Gone, Gone, Gone

She stares at me. “You can’t sleep with your eyes open.”

  “You are so literal, Claude. Come on. Remember . . . you’ve got to remember. When Gid was still a baby, and Dad used to take me, you, and Noah and set us up on deck chairs on the balcony at night? Wrap us all up in sleeping bags and tell us stories? And we’d hear the waves come in and it would always be too bright to sleep—”

  “Because of the stars?”

  “Well, because Mom had all the lights on inside, walking Gideon up and down the hall so he’d shut up, but . . . yeah. The stars, too.”

  Claudia sticks her head out my window. “I mean, I don’t know if they’re dripping exactly.”

  “The sky’s dripping.”

  She doesn’t speak for a minute, then says, “Oh.”

  I tuck her under my arm and hold her for a while. She says, “I don’t really remember.”

  “Well. You were young.”

  “Don’t remember before Gideon.” She smiles. “Was I alive then?”

  “I assure you that you were.”

  “Your birthday’s in two days.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know.”

  She sticks out her tongue.

  “Go back to bed,” I say. “Gideon will feel you walking around and get all upset.” Gid can tell the vibrations of our footsteps apart, and if he wakes up and realizes Claudia isn’t in bed where she’s supposed to be he is going to freak out. He hates when he wakes up and people aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Before he goes to bed every night, he takes an inventory of where we are, and if we drift, we have to be so quiet.

  She kisses my cheek. “Night, Chase.”

  “Night.”

  “‘No love without a little innocence’” Noah says, completely still.

  “I thought you were asleep. You’re so creepy.”

  He shrugs. “So how was your lovely innocent night?”

  “I kissed her.”

  “What a man.” But he says it warmly. “How was it?”

  My first thought is to relate it to soft-serve ice cream, but I can already hear Noah laughing at that. “It was nice.”

  “God. God, really, it was nice?” He sounds so earnest that I think for a minute that he’s making fun of me. He props himself up on an elbow. “God, I fucking miss when kisses were nice. I’m so jealous of people young enough to still have nice kisses.”

  “Wait, kissing isn’t nice anymore?”

  “No. It’s foreplay. Trust me, you get old enough, and everything is foreplay. Kissing is foreplay. Talking is foreplay. Holding hands is foreplay. I swear to God, Chase, I think at this point, sex would be foreplay.”

  This would probably be a good time to ask if he and Melinda have really slept together, but I can’t make myself say the words. So I just say, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Sex is a to-do list where nothing gets crossed out.”

  I find the passage Melinda quoted in my Camus book. “‘No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of virtue!’”

  Noah looks at me and coughs, his eyebrows up in his bangs.

  “What?” I say.

  With a straight face, he recites, “‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’”

  “Come on. It’s foreplay? Seriously?”

  “You’re too young.” He flops backward. “You wouldn’t understand. You are a fetus in a world of Camus and spermicidal lubricant.”

  “And you’re an asshole.”

  “I’m just cynical. And you have no idea how far that’s going to take me.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Au contraire, little brother. I know exactly how this college game works. I will arrive, the dark horse in a band of mushy-hearted freshman. College will pee itself in terror of my disenfranchised soul.”

  I roll my eyes. “Beautiful.”

  “Look. Listen to my words of wisdom. College’s only role these days, for an upper-middle-class kid going in for a fucking liberal arts degree, is very simple. Do you know what that is?”

  “A diploma. A good job. Yay.”

  “No. College exists only because it thrives on the hopes and dreams of the young and innocent. College is a hungry zombie here to eat your brains. It wants to remind you that your naivete is impermanent and someday, English major or no, you’ll wear a suit and hate the feeling of sand between your toes.”

  It’s not going to happen to me.

  Noah continues, in a low mutter, “Like that’s not already forced into our heads every single fucking minute of every winter.”

  “So you’re, like, essentially already educated, just because you’re an asshole?”

  “Because I’ve resigned myself to my fate, yeah. I’ve pre-colleged myself. I’m rocking the institution, entering it already all disillusioned and shit. I’m going to single-handedly change the world of higher education.”

  I clear my throat. “‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’”

  “Go to sleep. Asshole.”

  I never have a hard time falling asleep, but I do tonight. It takes a while of thinking of Bella’s lips before I drift off.