I am pretty sure I feel bones breaking. He screams. I kick him in the stomach and listen to him gasp as the air rushes out of him. Now he has no breath to scream and he is gagging. I drop onto his chest and, as I do this, I bring my elbow straight down into his mouth and feel the teeth give. He brings his arms up to cover his face and I punch the broken forearm. He screams again. When he moves the forearm, I drive my fists into him over and over. The skin splits along his eyebrows and forehead and cheekbones and blood seeps through the cracks like lava. Sweat is rolling down my face, plastering my hair to my forehead. I feel like crying.
Kelly says, “Enough.”
I stand up and look at the big frat boy at my feet. His wrist is bent at a terrible angle. His mouth looks like a tomato with ripped skin. There are teeth sticking through his upper lip.
I look at Kelly, who is also standing. “Wallets?” I say, my chest heaving.
Kelly shakes his head. “This is assault, not robbery.”
“Two birds, one stone?”
He chews his bottom lip and considers this. “Fuck it,” he says. He reaches inside his frat boy’s jacket and pulls out his wallet. The frat boy groans. Kelly kicks him in the ribs.
“We taking the car?” I say.
“No,” Kelly says. He looks at the frat boy below him. “Don’t take it too hard, fellas,” he says. “We’ve just grown past you. You’re the giraffes whose necks never stretched.” He pulls off his gloves. “You’re the elephants with short noses.”
“I think we’re ready for the next level,” Kelly says.
I glance at him. The streetlights we pass turn his face ghostly white and run the shadow of the windshield wipers along his profile. I massage the fingers of my left hand against the knuckles of my right, which are scraped bloody and have already begun to swell.
“What’s the next level?” I say.
Kelly turns his head slightly so that the wiper shadow now flows over his face asymmetrically, making a jagged line on his nose. He is smiling enough for me to see the tips of his teeth.
“It’s time to shoot somebody,” he says.
Heather is wearing a red dress with no back. The dress is longer on one side than the other. On the short side, it rises almost above her hip.
The skin on Heather’s thighs is the color of butterscotch.
We are standing under an enormous crystal chandelier that hangs over a crimson staircase. Everywhere I look, there are men in tuxedoes. Heather has the fingers of her left hand laced through the fingers of my right.
The poster next to the theater door shows two immense eyes and, above that, the word “Gatsby” in white letters.
Heather is talking to Cynthia Lowell-Wellington and Vanessa Mather Coppedge Bryson, who are jammed up against us by the crush of people. Cynthia’s boyfriend, who is taller than I am and has a dimpled chin, looms on my left, just behind Cynthia. I am fairly certain that he was on the crew team at Brown, but it is possible that he was on the lacrosse team at Penn. He shakes my hand at every opportunity.
For dinner, Heather had the New Orleans-style catfish with chipotle dipping sauce.
She is saying, “If you’re going to use a bronzing agent of any kind, you have to couple it with a good moisturizer.”
Cynthia says, “Should I be looking for one with sunblock in it?”
“I suppose it couldn’t hurt. But really, you should be keeping yourself out of the sun completely. That’s what the bronzer is for.”
Vanessa leans toward Heather and says, “So, do you put it everywhere?”