Tod Goldberg - The Bad Beat

“You have really soft legs,” he said. “I thought I was touching my chinos.”

Fiona leaned toward the boy and the boy leaned toward her, taking up most of the middle distance with what Fiona now discerned was far too much cologne. Polo or something else meant to make nineteen-year-old girls swoon in their Dress Barn rompers.

“If you touch my leg again,” Fiona said, “I’m going to dislocate your fingers.”

“Dislocate,” he said and gave her that smile again. “I like that word. I’m sorry. I’ll move them myself if you like. You don’t need to dislocat e them.”

Fiona got the sense the boy didn’t know what “dislocate” meant, since he was still trying to flirt with her. Another failure of American education. She’d be happy to show him the word’s precise meaning.

A few minutes later, Fiona felt a tapping on her knee-this time it was clear that it was intentional. Fiona decided to give the boy the benefit of the doubt that he wanted something from her and thus was tapping her with a purpose. Maybe he needed a pen? Some paper? A punch to the neck?

“Yes?” Fiona said.

“You smell really great,” he said.

“It’s called sweat.”

“Then your sweat smells like lavender and freshly cooked beignets.”

Some people, really, didn’t deserve the gift of speech.

“I am trying to concentrate, if you don’t mind,” Fiona said, because she just didn’t want to create a scene in the lecture hall. She might overreact and cause a compound fracture and no one wanted to see that. Plus, she didn’t want to be splashed with blood.

“Would you like to get a beer sometime?”

Did no one have common decency anymore?

The boy had left his index finger on her knee, so Fiona reached down and very casually sprained it by shoving her thumb in between the last joint and the fingertip. The boy let out a little yelp and then immediately shoved his finger into his mouth and scurried out of the classroom. The professor still never looked up.

The rest of the class went well enough, provided Fiona kept focused on any potential assassins and not anything having to do with whatever manifest destiny was, since the professor had managed to jump a hundred years to discuss some other trivial American policy and how it was originally tied to these violent separatists, though he didn’t use those words. The fool.

Now, as she and Brent went in search of what he deemed “the best rice bowls, like, ever” for lunch, Fiona kept being accosted by young men with flyers promoting different off-campus events, all of which boiled down to wonderful opportunities to get drugged and raped in the comfort of a beer-soaked fraternity house.

“Do you ever go to these parties?” Fiona asked. She handed Brent a flyer for a Sigma Upsilon party called the Pimp and Ho Ball. “No,” he said. “They don’t invite guys.”

Well, that made sense. Little else about the day had. While she’d sat in the classroom, Michael had texted her about Big Lumpy’s death and the potential for bugs in Brent’s room and possibly even in his computers-he and Sam were dismantling the ones left at Madeline’s-and informed her that she should avoid going to his dorm room at any cost, not that that was something high on her list of desires, anyway. And he also told her about the conditions of Brent’s inheritance, which could be both dangerous and ludicrous. Michael didn’t want her to tell Brent about Big Lumpy’s death or his conditions until they were away from the school, since they didn’t know who might be listening in. Any college kid could be one of Yuri’s people for all any of them knew and Fiona should treat any and all of the university’s thirty thousand students as suspects.

Great.

And then he’d texted her again just a few minutes ago to tell her that they had a black-tie event to attend that evening and to find Brent appropriate clothing for it, as if she was his accommodating yet exceptionally hot aunt or, well, whatever. It was just another piece of an increasingly odd puzzle. Her main goal now was to keep Brent safe, but unfortunately that didn’t extend to his food choices, apparently.

Brent finally found the haute cuisine he was looking for-it wasn’t much more than a trolley with a man cooking rice in a wok over a Bunsen burner-in front of the Otto G. Richter Library and now that he had his food, it was like the kid turned on for the first time all day. He was making observations about the people walking by, asking Fiona what she thought about the history class (“Egregious,” was Fiona’s reply).

“Can I ask you a question?” Brent said. They were sitting across from each other at a small cafe table that overlooked a fountain surrounded by grass.

“That depends,” Fiona said. “Is it going to be some sort of disgusting come-on?”

“No,” Brent said. “I don’t think of you that way.”

“Why not?” Fiona wasn’t aghast. At least not entirely.

“You’re more, like, I don’t know, motherly, I guess.”

The rules for what constituted justifiable homicide were nebulous, but Fiona surmised that any man telling a woman she was motherly counted. “Go ahead,” she said.

“So, like, what would you do? Big Lumpy wants me to, like, be his stepson or something. Wants to get me into MIT and to work with the government and all that stuff, but I’m, like, not even sure what I’m going to have for dinner.”

Fiona wasn’t exactly equipped to deliver life advice. Her mantra all these long years usually boiled down to a simple “Why don’t we just shoot them?” which, when truly examined, didn’t seem like sound advice to give to a young, impressionable boy like Brent.

So Fiona asked Brent the one question she thought was banal enough not to drive him toward a full-time life of crime. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I am grown-up,” Brent said.

“You’re nineteen. That’s like being grown-up without any of the side benefits, like money or class or a plan. No offense, of course.”

Brent didn’t seem offended. It actually seemed to make him rather contemplative. He shoveled his mouth full of teriyaki chicken and rice and chewed with real determination, as if obliterating his rice would somehow bring about a universal truth or two.

“I guess I want to do stuff with computers,” he said, “but also something where I can get girls. Most computer guys? They don’t get many girls and I don’t want to be like that. I mean, I like role-playing games and stuff, but I’d rather have a real girl than, like, a really intimate relationship with an elf or an orc or some fey creature or something.”

“I don’t blame you,” Fiona said.

“Like, you and Michael? You’re pretty much a couple, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“But, like, okay, I mean, not to be gross, but, like, you guys have hit it, right?”

Fiona couldn’t decide if she wanted to be offended, which made her realize that she probably shouldn’t be. Brent meant no actual harm. He just didn’t know how to speak like a human being. “Yes,” she said, “we have had sexual relations in the past.”

“And that’s not because, like, he can analyze stuff, right? It’s because, like, he can see stuff and then, like, beat ass and stuff, right?”

“Among other things, but yes, I suppose that’s part of the allure.”

“Well, I want that, then,” he said.

“If you take Big Lumpy’s offer-whatever it is-you understand that the life you have now will no longer be the life you have, right?”

Brent shrugged. “My dad? Michael said he’s somewhere safe, but, like, I’m not stupid. I know my dad is nuts. He’s, like, clinical probably. I want to help him, but I also don’t want him to ruin my life. Do you know what I mean?”