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Slinging my tennis bag over my shoulder I tell him: What the fuck do you know about tennis?

Later I feel bad. I shouldn’t have been so harsh. Then I find out the kid is a tennis player, that he was competing in the same tournament. I also hear he’s got a crush on my sister Tami, which is undoubtedly why he talked to me in the first place. Trying to get close to Tami.

But if I feel guilty, Perry is pissed. Word spreads along the Vegas teenager grapevine: Watch your back. Perry is gunning for you. He’s telling everyone that you disrespected him, and the next time he sees you, he’s going to kick your ass.

WEEKS LATER TAMI SAYS the whole gang is going to see a horror flick, all the older kids, and she asks if I want to go along.

That Perry kid going?

Maybe.

Yeah, I’ll go.

I love horror movies. And I have a plan.

Our mother drives us to the theater early so we can buy popcorn and licorice and find the perfect seats, dead center, middle row. I always sit dead center, middle row. Best seats in the house. I put Tami to my left and save the seat to my right. Sure enough, here comes Preppy Perry. I jump to my feet and wave. Hey Perry! Over here!

He turns, squints. I can see he’s caught off guard by my friendliness. He’s trying to analyze the situation, weigh his response. Then he smiles, visibly releases whatever anger he’s been holding. He saunters down the aisle and slides down our row, throwing himself into the seat next to me.

Hey Tami, he says across me.

Hey Perry.

Hey Andre.

Hey Perry.

Just as the lights go down and the first coming attraction starts we give each other a look.

Peace?

Peace.

The movie is Visiting Hours. It’s about a psycho who stalks a lady journalist, sneaks into her house, kills her maid, then for some reason puts on lipstick and pops out when the lady journalist comes home. She fights free, and somehow gets to a hospital, where she thinks she’s safe, but of course the psycho is hiding in the hospital, trying to find the lady journalist’s room, killing everyone who gets in his way. Cheesy, but satisfyingly creepy.

When scared, I react like a cat thrown into a room full of dogs. I freeze, don’t move a muscle. But Perry apparently is the high-strung type. As the suspense builds, he twitches and fidgets and spills soda on himself. Every time the killer jumps out of a closet, Perry jumps out of his seat. Several times I turn to Tami and roll my eyes. I don’t tease Perry about his reaction, however. I don’t even mention it when the lights come on. I don’t want to break our fragile peace accord.

We roll out of the theater and decide the popcorn and Cokes and Twizzlers weren’t enough. We head across the street to Winchell’s and buy a box of French crullers. Perry gets his covered with chocolate. I get mine with rainbow sprinkles. We eat the donuts at the counter, talking. Perry sure can talk. He’s like a lawyer before the Supreme Court. Then, in the middle of a fifteen-minute sentence, he stops and asks the guy behind the counter, Is this place open twenty-four hours?

Yup, the counter guy says.

Seven days a week?

Uh-huh.

Three hundred sixty-five days a year?

Yeah.

Then why are there locks on the front door?

We all turn and look. What a brilliant question! I start laughing so hard that I have to spit out my cruller. Rainbow sprinkles are falling from my mouth like confetti. This might be the funniest, smartest thing anyone’s ever said. Certainly the funniest, smartest thing said by anyone in this particular Winchell’s. Even the donut guy has to smile and admit: Kid, that’s a head-scratcher.

Isn’t life just like that? Perry says. Full of Winchell’s locks and other stuff you can’t explain?

You said it.

I always thought I was the only one who noticed. But here’s a kid who not only notices, he points that stuff out. When my mother comes to pick up me and Tami, I’m sad to say goodbye to my new friend Perry. I even find myself less annoyed by his polo shirt.

I ASK MY FATHER if I can sleep over at Perry’s house.

No fucking way, he says.

He doesn’t know Perry’s family from a hole in the ground. And he doesn’t trust anyone he doesn’t know. My father is suspicious of everyone in the world, especially the parents of our friends. I don’t bother asking why, and I don’t waste my breath arguing. I just invite Perry to our house for a sleepover.

Perry is extremely polite with my parents. He’s agreeable with my siblings, especially Tami, though she’s gently discouraged his crush. I ask if he wants a quick tour. Sure thing, he says, so I show him the room I share with Philly. He laughs at the white stripe down the middle. I show him the court out back. He takes a turn hitting with the dragon. I tell him how much I hate the dragon, how I used to think it was a living, breathing monster. He looks sympathetic. He’s seen enough horror flicks to know that monsters come in all shapes and sizes.

Since Perry is a fellow connoisseur of horror, I’ve got a surprise for him. I’ve scored a beta copy of The Exorcist. After seeing him jump out of his skin at Visiting Hours, I can’t wait to see how he reacts to a genuine horror classic. After everyone’s asleep we slide the movie into the machine. I suffer a minor aneurysm with every rotation of Linda Blair’s head, but Perry doesn’t flinch once. Visiting Hours gives him the shakes, but The Exorcist leaves him cold? I think: This dude marches to his own drummer.

Afterward, we sit up drinking sodas and talking. Perry agrees that my father’s scarier than anything Hollywood can offer, but he says his father is twice as scary. His father, he says, is an ogre, a tyrant, and a narcissist—the first time I’ve heard this word.

Perry says, Narcissist means he thinks only about himself. It also means his son is his personal property. He has a vision of how his son’s life is going to be, and he couldn’t care less about his son’s vision of that future.

Sounds familiar.

Perry and I agree that life would be a million times better if our fathers were like other kids’

fathers. But I hear an added note of pain in Perry’s voice, because he says his father doesn’t love him. I’ve never questioned my father’s love. I just wish it were softer, with more listening and less rage. In fact, I sometimes wish my father loved me less. Maybe then he’d back off, let me make my own choices. I tell Perry that having no choice, having no say about what I do or who I am, makes me crazy. That’s why I put more thought, obsessive thought, into the few choices I do have—what I wear, what I eat, who I call my friends.

He nods. He gets it.

At last, in Perry, I have a friend with whom I can share these deep thoughts, a friend I can tell about the Winchell’s locks in my life. I talk to Perry about playing tennis, despite hating tennis. Hating school, despite enjoying books. Feeling lucky to have Philly, despite his streak of bad luck. Perry listens, patient as Philly, but more involved. Perry doesn’t just talk, then listen, then nod. He converses. He analyzes, strategizes, spit-balls, helps me come up with a plan to make things better. When I tell Perry my problems, they sound jumbled and asinine at first, but Perry has a way of rearranging them, making them sound logical, which feels like the first step to making them solvable. I feel as if I’ve been on a desert island, with no one to talk to but the palm trees, and now a thoughtful, sensitive, like-minded castaway—albeit with a stupid polo player on his shirt—has come stumbling ashore.

Perry confides in me about his nose and mouth. He says he was born with a cleft palate.

He says it’s made him deeply self-conscious and painfully shy with girls. He’s had surgeries to fix it, and faces one more surgery at least. I tell him it’s not that noticeable. He gets tears in his eyes. He mumbles something about his father blaming him.